Hands-On Tech 183 Transcript

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0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Hands-On Tech. I unbox and talk about the new iPhone 16 Pro Max. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands-On Tech. Hello and welcome to Hands-On Tech.

If you are watching this, you're probably thinking that I just I don't know ascended no, descended, I guess from the heavens, as there's this beautiful glow going on around me. Forgive me, I am working with a new, improved camera, but it has some adjustments I need to make. So if you're distracted by the beautiful, soft tones of my skin, I can completely understand, but I wanted to get that out of the way so that you are not distracted by that. And we're just talking phones today. So here's the deal Apple, as any tech company does when it comes out with a new product, seeds some of the product to certain people in the press and says on this day, you can tell everybody about whatever it is we've given you, and that is the way that things typically work in consumer tech journalism. So there've been lots of reviews for the new iPhones. You've seen many reviews for the new iPhones and given that you've seen so many reviews for the new iPhones, I felt that it would be dishonest, disingenuous, to try to do a review. Well, actually not even that's the thing. I couldn't even call it a review, given that I just got the phone on Friday and it's only Sunday, and I didn't feel that it was fair to those of you who clicked on a thing that said iPhone review to hear me give my Saturday take on the new iPhone. I got it Friday night because UPS was driving all over the place, yeah, and so I did something very difficult for all of you, I want you to know I sacrificed because, even though I the world's smallest violin, but I kept it in the box, completely unboxed, so that we could take a look at the iPhone together. So, here in front of me, I have the let me center it here I have the new iPhone 16 Pro Max still in the box. You can check my oh, don't check that. You can check, oops, the facts there. You can see that it's still packaged and I'm going to unbox it for all of you and we're going to take a look at it and see what it's all about. So I did get the iPhone 16 Pro Max, as opposed to the 16 Pro or one of the standard iPhone 16s.

I've been going for the Max line for quite some time and one thing that I'm really excited about with this new phone is that it is supposed to have really great battery life in comparison to any phone that Apple has put out thus far. In fact, I believe it was Consumer Reports who just recently talked about the battery life for the new 16 Pro Max in particular, where they do a unique test of not just watching video or some other thing, but they have a proprietary test that involves actually using the browser on the phone for a period of time and having it at a certain brightness level and just doing different things, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max got more than 18 hours of battery life Incredible. So, without further ado, let us take a look at the new phone. I'm going to move this phone out of the way for now, but we will come back to that, and so the first thing, of course, that we'll do is take off the little. They're not plastic, but paper. Something interesting that Apple is doing this time around is they are whoops, if you can see. The fastening happens within the box, and that has to do with different ways that these devices can be adjusted with their packaging to kind of make changes to things and make it simple for the box to be sealed as it needs to be.

So when it came to the Apple Vision Pro, one thing that I noticed about it was that I waited there at the store and while I was waiting there, they put it together in the back based on my unique needs and preferences, and then it came out and then it seemed like it was Apple packaged, because it had those little pull tabs and everything, but they were able to do that right in the back. All right, so let's go ahead and take off the bits of paper and get this thing out of the box. The boxes get thinner and thinner every year as Apple works to try and reduce material and packaging, and this year I went for, of course, last year I had the beautiful blue titanium. This year I went for natural titanium and I have to say that it is quite lovely. It's pretty striking and it is just a nice natural bare color on the side that matches Whoops let me try to bring that into frame the Apple Watch Ultra that I have on my wrist. So I like that those colors go together.

Now, interestingly, the bit of paper that you pull off tells you what the different buttons do, so I can see that of course the action button is set to the mute toggle. You've got plus and minus for volume control. You've got power on the other side, which of course is also just the side button in general, and you've got the new camera control button, which we'll talk about in a moment. But I'll talk about what else is in here, not much. So. We have your charging cable, and it is even seemingly reduced than it was before. Interestingly braided cable, which is nice with the Pro model and I can easily pull that out of the paper, which can all go into recycling and, as we might expect, usb-c on both sides of the cable.

Per usual, you do not get a charging cable in or, excuse me, a power adapter in the box, but I always love having another USB-C cable hanging around and I particularly do like Apple's braided cable material, which makes them last a little bit longer, which I always appreciate. All right, oh, how long is the cable? Yes, and by the way, do feel free to ask questions along the way. It looks like it's about two feet long. I would say a little bit longer than two feet, probably.

