By a mile, the iPhone Duo has garnered more questions about what I think about it than any other phone I’ve ever had. It’s clearly a phone that has people intrigued, so I thought I’d jot down some loose, unorganized thoughts about what I think about it after about ten days. If I could sum all my thoughts up into one word, it’d simply be “fun”. I think for the vast majority of people, myself included, the iPhone 18 Pro is a more practical phone that through scientific analysis you’d likely even find a better phone. Even if they were priced the same, its package is more traditionally comfortable and ergonomic, with a better quality main camera, a helpful telephoto camera, a screen that’s more practical to use more of the time, a better biometric system (Face ID versus Touch ID) and a more established software experience. But damn if the iPhone Duo isn’t fun. Phones have been downright boring for so long. Incredible technology, lovely apps, but the hardware has been a bit slow moving since the iPhone X. Maybe that’s why I jumped onto the iPhone Air so readily. Even that slight departure from “black slab of glass” to “a dramatically thinner black slab of glass” was exciting versus what we’ve grown accustomed to. So I pick up the Duo, and it’s kinda just exciting to hold a phone for the first time in ages. Maybe that’s a honeymoon period and after a few months I’ll be over it. Maybe everyone who tries a folding phone for the first time experiences this. And to be clear, it’s not just all raw novelty. The fun aspect is fueled by having an absolutely incredible inner screen that fundamentally transforms what a phone is and can be. In addition, support the Apple Pencil has turned out to be phenomenally handy for me to be able to jot down quick thoughts and notes. For downsides, Touch ID is objectively worse than Face ID, but honestly, I don’t mind it as much as I expected I would. The smaller camera sensor than the Pro series phones is still decidedly great (rumors were it was a 17e size which was not correct, it’s the size of the normal 17’s). Software support gets better by the day, though iOS on the Duo is still decidedly a bit buggy at times. Other random thoughts Touch ID is objectively worse than Face ID, but honestly, I don’t mind it as much as I expected I would, previewing notifications is where I miss it the most After getting used to having a single speaker in the iPhone Air for a year, having stereo (not to mention great sounding) speakers is amazing The FaceTime camera on the inside is indeed not great for selfies/photography but honestly perfectly acceptable for FaceTime, and I’d definitely prefer this solution over a cutout on the inside so I’m happy! It definitely has a heavy feel to it, but it’s nothing honestly that bothersome A lot of the reviews said something to the effect of “the crease is practically invisible” and while I don’t really mind it or anything I definitely would disagree with that statement, you can see it a fair bit even with light content The hinge is a bit harder to open than I expected, I’ve found the secret is don’t pry from the middle of the side, instead put a thumb near the top and bottom (also helps prevent pressing Camera Control instead which I was doing all the time). I imagine this is necessary to have it be able to stop at arbitrary angles once open (which I do like) and hopefully it loosens up a bit with more use, but playing with Android foldables at Best Buy I did find their hinge easier to open I am really split on the inner, nano texture screen. It definitely helps reflections, has a neat look to it, and is super nice to draw on with the pencil, but it’s significantly less vibrant than the outer display which to my eyes looks a fair bit nicer. I think they made the right decision ultimately but it’s definitely not a zero-compromise solution. I was considering nano texture on my next MacBook but after this I think I’ll stick with glossy. My glass half full take with the Duo for now though is that we get two really cool screens to play with The outer screen is awesome for taking photos, unlike taller iPhones, your viewfinder fills the screen completely so it’s the largest feeling viewfinder I’ve used on a phone I miss the action button, nice little launcher for ChatGPT/Claude depending on which month it is Battery life is downright phenomenal versus my iPhone Air and 15 Pro (two devices admittedly not known for having great battery life) So, I don’t think the Duo is for most people who either don’t care much about phones, or care a lot about having the perfect phone, but for a decent amount of people in the middle I think the Duo represents a fundamentally different experience, that’s a ton of fun, and I’m excited to be excited about a phone again. (But, Apple, please figure out a way to add a telephoto lens.)

