CNET Editors React to Apple's iPhone 16 'Glowtime' Event video

Welcome back to CNS live coverage of the Apple iphone 16 event, the Glow Time Event or now, I guess we're in the Afterglow. Um I am here with my co-host Scott Stein and Aar Al Hedi and we have a lot to dive into. So we're just going to go around the room and you know what, let's show our feelings because a lot of it was kind of on par with like some of the rumors, but there were some surprises as well um uh for me, uh my because I always have to go first because you know, how can I expect you guys to um you know, say what you think without being on the spot too, man. Uh This is the, this is the time for the air pods. Um uh Perhaps they might have had uh the biggest splash but uh they, the and, and that, and the iphone 16 camera button uh that capture button. Those were the two big highlights for me. How about you, Scott? Yeah, I just, I just watched the event on the Vision pro so II I threw my through screens all around me. Um Yeah, I think the camera button is the, is the, you know, big splashy new thing here. Um How useful that is or not, you know, it depends on who you are and I thought it was interesting that some of those health features. Uh the, the most notable ones hearing aid um capabilities like FDA capable ones for airpods Pro two and sleep apnea detection. Uh Both are coming to older models of products, the airpods Pro Two and the Apple Watch uh from last year as well as this year. Uh That's because that stuff needs to be tested, you know, in order before it's released. So that doesn't surprise me. But I think it's, it's, it's just interesting to see those big prominent new features really being for existing products. What about you, Abra? Yeah, I agree with that. I think what was so interesting is that a lot of today was highlighting products that have come out before with new features um highlighting Apple Intelligence features that we already heard about during WW DC. Um But then uh I do think those health features, especially the, the hearing aid feature on the uh airpods Pro two and the hearing test. It's so fascinating because, you know, we think a lot about head like, you know, ear buds and headphones lead to hearing loss and it's interesting to see Apple acknowledge that. But then say, hey, you should still buy our products and we'll just find a way to, you know, minimize the damage if we can. And I feel like that's such an interesting way to market um these headphones. I'm really curious to see how people respond to that and how people use these features. But that, that definitely caught my attention and then, yeah, USB C charging, how exciting uh across the uh those headphones in your buds. Yeah. Will, will these earbuds uh uh be something that people ended up buying for the family members in their life who have hearing loss. We saw that example of, of an older motherly figure who finally could, you know, like I'm like, did no one buy her um an actual like hearing aid but, but my great grandmother did not like putting her hearing aids in and perhaps, you know, it's something that like, oh, I just have my air pods, you know, so it would be interesting to see if it becomes something that people use to kind of like, oh, you know, just throw your airpods in instead of getting out the whole earpiece and, and, and, and how that goes. But that will be something that's not, is that coming out right away or is that something that's going to be coming out a little later, Abra, did you catch that? I know that it will be their awaiting FDA clearance and I think it'll hopefully be coming out soon uh in, in the near future. But I think you bring up a really interesting point where there is a lot of stigma around things like hearing aids and devices that look very clinical. Uh And so I think, you know, making this something that's embedded in something that's so mainstream is potentially a really good step. And, and maybe it'll allow more people to have access to this kind of technology, not that airpods are cheap, of course. Um But you know, if you are already going to get airpods anyway, and then you have this additional functionality, it could be really helpful. I want to also talk about the Apple watch. I, I was really thinking, hey, is this the big 10th year anniversary of the announcement of the Apple watch? And it didn't wow me as much, but I found a few things interesting like how, ok, we're talking about sleep apnea detection. We're talking about how it's a new design as you're seeing here, play out how you'll be able to do more on the screen where it's slightly changed in design. But as someone with a series nine, I saw that you could still get some features on your series nine. So I'm going ok, the motivation to upgrade is a little bit weaker than other times. But um Scott, I kind of wanted to get your take, Mr I reviewed the very first Apple watch, you know, like here we are 10 years later, big focus on series 10. Also having some water, uh sport things. Uh if you go canoeing you'll have a few cool things too. But what was your take after watching that whole presentation with the watch? I mean, very much the same proposition, you know, I think that they're going for exactly for the sportier people. A bit sportier. Uh, a bit slimmer. A bit bit bigger screen and, and these are updates that we've seen before on Apple watches, you know, like they've, they've gradually increased the screen several times. Um, they've, they've focused on trying to make it, uh, a little more, a little less weighty. Um, yeah, it didn't really like, wow me, I, you know, all these things that we were talking about, like, you know, Apple Intelligence that, that did not show up in the way that I expected. They mentioned some machine learning and intelligence features. I think that's almost like a, like a hint that at some point, Apple intelligence will find a way on. But, you know, yeah, again, the big, the big feature that we were expecting apnea to Apple's credit is also available on the previous generation watches which, um, that's nicer than not. I don't