When the Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope recently blasted into space, a group of Ohio State professors and students traveled to Florida and watched a project they’d worked on soar skyward toward a destination about 1 million miles away.
One of the biggest media formats for anyone who attended school in the 20th century was the film strip. Now there’s a race against time to preserve these culturally important artifacts.
And phone-mania: a new foldable phone, a new iPhone 18 Pro, plus a retro tin phone. We'll tell you all about them.
It's all coming up on this week's Tech Tuesday.
Guests:
- David Weinberg, distinguished university professor, department of astronomy, Ohio State University
- Mark O'Brien, founder, Uncommon Ephemera
- Russell Holly, director of commerce content, CNET
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. When the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope blasted into space recently, a group of Ohio State professors and students who had a hand in its development watched the launch live. The telescope will travel more than a million miles from Earth and study dark energy, exoplanets, and cosmic evolution. Among those watching the liftoff was David Weinberg, an Ohio State distinguished university professor in the Department of Astronomy. And he joins us now to talk about the project and the university's role. Welcome to All Sides, David.
David Weinberg: Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.
Juravich: So I read that more than 20 Buckeyes, including nine undergraduates, traveled to Florida. Is that right? I mean, what was it like to be there?
Weinberg: It was great. I mean, this was my first rocket launch and my first trip to Kennedy Space Center. So it would have been great anyway, but to kind of do it on a mission that I've worked on for 15 years and which I hope will produce great data for the rest of my career, that was really exciting. And it was terrific to be there with students who have joined the project recently and for whom this will be a big part of their future.
Juravich: Yeah, as you said, you've been involved in this project for many years. What has your role been in the development of this telescope?
Weinberg: So a variety of things, but I mean, a telescope like this is the work of thousands of engineers and scientists at NASA and the community and contractors, but a lot of the scientific design and engineering design is done by a relatively small group, kind of a few dozen scientists and engineers. And at Ohio State, Professor Chris Harada and Scott Gowdy and me, we've been sort of three members of that science team since around 2010. And that team kind of defines what the telescope should do, what its capabilities need to be, how that interacts with the engineering, what's the quality of data it needs to produce, and then how will we analyze those data? To make scientific discoveries.
Juravich: How did Ohio State get involved in the first place? I mean, was there a reason?
Weinberg: I think it's a few different reasons that we've always been strong in doing astronomy with big surveys, and big surveys are usually done from the ground, and Roman is kind of the first really big survey telescope in space. So it was sort of natural ethos for our department. But some of it comes down to... Individual. So Scott Gowdy and before that, his thesis advisor Andy Gould at Ohio State really pioneered this novel technique for discovering planetary systems around other stars. And that's one of Roman's major programs. And Chris Harada is actually the person who knows more about the Roman space telescope than anyone else on the planet.
And he actually joined our department, he joined Ohio State in 2013, but he sort of brought with him this incredible expertise.
Juravich: Ed, I mean, how many years does it take to build a space telescope like this? I don't know how many year Ohio State was involved versus how many years they've been planning it, do you know?
Weinberg: Yeah, so there are ideas that go back as much as 20 years, but really from about 2010 to 2018 or so, we were really working through different possibilities on the technology. The construction really started in earnest around 2019. And managed to stay on time and on schedule through the pandemic. So, in the end, we launched seven months early, which is great and saves a lot of money.
Juravich: I think that sounds unprecedented to do something early. Okay, so if it's been that many years though, you've seen many students go through this. Probably they've been a part of it, they've graduated, moved on. I mean, is there like a class and telescope building that you designed that so you would have students who are working on this with you?
Weinberg: So, there are, we do actually train people in the kind of building of instruments for telescopes. Here I would say that the construction is really done largely by people either at NASA or at space contractors like Lockheed Martin, but the kind of things about how you design a mission and how you analyze the observations. Those are things which a lot of people have learned coming through Ohio State, and some of them are still here. But also, part of our imprint is that a lot the people who have been here and now are at Duke or at Princeton or at NASA are are still leaders now in the mission and have kind of taken what they learned here and are applying it elsewhere.
Juravich: I saw the mission described as cosmic cartography, basically the mapping of the universe. Can you tell me more about that in layman's terms? Because mapping the universe, that's a big deal.