I wish that I had a tape measure right around me, but that is upstairs in my toolbox, as you would imagine, there's the little cutout for the camera, and what else is in the box is, of course, our paperwork, as it were, and this is even smaller than it's been in years past. You can see that it's been cut out in sort of a pill shape that is reminiscent of the Magic Mouse, and so I am able to peel that back, which has this kind of fiber paper it's not plastic that is holding it shut is holding it shut, and it has some paper inside and including wow, this is quite literally just a piece of kind of cardboard that says hey, by the way, you don't need a physical SIM, so you don't need a little SIM removal tool, so that's all you get. You get your regulatory and warranty information, and the little thing that says don't worry about a SIM because you're not getting one. And that's the box. That's all you get inside the box, all right, so let's peel off. Oh, I forgot to mention, yeah, no Apple stickers anymore. That it's kind of hard to see because it's very bright. But there you go, you can kind of see that it has on the paper as well that the charging port is along the bottom. So we will peel that off, like so that's quite nice. And kick that to the side and I will once again hold it up next to the iPhone 15 Pro Max and you can see that they are very similarly sized. But if we put them together, like so, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is just a little bit longer. Well, let's see there we go. So, of course, the 15 Pro Max is in blue titanium, the 16 Pro Max is in natural titanium, so you can see that it sticks out just a little bit. And now that they've talked to each other, I will put that to the side and I will go ahead and turn on the iPhone with the side button, not to be confused with the capture or the camera control. So we'll power this on and we will see what the current battery level is on it. While that powers up, let's continue to talk about it.

I do want to see what some of the questions have been in the chat. And it says well, let's see One question here says well, we've already got the one about new Apple stickers. But somebody says what about carrier assignment without a SIM? Well, there are multiple methods for following through with your carrier. If you pre-order the device and you get it with your carrier, then that's going to be kind of an automated process. That's part of the setup. If you are starting fresh, very simple to do with any of the carriers, although every once in a while some people will have problems.

But let me go through the process here. I can kind of show you what the setup is continuing to look like. There will be times where we'll pull away while I enter you know information, but we've got our typical stuff here. What size do you want everything to look? I choose default for that, and then it's looking for a device nearby and asking if it can use that for quick start. So I will follow through with that and then we'll get going. Now I will switch back to my view so that we can follow through with this process of logging in.

So if you have an iPhone already, the process is pretty simple because you can use your other device to kind of pass along your Wi-Fi password and information, your Apple ID although now it's called your Apple account and any other kind of basic information while the activation process happens. If you are on an eSIM on your previous iPhone, then you will see an option to transfer your phone number over, and so I'm actually getting that. To set up cellular on this phone, you can transfer your phone number from another iPhone. Once your phone number is transferred to this iPhone, it will stop working on your other iPhone, and so we'll choose to transfer it over. And then I need to, on the previous phone, complete that transfer. Now, I'm not showing you that because I just would not prefer to receive calls from people on the internet, which is something that somehow happened. Not too long ago. I got a call from someone who was a listener, who was calling me from Norway to ask for help with their Facebook account. So, anyway, don't do that. So, basically, when this process happens, it's going to go through and pop all of the information over to the new phone.

Now, I'm not going to set this up as a. I'm not going to transfer everything over. I'm going to set it up as new so that we can show you what the phone is like and kind of give you an idea of some of the features. But at first glance, at first hold, the iPhone does not feel very. It doesn't feel too heavy. It feels quite similar to what I'm used to. If you're jumping sizes, though, you are going to notice a much heftier feel for sure. The look and feel of the device again very similar, minus the new button, which we will talk about again very soon, although Apple doesn't call it a button, but instead calls it the camera control option. So we'll let it finish continuing to connect to the network.

There've been quite a few different reviews out there that all seem to be touting a few things with this new phone the significantly improved battery life, the camera experience, which is something that I want to take time to actually show all of you. So I plan on doing some features and showing off each individual new thing that you're able to do as its own kind of video for you to see. So soon you'll be able to watch my video that's going to be about slow-mo and the improvements there on the camera, as well as the new ability to edit photos with special filters and some other changes there. Now we're going to go through the process of face ID, so I'll quickly do that, as you know. Quickly do that. As you know, you position your face in the frame and then you move your head in a circle to get going. Of course, if this is your first Face ID iPhone, then you will be doing. You know that's exactly how it works for the first time.