Thought I’d make a quick blog post about some weird behavior I’m seeing on iOS 27 and Dynamic Island live activities, that I initially thought was restricted to the Duo, but turns out affects everything. Yay. Maybe this post can save some others some time, and hopefully Apple can fix it. Long story short, ever since iOS 16.1 introduced “Live Activities”, where we can display handy little widgets in the Dynamic Island, there’s been a bunch of different configurations for showing things up there: something on the left, the right, when expanded, when two apps are showing things and yours gets a bit smaller, and on the lock screen. One interesting one is if you only need to show a small indicator in the Dynamic Island (screen recording indicator, electric vehicle charging status, etc.) you can do so, which just shows on the left on older iPhones, and on the Duo a single one below the camera cutout. Apple describes how to do this in their developer documentation (emphasis added): If you can’t find a solution to display views for leading and trailing compact presentations with limited width, provide a compact leading presentation that best represents your Live Activity, such as the view you use for the minimal presentation, and an empty view for the trailing compact presentation. The system hides the empty trailing view automatically. Unfortunately, in iOS 27 (and 27.1, and 27.2), this only half works, due to a new addition in iOS 27: isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth. It’s a variable that basically tells you if the Dynamic Island is even narrower than normal, presumably because they knew the Duo was coming with its vertical Dynamic Island, but also because as of iOS 27, Live Activities now show in the Dynamic Island when the device is in landscape too. So it’s handy to know if you have a bit less space than usual. In this new narrow view however, it seems like they didn’t test all the configurations thoroughly, as if you provide EmptyView for that trailing compact presentation, it’s not empty at all, and in fact enforces a quite large minimum size so the Dynamic Island looks hilariously tall. In other words: The system hides the empty trailing view automatically Left: what it should look like. Right: reality You can imagine this is especially rough on the Duo, where navigation buttons, toolbar buttons, tab bar buttons, etc. are all competing for precious space on the right. But that’s only half true. It displays perfectly fine (hiding it) when isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth is false (AKA how it always used to be), but in the new cases where it can be true, like the Duo and iPhones in landscape, that’s when it breaks. So tl;dr: In iOS 27, Dynamic Island Live Activities are improperly sized if you use the listed EmptyView configuration and isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth is true. This makes it especially bad on the Duo, womp womp. Complications Now, you might be saying “That’s weird, I haven’t seen that behavior! This is nothing but hogwash!”. But it is not hogwash, just a little complicated. There’s basically three categories of apps. Apple apps Maps, for instance, displays this single, small Dynamic Island live activity perfectly well and sized, and has been beautifully compiled with the iOS 27.2 SDK. By all accounts it should show this bug, too! Apple apps don’t have to use the same APIs as us normies, so funnily enough through really cool tools like REA we can disassemble the iOS Simulator and see that it’s in fact true, the Apple Maps live activity just completely bypasses WidgetKit and instead just renders plain UIKit through MapsBannerViewController which shows the cute little cyan widget through a ManeuverAccessoryView and then for the hidden trailing view simply returns a DistanceAccessoryView with CGSizeZero, which iOS actually respects, unlike our paltry SwiftUI EmptyView. Third-party apps NOT updated to iOS 27 If your app hasn’t been compiled with any of the iOS 27 SDKs, it only knows about iOS 26, and thus doesn’t know about (or have to worry about) the new, troublesome isDynamicIslandLimitedInWidth property, so it just… displays perfectly well. Here’s the Rivian app, which hasn’t been updated for iOS 27 yet, which shows the Live Activity displaying perfectly sized on the Duo (indicating vehicle charging): (Technical disassembly detail for the nerds: iOS shows the app’s minimal config, a smaller config normally used when multiple apps are in the Dynamic Island together, rather than the normal compact config, so it bypasses this issue entirely.) Developers who updated their apps for iOS 27 Surprise! That picture from before? On the left is just me compiling with the old 26 SDK that works! Unfortunately if you are a good developer who updated their app for iOS 27 and all the new features, you kind of get punished through this bug, because your live activity displays the improperly sized way described above, and you can’t just use raw UIKit like Apple. So you’re kinda stuck where I am: do I ship a weirdly sized Dynamic Island experience for everyone? Do I shove something extraneous in the compactTrailing spot just so it doesn’t look as empty? Do I not update the app at all until Apple fixes this bug? Widgets are techincally a separate extension from your main app, so you could compile them with a different SDK (26) than your main app (27) which fixes this bug, but I’m not sure Apple approves of that. Apple On the bright side hopefully it’s an easy enough fix, treating EmptyView like you used to on iOS 26 and per the documentation (the part that is weirdly right beside the mention of the new API that introduces this craziness in the first place). Radar/feedback assistant ID: FB25301955 Easy reproduction code if you’re curious: import ActivityKit import SwiftUI import WidgetKit struct CircleAttributes: ActivityAttributes { struct ContentState: Codable, Hashable {} } struct BlueCircle: View { var body: some View { Circle() .fill(.blue) .frame(width: 20, height: 20) } } @main struct CircleLiveActivity: Widget { var body: some WidgetConfiguration { ActivityConfiguration(for: CircleAttributes.self) { _ in BlueCircle() } dynamicIsland: { _ in DynamicIsland { DynamicIslandExpandedRegion(.center) { BlueCircle() } } compactLeading: { BlueCircle() } compactTrailing: { EmptyView() // pls respect me } minimal: { BlueCircle() } } } }

Hard to believe, but it’s been over 9 months since the current crop of iPhones came out, and I elected to grab the (apparently not super popular) iPhone Air, a new model of iPhone introduced for the first time. Rumor season for the new iPhones is in full swing, so it seemed like a good time to jot down my thoughts on the current model. Immediately, it’s really something to behold when you pick it up for the first time, it feels weirdly thin, pretty much everyone I’ve showed it to has been like “whoa”. You sacrifice a fair bit to get to that, from cameras to battery life, but I’ve always been a sucker for something novel, so when something as huge as the iPhone had a quirky new model I was really stoked to check it out. Heck, part of my frame of mind was that this device is going to have some serious limitations, which will probably also apply to the rumored upcoming folding iPhone which I also really want to check out, so it’ll almost be a warmup round to get me in the right headspace for a folding iPhone. I think that makes sense? Either way, over the last 9 months it’s been my primary phone day in and day out, and I wanted to jot down my thoughts on what it’s like