Weinberg: That's a big deal, right? So we're kind of used to Hubble, or more recently James Webb, producing these sort of breathtakingly detailed images. And that's because they're above the Earth's atmosphere. And so they don't have to look through the atmosphere, and the images don't get blurred by all of the motions in the atmosphere. But Hubble and Webb, they see a tiny patch of the sky. One time. So you really have to decide in advance, okay, here's what I'm going to look at, and that's where you point the telescope. So if you wanted to actually cover the whole sky with Hubble, it would take centuries. But for many fields of astronomy, and certainly the kinds of things that I work on, you really want to get images of a large area of the sky or make dimensional maps of a large chunk of the universe. And so, what's special about Roman is its telescope is the same size as Hubble's, but it's got an enormous camera. And that enables it to take pictures of a much larger area of sky at one time. And so, if you want to map the distribution of galaxies or map the stars in the Milky Way or repeatedly observe stars in the middle of the Milky way to look for planets that. Amplify their light by gravity, then what you want is this enormous field of view, and it's like having several hundred Hubble Space Telescopes all working for you at the same time.
Juravich: This is Tech Tuesday on All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about Ohio State's involvement in the recently launched Roman telescope, and our guest is Ohio State astronomy professor David Weinberg. I read also that it will take 100 days for the telescope to travel about a million miles to its destination. Is it on track to make it there on time when it's supposed to?
Weinberg: It is on track, so we just yesterday got the report on its mid-course correction, which seems to have gone super well. And one of the finite resources on a telescope that determines how long it can last is its fuel for making adjustments. And the fact that the launch went so well means that the telescope probably has enough fuel to last for 20 years. So that's very exciting. And although it's on its way out, it's already taking some images and returning some data. These are largely for testing out the systems and making calibrations. But so the first images will really be released to the public in early December. But everything I hear is that stuff that's coming back so far is all looking good.
Juravich: Yeah, so that was my next question. When will we be able to know stuff? So what findings will be available in December? Will it have reached its million miles away by that time, like its destination, I guess?
Weinberg: Yes, so it will have reached its destination around that time. And it doesn't need to be all the way out there in order to start getting data. So I think the things that will come out in December will be some of these amazing images. And a way I like to think about what Roman does is, You know, if you think about one of those iconic images from Hubble, like the pillars of creation that maybe, you know, you get on a coffee cup, okay? So coffee cup you're not getting all of the detail, but if you have a good computer screen, you can really show that Hubble image with all of its detail pretty well. It's about 2000 by 2000 pixels. One image from Roman, if you wanna display it with all of its information, you could do it with a wall of 36 4K televisions. Which I don't think I've ever seen a wall of 36 4K televisions. I think it's also roughly, you know, one, an IMAX screen has about enough pixels to show one pointing of Roman space telescope. So it's going to give us, you know, these images that have allow you to zoom in for all that level of detail.
Juravich: Wow. Are you only going to be able to see it at an iMac screen at NASA then?
Weinberg: Well, partly, it's kind of like if you think about surveying the population of the United States. If you can survey a thousand people and get their opinions, that's useful. But if you could really actually interview all 300 million of them, then you can go break them up in all sorts of different ways and ask about this group and that group and really find out a lot more richness about how the society works. So it's the same kind of thing, having this enormous level of detail over large areas of the sky allows us to really ask these questions that get us into the details of of how the universe works.
Juravich: The telescope is named for Nancy Grace Roman, NASA's first chief of astronomy. Can you tell us about her contributions that got her name on this telescope?
Weinberg: Well, I think that she joined NASA pretty soon after NASA was founded, but NASA really began life largely as a human space flight program, and still largely has that role. But I think she was very influential in the idea that NASA should do science and should do through putting telescopes in space and using that to observe the universe. And Hubble wasn't the first of those missions, but it was the first really big astronomy space telescope. And she was one of the people who played a really crucial role in making that happen, both emphasizing its importance, but then making it happen technically.
Juravich: You just described looking at the big image, IMAX-wise, 30-some TV screens, and also narrowing in on smaller parts of it, and both are good ways to investigate the universe. What role will you and Ohio State play in looking at these images that come back? Were you just involved in the building and the creation, or are you gonna be involved in analysis too?
Weinberg: So I think Ohio State people are involved in two main pieces. So one of them, led by Scott Gowdy, is looking for planetary systems around other stars and doing that by seeing the bending of light that is caused in background stars when planets pass in front of them. And so this is the best way of finding how common systems like Earth and our solar system are out in the galaxy. The other one, the one that Chris Harada and I are most involved with, is mapping the distribution of dark matter in the universe. And the problem with dark matter is it's dark, so you don't actually see any light from it, but it bends the light of background galaxies and slightly distorts their shapes. So our part of the project that we're most involved with is really measuring the shapes of billions of galaxies and using those measurements to make maps of the distribution of dark matter. And then using those maps to help us understand how gravity works on the scale of the universe, which is actually the biggest puzzle in cosmology and physics today.
