iPhone 16 and Apple Watch Hands On, and Big Brother TVs – Intego Mac Podcast Episode 363
Posted on
by
Kirk McElhearn
We discuss what’s patched in Apple’s latest operating systems, and more importantly, some of what isn’t. Models of some brand name TVs are phoning home with screenshots of your viewing habits. Telegram changes its terms of service in a way which won’t make criminals happy. And of course, we’re hands on with Apple’s new Watch and iPhone.
- macOS Sequoia and iOS 18: What Apple patched—and what they didn’t
- Apple neglects to fix “fake headlines” bug usable for election interference
- Watching TV with the Second-Party: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs
- Telegram will now hand over IP addresses, phone numbers of suspects to cops
- Warrant canary
- Review: Apple Watch Series 10, Larger, Thinner, Easier to Read
- Review: iPhone 16 Pro, Small Upgrade with Big New Features Coming Soon?
- Apple Intelligence: Why most users won’t get it
If you like the Intego Mac Podcast, be sure to follow it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon.
Intego Mac Premium Bundle X9 is the ultimate protection and utility suite for your Mac. Download a free trial now at intego.com, and use this link for a special discount when you’re ready to buy.
Get Apple security news delivered straight to your inbox, for free. Intego’s twice-monthly newsletter will keep you informed about Apple-related privacy and security, along with tips and tricks for getting the most out of your Mac or iPhone. Subscribe for free—no strings attached.
Transcript of Intego Mac Podcast episode 363
Voice Over 0:00
This is the Intego Mac Podcast—the voice of Mac security—for Thursday, September 26, 2024. This week’s Intego Mac Podcast security headlines include: What’s patched in Apple’s latest operating systems, and more importantly, some of what isn’t. Models of some brand name TVs are phoning home with screenshots of your viewing habits. Telegram changes its terms of service in a way which won’t make criminals happy. And of course, we’re hands on with Apple’s new Watch and iPhone. Now, here are the hosts of the Intego Mac Podcast: veteran Mac journalist Kirk McElhearn, and Intego’s Chief Security Analyst, Josh Long.
Kirk McElhearn 0:48
Good morning. Josh, how are you today?
Josh Long 0:49
I’m doing well. How are you, Kirk?
Kirk McElhearn 0:51
I’m just fine. I don’t know about you, but I had a busy day on Friday when I got my new Apple Watch and my new iPhone. It took a long time to set them up. How long did you have to spend?
Josh Long 1:02
You did this on purpose.
Kirk McElhearn 1:04
I did Josh. I did.
Josh Long 1:05
Because although I got mine on Friday, I haven’t taken the time to set them up yet. I do. I do have a new iPhone 16 Pro and a new Apple Watch Series 10, but I haven’t actually set them up yet. I know. How could I do this? It ruins my geek cred, right?
Initial impressions of setting up a new iPhone
Kirk McElhearn 1:24
Your geek cred is just like, totally lost here, right? You just to be fair, it does take a while. You know what I hate? We’re going to talk about the Apple Watch and the iPhone in the second part of the podcast, but you want to say the one thing I hate setting up a new Apple device is the amount of time you have to spend with Apple Pay, setting up cards in Apple Pay. It does that in the very beginning, and okay, it’s, it’s when you’re transferring from one iPhone to another. It knows the cards, but you have to enter the three digit code on the back, and then you have to get the two factor code from the bank and approve it. It takes, like, 15 minutes to be fair, I’ve got six cards, to business and for personal. So maybe some people only have a couple of cards. It’s a little bit easier. It took like, 15 or 20 minutes to do that for the phone, then to do it for the watch, then I had to do it for the phone again, because, for some reason, none of them got recorded, and I had to delete them all and do it again. That’s a long time to set those up. Anyway. So we’re going to get to the second part of the show, we want to just do an update about the update, about the updates from last week. So all the operating systems were updated last week, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia, watchOS 11, audioOS 18, I think for the HomePod TV OS 11, I guess. I’m not sure what it was.