to live with as someone who normally goes with the Pro phones, because there’s been some surprises. The design Picking up an iPhone Air for the first time is almost weird. Phones have had such a consistent slab design for so long that making it so, so dramatically thinner almost confuses your brain a little bit, like it’s an illusion or something. Forget putting a case on it, live with the danger. My favorite example was handing my phone to an employee at a local store to show her a product I was looking for, I could see kind of a confused look when I handed it to her followed by a “your phone is so thin”, almost like she thought there was something wrong with it. But, here’s my hot take. After the better part of a year it no longer feels thin, it just feels normal. Sure, when I pick up an older iPhone I’m lke “whoa this is so thick it feels like a relic”, but the Air doesn’t really feel noteworthy to me anymore. It’s like if you live in a cinnamon factory, I assume day one you’d be like “this is the best smelling place ever” but after a few months you’d go nose blind to it. My cat wouldn't even give the Air a chance, clearly a Pro phone fanboy That gives me pause, because it kinda makes me wonder that if any reasonably thin phone just feels normal after awhile, is it worth a bunch of compromises just to get it even thinner, when even that thinness feels normal eventually? I kinda feel like I thought about the thinness of my Pro iPhone the same amount after 9 months as I do now with the Air (which is to say, not really at all) but had a less compromised phone to show for it. And it’s weird, because with the old wedge-style MacBook Airs this feeling never went away for me, I loved those machines and every time I picked it up I kinda marveled, but that sensation kinda just went away with the iPhone Air, perhaps since I’m picking it up so much more than a laptop? The screen I’ve always been a normal-sized phone guy. The Plus/Max phones just feel unwieldy, but I do admit whenever I hold one I’m like “dang… maybe…”. The iPhone Air is the perfect solution to this, its screen size sits right in the middle of the normal Pro and Pro Max sized phones, and is one of my favorite parts of the phone. It’s large without feeling unwieldy (so awesome for games and videos), typing is a joy on the increased size, and it really makes me wish this size was the normal “small” Pro phone. Apple could then make the Pro Max phone 8" diagonal or something, I wanna test how far these Pro Max people will go. As a bonus my iPhone Pro can’t fit one of those tiny Xteink readers on the back, but my Air can perfectly! The cameras Camera quality feels as good as ever, it’s apparently not as good a main sensor as the Pro iPhones but I can’t really tell. It still has that distinctly over-processed look plaguing modern smartphones, but using an app like Project Indigo or Halide really helps here as they have modes that heavily reduce this distinct “phone” look. The real issue is that there’s only one sensor. I didn’t think I’d mind that much but unfortunately it turns out I do. On one hand, the iPhone’s main sensor has worse minimum focus distance than some Android phones, which means if you’re trying to take a photo of a document or something it often ends up blurry, you have to pull back a little bit then crop in after the fact. Since the sensor is 48 MP there’s tons of room to crop in (and even a built in faux 2x lens option) but it’s just kind of an annoyance versus either having an improved minimum focus distance or auto-macro mode using the ultrawide lens like on other iPhones. The ultrawide lens is not one I used a ton on previous iPhones, so outside of macro mode I don’t really miss it. I’m surprised though that I really miss the telephoto lens. There’s so many options where I want to see something that’s further away, like something when watching sports, or even a cool bird, and cropping in on the main sensor is such a far cry from a 5x telephoto lens. I’m in the minority here but I really wish Apple went back to having the secondary lens on iPhones be telephoto instead of ultrawide, and it makes me sad that going to the future folding iPhone will likely mean I still don’t get a telephoto lens back. Aside: camera plateaus have got out of control. This one rocks so badly if you try to interact with it while it’s lying down. I so prefer the Pixel style phones that have a consistent thickness across the full width of their camera plateau, because even though there’s a substantial plateau it doesn’t rock like a table with one short leg. The speaker (yes, singular) For the uninitiated, the iPhone Air has a single speaker up near the earpiece at the top of the phone. Pretty much every other modern iPhone (as far as I can remember) has one at the bottom as well, which means when watching video or something the audio doesn’t sound like it’s coming from one side of the phone. I was tempted to make an analogy to watching a video with only one AirPod in, but it’s not quite that bad, you do sorta get used to it, but it being subpar never fully goes away. What’s arguably worse though is with only one speaker the max volume is substantially lower, if you’re in an even remotely noisy environment (say, washing dishes) and you’re a little bit away from your iPhone good luck hearing things. Battery life Battery life confuses me. Coming from an iPhone 15 Pro which from everything I can tell was not revered for having the best battery life, I was pleasantly surprised with the iPhone Air’s battery life, it easily got me through a day where it sometimes felt the 15 Pro wouldn’t. This felt like an impossible feat given the thinness of the device, but improvements in electronics efficiency is remarkable. As time went on though, I started to be less impressed. Entering the spring season I started to notice getting the 20% battery notification a lot more often, and now in the summer it’s only gotten worse where it’s virtually every day. According to battery stats I’m still at 96% health. Is this an iOS regression that’s causing more battery usage? Am I just going out and on cellular more now that it’s gotten warmer? I honestly have no idea, but either way I wouldn’t call this phone a battery champion. I really long for a day where battery life is an afterthought in phones, some of the Silicon Carbide battery stuff seems really interesting here, so fingers crossed there’s some cool battery tech in the folding iPhone. Overall thoughts Ultimately, I love this phone, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to most people. Honestly, I’m not even sure I’d get it again over a Pro iPhone when it really comes down to it. If a fascinatingly cool design matters to you above all else, you should go for it. That sounds superficial, but I don’t think it is. Lots of people appreciate wearing a beautifully crafted mechanical watch over a $10 digital watch that is empirically more accurate and less fussy, there’s something just delightful about impressively crafted objects. I feel like we’re gonna be looking back at this phone even in 5 years remarking at its form factor versus 2031 phones, and there’s really something to say for a phone design being that bold. But it really does go back to that original MacBook Air that Steve Jobs pulled out of the manilla envelope. Absolutely amazing piece of engineering, as if something from the future came back proudly to show us what’s to come, but also something with enough compromises that your average person probably shouldn’t brave these waters. (Does anyone remember CoolBook?)