Juravich: All right, well, as you work to solve those puzzles, I know you only have 90 seconds left, but is this telescope gonna take a picture of life out there as well? That's the question everyone always asks.
Weinberg: Yeah, so I think that one thing about observing a lot of the sky is things that are very surprising and rare can nonetheless happen. So it's kind of got a better chance, if anybody's out there signaling us, it's got a chance than most telescopes. But I think more likely it will tell us how common are the kinds of worlds that could support life. And probably we won't actually get the aliens waving at us.
Juravich: But you're telling me there's a chance.
Weinberg: I'm telling you there's a chance. I'm tell you, you'll look at a lot of the sky and you don't know what you'll find.
Juravich: We've been talking about the launch of the Roman Space Telescope, and we've been learning about the role Ohio State played in its development. We've be talking with Ohio State astronomy professor David Weinberg. Thank you so much for your time today, David. Thank you. And coming up, we're going to meet a man who gave up a career in IT to preserve American industrial and educational film strips. That is when Tech Tuesday from All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. In recent years, it seems many analog media formats have made a comeback. This includes film cameras, vinyl records, physical books, and paper planners. One of the biggest media formats for anyone who attended school in the 20th century was the film strip. When's the last time you thought about a film strip? Well, they're not necessarily making a comeback, but the mission to preserve film strips is underway in upstate New York. Joining us now to talk about the cultural importance and the race against time to save these artifacts is Mark O'Brien, founder of Uncommon Ephemera. Welcome to Tech Tuesday, Mark. Thanks for being here.
Mark O'Brien: Thank you for having me.
Juravich: So listeners of a certain age are gonna remember looking at film strips in a darkened classroom, but they weren't used just by schools. Tell me who used film strips and why.
O'Brien: Well, anybody who needed to present something in a multimedia way would have used film strips between approximately 1930 and 1990. It was, I hate to say that it was the original PowerPoint because it was much more creative usually than just some mid-level manager, you know, reading off the bullet points that he's put on the screen. Businesses use them for training. Chrysler used them as far back as 1930. They founded an efficient way to get new information to their service departments. So for instance, if they're working on something and they've discovered that one of their vehicles has a certain problem, they could make up a film strip quickly, distribute it to all of their service department, and then the service people could watch it. And what's interesting about that is, it's not just like a printout or an email or a photocopy where it just says, you have to do this, you have do this and so on. They could show you pictures of the affected part of the car. And they could say, remove these two bolts or whatever and put this clip on this gear and whatnot. So it is sort of an early way to use photos and they were even using soundtracks back then synchronized on a record. As far back as the 30s and the 40s. Insurance companies, in the 60s, there was a company that provided film strips to insurance agents. Of course, they're all terribly predatory. So the insurance agent would maybe come to a family's house. They had these custom projectors that were built into briefcases with a little screen on one side.
Juravich: Ooh, a travel projector, okay.
O'Brien: The travel project, exactly. So you could just show this to your client and of course it would show, you know, all the terrible things that would happen if you didn't buy a life insurance policy from them, of course.
Juravich: Well, so my experience with film strips would have been in school, right? So the darkened classroom and maybe like an audio sound. I remember an audio soundtrack with them because I did remember the distinct beep noise to go to the next film strip. Was that very common for schools to use?
O'Brien: Oh, absolutely. By the late 60s, mid 60s maybe, most filmstrips would have come with a soundtrack and that would have been on a separate record or cassette and played on a player next to the filmstrip projector. And it gave these companies an opportunity to either narrate pictures or dramatize what was going on on on the screen and you had some crossover where Some companies would make short films, 16 millimeter, which people are, because those are being preserved. So people are more likely to remember those. But for people who were on a budget, schools that didn't have a lot of money, they would make a film strip version, which was just a key frame from every scene, and dramatize it with the audio so that you could sort of follow along.
Juravich: Yeah, so help me remember here. You mentioned the 60s. I'm not that old, so I will say that. But I do remember film strips being used in my elementary school, so it must have been in the 80s. But then they got replaced by VHS tapes, sometimes between the 80's and the 90's. Do I have my timeline right here?
O'Brien: Yeah, that's about right, yeah. So.
Juravich: How did it become your mission to start collecting and preserving these film strips?