Josh Long 2:37
TV OS 18 andVision OS 2.0 andVision OS.
Apple still using outdated open-source utilities in macOS
Kirk McElhearn 2:42
How can I forget Vision OS, well, well, it’s quite forgettable. (Yeah, yes.) Anyway, we talked about all of the vulnerabilities that were fixed and all of the previous versions of the operating systems that weren’t patched, but there are a number of other vulnerabilities, and what would we say out of date executables that haven’t been patched with these updates. Josh, tell us all about these.
Josh Long 3:05
All right, we have talked about this in the past, in the context of macOS Sonoma, but it’s the same thing. Again, history repeating itself with macOS Sequoia, where we’ve got some open source utilities. These are like command line utilities and software that is open source, software that runs kind of behind the scenes or is used for specialized purposes, right? Some of these important open source software packages, like libreSSL, is still two and a half years out of date. It has four known vulnerabilities, two of which are rated 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS criticality scale. It’s kind of unconscionable that Apple is still including such ancient, out of date software with the brand new operating system. And by the way, this is also still the case so far, at least in the point one betas of macOS as well. So I don’t know how Apple justifies this and thinks that this is okay to leave extremely vulnerable, extremely outdated software as part of the operating system, but Apple’s still doing it, even in macOS Sequoia.
Kirk McElhearn 4:19
Okay. In addition, there is a bug that apparently has been around for five and a half years that can spread misinformation via fake news headlines. I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this on the podcast once or twice before. I think every new operating system you tested to see if it’s been fixed, and you find that it hasn’t. And this is another sort of head desk moment that they haven’t fixed this. But you see, you think of it as a bug because it can spread misinformation. They think of it as a minor annoyance. They don’t think of it as a security issue.
Josh Long 4:48
Apple probably sees this as a feature, but I can’t imagine anyone in their right mind would look at this particular thing as a feature. So here’s an actual feature. I. That is part of Safari and the share sheet, okay, so when you highlight something on a web page and you hit the share button in Safari, it will give you the option to send that to messages, so that you can send an iMessage to somebody with a portion of the page quoted. That’s a great thing. I love that it’s been there for years. But here’s the problem, you can highlight something in a text input field, meaning that the user adds that to quote, unquote the page. It’s really just in like, for example, a search box or something like that. So most major websites, including news websites have a search box so you can type literally anything that you want or paste it in there and then highlight that, hit the share button, and now you can send something to somebody with iMessage that looks like it’s an exact quote from this reputable news organization, or maybe a headline from that news organization that’s really problematic, and I’m kind of shocked that Apple still has not fixed this at least five and a half years after this was originally reported to Apple.
Kirk McElhearn 6:14
Okay, well, in order to test this, I’ve just sent you a message, Josh, and I wanted to send it from YouTube, but I was unable to, for some reason, it doesn’t work in YouTube search field. Yeah,
Josh Long 6:23
I’ve noticed that. In fact, I think four years ago, when I last wrote an article about this during the last election cycle, because, you know, this is kind of a problem in a big election year in the US, right? That like Apple, which half of people in the US probably use an Apple phone, and kind of a big deal, I feel like that. They haven’t patched this problem that makes it easy to spread misinformation. But in any case, Kirk tested this by saying breaking Josh loses geek cred.