The Apple Watch is one of the most fascinating pieces of modern technology for me. A gorgeous screen, an abundance of sensors, and a bonkers amount of computational power in a tiny little package that fits on your wrist. It reminds me of the Vision Pro in that a good amount of the time I put it on I can’t help but smile at how far technology has came. But it’s also weirdly something I’ve never used a great deal. Every few generations I buy a new one and try it out for a few weeks, but I inevitably run into a few speed bumps: I just fundamentally don’t love notifications being an even more prevalent part of my life than they already are I’m not a fan of having another device to charge daily or near daily While I love wearing a cool mechanical watch from time to time, I’m not a fan of having something substantial on my wrist most days. I can’t help but notice it all the time (forget sleeping in it). Personality quirk I suppose So ultimately I end up just putting it on for sports (go volleyball!) and leaving it on the charger the rest of the time, hoping one day for a device that’ll be a better fit. There’s a new wearable in town A few weeks ago a bunch of YouTube videos popped up showcasing a new wearable device: the Fitbit Air. I initially brushed it off assuming it would be mostly for Android users (as Google now owns Fitbit) and there wouldn’t be much possible for iOS integration. Talking to some people though, I learned there’s an iOS app that actually integrates things pretty well (its feature subset is a lot smaller than something like a smartwatch that would require a lot deeper OS integration). So now I’m listening. On paper, it provides a bunch of handy sensors, a week of advertised battery life, all in a package that is really low profile on the wrist. Okay, you have my interest. That was enough for me to head over to Best Buy on launch day to pick one up. (They were almost completely sold out, so there’s clearly some interest for this thing.) The hardware It’s a bit bigger than it looks like in pictures, but it’s absolutely tiny compared to any smartwatch. It’s just small and sleek enough that I barely notice it’s there, sometimes I even catch myself wondering if I accidentally took it off, which is a great sign. First wearable I’ve been able to sleep in without a worry. The actual “unit” is just a little rock sized device that slips into one of a few different bands. I have the default “obsidian” colorway and really like it visually; it has a nice style while also not being loud whatsoever, but there’s a variety of bands (and presumably more cool ones to come from the community) you can choose from. I’ve played a few sweaty sports in it, and done a bunch of yardwork, and the band holds up better than I thought it would for fitness activities, it really seems like the default band is one you can get away with using for a variety of activities. Battery The claim is a week of battery life. Charging that infrequently sounds really awesome (imagine if phones could do that!) so I was really hoping that would be the reality. And indeed, it seems to be! From my estimates I’m losing around 10% per day, so a week should be pretty easy to hit. It also charges up quite quickly. I don’t really love the idea of wearing it into the shower, so that’s a great time for me to take it off to charge, and in a 15 minute shower it charged from 44% to 85%, so taking it off for a quick charge while showering seems like a great way to keep it always topped off. The only missing of the charging story is a decent charging stand. By default the device connects with a little magnetic Apple Watch style charger, but I kinda want a way to just plunk it down on my nightstand into something and was kinda surprised Google doesn’t immediately have an accessory for that. To remedy this I made a quick little 3D printable stand that came out quite nice if I do say so myself! Download link if you want to grab it. The Google Health app The Google Health app itself is probably the most disappointing part of the equation, and a real head scratcher overall. It’s not like, offensively bad, it’s just very mediocre and I’m not sure why they didn’t delay the launch a month or something just to work on the app a bit longer. There’s two main issues. The first is that it’s just really buggy. Sometimes tapping things does nothing, my sleep score almost always states “unable to record” until I sign in and out, at which point it’s magically available. The other is the design. I’m not the biggest fan of Google’s software design but even this is just so boringly bland, half the time it feels like an old HTML website where the CSS didn’t load. It is so aggressively bland that it’s almost depressing. Things pop in and out like janky web views when loading. Sections just seem to bleed into each other with no solid information hierarchy (especially the AI assistant stuff). Things are aligned inconsistently. Then again, I have similar complaints about the Gmail iOS app so maybe this is just Google’s design language as a whole? The other part is just bizarre design functionality decisions, like when selecting a workout there’s a ton of activities listed from biking to swimming to golf to tennis, if you’re looking for a specific sport, you’ll never find it, you just have to select “Sport” (aren’t tennis and golf sports??), and then after the workout is finished you can classify it as basketball, volleyball, soccer, etc. Why not just be like the Apple Watch where you can select, I dunno, the sport? Heck if you go to the “Fitness” tab or the app (where I would think you’d easily be able to start a workout) the top 25% of the screen is a “Start your health journey” call to action that upon tapping the “Set your goal” button opens an AI chat (what?) that has been spinning for 15 seconds now with “Preparing an answer” (an answer to what??). Then there’s another 40% of the screen dominated by a library of what seem to be guided video exercises rather than again, a simple list of activities to choose from. Why? This screen should be dominated by my fitness stats and the option to start a workout. There is a teeny bar to start different workouts, with workout options such as “Workout” or “Walk”. This makes a lot of sense to me, as I often go to the shoe store and ask for “shoe”. I’m just complaining at this point, but as it stands now my “Weekly Cardio” progress bar is 22% full, but has “Calibrating, 3 days left” in it and “+0” overlaid on the bar. How do I have any progress if the value is 0? Is the 0 something else? Why