O'Brien: Um, in, uh, it, it actually happened entirely by happenstance in the, uh late nineties, I was working at a school district and I thought that I was going to become a musician or a rock star or something like that. So, and I was doing, I, was thinking about doing, you know, heavy atmospheric sample laden, uh sort of stuff. So I was always looking for weird audio, outsider audio, and I had no... Particular interest in film strips at that point except that I saw them as like adjacent to the stuff they would have watched on "Mystery Science Theater 3000." So I knew that there was something there potentially. And I think MST3K also gave us the permission to sort of laugh at or along with industrial films, educational films.
O'Brien: But I was on good terms with the middle school librarian because I was taking care of their computers and I walked in there one day and she's getting rid of a shelf that was maybe one wall, 60 feet wide, full of all of their media. And I was like, what are you doing? She says, I'm getting rid of all these old film strips, we don't need them anymore. And I knew that they had the records and the cassettes and those might be weird and might serve the purpose that I wanted to do with them. And so I said, you know what? Can you just, you know, hear me out. Can you just put those in my car instead of in the dumpster out back? And she went for it. And at the time, I didn't have the ability or the equipment to save the film and not the knowledge or anything. And I tried to hang on to them for four or five years and finally I couldn't do anything with them. So with a heavy heart, I just kind of got rid of them which I still regret. Fast forward to 2018, uh, after a long bout of chronic fatigue, I was actually, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Uh, and then they went, you know, through and the thyroid ectomy took it out. I'm cancer free, but I still had this chronic fatigue for a couple of years. And, uh I was unable to work in the traditional sense at the time. And I was really looking for, you know, purpose or meaning in the, in the new normal. And I got thinking one day, I don't remember why, but I got to thinking, you know, I wonder if anybody's doing anything with film strips because the whole retro media thing, preservation and YouTube, and it had all blown up in all that time. And I looked and I was kind of shocked that nobody was working on the format. You have so many people working on VHS, you have the incredible Prellinger archive of 16 millimeter film, industrial shorts, educational shorts, all that stuff. Nobody's working on this format. And I'm like, why? And it was just the perfect sort of thing because it was something that I felt that I could do with the energy that I had. And it wasn't so big that it was insurmountable and impossible without a team of hundreds of thousands of people or whatever. So I just kind of said, well, maybe let me see if I can do it because I don't have a lot of energy but I have enough energy to feed film into a scanner and upload it somewhere. So it just sort of fit. And I feel like a lot of people are working on different sorts of retro media and nothing against it, but I feel if I just started up the the 1000th channel about the YouTube channel about The Nintendo Entertainment System Yeah, who cares that that's people are on that and they're doing a great job but maybe I could do this from for this format that's been completely neglected and and do something about it, you know.
Juravich: This is Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about the cultural importance and preservation of film strips with Mark O'Brien, founder of Uncommon Ephemera. So you have the film strips and do you have the audio for a lot of them? So you're able to, basically you're digitizing them. You're putting them on the web, right?
O'Brien: Right, I have about 5,000 film strips currently.
Which was partly an original seed from, you know, out of my own pocket, finding things on eBay. And then once people realized that I was doing this, I started getting donations. Out of the 5,000 or so film strips, I have maybe 1,000 with soundtracks. Okay. Um, that Because they were separate pieces of media you had a canister with the film and you had a record or a cassette when these got into secondhand markets or when schools started throwing things away but people maybe rescued them from the dumpster those things get separated.
A lot of people see film strips and they just grab the film because they think that's all it is. And then sometimes soundtracks end up in the hands of record collectors and you have to go chase them and figure out how to get them to donate to you. But, and some film strips didn't come with soundtracks. Before the 60s, that was very common.
Juravich: Yeah, the teacher would narrate it too. It probably had like a piece of paper with it, yeah.
O'Brien: Yeah a lot of them in the sixties especially home economics film strips for some reason they had uh... Scripts they had a little booklet that the teacher would read and i guess save money on producing a soundtrack if i have the soundtrack and the film strip i can sort of put them together into a video that simulates how it would have looked in that classroom in the eighties or the seventies uh... And i post those on youtube and i also upload them to the internet archive along with the original scans. And the original digitized audio files. So what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make this available. I don't like saying I'm a collector because that just means that it's in my house. And if I get hit by a bus or my house burns down or something like that, a hurricane, tornado, it's all gone. And film strips are already so neglected that the majority of them have been thrown away already. So they're already gone. So the mission is not only to find them, but to get them saved in a format where they're not going to degrade as a lot of the film is falling apart.