Research uncovers TV manufacturers screenshotting viewing activity
Kirk McElhearn 6:56
Interestingly, it cut off the end. I typed out Joshua’s geek cred by not unboxing iPhone, and it cut that off. It didn’t go to the second line. So there are some limits to this. In any case, this is an issue that you can send something to someone and it will look like it’s a big headline. I wanted to obviously do it to the Rick Astley video, and that’s why I went to YouTube. But YouTube doesn’t allow this from the search box. We have a story which is going to make me change something on my TV. And this is a study that was done at Cornell University. This looks at something called automatic content recognition. And this is actually quite big brother spooky. These researchers looked at two brands, Samsung and LG, because they’re the biggest selling TV brands the United States that use automatic content recognition to profile viewing activity of their users. They describe this as a Shazam like technology that works by periodically capturing the content displayed on a TV screen and matching it against the content library to detect what content is being displayed at any given point in time. Now think about this, they don’t know what you’re watching if you’re not watching on the TV, let’s say you have an Apple TV, right? And you’re streaming, or a Roku box, or something else you’re streaming to the TV, your TV set doesn’t know what you’re watching, so the TV manufacturer, who’s collecting all sorts of data can’t know. However, if they can see what’s on the TV and match it. They can know exactly what you’re watching, even if you’re airplaying Something to the TV, if the TV supports AirPlay or to another box, like an Apple TV, they can know exactly what you’re watching. Now this means that they’ll know what movies and TV shows you watch, they’ll know what news channel you’ll watch. They’ll know if you watch religious programming, they’ll know anything you’re watching on YouTube. If you’re using a YouTube app on any of these they will be able to see your encrypted video calls with FaceTime or zoom or other apps. This is really spooky. So the change I’m going to make is turn WiFi off on my TV so no data can be collected. I use an Apple TV for almost everything. The only time I actually look at my TV’s interface is when I need to change inputs, which don’t always change automatically, between my Apple TV, my blu ray player and my Xbox.
Josh Long 9:12
Right? A lot of people do use the apps built into their Smart TV. So for example, it might come with a Netflix app pre installed, and so you might have that set up so that you can stream Netflix without having to attach anything to your TV. Here’s the problem with that. If you’ve got one of these major brands, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ve got some kind of visual tracking set up that they may not have really disclosed to you, certainly not in any obvious way. Maybe it was in the 10,000 pages that you had to read of their fine print when you set up your device. Initially, nobody reads any of that, and they know it, and you know it, but legally it might allow them to do such a thing. In any case, this is kind of problematic. So, yes. As Kirk mentioned, the easiest fix for this is just turn off Wi Fi. Don’t have it plugged in. If you’ve got an Ethernet cable that can plug into the back of your TV, don’t do that either. If you have Wi Fi, turned off. The other thing that you need to do then, presumably, if you’re trying to watch your streaming content on your teleVision is you need to have some other device, like an Apple TV, hooked up, and that as long as you’ve got your Smart TV disabled from all internet communications, then it won’t be a big deal if you’re streaming stuff to your Apple TV, for example.
Kirk McElhearn 10:37
This is really creepy when you think about it. I mean, we’ve known for a while that TV manufacturers collect data. Smart TVs collect data about what you’re watching. I can imagine that someone said, Hello, Mr. Nielsen, you don’t get ratings of what people are watching using your traditional method. So here’s a way to find what people are watching, and it’s certainly useful for a TV network, a streaming network, to know how many people are watching something on their on TV. But this goes too far, that the kind of data that they can get, and particularly, there’s no reason why they can’t get screenshots of video calls that are encrypted. That could be, you know, it could be work calls. It could be, I don’t think someone in the State Department’s going to use a smart TV. They’ve got their own secure system, but it could be professional calls, and seeing who’s on the calls could be something that gives a lot of information to potential industrial espionage. So speaking of espionage, remember when we talked about Telegram, that messaging service that pretends that it’s secure, but it wasn’t secure, and whose CEO got arrested, and they were saying free speech and privacy and all this. Well, they’ve kind of changed their tune now, haven’t they, right?
Telegram messaging app tweaks their Terms of Service
Josh Long 11:46
So there was some fine print previously in Telegram that said, if Telegram receives a court order that confirms you’re a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened. So that sounds pretty reasonable, right? Like we don’t want people using something like this to facilitate terrorism. So that’s all that sounds all good, right? Now that text has changed too. If Telegram receives a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities that confirms your suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Telegram Terms of Service, we will perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. Well, that still doesn’t sound too bad, because it’s criminal activities, right?