like the idea of gatekeeping at all. It just means that it's, you know, it, it makes this new watch feel like it doesn't have a particularly new thing going on with it other than being a little, a little bit larger screened. And so it didn't address battery life either, which we were talking about with LEXI before. If you're going to be wearing this for apnea detection, you're wearing it to sleep and they haven't explained how that's going to be more useful for people. The answer for Apple has always been about changing your charging habits. This is 30% not 30% like 30 minutes to 80% charging. So it's faster charging, but you're still gonna have to juggle that and it's not multi day like a Fitbit from the past or, or something like that, bro. Give me your watch takes. Ok, I have a very superficial watch take, which is about how you can play music out loud from your Apple watch without putting in headphones. Um That's so annoying because it could be really helpful. But imagine you're on the train and somebody's just like blasting their music on their Apple watch. Hopefully that's not gonna happen, but it's, it's more possible. Now. Um That's my very superficial takeaway from the Apple watch reveal today. Humans are always annoying. You can always guarantee a human being annoying. But for me, actually, I use a lot of different um products in the house that have uh the assistant. Sorry, I'm like, it's going to go off in my house all of a sudden but, but when I'm asking for a song through my watch, I'm expecting it to play in speakers. Now. Will it know which what device it wants to play it on? Am I gonna play that little game of like no phone. I didn't mean you no speakers. I meant you no watch. I didn't mean and I've always struggled with that a little bit as a user. So I like to see how apple um and, and, and its machine learning kind of knows what we intend. Um But uh yeah, and then with Ultra, we have to mention uh it comes in black. There you go for a glow Time Event. Uh uh black is the color, but we do another color on the series nine and it's also black you can choose and rose gold. It's the one thing about them. Yeah, about the speaker too. Like it occurred to me, we were all chatting and going, what is this going to be used for? I can see one practical thing which is uh workouts and meditations when you don't have headphones so I could see that being something where you go. OK. You know, I need, I want guidance on this or I listen to music and OK, that's helpful because I don't know where my headphones are right now and, or I just don't want to take them out. But like Abra said, like, you know, anytime you put the ability to play something loudly on something, somebody's going to use it for that. So that's going to be annoying. Well, we got to go into the iphone 16 and the camera control and, and how there's so many things that we heard about today that were still from WW DC. It was almost like a little bit of a hand holding to get you through what Apple Intelligence is. But yeah, we were seeing that all the phones are getting this action button. So it wasn't something that was a big thing for me living with the action button in my phone last year, but it was kind of talked about how, hey, hey, we have more apps now. They're going to be working with it. Maybe you want to like have that action button work with a third party app. So I think that was the little twist. Oh, you remember Apple Intelligence working with, we suggested how to write an email. Maybe they'll be able to have suggestions in third party apps. But that um that that camera control button really has me thinking uh it definitely matters what case you get. Um Scott. Tell me a little bit about your first thoughts with this button. Yeah. So it looks like the buttons working with capacitive touch and haptics. And it reminds me of like uh virtual buttons where you get kind of a haptic feedback and fitbits had some of some of those like capacitive touch type things with, with vibration. Uh I love the idea in theory of being able to pull out those camera settings um from that I or even some things in apps for sharing. Uh in practice. I'm curious how weird or annoying. Those will be, um, it kind of reminded me of touch bar a little bit in a little way. Um, uh, and, and, you know, I don't think it's gonna be like that, I think, but I think that it's, you know, new interface means new learning curve and also potential for misfires. I also wonder about, can you use this with gloves, you know, like, you know, is this something that like, you know, when you quickly take a photo, are you gonna like take your gloves off now in the winter or whatever and do this and how is it going to work with water? Um Because the phones are pretty water resistant and like, you know, sometimes you do like take a photo near the pool or whatever else that you're always going to be thinking about that. But um but if it means like, you know, instant response and then you feel it gets a little wonky versus using a side volume button for shutter. Uh So I, you know, I'm just curious about all of that how that plays out Abra. We also saw that this, this button is going to have visual intelligence. It's it's given Google lens vibes even being able to use with third party apps. Um I found that to be interesting in the examples they were using, being able to say, oh, take a photo dog breeding. And some of us were joking on the side in the chat like what you're not talking to people anymore to ask what dog they had, but you'll be able to do a lot of different things with this. It seems um when it's coming later this year, what, what, what was on your mind when it comes to the visual intelligence side? It's fascinating to me that Apple is, is using a physical button or hardware to try to lure you into some of its new software capabilities. So obviously, they want you to use Apple Intelligence and they want you to use all their schmancy new camera features and to say, here's a designated button where you can tap into all of that is a really fascinating approach. Um And potentially it