Juravich: Are there many other film strip preservationists out there or are you still one of the few?
O'Brien: As far as I can tell, I'm the only person in the United States doing it at scale. Other countries have a different relationship with the format. There is an organization in Europe that is actually doing it, at scale, there is an organization or an individual in Hungary, I believe, and in Austria, if I'm not mistaken. But different countries use them for at different times Russia used them way later than anybody else did and there's some preservation going on there But for the American film strip and maybe maybe even the North American filmstrip. I believe I'm the only one doing it scale
Juravich: Wow. And film strips are neither, they're not movies or photographs. They're like in a category all of their own. Is that one of the reasons people weren't saving them? Did they like have you figured out why people didn't think to save them?
O'Brien: I don't know because that sort of thing is a complex web of what people remember, what people are nostalgic for, if the technology is easily available for amateurs to do it and sort of start a grassroots nostalgic revival of it. Film strips are particularly multidisciplinary. Because you have to be able to scan film, but you also need to be to digitize audio. You need to remember what film strips looked like when they were projected, how they moved through the projector, which was different than other formats, and also I make a lot of videos, reassembling these into videos and sort of getting the feel right of them. So. I think that you can go on Amazon and you can get a little USB thing for 17 bucks, plug a VCR in it and then copy your VHS tapes.
And this is a little more complicated. Obviously, it's not insurmountable, because I can do it. But it's a little more complicated than plugging in a USB thing and clicking a button.
Juravich: And why did you decide to name your company Uncommon Ephemera instead of naming it like Filmstrip Headquarters or something like that?
O'Brien: Well, because believe it or not, I didn't start with film strips. I initially saw the project in about 2014 as a way to fulfill my love of weird records and cassettes. So I started with audio only. But I also, in the back of my mind, I had that maybe I could get into a film strip or something like that at some point. And the reason why I called it Uncommon Ephemera is for the example that I said about being the thousandth channel about the Nintendo Entertainment System. That we have a relationship in our culture with Ephemeral that is fueled by nostalgia and how many people had it and how people had a relationship with it. And so because I didn't want to be that thousandth channel about the Nintendo Entertainment system or anything like that, I sort of. Wanted to set myself apart by saying that sort of stuff is common, ephemera. So that's how it started. And it turns out to be a mixed blessing with the name, because I found that when I talk to some people, I'm surprised by how few people know how to pronounce ephemera.
Juravich: I was just worried. I was like, did I say it right? Okay, okay, but there are some
O'Brien: You did say it right, but there are some people who don't, and I'm like, really? It never occurred to me that it's not a word that people could pronounce, but so it's been a mixed blessing.
Juravich: I see. I could see that. Yeah, what we we have a few minutes left. I wanted to talk about you mentioned film strips falling apart. So they so they were they weren't made to last forever. I'm they they degrade. Do you have a way to save them or do they have to be intact when you find them?
O'Brien: It's not that they weren't made to last. It's that a lot of them were printed on a film stock that due to the way it was made just ended up not standing the test of time. There was an industrial stock called Eastman Color from Kodak and it was, it was made for industrial uses like industrial film duplication. If you've got slides at a gift shop at some tourist attraction. They were always on Eastman Color. And most film doesn't do this, but a lot of film strips were printed on Eastmen Color. And what Eastman color does is the dyes will start fading unevenly. Film has three dye layers, magenta, cyan, and yellow. And they'developed in different ratios to produce all the colors. Most film does most most film the dice sort of fade evenly and just a little bit over time Eastman color the dyes fade very unevenly cyan goes first yellow goes next Which is why a lot of these films you see they look like they've got this deep horrible red tint to them
Juravich: Oh, okay.
O'Brien: An additional problem with Eastman Color is about this time, about 70 years after it was printed, what happens is the binder that holds the dye layer in place, which is sort of like, you can think of it as like nail polish, where it just hardens, you know? It's a chemical, but it hardens. And what's happening now with the binder in Eastman color is it's turning sort of back into a viscous liquid. Once it does that... It won't hold the die layers in place anymore and the image is just
Juravich: disappear.
O'Brien: Yeah, they just sort of scramble. So to your question, once that happens, it's over for that film. It's lost. So at this point, I like to say that this isn't preservation in the traditional sense, as much as its triage.
Where I'm just trying to get whatever copy I can of some of these because the format has been so undocumented that we don't even know, we don't even have a full list of all the titles that were produced, all the companies are out of business.