Kirk McElhearn 12:34
But they don’t say that this had never happened.
Josh Long 12:37
Well, yeah, so this is something that’s called a warrant canary. This was at the end of the paragraph before it said, so far, this has never happened. Notice that that’s absent now, which presumably means that, well, this probably has happened. That’s the whole idea of these warrant canaries is usually the government will tell a company you may not disclose that you’ve had to reveal this information to us because that could compromise our ongoing investigation or whatever they claim. And so that’s the whole reason why a lot of companies use these warrant Canaries, because now all of a sudden, if they if that bit of text is just missing from their website, they can say, Oh, well, we just updated our terms. And only those who are astute enough to know that there was a warrant canary in the first place and that it’s now missing will be able to identify that. Ooh, they communicated something that they warned us they would tell us if they ever had to communicate.
Kirk McElhearn 13:36
Right? But you can’t know what, when or once they’ve removed this warrant canary. It can happen as many times as possible. What they’re actually saying is we are no longer protecting you.
Josh Long 13:46
Well, yeah, you could read it that way. Now, I think the really important thing to talk about here is that, again, as we’ve mentioned before, Telegram is often billed as an encrypted messaging service. It is not encrypted into an encrypted by default. You have to turn that on for individual chats between two people. It’s not on by default, and even if you turn it on, well, that’s great, but it’s only on for that one chat with one person. You still have to manually enable it for any other person that you want to have an individual chat with. And group chats don’t have an encrypted option, so Telegram is really not an encrypted messaging platform. It’s a platform that you can manually set it up per conversation to be into an encrypted but there’s also this little aspect of well, Telegram employees have access to unencrypted conversations, and that might make you a little bit uncomfortable, especially again, just like Kirk was talking about, there’s industrial espionage, right? Like you don’t want company employees of some, if any other company, to know something that employees of your company should be the only ones who have access to that proprietary information.
Kirk McElhearn 14:57
Okay, we’re going to take a break. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the. New Apple Watch Series 10 and the new iPhone 16 Pro.
Voice Over 15:05
Protecting your online security and privacy has never been more important than it is today. Intego has been proudly protecting Mac users for over 25 years. And our latest Mac protection suite includes the tools you need to stay protected. Intego’s Mac Premium Bundle X9 includes Virus Barrier, the world’s best Mac anti-malware protection, Net Barrier, powerful inbound and outbound firewall security, Personal Backup to keep your important files safe from ransomware. And much more to help protect, secure and organize your Mac. Best of all, it’s compatible with macOS Sonoma, and the latest Apple Silicon Macs. Download the free trial of Mac Premium Bundle X9 from intego.com today. When you’re ready to buy, Intego Mac Podcast listeners can get a special discount by using the link in this episode’s show notes at podcast.intego.com. That’s podcast.intego.com and click on this episode to find the special discount link exclusively for Intego Mac Podcast listeners. Intego. World class protection and utility software for Mac users made by the Mac security experts.