Now I am going to set up the account again the iPhone as if it's new, so that we can get rolling with it, and then you'll be able to see some of the features and I'll finally be able to press that button. Now someone did ask does the camera control button actually press? And yes, even when it's off, you can feel the button depress down into the phone. So it's not as if it's just haptic, it's not just the vibration that is telling your brain that it's pressing down, it actually does press down. Now you're seeing a little bit about the process here of the signup, which includes how you want to transfer your data. Now you can do it from another iPhone, which is what I will eventually do when I reset this phone and start over after this from an iCloud backup from an Android device. In this case, I'm choosing don't transfer anything because I want it to be fresh. Now I did press that button. We have to wait to see if it's actually going to go through.

One thing that I'm really looking forward to with these new phones is that you do have the ability to adjust the brightness down to one nit of brightness. Up to this point you could get to a relative dark area, but I would always have to go in and change the white point value. This has been improved on this device, so I am looking forward to having that. It's asking me to add, of course, my cards, which we'll do later, do later, and I'm also seeing that within this first little bit of using the phone, it is feeling like the device is a little bit zippier. Now. This is pretty cool For folks who are just listening and not watching.

We're getting a kind of tutorial of camera control. So it says click camera control to open a camera app because, again, this can be adjusted. It says then click again to use camera control as a shutter. So we'll tap continue and it shows okay, the first one opens the camera app that you choose, and then the second one lets you take a photo. Yes, we want to use Emergency SOS with crash detection, and now we can get started. So we will do that whenever we are ready. So the first thing I'm going to do is kind of pop open some of the different apps so that my location is not prompted immediately, and then we will go from there. So let's pop into the camera app, all right.

So let me show you some of the new kind of photo editing options here. Let me give myself something to actually take a photo of. Why don't we use this thing from Micah's Crafting Corner? We've got a device here and some cables in the way, but we will take a photo of this and I'm immediately oh, of course I do it this way All right. So portrait view. I'm immediately presented with the option to change different values. Now I can do different filters, including neutral, cool, rose rose gold, gold, amber, standard, vibrant, natural, luminous, dramatic, quiet, cozy, ethereal, and then some black and white options.

But what we want to do is let's take a standard photo and immediately what we can start to do is put our thumb on the D-pad and start moving it around, and when we move it around you can see how it's changing the tone and the color. I can pull color out by moving to the left and I can up the tone by moving. So if I move along the x-axis, then it will pull color out or raise color up. If I move along the y-axis, that brings the tone up or down. So you can get a really tone-filled and color-filled photo by moving it all the way to the right side, although that's not something that we would want to do.

But let me adjust this back to zero and show you that we can take this photo and then afterward we are able to to edit this photo by tapping on our standard editing options and then we can make adjustments based on, again, those styles that are built in cozy, ethereal, etc. But also, at any time, I can take this photo and just tap on that D-pad again and make adjustments to it right there. Just tap on that D-pad again and make adjustments to it right there, so I can get exactly the look that I want to dial in, which is quite nice. Then, after that, if I want to make specific adjustments, like auto adjust, you know, exposure, all of that's still built in, all of that's right there. But these new styles, that's what makes this unique, and being able to see those live is quite nice.

So let's discard the changes there and let's see what happens when I press the camera control button. Oh, remember, not a button, but if I press it, whoa, it launches camera control. And then, if I were to press it again, it takes a photo just as we would expect. Now I can take this and I can barely press and I'm presented with the ability to zoom in or zoom out ability to zoom in or zoom out, and what's built into this is a capacitive sensor that gives me the ability to actually move the view with my thumb or whatever finger that you want to use it to move with. Then pressing it once again, we'll take the photo.

The one thing that I have seen that seems to be the case as things stand is that right now, you have the problem of figuring out how to get out of those camera controls after you've gotten into them. From what I've seen with the different reviews, most people just tap the screen and then move on from there. But again, that is kind of bothersome. I don't have anything in front of me that is moving very quickly to show you the new slow-mo options, but that is something that I, again, I want to show you over time with a more focused understanding of kind of what is going on there.

A lot of people have asked what all can you do with the camera control button? You can launch a camera. You that's all you do with it. It is not a scroll option on the side of the phone, it is not another action button that you can change to do something else. It is simply an option to control the camera. Now, right now, with iOS 18, you are not able to use it for what Apple showed it being able to be used for, if you'll remember, if you'll recall, apple said on stage that the camera control button will launch the camera by letting you click it, take a photo, by letting you click it again, tap and hold to record video. It can do all of those and you can also press it slightly to pull focus. That feature is not yet available for the camera control button, so if you were hoping to be able to use that to pull focus, you're going to have to wait for that feature.