Juravich: Right, you don't know what you're missing, yeah.
O'Brien: Yeah, we don't know we we don't know what we're missing so at this point most of the stuff I'm just trying to get whatever copy we can't not that those scans aren't high quality But it's not like it was you know it's brand new or it's on a stock that doesn't fade
Juravich: Well, just to end on for our listeners, if someone wants to go to your website or your YouTube page and wants to watch one of these that you have preserved and documented, do you have a favorite?
O'Brien: Oh, that's hard. I like the weird ones.
Juravich: Tell us a weird one to go find and check out.
O'Brien: There is a film strip from the early 80s called "The Art of Pantomime in the Church." There was a mime named Randall Bayne, very famous from what I can tell, and he was also a very devout Christian. And of course, there's nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned, whatever you're into. But he decided to merge these two things and produce a film strip for churches who wanted to introduce mimes and pantomime into their service. And it's, you know, like I said, everybody's got their something and I'm not here to judge that. But the juxtaposition is so weird that you just sort of, you just sorta transfixed watching it, that these two things can be, and it ends with a, with a mime performance of like a psalm or something like that. And that's just like, I didn't have these two things on my bingo card at the same time, right?
Juravich: Right. I don't think anyone did. So where can our listeners find that one and others?
O'Brien: You can you can go to uncommon ephemera org or you can just google uncommon ephemera to find all my stuff Everything's linked from the website if you have you're having trouble spelling ephemeral You can just Google filmstrip preservation, and I think I'm the first person who comes up
Juravich: You're the person. We've been speaking with the person, Mark O'Brien, founder of Uncommon Ephemera. And we've been talking about the cultural importance and preservation of film strips. Thank you so much for your time today, Mark.
O'Brien: My pleasure, thank you.
Juravich: And coming up, we are going to talk with Russell Holly, and we're going to get a review of all the big announcements from Apple from last week. That is when All Sides continues with Tech Tuesday on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides with Amy Juravich, a show where we share stories about science, technology, and the future of our environment. The iPhone 18 didn't get announced last week, but Apple's first foldable phone did, along with an iPhone 18 Pro. We're talking about Apple's big announcements and what was missing with Russell Holly, Director of Commerce Content at CNET. Welcome back to the show, Russell.
Russell Holly: Thank you.
Juravich: So the iPhone 18 did not get announced, but Apple announced a new iPhone 18 Pro and its first foldable iPhone called the Duo. But let's start with what was missing. Why didn't Apple announce the new 18, the standard, the hopefully more reasonably priced model?
Holly: I think that this will now be something that Apple announces in the spring from now on. You know, Apple for a while now has had... A twice-a-year cycle for announcing its phones, with the more budget-oriented phones being something that's available in the spring. Sometimes Apple calls these the E series, where you have the 15E and the 16E, where they are kind of more budget-friendly versions of the phones that were announced in the fall, usually having a different color palette associated with them and with some small drawback when it comes to the hardware that is inside of it. And I think that that's going to be What the spring looks like now is that Apple will have the kind of standard version of their phone. And then a more budget friendly version of their phone is something that gets announced in the spring from now on.
Juravich: All right, so what about this foldable phone? I mean, I guess it was the worst kept secret in the tech world. Everyone knew it was probably coming, you know, and would have been surprised if it wasn't. Is it living up to all the hype and all the weight?
Holly: So far, there's a lot to be excited about first and foremost, being that this is the first iPhone that bends on purpose, you can take this phone, you know, it's a passport style fold. So it's not the kind of clamshell that you had seen Samsung do in years past. It's much more aligned with the phones that are that are being announced in China right now. You know, you have a pretty sizable display on the front that Apple says if you use just the front of the screen, battery will last you around 44 hours and you can open it whenever you want to a much larger display. Because it's so wide, it's probably going to look a little unusual the first time you go and hold it up to your head, just because it's a little wider than usual. That's just for the folks who hold their phone up to their head. Very few people do that anymore. There's also no face ID camera on it, and instead they've brought back the touch ID using your finger on the side of the phone.
Juravich: Did they? Did they really? Yeah, I missed that. All right. That's interesting. Wow. That is interesting. OK.