Hands on with the new Apple Watch Series 10
Kirk McElhearn 16:21
All right, so let’s start with the Apple Watch. I upgraded from an Apple Watch Series eight, so I had every Apple watch through the series six, and then I kept the series six for two years and the eight for two years, and I got the 10 because mainly wanted a larger watch. And I may have mentioned on the podcast I’d been considering the Apple Watch Ultra, but since they didn’t update the Apple Watch Ultra would have been last year’s model that they’re keeping around for two years. And since the display on the Apple Watch Series 10 is a little bit bigger, I thought that would be a nice compromise. And in my review of the Apple Watch on the Intego Max security blog, you can see a photo where I show the Apple Watch Series eight next to the series 10. The 10 looks a lot bigger than it is. I think it’s the curves on the bezels that are a little bit different in the photo. It’s not that much bigger. It’s only one millimeter higher and wider, so it’s not that much. But the display size, and I have the 46 millimeters, about 7% larger, and on the 42 millimeter, it’s about 9% larger. That’s actually noticeable. If you saw Apple’s presentation, they were showing how you could get one more line of text and how the keyboard is actually large enough to actually type and not make too many mistakes. I’ve typed a few times. You can’t do a lot, but you can type a couple of words to search for things. So I’m very happy about that. The thickness or thinness difference? Do we want to call thin thickness or thick thinness. It’s a millimeter, it’s 10% it’s not a lot, it’s not noticeable. One thing I was hoping was that it would fit under the cuff of a shirt more easily. Maybe my cuffs need to be looser for the watch to go under, because it still doesn’t go under, it’ll fit under a jacket relatively easily. I’m looking at it now. It’s still it’s hard to I’ve mentioned that I don’t really think the Apple Watch is attractive. It’s got this sort of squirt squircle Square tangle thing, or whatever you want to call it, and that hasn’t changed. And there have been rumors that the Apple Watch 10 would be a big design change, and well, the big design change is just a little bit bigger this way, a little bit smaller that way, and it’s not that much. I guess I sound somewhat negative, but I kind of like the new Apple Watch, and part of this is because of watchOS 11. Now, I’ve been running the betas of iOS, iPad OS and macOS, but I didn’t put the betas on my watch. And there’s one feature in watchOS 11 which has changed the way the watch works for me. It’s the smart stack. So previously, the smart stack was something related to Siri, and it would show you different things during the day that wouldn’t always be useful, but now everything seems to be coming at the right time. If I look at my watch now, I can see what the temperature is outside. I can see that it’s raining. If I’ve put a timer on in the kitchen, my watch face goes up and takes up the top half of the display, and the bottom half shows a widget with the timer while it’s on. When I get up in the morning, I look at my watch, I see my next calendar events, and as the day goes on, it changes. You can remove in the settings. You can say certain things you don’t want to see in the smart snack. But it’s really practical. I know this sounds a little bit amorphous without trying it on the watch, but when you see in your own context of things you do, I think you’ll find it a lot better.
Josh Long 19:29
I think one of the things that Apple’s really touting with all of its new operating systems is Apple intelligence. You see it on all these ads, but Apple intelligence really isn’t even coming to the watch, right? Like they haven’t said anything about even Siri on the Apple Watch getting Apple intelligence.
Kirk McElhearn 19:45
They haven’t said anything. We’ve talked about the needs of processor power and RAM for Apple intelligence, and obviously the watch doesn’t have that. I’ve been wondering if the watch could serve as a bridge to Apple intelligence somehow, so you could make a Siri request on the watch that gets sent to. The phone, but Apple hasn’t said anything about that. And with all the talk of Apple intelligence, the fact that there’s not even the slightest mention for the Apple Watch, it feels like it’s this product isn’t part of Apple’s main product line right now, which is kind of interesting.
Josh Long 20:16
Just as an aside on that Apple Vision Pro, also, which even has an m2 processor. Apple hasn’t said that any Apple intelligence features are coming to that product line either, and that’s interesting because it actually does have the same processor. That’s, you know, Max, even Max, back to the m1 are getting Apple intelligence. So that’s another interesting thing. Again, I suspect that probably has more to do with battery life than anything else. But again, if you’ve got an apple Vision Pro and you’ve also got an iPhone in your pocket and you’ve or you’ve also got a Mac nearby, you know, why couldn’t Siri queries, if nothing else, like go to one of your other local devices, right? I do feel like, at the very least, it feels like Siri ought to be able to get Apple intelligence type features right, even if they’re not being processed on device. Some of that stuff ought to be able to process through Apple’s private cloud compute.
Kirk McElhearn 21:14
Well, we’ll find out. So I got the Apple Watch in Jet Black polished aluminum, which is quite snazzy. I never really liked the aluminum watches because they have that rough finish, and this one is more like the stainless steel, which I’ve had for my last two models. It’s funny, all my friends got the same jet black Apple Watch Series 10. Did you order that as well, Josh?( I did. Yeah, yep.) And you have it in a box?