This is a phone that is all about up for Apple intelligence and when you opened on day one, you're not going to get Apple intelligence features. What Apple did do that was a little clever. As has been noted, is it released the public beta of iOS 18.1, which will have which does have, some of the Apple intelligence features built in. But I was just watching a video of a launch at an Apple store where the team members were doing a little sort of hurrah, hurrah, hooray, hooray moment and it was all about Apple intelligence. Hurrah, hurrah, hooray, hooray moment, and it was all about Apple intelligence.

The criticisms about this phone coming out on day one without one of the main features that is being marketed, I think, are fair and are something to bear in mind. This may not be a phone that you want to buy right now until you have the opportunity to understand how Apple intelligence will play a role. When I had I'm forgetting his last name, but Patrick from CNET on Tech News Weekly recently, he had mentioned that one of the main things he sees the camera control button being used for is the new vision features with Apple Intelligence the ability to click that button, hold it up to something and then understand what it is or get more information about something specific. The fact that it's not there yet and that's Patrick Holland, thank you, john of CNET and the fact that that feature is not yet there kind of feels like it's something that is a glaring omission, as it were.

When it comes to these new iPhones, I think there's one thing that is worth celebrating more than anything else. You know, cast aside the conversation about AI not being there on day one. Cast aside the conversation about it being just a small iterative improvement over the previous model, even all the way back to the iPhone 12, because the design hasn't really changed. Let's talk about the fact that all four of the iPhones be it the iPhone 16, the iPhone 16 Plus, the iPhone 16 Pro, the iPhone 16 Pro Max Pro, the iPhone 16 Pro Max, all of the iPhones are so close in feature set to one another that, regardless of which phone you buy, you're getting the latest and the greatest. And I think that does speak to Apple's desire to encourage updates, to get people into a phone, to get people into a phone, into hardware. That is going to support Apple's uh, apple intelligence, because it becomes a lot easier to say it doesn't really matter which iPhone you get. You're going to get that ultra wide angle camera. You're going to get, uh, incredible battery improvements. Over whichever phone you have, you are going to get the action button and the camera control button. You're going to get these features and it is so much of an improvement in those specific areas. So when I say cast aside, I don't mean that those features don't matter, but I do mean that, um, that it is good to bear in mind that, regardless of which phone you get, you are going to have the, the option to kind of get the latest and the greatest.

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All right. So we're back from the break and we are taking a first look at Apple's new iPhone 16 Pro Max. I wanted to make sure that people had an opportunity to ask some questions, if they had them, specifically about the iPhone. Prefer that the questions are not joke questions that just fill things up, but indeed real questions that you might have about the device. I was able to get my hands on it Friday night. It is now Sunday morning, so I have not had and I left it boxed so that we could unbox it together on this episode and take a true first look at it and kind of get the initial impressions there.

But this new phone, if you're coming from the 15 Pro Max, you are probably not going to see no, you will not see much that is different about it because it's a little tiny bit bigger and the bezels are a little bit smaller. But outside of that the phones are going to feel very familiar. And that's a conversation that I actually wanted to discuss, because I do see discuss, because I do see a common refrain which is that smartphone manufacturers are kind of running out of ideas, right, and all of the phones look the same. These phones have looked the same for some time. And so having that issue, having that be something that you have to think about if you're thinking about upgrading to the latest device, it becomes about is it just time to upgrade because my battery's dead or am I actually getting something new? And that's fair. But recently I saw a tech journalist and I wish I could recall who it was, but Joanna Stern had had a conversation with them. Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal.

More like how we view laptops when a company comes out with the latest laptop or other kind of desktop hardware. It's iterative improvements that make a difference. They show that the processor is this much faster, that it's more performant at better efficiencies, that the screen is a little bit better to look at, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that is what happens when a hardware category reaches a level of maturity. We have seen some innovations in this space and I say that with the biggest quotes, given the introduction of foldables. And I say introduction and not reintroduction, because these foldables are not just a phone that folds in half, but a screen that folds in half. But it's got big quotes around it because there are so many issues with these foldable devices, lots of breakages, lots of finicky apps, lots of experiences there. And so, given that, you know, is it a mature category? And what comes next? I don't know.