show me data if it’s not calibrated? Okay one more complaint. My resting heart rate looks to be around 58 bpm but under “Daily Readiness” my resting heart rate is rated as “poor”. Why? If I tap on that it says “RHR typically ranges from 60-100 … active people often have lower RHR”. Why is 58-64 poor then? It’s a bewildering app that on one hand does the job and lets you get to and see the things you want once you get used to it, but it feels like the most hodgepodged, design by committee app I’ve used in awhile. Like six different teams at Google got to do design passes on the app and kept shoehorning in things they wanted versus someone having an actual cohesive vision of what this app should be. It genuinely feels like it would be worth starting over completely from scratch. This is a minimal bracelet that is super easy to use (it just sits on your wrist), it needs a corresponding elegant, non-bloated, simple app. The experience of using it All that said, it’s pretty awesome to use. How do you reconcile that with complaining about software for a few hundred words? Because you don’t have to interact with the software that much, it mostly just works ambiently/automatically, and you open the app if you want to view the stats it collected. I wish that last part was better, but you learn to live with the jank. One of my biggest issue with the Apple Watch is the whole thing around starting and stopping a workout. Call me a dummy but I’d often forget to either start or stop a workout. The watch kinda seems to try to help with this, where 15 minutes after a volleyball match on the drive home when I can’t safely interact with my watch it’ll be like “Hey I think you’re done want me to stop? Yes/No” which is not ideal. On the flip side I’ve never even had to start or stop a workout with the Fitbit Air, it just knows I was working out and nails the start and stop time, at best I have to relabel the workout to the actual sport it was, but apparently this gets better as you train it with time. And where it’s so much less obtrusive than an Apple Watch it’s so easy to get stats on everything throughout the day and night as I just leave it on 24/7. As for the accuracy of the stats, all seems great for me there. Sleep data seems to reflect how I feel and has a really in-depth breakdown, and fitness activity seems to track pretty nicely with what I’ve come to expect from the Apple Watch. The only weird thing I’ve noticed (and maybe it’s the case with the Apple Watch too, haven’t tested) but you can really easily/accidentally cheat the pedometer steps by just shaking your wrist (I remember doing this with cheap little pedometers in middle school) which seems weird? If you talk a lot with your hands you might have inflated step counts. Elephant in the room: Google Being an ads company, Google doesn’t have the best reputation with data privacy, so I can see why some are squeamish about using such a device. Me? I’m not too worried about Google having access to my step count, heart rate, sleep stats, etc. as they don’t massively feel like super personal stats, and the little bit of unease that gives me is outweighed by the utility of this device, but I totally get how someone else might feel differently. Wishes from Google Beyond fixing the app (please), functionality-wise the Fitbit Air seems pretty much perfect to me so there’s not a lot I find myself asking for. One thing I really would love though is wrist notifications around phone calls. One of my favorite uses for the Apple Watch is when I’m expecting a phone call on a given day, I find even with the ringer on I’ll just miss calls from my iPhone by not hearing the ring or not feeling the vibration, but the Apple Watch vibrating on my wrist always gets through to me. The Fitbit Air has a similar vibration mechanism (used only for alarms I think right now) and if it could pair to your phone like a car can for reporting phone calls (and maybe even texts, but I’d personally turn that part off), that’d be super handy. Do I recommend it? I do! At $99 USD it’s a pretty handy device if you care at all about health stats. It’s not perfect (especially in the app department) but it’s honestly exceeded the expectations I had for it, so for the price and for how unobtrusive it is day to day I’m really enjoying it. At the same time, Apple has a much better (downright impressive) reputation around data privacy, and in my eyes a lot better ability to design nice software, so I’d love to see them design a competing bracelet as an additional offering to the Apple Watch ecosystem. I’m not sure what more in terms of OS integration they’d be able to do that would move the needle that much, but I’d just love to see Apple’s spin on such a device and I’d feel a bit better about the data privacy angle.

After 7 years with a Tesla Model 3, we picked up a gen 2 Rivian R1S in April of 2025. We still have the Model 3 as a second vehicle, but it’s been really cool experiencing a new electric vehicle from a very passionate new company. 2026 is a really exciting time for Rivian, as in the first half of this year they’re launching their R2 vehicle - a smaller, less expensive SUV offering that should have a lot more mass-market appeal. With a bunch of jourrnalists getting previews of the vehicle today, I thought I’d share what I’m really hoping for in this new vehicle having experienced their existing vehicle for almost a year, and a Tesla for the better part of a decade. None of these are in any particular order. Better audio We sprung for the “Premium Audio” package in our R1S and… it’s not premium at all. Whatever system just came with our Model 3 sounds demonstrably better, from where it feels like the sound is coming from (much more expansive) to the bass, the R1S just feels a lot weaker. Honestly for the base audio system it would be probably decent, but for a “Premium Audio” system it just falls short. They have been making it better and better with softwware updates of all things over the course of our vehicle’s life, where it’s noticeable better now than it was at the beginning, a recent update in December basically sounds like they figured out how to turn on the subwoofer in the trunk a little bit, but it’s still just not that much. With the Tesla sometimes I’d park and finish out a song before leaving the car because it just sounded so good, have never had that happen in the Rivian so I hope they bring some of that experience to the R2 even through another “Premium Audio” package for those who care. No dual motor EPA shenanigans So our R1S is