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Here it is. The iPhone Air.

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>> Wow. >> Okay. Very funny, guys. Where is it? >> Our friends at Dbrand sent it over.

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>> Here you go.

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>> According to the instructions, Dbrand wants me to get it myself.

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>> Actually, don't don't >> Why do that? >> It is a real cut. You don't do that,

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please. >> But that's Look at the blood on it. It's ringing.

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>> I could get my arm out of it. >> Don't do that, Lionus.

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>> No. My god, Lus. >> No. No.

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>> Okay, there's an iPhone. >> Oh my god.

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>> Okay. >> What a poorly crafted trap, Dbrand.

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>> Oh, well that that was better than I expected.

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Next time, if you don't want me to get the iPhone Air, you'll have to make a better trap. Also, I'm just going to

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break the glass for fun. There you go.

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Get Get this out of here.

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Without further ado, let's open up the extremely generous accessory package for

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the iPhone Air. Inside you will find a USBC to C USB 2 cable.

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Wow, is that even a meter? Did you measure

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it? and one piece of paper. That's it.

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I mean, it's better than what they include with the AirPods Pro 3s. You

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don't even get a cable with those anymore. But how else would Apple save

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the envir Wow, it's really thin.

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Oh, and it doesn't have the issue that I

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have with some iPhones where the edges are really sharp. Like, they managed to

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make it this thin without you feeling like it's going to slice your fingers

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off at the first knuckle. Oh, I like it.

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I don't even mind the plateau. See, Google, I blame Google for this. They

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normalized this Apple's just taken Google's crappy design and

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elevated it. Get it?

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It's taller. In all seriousness, the plateau, which

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Apple says was created to house some of the essential functions of their

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thinnest phone ever, is far from the only controversial thing about this.

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Let's start with a quick exterior tour. Over on the right, we will find our lock

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button along with oo camera button. I

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don't actually like it for using as a shutter. I actually just prefer the

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on-creen button, but I do like it as a quick button for opening up the camera.

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On the bottom, we find Oh, interesting.

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An offcenter USB 2 type-C port. Oh, it's

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not that offc center. People are complaining about such little things,

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man. especially when you have big things to complain about down here, like the

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lack of a speaker. The amplified earpiece speaker right here is the only

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speaker you will find on the iPhone Air. Finally, over on the other side, we've

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got our volume rocker as well as action button, which can be programmed to long

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press and activate pretty much whatever you want as long as Apple authorizes you

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to use it for that. There's really not much else to say about it other than

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damn, I know it's $200 extra for a phone that

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is missing a lot of features from the regular iPhone 17, especially notably a

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second camera. That's right. You get just one 48 megapixel fusion camera with

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2x optical zoom that is not optical zoom at all. It's just playing around with

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which pixels it's using on the sensor and applying digital processing. full

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support for MagSafe in spite of its thinness. Do we have any Mags safe

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accessories that we can stick on it? I'm kidding. I wouldn't want them. What

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would be the point of buying the world's thinnest iPhone only to put a giant

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honking accessory on it? And yet, you know that's what you're going to do. If

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you're going to put a skin on, it should be from our sponsor Dbrand.

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Wow. Thank you. Oo, tank case. Oh my

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god. Really? So Dbrand took the whole concept

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of why would you put a big bulky case on

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the thinnest phone and freaking ran with it with this thing. I mean, I'd hate for

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my expensive iPhone air to get broken unless this thing started at $1,000.

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It's like the very opposite of who I would imagine the target audience is for

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the iPhone Air. Everything about the iPhone Air says I'm an Asian lady who

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loves designer brands. And everything about this case that I've put on it says

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that I'm a pubescent or young adult male

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who's into guns. Apparently the buttons on it are interchangeable though. That

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okay. Okay, that's pretty cool. I'm going to go with the green one because

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whatever. I think camo is cool. Oh, I didn't see the pink ones. Why' I put the

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stupid military green on? All right,

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there it is. The tank. You can get yours at my boss is a shortnaristic

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asshole.com. I assume they own that domain as well.

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Nope. >> Nope. They have to buy it now.

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And the best part is when a Dbrand employee buys it, well, I'm not their

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boss. One area where you won't find any

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controversy around the iPhone Air is the screen. It's absolutely gorgeous. At 6

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1/2 in, it is just in between the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro and the 17 Pro Max. And

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like them, it features Apple's ceramic Shield 2, which they claim is much more

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scratch resistant. And it features a maximum brightness of up to 3,000 nits

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outdoors, which we were able to validate, and 1,600 nits maximum in HDR.