Josh Long 21:36
Yes, it’s still in a box. Okay, sue me,
Hands on with the new Apple iPhone 16
Kirk McElhearn 21:39
Okay, all right. So let’s talk about the iPhone. And the iPhone is interesting because that is all about Apple intelligence. If you remember, Tim Cook, disingenuously said, and I choose my adverb carefully that the iPhone 16. I wish I could do the Tim Cook voice, the iPhone 16 was built from the ground up for Apple intelligence. Now the iPhone 16 is actually a reVision of the iPhone 15, which is a reVision of the iPhone 14, et cetera, et cetera. None of these were built from the ground up, except for the very first iPhone. And when you go onto Apple’s website, you see iPhone 16. Hello, Apple intelligence. And this is like, Oh, I’m getting a new iPhone. I’m going to have Apple intelligence, except I’m not. And I’m going to put a link in the show notes to an article from a few months ago talking about, well, first of all, the devices that won’t get Apple intelligence, and the fact that we’re not going to see this for months now, at the minimum, we’ll start seeing some features with the 18.1 and the macOS Sequoia 15.1 releases sometime in October. But we’re months away from all this real apple intelligence stuff. When writing my review on the Intego Mac security blog, I went to some different Apple country websites. I went to the US and the UK and Canada, and then I went to France and Germany, and they only list two new features for the iPhone on the main page, the new camera and the new camera control button, because they’re not getting Apple intelligence in the beginning. In fact, don’t forget, Apple intelligence is a beta. When it releases, it’s only US English, etc. When you buy a new iPhone these days, you know that you’re getting last year’s iPhone with some tiny incremental updates. Now, to be fair, the iPhone pros get a 48 megapixel ultra wide camera. So that’s the main camera, and the ultra wide are both 48 megapixels. It has a 5x zoom, which is only 12 megapixels, which isn’t that good. And the main new feature that Apple’s presented is this button that’s called camera control. So on the bottom right when you’re holding the iPhone vertically, or on the top right when you’re holding it in landscape mode, it’s a button called the camera control. Now think about holding your iPhone like a camera in landscape mode, and it’s in the position where a shutter button would be on a normal camera, and this little button is it’s strange because you can press it, but it doesn’t press it uses haptic feedback to make you feel like it’s pressing it. It’s also a capacitive button that you can slide your finger on, so if you press it, it brings up the camera. If you press it again, it’s a shutter button. But if you light press it like do a half press then you bring up a little menu that lets you change things like exposure camera, the zoom level, et cetera. There are a lot of options, and you can slide your finger like a trackpad to adjust these things. This is the kind of feature, and I guess I can mention I do a photography podcast called photoactive, and recorded an episode yesterday where we were talking about this, and my co host Jeff Carlson and I both agreed that this is something that, you know, photo geeks are going to love this, but most normal people won’t want to use it. It’s way too complicated.
Josh Long 24:37
That’s why, one of the reasons why I was so surprised to see that Apple announced this on the regular iPhone 16, because, again, if you’re a photographer, especially if you’re a professional, right, like you’re gonna want to get the Pro or pro Max model because of the better lenses, anyway, so I was really shocked to see. Introducing this on the basic 16, because it’s one of the few things that differentiates the two, or could potentially have differentiated the two phones this year, right? There’s almost no difference between a 16 and a 16 Pro. They’re basically the same processor. You do get one extra Graphics Core in the Pro models. But, I mean, you know, the processors are basically the same, and there’s not a whole lot else other than the camera related stuff. So why would they put this on the base 16? I’m so confused by that.