dual motor, meaning it has a motor for the front wheels and a separate motor for the back wheels, meaning you get AWD. Rivian allows you to get more range by only using the front motor, turning it into effectively a front wheel drive vehicle and as only one motor is active you get a bit better range (about 10%). Sounds great, right? Choose between more efficient front-wheel drive on trips, but just use AWD around town by default. Well, the devil is in the details. In order to be able to market this slightly improved range, the EPA requires Rivian to automatically revert back to this front wheel drive/higher efficiency mode after a few hours. Kinda like gas vehicles and how they turn off the engine at traffic lights, and if you disable that it just keeps turning itself back on. So even if it’s the winter and you’re like, “Dang, roads are a little dicey, I want to be in AWD”, if you park the car for awhile and forget to set it to AWD, it just reverts to front wheel drive. It’s like if your iPhone kept reverting to “Low Battery Mode” every 2 hours even after you keep toggling it off so Apple could advertise that model having 10% better battery life. Note: the vehicle isn’t hard-locked to front wheel drive in this mode, if it slips it alerts you that it’s switching over to AWD (I don’t want to wait for it to slip), and if you floor it on the highway for instance it’ll engage the rear motors for extra grunt, but because it has to link up the rear motors to an already moving system, you can sometimes get a kinda weird clunk feeling as the rear motor connects itself at speed which isn’t very satisfying. It almost feels like a wheel slip in the rain. This is maddening, and is only the case on their dual motor vehicles. For tri and quad motor vehicles, they just don’t market them as having that extra 10% range, so all the modes are actually sticky! If you say “front wheel drive mode” (they call it “Conserve”) it stays there indefinitely, if you say “AWD mode”, it stays there indefinitely. Is this dumb? Yes. Do I blame the EPA? Yes. Do I also blame Rivian? Also yes, they’re making this trade off to be able to market extra range. If Rivian does this same stuff for the R2 dual motor just so they can advertise a few extra miles, I really hope they have a $10 option you can configure when you order called “Give me less marketed range with no actual range decrease but have the vehicle actually do what I tell it to”, but maybe with a catchier title. Spare compact tire Our Tesla lacks a spare tire of any sort, instead electing to include a repair method and roadside assistance. A few years back a nasty pothole absolutely destroyed the sidewall of one of our tires on a drive home, and where it was sidewall damage it simply wasn’t repairable, so we had to call Tesla roadside assistance. Unfortuantely Tesla roadside assistance was absolutely useless, taking ages to respond and then ultimately not having any providers in the area, so we just ditched the car and got a ride home with a friend and dealt with it the next day. After that I was like “I do not want another vehicle without a spare tire on board”. With our R1S on the other hand, we had another unlucky event where we popped a tire (also the sidewall if you’d believe it, I have some great luck) and sure enough, since we elected to get a compact spare tire it was super easy to deal with, just grab the included jack, throw the compact spare on, then the next day we just slowly drove over to a shop for a new tire. Completely uneventful. I was worried with the smaller body that you wouldn’t be able to in the R2, but Jerry Rig Everything showed room for a compact spare in the sub trunk, nice! Digital rear view mirror I don’t see this in any of the videos so it seems unlikely but I’m holding out hope it’s an option. Picture this: you approach your vehicle, since it sees it’s your phone it knows who you are, so it positions your seat, steering wheel, mirrors, Apple Music/Spotify account, and temperature preferences. You didn’t have to do a thing, the vehicle is just smart! Except… your spouse is 7 inches shorter than you so when you look in the rear view mirror you’re staring at the back seat. Is having to adjust your rear view mirror a big deal? No, but having the vehicle do everything else for you almost draws more attention to the final thing it’s missing that you still have to adjust every single time. This is a solved problem in inexpensive vehicles, just have a “digital rear view mirror” that requires no adjusting as it just shows a camera feed of the rear of the vehicle where the mirror is. Digital rear view mirror in a RAV4 by u/MildSpaghettiSauce Rivian’s cameras are legitimately so good, that at night it’s easier to use them for side blind spot monitoring when you change lanes than the actual side mirrors, because they let in enough light that you can actually make out details through the pseudo “Night Mode” camera vision that you can’t with the mirrors alone, it’s wild. I want that for the rear view mirror too! Do you still prefer an analog mirror? That’s totally cool, all the vehicles that offer this let you just toggle back to a good ol’ reflective mirror. No harm no foul. V2H story Not a lot of people realize one of the most powerful part of EVs: they’re mobile powerstations that can (theoretically) power your entire home. Take a Tesla Model 3 for instance, it has a 75 kWh battery. Tesla also sells Powerwalls to help you back up your home, each Powerwall is around $6,000 and has 13.5 kWh of battery capacity. Yes, that means your Model 3 is the equivalent of more than 5 Powerwalls, or $33,000 in equivalent batteries. That’s nuts! Ever have a power outage? With the average home in Canada using about 30 kWh per day, that could power your house through potentially multiple days and genuinely save lives. My Rivian R1S is a lot better than my Tesla here in that it actually has normal, 120V AC outlets, but they can only output a measly 1.5 kW, so even powering a hungry kettle could result in the breaker tripping. Much better than the max 120W my Tesla can do through a 12V cigarette outlet (good god how is that the best they can do), but it’s still not enough output to power a house effectively. It’s kinda like being in a drought with a massive water tower, but water only comes out in drips. Better than nothing, but we need output speed too. The R1 can output much more by pulling DC energy directly from the battery through CCS protocols like the ISO 15118 standard, and sure enough despite Rivian not talnking about it, folks