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Of course, for me, the bigger one is that they claim one nit of minimum

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brightness in their brightness reduced mode, which can be accessed. Oh, shoot.

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It isn't linked on this one. I will have to edit it. And it's worth it because it

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is so awesome. Yeah, it's an excess. Ah,

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it's Dude, this at night is a freaking

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lifesaver. You crank your brightness all the way down, dude. Okay, it looks like

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nothing right now. That's because it's almost nothing. But like at night when

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I'm going to bed, forget like reduce blue light mode or whatever. This is

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freaking awesome. Sitting there playing Wordscapes in bed with the wife. It's

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great. I just have to figure out how to turn it back on. Or maybe I shouldn't.

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This is a great opportunity to have a look at Apple's new anti-glare coating.

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Oh, okay. I gotta say, I wouldn't quite put this

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on par with the S24 Ultra, but damn,

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that's not bad. Here, let's grab a crappy phone. Ah,

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it's a little better. Yeah, you just you just want less. So, I'm scanning around

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for the same. Like, here's the brightest spot. It's a little better. Like every

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iPhone in the 2025 lineup, it features an up to 120 Hz prootion display. But

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unlike the other iPhones that it came out alongside, the performance in gaming

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is not necessarily peak. See, Apple

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raised a lot of eyebrows when they announced that the Air would feature the

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same A19 Processor that's in the iPhone

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17 Pro and Pro Max, albeit with one

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fever GPU core. So, we were thinking like, man, it's so thin. And they were

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up there on stage saying, "Yeah, we needed an aluminum body in order to

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freaking cool this thing in our Pro phono." But then the Air has a titanium

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body, which in people's bent tests has apparently held up extraordinarily well.

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What gives? Turns out what gives is some

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thermal throttling. With that said, while the iPhone Air does fall behind

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the 17 and the 17 Pro in most cases,

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what it doesn't fall behind is its Android competition. I was shocked to

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see it not only lead the Galaxy S25 Edge

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in everything but Geekbench CPU multi-threaded where it ties and 3D Mark

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Steel Nomad where I don't even know if I can count because in 3D Mark Wildlife

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Extreme where we actually run the test multiple times once it reaches its

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minimum score where realistically all of the phones are thermal throttling the

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air comes out ahead and that ignores the absolute

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buttwamping that the Pixel 10 Pro gets.

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Like, man, for years, Apple's whole pitch was, well, our hardware is kind of

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a generation or two behind, but you'll stay for the software and the ecosystem.

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Nowadays, it's like, I got to be Apple sitting here going.

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This is our thin one. Y'all can't even beat this.

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If you guys want to check out the details, we're going to have the Labs website linked down below where they'll

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have more extensive testing and graphs and all that good stuff for you folks who enjoy it. In the meantime, let's

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talk about charging and battery life. Yes, my friends, we are returning to

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controversy. The iPhone Air not only charges slower than its 17 and 17 Pro

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compatriots, but manages less battery

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life in usage thanks to, of course, being well, significantly thinner. With

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that said, it's not that bad. It's worse than the Galaxy S25 Edge, but then it's

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also thinner than the Galaxy S25 Edge.

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And embarrassingly again for Google, it

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manages to beat the Pixel 10 Pro in

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battery life for crying out loud. Man, I

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don't know who's making it harder to be an Android user these days, Apple or

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Google. We were able to validate Apple's claim that you can reach up to 50%

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battery life in 30 minutes with an appropriately spec charger. Not that

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they include one in the box. And perhaps more impressively, from zero, you can

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get to about 25% in just 12 minutes. Not

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bad. But what will I be doing for all of that battery life? Why don't we fire up

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YouTube and see just how usable these speakers are? Give me that crab rave.

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Okay, it's the worst speaker I've heard on an iPhone in quite some time.

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And it's not close.

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Physics, right? Like Apple has done a lot to bend the laws of physics in terms

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of making their very compact devices sound shockingly big, but there's only

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so much they can do. It's just not a very big speaker. It's about as good as

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I could have possibly imagined it sounding, though. Let's try out the

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camera. Ooh, new camera design now

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simpler than ever. Gotta say, man, as someone who uses the telephoto on my

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phone a lot, like I don't really care about not having the ultra wide, but

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missing the telephoto is kind of a downer. Wow, look at that, dude. I don't

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even have noise in your shirt. Like, there's a little bit, but like wow. And

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like, it knows that you and Reese aren't the same color. Dude, you see some of

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these like racist phones we get? Like I can't believe what some phones are doing

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to skin tones. Whereas like Apple, they just Yep. That's what they look like.

