John, thank you so much for the time. Nice to see you again.
Nice to see you. Thanks for coming.
VP of hardware engineering, right?
Senior vice president of hardware engineering.
Since I have you for a couple of minutes, I needed to ask about hardware because it's been a big year for hardware from the iPhones, the new iPhone Air, the Pros redesigned, and the AirPods that I'll get into a little bit. Might be my favorite thing of the event.
But starting with the incredible iPhone Air, I loved it. Once I grabbed it and I saw how thin it is, it not only looks like it, but feels like the future. Like you're grabbing something so futuristic, it's so cool.
That's been such a consistent response is like every time a person picks it up for the first time, it's just like whoa.
Yeah. Like it's crazy to see it on video and the finger with the but then you grab it and it's a whole other sensation. I wanted to ask what was the most difficult thing about doing the thinnest iPhone ever?
Well, I mean it was packing it all in there, right? I think this product represents the culmination of many, many, many years of work as we've been developing more and more core technologies internally. When you think about Apple Silicon and the focus on efficiency that Johnny's team has, and of course we've been doing that for the SoC, and then we added this now in this case the C1X modem and we've got N1. By building that and really optimizing efficiency, it enables a completely new kind of product, right? And then of course we've got this plateau on the top and the ceramic shield, and we had to make the product the way we wanted it, we had to figure out how much could we cram into there, right? And so we have the most densely packed main logic board we've ever had on a phone. We've got the cameras up there. We had to repackage the cameras so that they could fit up there, all that Apple Silicon, which then leaves all that extra space for battery, and it has great battery life. And so I think it's all of these things coming together. Took years and years of work and kind of learning and growth across generations of phones to finally have the building blocks to be able to make a product like this.
So the camera plateau design-wise specifically is just to cram more things in there.
Yeah. I mean it's a key part of it. What's interesting is it's actually machined out. It's precision milled on the inside as well. So it's actually a hollow plateau. It's not just an extra thick piece of ceramic shield. And that allowed us to kind of put more of the components in there. So, if you saw in the picture, there's just a huge battery that runs almost the rest of the length of the phone.
That's so cool. It's so nice to see like a new iPhone model because we've been accustomed to the regular iPhones and the Pros and having something completely new. I also noticed it's named iPhone Air, not 17 Air. So, I've been making that mistake, which I find really, really interesting. And I usually because I've had the chance to talk to software people and hardware people and I always know there's this sort of clash between designers and hardware specialists. You need to make the phones better, but you also need to make them look better. So, I wanted to ask him, how do you strike that balance? So, what went into changing the design for the Pros specifically? And like, hey, we want to do all this cool stuff, but we also needed to look cool. So, how do you go about those decisions?
Yeah, it's funny. I never think of it as being a clash between the hardware team and the design team. I think it's because it's one of the things that makes Apple special is that everyone here has a deep appreciation for design and how important it is and how much value it brings to our products and how much it brightens people's lives. And so, we go into it together with the studio from the very beginning. We're thinking about the product together, the engineering side and the design side and ideas going back and forth and how do we optimize this and how do we push on this and is there any way we could make this a little bit thinner or is there any way we could make this a little different. And it's a very collaborative process that feels really good because in the end if you just left engineers to themselves they would build something very functional but maybe not beautiful. It's very special when you can build something that's so capable and so beautiful.
It's a great balance. I'm sure everyone has their own opinions on the new design.
That's what good design does.
Yes, exactly. And I think one of those topics specifically is the change from titanium back to aluminum. I love the whole unibody design and the video was great, but I'm sure there's going to be some headlines like, 'Hey, why did you go back to aluminum? Wasn't titanium a bit more premium feeling?' I know there's thermal advantages and it's lighter, but were you a little bit afraid of the pushback of going back to aluminum?
I don't think so. I mean, like you said, design is always, there's always opinions on design, which is a wonderful thing, but I think we try to approach things with what is the best material for the job. What is the best material for the application? And it was really obvious from the very beginning that aluminum was the right material to use for this product. And you touched on kind of the two key reasons. One of them is as we created this new product category with iPhone Air, we wanted to make the Pro even more pro. We wanted to push on it. And one way to do that is to make it even more performant, right? And so if you want more performance, you got to have great thermals. And our custom alloy for aluminum, it has 20 times the thermal conductivity as the titanium we're using. So that's a really, really big enabler, right? Significant. And as you mentioned, aluminum has a lower density than titanium. So in the same form factor, it ends up being quite a bit lighter. And when you make it lighter, well then that allows us to, hey, let's push some more battery in there and things like that. So I don't think this product would have been possible. I know this product wouldn't have been possible the way it is if we had tried to use titanium. We think aluminum is absolutely the best option.
And it feels great. I had a chance to try them on at the hands-on after the event and it I mean to people saying it's not that it feels premium like I love the feel. It definitely feels premium. And one of the other options is with the anodized aluminum, we could do this cosmic orange, which I love and I could tell from the hands-on area is a huge hit.
Yes, it's my personal favorite as well. I've been waiting for orange forever. So, to finally get it, it's awesome.
Just to switch a little bit gears to the AirPods. I think everyone loves talking about the iPhones, but the AirPods, I think it's an amazing upgrade. Everything just kept piling on a better ANC, which I don't even understand how you can have 4x better performance if it's already amazing.