could lead people to OK, let me play around. OK. It's right there. It's on the side of my phone. Why don't I just utilize it and see how it works? Yes, Google Lens has been around forever. But how often do you actually go into that and use that? And how often do you take a picture of, you know, a restaurant to find out what the menu is at that place? It's so I think it could potentially increase um the use of some of its new A I features. I did use uh uh the Apple camera itself to take a picture of a plant the other day and be like, what is this? And you know, that's that, that is one of those things that's kind of hidden inside of the iphone. You got to know how to take the picture swipe up and you get, it's the kind of thing you tell your friends about. Did you know you could do? And here I feel like uh by having it on this button, maybe they're kind of being a little show off uh uh Scott. Um you know, what do you think about being able to do this whole like identifying something with visual intelligence? Oh man, my future devices, uh Spidey things are tingling all over the place on this one. Like that's like, you know, just we the vision pro to watch this thing. I wear Meta's glasses a lot. And um I was thinking, oh, that camera button would be interesting on glasses, wouldn't it? Because you know, when you have a phone, you have a screen when you have glasses or ones with future displays and you press on that and it can give you a menu that you can adjust or instantly bring up A I that's really intriguing on Meta's glasses. You have to say, hey, meta and trigger them. And there is not an A I button on the glasses. There's a, there's a general button, I guess you could kind of press and hold things, but that's more, that's for camera recording and that's for snapping photos. So yeah, I'm already leaping there because I think that this is easing people into instant use of this vision system and we're like, oh when Apple makes glasses, Apple has mixed reality now, the cat's out of the bag. I mean, they're in this space. I don't think it will be very long in the future before they start thinking or showing glasses. Um It seems like part of the road map and visual intelligence is such a big part of A R and it is a big missing part of vision pro that I just go OK. There we go. I don't know. But Apple sometimes takes like three or four years to introduce that on something else. In the meantime, I think, I think it's just interesting to see how it, how it evolves here. I guess they're going to test how people use it. Yeah, it's kind of like uh now you get to see it in action and then like after a few years with it, you know, they get to like maybe perfect it a little more. We, we, we're showing the Pro on screen, we got to go talk about the pro a little bit and how I guess we're all just going to be um uh amazing photographers now and making music videos in super slow motion, you know, II I always like the pro line. We, we're in the business of video, I mean, particularly I want, make sure like, oh yeah, I want, I want the best of the best, but now I'm going OK, super slow motion. Four K. Uh Yeah, but wait, I can adjust things after the fact. And now I'm really curious, these were, these were small little talks about adjusting colors and different things after the fact. Now I'm going ok. Maybe, maybe that, that is something that could be fun to play with. But, um, a bar like, are you, are you going all the way and pro on this one? Uh, or, or to be able to have all these cool audio right now? We're even seeing a demo of the audio. You, you could, you could change up because how many times have you done something where you wish the audio was better? Yeah, I I'm also with you in that, I believe like you're already chalking up, you know, minimum $800 for an iphone. If you have the capacity to pay 200 more and actually get like top of the line video and, and, and hardware then then go for it. But um the audio aspect is really interesting because it reminds me of pixels um audio magic eraser, which can also kind of you can tweak the audio if there's some background sounds that are ruining your, your shot. Um I, I I love that they had a demo of somebody in San Francisco and the Wind was ruining their video because that was just the perfect example of really being in San Francisco and dealing with that. But um but such incremental upgrades. So honestly, I have an iphone 14 pro and I don't think this event was enough to convince me that I need to upgrade. I think I'm probably just gonna wait until next year and see if there's anything that's a bit more revolutionary, which there should be after this event, which was kind of, you know, a bit, a bit modest. Well, come on. Largest iphone ever though, Scott. You don't want the largest iphone ever. We love that our best product yet. Yeah, of course. I hope so. Even bigger. Um Yeah, I mean, a lot of those increments. Yeah, it is. They, they feel incremental where it's like, you know, yes, technically it is bigger, how much bigger will bigger feel. Um, you know, some people don't have a max and that could already be their bigger, but this is bigger compared to bigger. Um I felt the same way as a bar did where I didn't feel any particularly large pull to say, oh, this is the upgrade moment. I think the camera button is interesting that definitely is intriguing to me. But again, like I'd say intriguing, you know, because I don't know how it will feel when I start using it all the time and um or if I start using it all the time and then, um and then the, the, the spatial audio recording stuff. I mean, again, that's the vision pro mentioned one of the couple in there. Uh Yeah, I understand that for future capture on things. But I think if you're doing that for uh vision pro that's such a small subset, obviously. So it's a very small subset. And I think that by the time uh Apple evolves its headsets and other things you'll have something that does that even better. Um I thought it was interesting. They mentioned that I don't know when other times I'd use it or, you know, I'm not thinking