with these systems have been able to connect the R1S directly to their house with the appropriate cable and send up to 24 kW to power their entire home, crazy stuff, hope Rivian talks about this more in the future as clearly the vehicle supports it even if they are quiet about it. I’m kinda curious what the R2’s story is here. The CEO of Rivian said in an interview (~1:20:20) that the R1 and R2 both have bidirectional EV charging in the realm of 20 kW (which again we’re finally seeing folks be able to take advantage of in the R1 recently), but unlike being limited to 1.5 kW of AC output in the R1, the CEO says the R2 will be able to do “10 or 11 kW”. That’s massive versus the 1.5 kW the R1 can do, but I’m not sure that made it to production in the end? Doug Demuro showed a Rivian graphic with a V2L adapter (at 26:22) but it’s only listed as 2.4 kW. Still a lot better than 1.5, but a far cry fro the 10 or 11 kW that RJ Scaringe said earlier. Either way, talk more about this Rivian! This is one of the coolest parts about EVs! Better suspension The R1S has a fancy air suspension, so picture a bagpipe over each corner of the vehicle that lets it inflate or deflate to change the height of the vehicle and theoretically make for a cushier ride. I say theoretically because honestly I find the gen 2 R1S kinda rough suspension wise. Like, hitting the same potholes around where I live in the Tesla Model 3 (with a much simpler coil suspension, no bagpipes) versus the Rivian R1S I honestly find the Tesla makes me wince less. I thought it might have been the massive 22" wheels that came on the Rivian and the correspondingly small sidewall on the tire, but we switched to a 20" wheel for the winter with a much larger sidewall and it’s better but still not great. Would love to see Rivian tune this so that the R2 is a super smooth ride, I’ve heard the newer Tesla Model Ys are incredible here and also just have a coil suspension like the R2 will have. Faster charging Brands love to brag about maximum charge speeds, our Tesla for instance got a software update to enable 250 kW charging, which is super fast. To put that in perspective, most new homes in North America have 200 amp service going into their home, 250 kW is the equivalent of upgrading to 1,000 amp service, and then pouring every drop of that power into your car. But, while that top speed is impressive, it holds that for like, minutes maybe before crashing down to much slower charging speeds. Our R1S is no different here, with good peak speeds but it doesn’t exactly hold them super well, there’s been tons of reports that the cooling method for the batteries in the R1S is just underwhelming, where the Rivian R1 models have a two battery packs stacked on top of each other with a single liquid cooling plate in the middle (so only the top or the bottom of the battery is touching the cooling surface), and that single plate often seems a little underpowered for cooling such a massive pack quickly. Kinda like thermal throttling in laptops! We typically see around 45 minutes for the battery to charge 10-80% at fast chargers. The R2 on the other hand appears to be moving to a smarter cooling method where the cooling liquid flows almost through a ribbon, weaving along the sides of each cell in the battery pack, meaning a lot more cooling surface area. And indeed, this seems to have paid off, with a Rivian employee saying they’re now under 30 minutes for 10-80% on the R2. Class-leading? No, Hyundai is under 20 minutes, but a fair bit better. And for folks without EV experience, honestly, this is mostly a non-issue. 99.5% of your charging is done at home where speeds don’t matter (it just charges overnight like your phone), it’s only if you’re going on a bit of a roadtrip where this comes into play. Better USB-C Okay this isn’t a big deal, but the R1S has a ton of USB-C ports everywhere, like there must be close to a dozen, which is awesome, but if you try to charge a power bank or a laptop or something over USB-C it’s just… not very fast. I haven’t actually measured but I’m assuming they’re only doing 12V (at most) instead of at least 20V which most chargers are at nowadays, which I really hope they improve. My MacBook charges so slow. Better phone charger This is the one part of the Rivian that I’m like “how did this even make it out of the factory”. And if you’d believe it the phone charger in my vehicle is the second revision, so this is their attempt at fixing it somehow. Basically they have a flat little area near the arm rests where you can place one or two phones to have them wirelessly charge. Sounds fine, right? I haven’t measured it, but from experience I believe the charging “sweet spot” is approximately 4 atoms wide. If the car is in motion at all, it moves from those four atoms and tries super hard to charge it but ultimately cannot, ultimately just making the phone get super hot and lose a bunch of battery life. One time we went camping and I was like “Okay, the vehicle is not moving, surely I can just set it here while I sleep and it’ll charge”. Nope, somehow even stationary the phone did not charge beyond 20% overnight and was super hot in the morning. What. They have managed to make a phone charger that is worse than not having one at all. I can’t even place my phone in the arm rest while I drive because it just cooks it, at least if nothing was there it could just be a storage location. No, mine is not broken, this is a common complaint from just about every Rivian owner, and they need to make this better for the R2. Just hot glue a MagSafe puck in there at minimum. Better Phone as a Key (PAAK) Rivian and Tesla do the (honestly very cool thing) where it uses your phone to detect your proximity to the car and lock/unlock it and recognize who the driver is to set preferences. It’s great, no having to carry around bulky car keys (don’t worry, there is a backup little credit card style key you carry in your pocket in case your phone dies or disappears). Rivian even recently updated theirs to use the first-party “Apple CarKey” functionality so you get bonuses like being able to unlock it for a few hours even after your phone’s battery died, and it uses “Ultra Wide Band” (UWB) so it can position your phone in relation to the car down to the centimeter. Tesla doesn’t do this and has their own proprietary thing that I think is based on Bluetooth but might use a bit of UWB on newer models (not on my car). But… Tesla’s is still much better. There’s two aspects of nailing good “phone as a key” support: firstly, unlocking