The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I guess we should do the first segment on the M1 stuff,

00:00:02 ◼   ► get it out of the way and then blow the rest of our time

00:00:04 ◼   ► on the phones.

00:00:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that sounds about right.

00:00:07 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:09 ◼   ► - So with the Verge, you guys got all three.

00:00:12 ◼   ► You took the Pro, Dieter took the MacBook Air

00:00:16 ◼   ► and Dan Seifert took the Mac Mini.

00:00:19 ◼   ► - Chris, Chris Welch took the Mac.

00:00:21 ◼   ► - Chris Welch took it, all right,

00:00:22 ◼   ► I knew I blew it on the third one, all right.

00:00:25 ◼   ► But you guys did get all three.

00:00:28 ◼   ► I had the MacBook Pro, I still have it.

00:00:30 ◼   ► I'm still amazed by it.

00:00:32 ◼   ► And I kind of feel like

00:00:37 ◼   ► this was a case where, did you see the review

00:00:42 ◼   ► that Patrick Morehead quote unquote review

00:00:45 ◼   ► that he put on Forbes,

00:00:46 ◼   ► it's like part of the Forbes Contributor Network.

00:00:48 ◼   ► It was like the last honest man's review of the M1.

00:00:52 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:00:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean Pat and I have been talking

00:00:55 ◼   ► back and forth a little bit about it, yeah.

00:00:57 ◼   ► And I noticed that, he published it

00:01:00 ◼   ► and I think it took off in a way

00:01:02 ◼   ► that maybe even he wasn't expecting.

00:01:04 ◼   ► It got a lot of uptake.

00:01:06 ◼   ► - I think that's very true,

00:01:07 ◼   ► that he was not expecting the reaction it got.

00:01:09 ◼   ► - And he toned it down a bit in post.

00:01:14 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:17 ◼   ► There were quite a few references in the original version

00:01:20 ◼   ► to Apple chosen reviewers.

00:01:24 ◼   ► You know, let me give you my take on this

00:01:27 ◼   ► as opposed to the initial reviews

00:01:29 ◼   ► from Apple's chosen reviewers.

00:01:31 ◼   ► And you know, you don't have to,

00:01:33 ◼   ► and it was almost like he needed an editor

00:01:35 ◼   ► 'cause he mentioned Apple chosen reviewers too many times.

00:01:39 ◼   ► But I did notice that in the uptake,

00:01:41 ◼   ► that was what caught on, right?

00:01:44 ◼   ► It was sort of like there are people,

00:01:46 ◼   ► and I don't blame them, right?

00:01:47 ◼   ► It's like cynicism and being jaded pays off

00:01:52 ◼   ► probably more now than ever in our media world.

00:01:56 ◼   ► And I think people thought, wait,

00:01:58 ◼   ► these initial reviews sound too good to be true.

00:02:01 ◼   ► And then Patrick Morehead's review comes out and says,

00:02:03 ◼   ► they're too good to be true.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Here's the truth.

00:02:05 ◼   ► And well then wait, why were all the reviewers so glowing?

00:02:10 ◼   ► And it's because Apple picked people who would either,

00:02:16 ◼   ► he never, you know, and it was definitely made

00:02:19 ◼   ► where he never insinuated why Apple's chosen reviewers

00:02:22 ◼   ► would write overwhelmingly positive reviews,

00:02:27 ◼   ► but it played into people's just gut level suspicion

00:02:31 ◼   ► that hey, something's wrong with these reviews

00:02:33 ◼   ► because they're saying things that don't add up.

00:02:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, this for me is,

00:02:39 ◼   ► as a former gadget blogger,

00:02:42 ◼   ► is about as full circle as it gets, right?

00:02:45 ◼   ► I would, when I was making $14 a post-it-in gadget,

00:02:49 ◼   ► why did Ed Big and Walt Mossberg get the iPhone?

00:02:53 ◼   ► It's 'cause Apple has made some,

00:02:55 ◼   ► and it's like now I know Walt

00:02:57 ◼   ► and I'm the guy who gets accused of, okay, well,

00:03:00 ◼   ► you know, like this is just, the circle of life continues.