Kirk McElhearn 25:37
It’s because these iPhones are built from the ground up for Apple intelligence because his camera control will also invoke Apple’s visual intelligence. Now, in Apple’s presentation, they showed this and they showed a couple of examples. We talked about recently, the guy taking a picture of a restaurant to find its opening hours that he could have found if he walked across the street or taking a picture of a dog without really asking permission. But more interesting was the woman asking who was the architect of a building. Let’s say you’re in a museum and you want information about a painting. So this button will be used by non photographers to invoke Apple intelligence. Of course, they could use any button to do that. You wouldn’t need a special button to do it. It’s kind of a way to give an excuse to have this control. I would say conceptually, the control is really impressive, but trying to figure out how to use it with all the variations, it’s really hard to use it is important that you pointed out that they’re the same because they both have the specs to run Apple intelligence. Now, previously, the Pro model had a faster processor, more RAM, and that’s the same right. Now they’re calling the chip in the iPhone 16, the A 18 and the chip in the iPhone 16 Pro, the A 18 Pro, as you say, it’s just got one Graphics Core. That’s the only difference. So that’s basically it. You get three cameras instead of two, you get a little bit faster process, and you get titanium, of course, a aerospace grade titanium case, because, you know, who wants non aerospace grade titanium, right? Anyway, I put mine in the case, so I don’t really see the titanium very much. There is. It’s the it’s the year where there’s the least amount of difference between the Pro and the non Pro models. And in fact, if you don’t really care about the extra camera, which is the main difference, don’t buy the Pro model. Save yourself a couple $100 because it is almost the same. Now I have seen a number of reviewers say something, and I’m almost quoting. It’s 2024 How can it only have a 60 Hertz display? This is in the basic iPhone 16. I don’t know what 2024 has to do with this. I’ve had promotion displays on my last few iPhones. It’s true that it’s nice. Most people don’t care if it’s a 60 Hertz or 120 hertz display. It doesn’t make a difference to them. I think too many reviewers are looking at this from the spec and the Geek point of view. I’d say for most people get the iPhone 16. Unless you really want the extra camera, you’re gonna have pretty much the same experience.
Josh Long 27:58
Yeah, I’d find this funny too. There’s so many tech geeks who complain about this every single time that a new iPhone comes out, a base model iPhone, oh, it’s not 120 hertz like display, okay, yeah. Again, the average person really does not even notice that. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they literally will not notice the difference between the two. So, yeah, if you’re if you’re not used to it, you’re not going to notice it.
Kirk McElhearn 28:23
Okay. So to sum up, I’m very happy with my Apple Watch purchase. I’m very disappointed with my iPhone purchase because I just paid off my iPhone 14 pro like you did, Josh, and there’s not that much of a difference if it wasn’t, if I didn’t need the iPhone to write about Apple intelligence, I would not have upgraded. Looking at the phone, it’s fine. It’s newer. It’s two years newer than my last one. I traded in my old one, but I could have not been paying a monthly amount for this new iPhone and kept going with the one that I had. That was fine. So I would say, if you don’t care about Apple intelligence, don’t upgrade to either of these phones. If you have maybe a 13 or a 12, then consider upgrading, right? That’s getting to be a few years old. You’ll get all sorts of, you know, other new features with it. But if you don’t care about the camera, the extra camera, I don’t see any need to go to the Pro model this year. In previous years, there was always that major distinction between the two with, you know, more features in the Pro model. If you get the plain iPhone 16, you can get one in colors instead of just what do they call it natural desert and black these, you know, bland titanium colors. So you can get a colored iPhone. If you get the plane iPhone 16, I think next week, if you finally unboxed your Apple Watch and iPhone, we can get your impressions about it until next week. Josh, stay secure.
Josh Long 29:36
All right. Stay secure.
Voice Over 29:42
Thanks for listening to the Intego Mac podcast. The voice of Mac security with your host, Kirk McElhearn and Josh long to get every weekly episode. Be sure to follow us in Apple podcasts or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and if you can leave a rating, a like or a review, links to topics and information mentioned in the podcast can be found in the show notes for the [email protected] the Intego website is also where to find details on the full line of Intego security and utility software intego.com.
