Interesting Apple keynote. Ternus immediately strikes me as a more interesting CEO, if we ignore that our CEO names, to this point, have been Steve, Tim, and John, which are as whitebread as it comes.

(Ooops. I started at The Return. Michael, Mike, John, Michael (I see a trend), Gilbert, then Steve, Tim, and John. Not exactly injera, are they?)

But, unlike wooden -- but otherwise amazingly business-competent -- Cook, I want to ask Ternus questions about what he's presenting. I feel like I might get better than boilerplate answers, which my intuition tells me are all I'd get from Cook. There's a huge gap between buttoned up and effusively proud of what you've done before you get to "That's company IP; I can't tell you". We've at least solved the "Do you seem to care about my phone?" issue. Tentatively.

The only other item of real interest for me -- beyond the reuse of "one more thing", which you could see coming a mile away -- was the one more thing: Duo.

I am the market for this thing, which is to say who the heck is the market?

  1. I love small phones.
  2. I hate Face ID.
  3. My favorite Apple device is my iPad mini.
    • (I have a 6th gen. Battery kinda stinks. I've kept on iOS 18 because 26 killed my SE 3's performance. I want a new one.)
    • But, honestly, if I could only have one Apple device, the mini is it.

Imagine an iPad mini in your pocket. This is my dream!

Well, you had me in the first half; not going to lie. It's a dream, but not at $2200.* Is this for Apple Watch Edition owners only? Or at least Hermes watch owners, I guess. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.

Yet for that price, I can buy a Fairphone 6+ ($650), a Garmin Instinct Solar that "never" needs charging ($350, $1k running total), and a new mini ($700 once 8th gen is out?, $1700 total), pocket $500 and say forget the Duo.

Except that 8th gen mini won't fit in my pocket. Decisions, decisions.

IP68?!!

Now admittedly part of me doesn't trust the IP68 rating Apple claims for the Duo.

iPhone Duo is splash, water, and dust resistant and was tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes). Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions. Resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.

Frankly, that's amazing. A 6 for dust means, "No ingress of dust; complete protection against contact (dust-tight). A vacuum must be applied. Test duration of up to 8 hours based on airflow." Really? Again, amazing.

The Galaxy Z Fold 8 that iFixit recently showed still gets sand crackle is only IP48.

Still, "Resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear" and "dust resistance [is] not a permanent condition" is doing a lot of work in that blurb.

That is, I still wouldn't want to take a Duo to the beach, and I'd probably want to drop another $200 for at least a year of AppleCare.

But, man, that SE 3 is getting slow. It stinks that if I don't order Friday I probably wouldn't get a new phone delivered until the 18e is out. This is definitely a see-it-first type of purchase. And probably a wait for version 2, see how long IP68 lasts, and hope it still has Touch ID next year thing for me.

*The storage trap/lock-in

Why $2200 for me to buy a Duo? Because there's another bit of lock-in I'm experiencing: I've got too danged much on my phone.

My main SE 3 has 256 gigs, and it's still to the point that I'm constantly unloading apps and whacking music off of it to keep it running quickly. I bought a back-up SE 3 a while back with 64 gigs of space and, well, it's a pita to set up if you don't just say, "Forget it, don't restore from backup after all." But then you lose health, etc, right? Is there a clever way to do this other than...

  1. Back up your well-storaged phone completely to your Mac with password protection.
  2. Toss everything off of your main until you're under the storage of the poorly-storaged phone.
  3. Make another backup of your main, now with waaaay less storage use so it fits on the new one, and ensure you don't accidentally erase that previous backup when saving it.
  4. Install Backup 2 on poorly-storaged phone.
  5. Install Backup 1 on well-storaged phone.

That's crazy. So I have to buy an even better-storaged phone not to go mad during my transfer.

That puts me at $2200.

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