00:03:04 ◼   ► But you know, I did, Pat and I talked,

00:03:06 ◼   ► we DMed a little bit.

00:03:07 ◼   ► I think he tweeted that, you know,

00:03:11 ◼   ► one thing that is really true about OS X or Mac OS,

00:03:16 ◼   ► they call it now,

00:03:17 ◼   ► that first day of a new Mac OS machine is shot for testing.

00:03:21 ◼   ► That system just wants to index.

00:03:24 ◼   ► It is, it comes into the world

00:03:26 ◼   ► and the first thing it wants to do is index itself

00:03:29 ◼   ► as hardcore as it can.

00:03:31 ◼   ► And so just for years,

00:03:33 ◼   ► and probably they've told you this too,

00:03:34 ◼   ► but I get a new Mac machine from Apple

00:03:38 ◼   ► and I'm like, my benchmarks are slow.

00:03:39 ◼   ► And they're like, has it been a full day yet?

00:03:41 ◼   ► I'm like, no.

00:03:42 ◼   ► And they're like, wait.

00:03:43 ◼   ► And like, then the next year a new one comes out

00:03:44 ◼   ► and I forget.

00:03:45 ◼   ► That played a pretty significant role

00:03:47 ◼   ► in the results he was getting.

00:03:49 ◼   ► And then the other, and I, you know,

00:03:51 ◼   ► this is every computer is different.

00:03:53 ◼   ► Everyone's workloads are different.

00:03:55 ◼   ► It is a processor transition.

00:03:57 ◼   ► There's a bunch of weird big sur stuff that's going on

00:04:01 ◼   ► with compatibility.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And then on top of that, and you know,

00:04:05 ◼   ► just I'll say it as directly as I can.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Like I don't use a bunch of Microsoft apps.

00:04:09 ◼   ► I don't use a bunch of weird enterprise collaboration tools.

00:04:13 ◼   ► The Vox Media is still a startup.

00:04:14 ◼   ► We run on Google apps and Zoom and we tested what we tested.

00:04:17 ◼   ► And I will, you know, Dieter and I are like motivated

00:04:20 ◼   ► to break the thing, right?

00:04:22 ◼   ► Like we want to push it to its limit and tell you

00:04:24 ◼   ► this is where we found the limit.

00:04:26 ◼   ► And we were sort of unable to do that

00:04:28 ◼   ► inside of our workflows.

00:04:29 ◼   ► I think if I worked at a fortune 500 company

00:04:34 ◼   ► that ran on weird old custom windows software,

00:04:38 ◼   ► I probably would have broken it in a different way.

00:04:39 ◼   ► So I did appreciate the shift in perspectives,

00:04:42 ◼   ► but in talking to Pat, I mean, he can speak for himself,

00:04:45 ◼   ► but I definitely got the sense that he was not expecting

00:04:48 ◼   ► the uptake that he got.

00:04:49 ◼   ► - No.

00:04:50 ◼   ► Well, I looked back at it and I know what you're talking

00:04:54 ◼   ► about that one day and for me, it's usually Spotlight

00:04:58 ◼   ► and the photos stuff.

00:05:01 ◼   ► 'Cause I have all of my photos

00:05:02 ◼   ► in the iCloud photos library.

00:05:06 ◼   ► So I don't know, it's like up to 37,000 photos and videos.

00:05:09 ◼   ► And even when you run Migration Assistant,

00:05:12 ◼   ► there's some of the indexing of that stuff

00:05:14 ◼   ► doesn't come over by choice.

00:05:18 ◼   ► Spotlight doesn't come over, I guess.

00:05:20 ◼   ► I don't know why.

00:05:21 ◼   ► I think the photos stuff doesn't,

00:05:23 ◼   ► perhaps it's for some sort of privacy reason,

00:05:27 ◼   ► perhaps they've talked about that they don't store

00:05:30 ◼   ► some of the facial recognition stuff in the cloud,

00:05:35 ◼   ► or at least it's not supposedly in a way

00:05:38 ◼   ► that they can get it.