Holly: Yeah, I think that having the camera on the inside is also hidden beneath the display. So the screen looks completely full. But if you go to take a selfie or FaceTime or something like that and the phone is fully open, then a little hidden camera will make itself visible and you'll be able to use that to communicate with folks. I think the other thing that's really interesting about the iPhone Fold so far is that it is really kind of the response that I've seen from a lot of folks is there's really not a reason to buy a small iPad anymore. Which is something that you know has been kind of a conversation for the last couple years if I have this one phone that does a bunch of stuff and do I really need you know to bring a laptop with me or to you know to bring A tablet with me and the phone really is wide enough when it's fully open that if you've got yourself a little keyboard I absolutely by the time we get to Christmas I'm sure that I will see people typing on airplanes on these things and and you know doing all kinds of stuff but They do start at $2,000 and they go quite a bit up from there. The most expensive version of the iPhone fold is going to have two terabytes of storage and it will be just shy of $3,300.
Juravich: Which is so much money for a phone, yeah. I wanna say you can get a barely working car for that, but anyway. Okay, so does it fit in your pocket?
Holly: It does. You know, the trade-off for the phone.
Juravich: Does it fit in my pocket? It fits in your...
Holly: Well, so this is kind of the interesting point, is that so far the answer is yes. And the reason that the answer is yes is that in order to have that kind of wide effect that I was talking about before, it's actually a bit stout. It's not as long as the iPhone 16 or 17 if you've seen those around you in the past. So it is certainly wider. You will certainly notice it, especially in a woman's front pocket. But it does fit. We have in fact tested this with real live human women, I promise.
Juravich: Okay, with many styles of pants, I would assume.
Holly: That's exactly right.
Juravich: I mean, that's also a commentary on the pants industry, but that's for another day. That's not a Tech Tuesday. Okay. So what do you think about the – because there's all this talk about also an iPhone Air 2. Is there a – like, is that something that might come out in the spring as well? Is Apple just throwing everything out there?
Holly: Believe it or not there was no mention of the iPhone air 2 and it's unlikely that we would see something like that anytime soon Unless the iPhone Air is just what the iPhone 18 becomes Yeah, that's what I was wondering. You know, they're certainly like that. What we did see, however, is when Apple broke down kind of how the iPhone Fold gets made, it borrows a lot from the way that the iPhone Air got made. Basically, the entire computer is up in the camera area, and the entire rest of the phone is your display and battery life. And that is what makes the iPhone Air as thin as it does because it's very thin in most of the phone, but then you get up in that camera area and it's just as chunky as most other iPhones. And you'll see the same thing with the iPhone Fold is that there'll be a little bump that comes out that has the camera, and that's because it is now way more than the camera. It is basically the entire computer that powers it is up in the area, along with a really big, what they call a vapor chamber, in order to make sure that the phone stays cooler while you're using it.
Juravich: Okay, so would you recommend, I guess, do you have any idea how much just an 18 is going to cost versus like spending, you know, $3,000 on this foldable phone? I guess it just depends on what you want, right?
Holly: Yeah, so the 18 is going to start at around $1,100 and Apple has a really aggressive trade-in program for the first couple weeks of any phone launch. So you can go and take a look and tell it what phone you currently have it'll tell you what its trade-in value is I think for folks who have an iPhone 17, that's in a reasonable condition. The the payout is something like eight hundred and fifty dollars So you end up getting this new phone for pretty reasonable price And you know, there's there's quite a bit the like about the iPhone 18 Pro in terms of what it's capable of It has especially for for you know kind of nerdy chip people like myself It has a brand new what is called a cellular radio in it So if you've ever felt like you've been standing next to someone who has an Android phone and they've got service and you don't as you're sitting here with an iPhone, it's because the radios inside of iPhones are actually not super great. But this brand new one promises to get much better reception in areas that iPhones have typically struggled before.
Juravich: Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, I'm still going to have to ponder and consider, but pivoting to another Apple topic real quick, Apple is introducing its new audio intelligence tool to listen and transcribe the world around you with the help of your Apple Watch. And the article in CNET says, AI wearables may be the future of tech, and Apple is reframing itself as an intelligent personal hub. Can you tell me what that means?
Holly: So Apple's big presentation for this feature on the Apple Watch and it's something that will be available on the apple watch, you know not just for the the current phone, the current watches, but there will be you know software updates to make changes to this over time. You will have the ability to turn on what is essentially a transcription that stores locally. So you can be in a meeting with someone and you know record all of that conversation and have a transcript of it. You can ask Siri later. Hey, when I was talking to Jim, you know, can you remind me what our you know what our takeaways were? And it will provide you with that information or notes that you've left for yourself throughout the day. I think that there is potential for this to be really, really interesting. I also think that is a massive, massive potential for these to be abused in ways that will probably generate headlines for years to come.