tremendously much about audio with my videos. Maybe I, maybe I would start doing that more. Um So, yeah, I kind of felt like, I mean, I like the idea of the pro has the five X Zoom. I think that's great because that was, that was kept in that max model and I miss not having five X Zoom. So that's how I felt. Well, not everyone uses cinematic mode, right? And, and that was something that's out for a while. So it's more like leaning more into that, like if you want that professional moment to be able to like, you know, fine tune where the audio is coming from. It's a nice thing to have, but it doesn't mean it's gonna be for everyone. Um I, you know, there was a lot to digest and I want to go around one more time and get final kind of things and questions you might be dwelling on and feelings for me. I thought it was interesting how much of a stress we heard about battery boosted right off the bat with the iphone. Uh, 16 Pro models didn't really get like numbers. I mean, that's something we could dig into later, like, ok, but clearly Apple wanted you to know, hey, the battery is better. Um, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll tell you how later, but it's better, please. Because what, what do we hear from our CNET survey that people care about battery when they're actually updating, you know, and, and A I is a little lower on the list. Um, I'm worried about that, that camera button and how it works with what kind of cases you might have or if, if I'm going to accidentally set it off because of the way I'm holding my phone, we don't need another issue of us holding our phones wrong and, and I also, um, did find it interesting how much Apple stressed, um, this presentation, how much you can get for a trade in of just last year's model making it appear that it's a free phone. And I mean, what I mean by that is that if you had the iphone 15, it was like, and you get a trade in as much as $800. Wait, it starts at $800 for the new one. If you have a pro, it's as much as 1000. Wait, are you, are you like? So how is Apple trying to convince people now to do this upgrade? We here we're all talking about how it's a, maybe a lesser of, of, of, um, of a, wow. But it's a lot of little things. So they definitely hit on pricing more. But there's so much more I want to explore and, and we're all going to have to chew on for a while, but I'll go with you, Scott. What is still kind of in your mind after all this, what exactly Apple Intelligence is going to be? You know, I think that that's a big thing for me. I think they've talked about some of the features and they say more to come and considering it's not launched yet and they sound like they're going to be taking a step by step approach. And visual intelligence was a big focus here. I just wonder when that will appear in other platforms like the watch, um when it might show up for air pods in some way more. Um That was my big question because all the products here seem pretty straightforward. You know, I feel like these seem like continuations of what we already know. And then the question is when you choose to upgrade. But I think that bigger question, it didn't really feel like a great arrival moment for A I, you know, they said built from the ground up for this, but I thought the other, the other phones are built for A I too. So, you know, I don't know, I don't know what that means. Exactly. Um, and I, I think that, uh it's always a moving point and, uh, so, you know, they haven't changed the forms on anything yet. The, the everything functions as we are used to it functioning and we didn't get a whole new gesture language. We didn't get, um, you know, other new surprising things other than the camera button. Um, and so that's how I feel about it right now. It's kind of like, OK, you know, I think it was a reemphasizing of Apple Intelligence, like you said, a lot of it was recap for that as well. Yeah. No, no new double tap and no new motions to learn. But I, but, but perhaps there are other things we haven't even figured out yet with that button. A bra. What are you kind of sitting with after all this? Yeah, I'm right there with Scott in that. Even just the, the format of this event was really interesting comparative events from Samsung or Google where A I was right off the bat, what was discussed, right? Because those are companies that really hit the ground running when it comes to A I and Apple has had a much more cautious approach as we know, and it's being a little bit more measured about what it rolls this out. So, um I think the fact that we really didn't get that definitive idea of like, oh, when you get your iphone 16, like Apple, you know, apple intelligence will be ready to go. No, like, you know, we still don't know exactly what that will look like when it'll really be available. Um And so I'm sure we'll learn more. Uh, but I think there is a lot of unknown in that way and I think this, this event is really reflective of that idea of, hey, here's the hardware, it's really cool, some cool, you know, software and A I features will be coming too. I am curious on what we're going to get out of that demo room. Uh Those of you watching um be sure to stay to our channels because we're going to be having videos from the demo room with hands on time. You know, if A I is not coming out right now, will our team be getting some demos of all of these different A I uh features in the showroom in the observatory? Uh This new room that apparently might be utilized today and also we did not hear about a change in the watch bands uh with this new design that was not something Apple talked about at all. So that's another thing I'm looking forward to with hands on time. So it'll be very interesting to see if uh you know, being hands on with these products reveals any little nuggets that we didn't get from the presentation. But thank you, Scott and thank you. He is always fun kind of digesting this in real time. With you guys and for those of you watching, thanks again and we will keep having more content coming out for you all week long. We'll see you next time.