But in the meantime, when we kind of shift our thinking a little bit, I think that it helps one to better understand what changes to a smartphone actually mean for people these days, while also bearing in mind that there's external and internal pressure for these devices to become more and more repairable and upgradable and replaceable and recyclable, and all of that means that they're going to last a lot longer, and given that you don't necessarily need to have some huge new set of features to draw people in, and it just becomes about having the latest and greatest for someone who wants it or having the latest and greatest for someone who needs it after five, six, seven years of having the last device right, and I think that that has been helpful to me to kind of avoid the disappointment of well, it's not that much different from last year. It doesn't really need to be that much different from last year, because these companies are no longer targeting the person who bought the phone last year, although, with some companies Apple being one of them they can always rely on that small subset of the community that's probably going to get the new thing, even though they just got the one last year. Someone had a great question in the chat what does it look like to change the capture button on the iPhone? So what I'm going to do is go to the app store and get a camera app real quick, because again, this is remember I set this up as new, so I will download Halide, and once we've downloaded Halide, we can see what that looks like to actually switch the view from one camera app to another. So, by default, again, the camera app is set to the built-in camera app. But I'm just going through the process of granting location and all that jazz to Halide and then we can take a look at this. So I'll pull the iPhone back up and we shall give it a go.

So Halide is now downloaded to this iPhone 16 Pro Max. We'll go into settings, we'll scroll down down, we'll choose camera and we can see system settings, camera control. We will tap on this and then we should be able to change it there. So I'm not sure why it didn't register. Um, this is also another thing that I want to note really quick is that with the camera control something that's pretty cool is some people, if you're left-handed, like I am, have a problem where when they pull the phone out of their pocket, they're accidentally grabbing and launching camera control by default, and so changing that to a double tap is easy to do.

So, paul, halide is specifically one that does have camera control access for sure. So I'm just going to see if there's something that I need to do here to be able to do that. So, yeah, lock screen capture etc. And then no, that's not it. I wonder if it needs to kind of register with the system or something to be able to do that. I wonder if it needs to kind of register with the system or something to be able to do that. So we'll go back into settings. Yeah, it's not showing up there.

All right, then in that case let's go back to the app store and we will also grab. And we will also grab. There's another app that is a camera app that is escaping my mind at this moment. Obscura is the name of the app. So we'll try to grab that one and see what it looks like. So we will get that. And I guess I was on the beta so I did not have it downloaded from the app store. So we'll grab the Obscura beta, oh, and we'll make the phone quit. That kind of makes me wonder, yep.

So remember how Halide wasn't showing up? The moment that the phone had to go through a forced restart, it showed up here. So now Halide is selected as my camera control option. Now I will click that side button the camera control button, not the side button, that is actually a different button and it launches Halide. Notice that it launched it just to whatever page I was on in Halide. So that's something to bear in mind. We want to have it launch and then I can press it again and it takes a photo.

Let's go ahead and launch Obscura, and it's probably going to ask me for access to everything. So let me switch my view over here for a second, while I just give it access to my location and then we can move on to this. So here is a feature set, and I thought there was a way to not do. Ah, there we go. More options, try with limited features. There we go.

So now let's see if we can't get obscura. Yeah, so see, it looks like in order right now to get the camera control to show up. I wonder if I just force quit settings, if that will do it, then I should be able. No, um, so it was actually a full-on restart of the phone that seemed to be required, which, that is. That's got to be a bug. I don't see Apple wanting you to have to, uh, do that in the long term to be able to use it for your camera control button. Hmm. So, yeah, let's go ahead and restart this phone and see again if that makes Halide pop or, excuse me, not Halide, but Obscura pop up there. So of course, it'll disappear off of my screen while we wait for it to restart, and then we'll go to that.

But let's see what some other questions are. How would I compare it to the Samsung S series flagships? That is a great question, I think. Off the top, the first thing that I'll say is that Apple, given that it's Apple intelligence is not yet ready, you're not going to see anywhere near as many features as you're seeing on the full suite of Android devices. Those are all showing lots of AI features. So if you're looking for excuse me, for an AI phone that you can use today, apple's phone is not where you're going to want to look. Now I have access to Obscura. So, yeah, it appears that a restart is required as it stands to get camera control working with a camera app. That's frustrating.