Juravich: Yes. So if it's always listening, does it save everything forever, forever, forever?
Holly: So to be very clear, it is only listening when you turn it on, by which I mean this feature and not the watch. However, it's not immediately obvious to the other person that you have turned this feature on, which raises a lot of questions about how this works in states that have one-party recording rules and what the disclosure for that is going to look like. But in places where this technology would be encouraged, It'll all be stored on your personal So it's not something that ever leaves your phone or your watch and goes to live up in Apple servers is the claim that is made there. And it's something that you get to decide, you know, how long you keep these recordings versus how long. You get rid of like if they auto expire after 30 days or something like that, these are settings that you're able to put in place.
Juravich: Are they going to impact your storage then? That sounds like an incredible amount of storage if you record everything.
Holly: It's so I think what's going to happen here is instead of recording the audio and keeping the audio is doing the transcription and it's keeping the transcription. And while audio takes up quite a bit of space, text is storage wise, very cheap. So you can you can store that text and not have to worry about it taking up a lot of what you will have to worry about is any kind of continuing recording like that, especially on something as small as an Apple watch is going to crush your battery. You know, that that kind of always listening thing is cute when you are when it's only listening for like a single word to wake up and turn on Siri and have it do something or the same thing that goes for the electronics that we keep in our house. It is much harder to constantly listen and transcribe everything. So the bigger concern for someone who wants to use this all day long is whether the battery will actually allow you to do that.
Juravich: Okay. When can we, when will this feature be available on our watches?
Holly: The Apple Watch was available for pre-order starting Saturday and will be shipping out this coming Friday and will available in Apple stores this coming friday and it will be first available there. Then there will be software updates to other Apple Watches over the next couple of weeks and you'll know when you get the update whether or not you have that feature depending on which version of the watch you have.
Juravich: All right, well, when it all goes horribly wrong, we'll talk about it again here on Tech Tuesday. We only have like three minutes left, but I wanted to talk about the actual opposite of all of this, which is, you had an article in CNET about tin can phones. So new smartphone technology shows we've come a long way since the tin can phone, which is two soup cans and some string in between. But now there's a tin can phone that connects to Wi-Fi that allows kids to talk with friends and family without having to navigate the internet on their own. So tell me what is so special about this tin can phone except that the company came up with a very clever name.
Holly: It's a very clever name and an incredibly cute design. They look like little soup cans and very fun colors. And then you lift it up off of the rocker and you can see that it's got a bunch of buttons on it. This is a landline. This is home phone that does not require an actual landline to plug in. It connects over wifi and it gives you like phone access over wifi. So you can call regular numbers and you have full conversations with someone and adjust, it's just over wifi so if you want your kid to have a phone in their room or throughout the house and have it not be connected to the internet and not be a smartphone is actually a really compelling option.
Juravich: Is it is there a phone bill though? Like how do you you know? How does tin can make any money here?
Holly: So there is aside from the phone itself costing around a hundred dollars and and you know having some basic functionality There is something that tin can has a monthly subscription for what they call the party line plan Which allows you another old? Exactly, yeah, which allows you to make and receive calls to and from regular numbers instead of just tin can owners So if you have if you don't pay for that monthly thing You can have unlimited free conversations with another person that owns a tin can But if you pay for this $10 a month, then they get Wi-Fi access and can make and receive calls with anyone.
Juravich: Okay, so if you pay for it, the kid could talk to grandparents, friends, family, anyone. But if you just want, you and your friend have to both have the tin can phone if you don't want to pay like a monthly bill. Is that right?
Holly: That's exactly right, yeah.
Juravich: And the parent has control over it. Does the parent approve numbers?
Holly: That's exactly right. There's actually a lot of parental controls that go into this and it's, you know, it's something that's kind of constantly in development, they're receiving a lot of feedback from folks and you know they're they're making changes as they go. But as far as the actual you know hardware goes, it seems to work really well.
Juravich: Okay, and so basically it's a landline phone, but you don't have to have a phone company come to your house with the little old phone jack from back in the day.
Holly: Yeah, it just runs right off your Wi-Fi.
Juravich: Wow. All right. Well, listeners, I encourage you to go look at the tin can phone because Russell's right. It's really fun and cute. We have been talking about Apple's big announcements from last week and all the way to a tin can foam with Russell Holly, director of commerce content at CNET. Thanks for joining us today.
Holly: Thanks for having me.
Juravich: And you've been listening to Tech Tuesday from All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. I'm Amy Juravich.