the car as you approach (duh), and secondly, knowing who approached the car so you can set their preferences (seat, steering wheel, mirror positions, temperature preferences, music streaming account, etc.) Unlocking: B+ for Rivian here, sometimes even with the recent update I have to stand by the door for a few seconds and be like “Um, hello” before it sees me there and unlocks. Same phone, walk over to my Tesla, always unlocks instantly even though the Rivian should have a massive advantage with UWB. Identifying driver: D for Rivian here. Again, with UWB and centimeter-level positioning over the driver in relation to the vehicle Rivian should be able to know exactly who is approaching the driver door when my girlfriend and I (who both have Rivian keys) approach the vehicle, but 95% of the time when my girlfriend is with me (despite her always preferring to be passenger) it always sets her as the driver. Even weirder, sometimes she’ll yell out the window if I’m putting something in the frunk “Oh it actually recognized you this time!” with me set as the profile, but then when I sit down in the seat it reverts to her. What. Rivian needs to do better here for the R2. The pain is especially compounded by the fact that if you leave in a bit of a rush and somehow don’t realize the driver profile is wrong, Rivian won’t let you change your driver settings unless you slow down to under 3 mph, so you better get ready to pull over and stop the car if you need to adjust something. With Tesla you can always just swap profile and have your steering wheel, seat, mirrors, etc. move to where they should be, and that feels a lot safer than having to muck around with changing things via a touch screen or sit their tweaking controls on the side of the car seat. Smoother software Somehow despite my Model 3 being a 2018 model and probably running a Raspberry Pi compared to the hardware Rivian runs, moving around the OS in the Tesla still feels faster. With the Rivian there’s still lag just bouncing around screens with stuff sometimes taking a second or two to show up. I don’t get it. I really hope this improves on the R2, and thankfully it looks like it does, Doug DeMuro bounces around the R2’s UI here and it’s much faster than my gen 2 R1S with everything loading virtually instantly. Yay. CarPlay I’ve never had a vehicle with CarPlay, we rented a vehcile with it and it was kinda neat but Teslas and Rivians already have like every piece of software I’d want when interfacing with a vehcile (good, traffic-based maps and popular music streaming services), so with the exception of Overcast I don’t personally care about CarPlay at all. That being said, I know a ton of people do so I kinda hope Rivian looks into it even just as a little windowed experience because I think it would make a lot more people interested. Alexa is so bad About a month ago at their Autonomy Day Rivian previewed (among many other cool things) their new “Rivian Assistant”. This is sorely needed, their current system uses Alexa and. it. is. so. bad. With our Tesla, you can say “Navigate to Blah” and it will just automatically plot it and you’re off to the races. Best case with Rivian you’re like, “Alexa, navigate to Bob’s Cool Donuts in Dartmouth”, and Alexa is like “Would you like to navigate to Bob’s Cool Donuts, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia”, “Yes” where it repeats literally the only possible match back to you requiring confirmation every time instead of just… taking you there. A more typical case is “Alexa, navigate to Bob’s Donuts in Dartmouth”, “Would you like directions to Bob’s Donuts in Toledo, Ohio”. No Alexa, I want the one that’s a five minute drive, not the one a three day drive away. “Oh, okay, try being more specific next time” Better heat pump They do a decent job isolating the sound from the outside if you’re in the vehicle, but if it’s cold outside and you heat up your Rivian R1S, you can hear that sucker from a full block away in this super high pitched whine. I’ve understandably had multiple people ask “Is it okay?”. Better time placement The UX for knowing the current time in the cabin is not great. There is no clock on the main driver instrument display, and it’s in the furthest place possible on the middle display, so it’s not exactly easy to check. There’s tons of space on the driver display so I either wish they shoved it ther, or if you put in directions, I wish it showed you the current time there. Right now it just says “ETA 2:58 PM” which if you’ve been driving for 45 minutes and kinda have lost track of time is not particularly helpful, that could be in 5 minutes or in 25 minutes for all I know. It looks a bit better on the R2 (seen in MKBHD’s video) where they’re placing it on the middle display a lot closer to the driver, but I still wish they just put it on the driver display. Better second row release The R1S and many other modern vehicles have really stupid and downright dangerous second row releases, where the main door handles are electric, so it there’s an electrical issue and you need to get out of the vehicle, you obviously need a manual release. On my Tesla, there’s a (shocker) pull handle that is obvious and you can just pull to get out of the vehicle. Easy peasy (don’t worry Tesla has since changed to an inexplicably stupider, hidden design like Rivian) The R1 is incredibly stupid and you literally have to pop off trim in the rear door to get access to a cable you can yank. Yeah, good luck remembering that in dire circumstances, so I threw one of those window breakers in the back cubby. The R2 is better here, Jerry Rig Everything shows a little button patch you can pop off much easier to get to the cable, but still, just put the manual release that the front doors have, this is a basic safety feature and should not be complicated. Smaller This we know will be the case, with the Rivian R2 being about 2 feet shorter than the R1S. The R1S is a properly large vehicle, which makes it very capable, but I dunno, I do find myself wishing it was a little smaller quite often, so I honestly think if the R2 is compelling enough I might be trading in my R1. I’m so excited I genuinely think Rivian is doing such cool things, and the company behind it seems to have a real passion for building cool products instead of just sitting on Twitter all day, so I’m super excited to see what this mass-market vehicle does for them and I’m hoping for the best. Looks like they’re launching in spring (I guessed summer!) with more pricing and configuration details March 12th.