But as far as hardware goes, you know, know, I think that many of these phones are neck and neck. Um, if you're looking for that really light titanium look and feel, then uh, I think that iphone is the way to go. Now, uh, there's a question have you been loading an iCloud backup onto it? Is the phone any more or less warmer than the iPhone 15? I would say it is the same warmth that I've experienced in the past, it does get warm. I'm not currently loading an iCloud backup onto it, but it is in the background downloading my photos and things like that, because I did set it up as new. But because I'm logged into my iCloud account, it does still pull my music and photos and other things that are stored locally. I don't think that you should expect any different when it comes to the warmth, other than it is possible that the phone might get a little warmer due to the size of the battery changing. But yeah, I don't think that you're going to notice much of a difference there. Let's see if there's any other questions.

Somebody said you know what people have not wanted Thinner. You know what people do want Bigger batteries. I agree, and I think that's why this year that's exactly what's happened the battery is bigger. It didn't change to make the phone any thicker, but the battery is certainly bigger. What am I using to project the phone onto the screen? Uh, one of the most common questions. I get our sponsor or previous sponsor, ecamm live. That's what I use to do that. Uh, and there is a way to get to the camera from the lock screen on your phone. There are multiple ways to get to the camera from the lock screen on your phone, the most common way is to tap the camera button in the bottom right-hand corner. Another way now is to use the camera control button, which, of course, is going to launch your camera of choice, which reminds me that I need to turn it back.

And somebody has asked I use both eSIMs in my iPhone 14 Pro. How difficult would it be to transfer both numbers to the iPhone 16? Not difficult at all, incredibly easy, in fact. When you do the process of transferring to a new phone, it will ask you uh, what, what phones you want to, what phone numbers you want to transfer over, and then it does it automatically Very easy to do. Um, it does it automatically Very easy to do. I like that the process has been simplified for actually doing eSIM transfer, because it does make me a little anxious when I am moving over my cellular account, because I worry that moving over my cellular account is going to mean that I'm not going to have access to my phone if something goes wrong.

One other thing that I'll say I've been watching people set up their new phones and looking at different processes that people are using. A common method, of course is to use your iCloud backup. That takes a while but it doesn't take too long because what Apple does is they basically kind of bookmark your bookmarks on a good word. They alias your apps and after you're already logged in, you're using your phone, it starts to restore those apps from iCloud Backup by actually just downloading them again. You can do the device-to-device transfer, which of course is something you can do over Wi-Fi, or that you can do using a USB-C cable. I saw someone say that they used a standard USB-C cable and they were quoted for two hours transfer time and then they used a Thunderbolt 4 cable and they were quoted for one hour of transfer time. So if you happen to have a Thunderbolt cable, which of course supports, depending on which one, usb 3, usb 4 speeds, you may try using that and seeing if that does help to improve it. But if you have Wi-Fi 7, if you have a Wi-Fi 7 router, then you will also see significant improvements of transfer because every single iPhone features Wi-Fi 7.

I also wanted to mention that the iPhone 16 and the 16 Plus are able to charge faster than they have been able to in the past. You can use MagSafe charging that charges at I believe it's 25 watts, yes, of charging, and then if you use a USB-C cable, it can go up to 45 watts. So charging will be faster and you'll be able to you know, plug it in for 30 minutes and get to full which is great, assuming that you're not for 30 minutes and get get to full um, which is great, assuming that you're not. If you're at zero or something like that, it's going to take longer, but most of the time people kind of see their phone getting low. They plug it in um 30 minutes and it's it's going to be good to go. So being able to have that faster charging is great. And yeah, that's kind of the extent of what I wanted to mention in terms of new features. I want to give people one last chance to ask their questions, if they have any, specifically while I have the phone in front of me, and then, as I've promised, I will be doing more thorough reviews of some of the new features for these phones. So you're going to get the opportunity to see specifically what the new slow-mo is like. I'll be talking a lot about the photographic styles I will be talking about, you know, what improvements we can get with Wi-Fi 7, usb-c improvements, etc, etc. So I will happily be looking into that as well.