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That's good. And that's especially hard cuz it's it's legitimately like really

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dark over there. They're all sitting in the shadows. I'm I'm actually really I'm

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Man, I'm really happy with that. Now, let's have a look at the fake telephoto.

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Yeah, it's it's worse. It's just It's

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just not better, though. That's the issue that I have. I swear to God, one

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of these days I'm going to get through an Apple device video without talking

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about the inconsistency in their UI design. I want to un what I'm doing. No,

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I have to painstakingly do this because

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you don't have a back button.

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Oh. Oh, I should try the new simultaneous recording feature. How the

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hell do I do that? Whoa, check this out. Like I'm on the ShortCircuit set. This

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is what everything looks like on the ShortCircuit set. Look, look at there's Labs nerds.

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>> You can move the window around, too. >> What's up? I can move the Oh, I can

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move. Oh, yeah. Oh, I can put it dead center so I can just look at myself

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instead of other people because that's honestly the most important part for me

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cuz I just love the look of myself. I can't actually. Apple won't let you just

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put it wherever you want. You have to put it in a corner. See? Oh man. Sorry.

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Apple, man, you got no consistency when it comes to UI UX philosophy. See, you

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do want to dictate where I put my stuff, right? You won't just let me put it

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wherever I want, but you would let me put it in the way of like buttons and

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what the why wouldn't it be here and

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here? Like, that's stupid. They might as

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well put like a big hole in the middle of where my display is supposed to.

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Okay, before we finish up with the camera, can I get all of my friends in

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here? And I need to have it automatically frame a shot for me. One

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of the big features here is, of course, Apple Intelligence. uh more specifically

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the Apple intelligence way that they're using their new 18 megapixel square

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sensor here to automatically refframe

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and crop your images so that you can fit all of your all of your paid friends

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with you. So if you're taking a picture okay is it going to automatically go

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landscape for me? >> Oh no, it just went wider. >> Yeah, but that's just already a thing.

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>> Wait, we need more people. >> Yeah, we need more thing. More thing. We need more Yeah, we need more thing.

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Look, >> it's been a long day. Okay. Okay. So, I'll take a picture of myself because

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that's what I do. Okay. All right. Then a couple people come in.

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Oh, dude. Oh, dude. That's so cool. I

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love it. See, this is the kind of thing I want

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Apple spending R&D money on. Fighting the war that I can't afford to fight

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against people holding their phones like this and filming content that would be

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way freaking better if they went like this. And a square sensor is such a

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freaking smart solution to this. They could crop it this way. They could crop

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it this way. They can do whatever they want. They got 18 megapixels and they

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can be any shape you like. Freaking awesome. I love it. Oh, also it's

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probably a decent selfie camera. Yep.

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Solid. That's healthy. You love to see

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it. Some other key features include the use of Apple's new C1X modem, which

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they're claiming makes this the most efficient iPhone ever, as well as the

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ability to send out SOS messages via satellite if you are out of reception

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and you are lost. If I was buying a phone for a kid or a dependent, that

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would be a major factor for me. Other key features, we've got Wi-Fi 7 again,

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but this time with Bluetooth 6, which theoretically should give us, you know,

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better security, better everything.

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Cool. Which means the last major feature is of course iOS 26 which has some stuff

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that I got to say is extremely tempting. You can check out our rundown from back

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when they announced it. But for me the standout feature is to just

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automatically screening unknown callers, having them state their purpose and then

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only ringing my phone if they have a valid one.

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That alone has got me going, well, I might as well just do another iPhone

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30-day challenge because I might just be

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ready to go iPhone right now. I have not had a great experience with my Pixel 9a.

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You guys, if you watch ShortCircuit regularly, will have known that just

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about every phone we unbox on here, I'm like, maybe this will be it. Maybe this

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will be my daily driver. And like, I just haven't found anything that's been

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exciting and and reliable. This has great battery life, but other downsides,

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I just I think I'm ready. Apple, bring me into

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the ecosystem. It's too bad the AirPods Pro 3 suck ass.