Let me see here, with camera control, I wish they let us disable the swipe to enter camera from the lock screen. So many accidental photos all the time. I assume you mean I actually don't know what you mean Swipe to? Oh, by swiping from, by swiping from the right to the left, accessing the photos. That's fair, that you know you wish that it would not do that. Why do I feel like there is a way to turn that off? Maybe I'm misremembering Light press, the camera control to quickly make adjustments. Double light press, let me see if that's not something that can be changed. Swipe no, unfortunately it's not. Um, let's see. Is the new wide camera able to take 24 megapixel binned photos like the main camera? Do you mean the new ultra wide camera? Um, beyond the new button and future Apple intelligence, is there anything else new that you're aware of? Yes, again. Wi-fi 7 on all of the devices, the ability to take spatial photos and videos on all of the devices, lower minimum brightness as well.

And then someone asks with slow-mo, do you have to shoot in slow-mo mode or can you slow it down later? Um, you, you. This is complex, it's not complicated. I guess you can uh, you can take regular video and slow it down by taking the video and stretching it out, and then what it does is that it just adds extra frames in of the frames that it sees the keyframes, essentially. But if you want what is true slow-mo, you do need to be in slow-mo mode, because what happens there is the camera is, say, typically you're viewing a video at 30 frames per second, so in every second it's taking 30 photographs and then playing that back. What your phone does is when it's in slow-mo mode, it's taking at 120 more, in this case, frames per second, and so it's taking that many photos every single second. And then you are playing it back at 30 frames per second, for example, and then you are playing it back at 30 frames per second, for example, and so it has all of these extra little frames that it can show you within those 30 frames of video that it's playing back. So it actually has to stretch out to fill out that same amount. So you want to be in slow-mo mode. Basically that is the best way to do it to get the best looking slow motion. But yeah, if you wanted to, if you just wanted to kind of slow down a video to try to see what you're you know might be missing. You can just use the basic mode to do that, all right, yeah, thank you. 240 frames per second, it is very high at this point.

Thank you all for your questions today, if you. Oh, there's one last question I'll go with. Paul has asked what type of chargers are required to get the maximum charge rate. Apple or any brand, if the cable is rated for the maximum charging speeds and the adapter is rated for the maximum charging speeds, the iPhone will charge at those speeds. You aren't required to have an iPhone cable and an Apple, an Apple cable and an Apple adapter, to be able to get those speeds. It's a little different when it comes to MagSafe, because MagSafe is a. It's a special flavor of Qi, but if we're talking about a cable that's plugged in, flavor of chi Um, but if we're talking about a cable that's plugged in, as long as the cable and the adapter are rated for those faster charging speeds, you're going to get those faster charging speeds. I agree.

There was someone who said wouldn't it be nice if, when we plugged in a cable to charge, that our phone would show us. Hey, this is what, um, this is what the device is that you are rolling with. This is the cable and this is the amount of speed that I can actually get from it, or amount of charging, excuse me, that I can get from it. That would be pretty cool. Is the included cable rated for the 45-watt recharge? Is the included cable rated for the 45 watt recharge? That is a very good question. That's something I'll have to look into. Gern, I would imagine yes, but I don't want to give that, and I can see that the cable was made in Vietnam. Where's my loop? I don't have my loop with me. But yeah, that's the only information that I have right now. I will have to test that. You know what? Maybe that's a new purchase I'll make on Amazon as a little cable charging tester.

Folks, I want to thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Hands-On Tech, where we got our first look at the iPhone 16 Pro Max, including an unboxing and my initial thoughts. I'm still trying to decide if I want to put this thing into a case. I do have the clear case for this phone, but I've been using the 15 Pro Max without a case leading up to the day that my iPhone was arriving and I'm kind of liking it. So we'll see if this ends up in a case. It probably will. But in the meantime, if you have questions about the iPhone 16 Pro Max or any of the iPhones anything, let me know. You can email us hot@twit.v.

Again, I plan on doing lots of reviews, individual reviews because I really think that, look, your time is valuable and I want to give you researched answers to each of these questions. And so trying to give you a full review of a phone that I've literally had what would have boiled down to one day with the phone if I didn't wait to unbox it with all of you didn't feel right, and so instead, what I'm going to give you are really thorough, uh reviews of the new features and everything that's involved. Uh, lastly, um, I want to remind you that you can join club twit to get the video version, um, of all of our club shows, as well as access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra content you want to find anywhere else behind the scenes, before the show, after the show, special club events, and access to the members-only Discord server where lots of folks are chatting and have great tips, advice, et cetera. And again, thank you for tuning in and I will catch you again next week for another episode of Hands on Tech. Bye, bye.