00:05:39 ◼   ► But anyway, photos D or whatever it's called,

00:05:42 ◼   ► something with a D runs in the background,

00:05:44 ◼   ► takes a lot of CPU.

00:05:45 ◼   ► I found it with this machine for the first time,

00:05:47 ◼   ► it never made it hot, never slowed it down

00:05:49 ◼   ► and I was still getting incredible benchmarks.

00:05:52 ◼   ► It was like, and I could see an activity monitor

00:05:55 ◼   ► that this stuff was happening that usually wrecks a machine

00:05:58 ◼   ► until it's not, you can look in activity monitor

00:06:02 ◼   ► and when you're not doing anything,

00:06:04 ◼   ► the machine's not doing anything, okay,

00:06:05 ◼   ► now's the time to start running benchmarks.

00:06:07 ◼   ► And I didn't even see that.

00:06:09 ◼   ► Again, am I accusing him of dishonesty?

00:06:12 ◼   ► It just doesn't add up to what I saw,

00:06:15 ◼   ► what other reviewers saw.

00:06:16 ◼   ► And I think where he really had to tone it down a little bit

00:06:21 ◼   ► was it didn't jibe with what just real people

00:06:23 ◼   ► who now are getting them are seeing.

00:06:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, before we published our reviews,

00:06:28 ◼   ► I texted Joanna and I was like,

00:06:30 ◼   ► "We're real close to giving the Air a 10.

00:06:33 ◼   ► "Are we way out over our skis here?"

00:06:34 ◼   ► And she was like, "Nah, I don't think so."

00:06:36 ◼   ► - That's remarkable.

00:06:37 ◼   ► You know, and we're not, again,

00:06:39 ◼   ► we're motivated to find the limits.

00:06:41 ◼   ► 'Cause I think for me as a reviewer,

00:06:44 ◼   ► one thing that we do is we tell you if it's worth the money.

00:06:48 ◼   ► And one of the clearest ways to explain

00:06:50 ◼   ► whether or not something is worth the money is to say,

00:06:52 ◼   ► "Here's where your money will stop.

00:06:53 ◼   ► "Here's what you cannot do."

00:06:55 ◼   ► And with the Air, we could find the line.

00:06:59 ◼   ► Certainly we could see it throttle at certain moments,

00:07:01 ◼   ► but that line is so far above

00:07:05 ◼   ► where any other consumer laptop at that price point is,

00:07:07 ◼   ► it just made total sense to say, "This is great."

00:07:10 ◼   ► I think now that people have,

00:07:13 ◼   ► you can't hide from the truth, right?

00:07:14 ◼   ► Like people have the machines.

00:07:17 ◼   ► They're gonna run applications that aren't gonna work.

00:07:20 ◼   ► And Apple's claims are everything works.

00:07:22 ◼   ► So there is a little bit of daylight there

00:07:24 ◼   ► between what I think the most common experience is,

00:07:26 ◼   ► what Apple is saying,

00:07:27 ◼   ► and then what someone's absolutely bizarre edge case

00:07:31 ◼   ► is gonna be.

00:07:32 ◼   ► And the question is just how much daylight is there?

00:07:34 ◼   ► - Right.

00:07:34 ◼   ► - And it's like that was part of Morehead's review.

00:07:37 ◼   ► It was like he listed some of the apps he was running,

00:07:40 ◼   ► and I'd never even heard of them.

00:07:41 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:07:42 ◼   ► And it was like a bunch of Microsoft stuff.

00:07:44 ◼   ► But like some of the stuff he said too

00:07:46 ◼   ► just didn't add up to me.

00:07:47 ◼   ► Like I ran all of my benchmarks with Chrome

00:07:51 ◼   ► with the Intel-compiled version of Chrome

00:07:54 ◼   ► because I think that their first,

00:07:57 ◼   ► I don't even know if it was still a beta,

00:07:59 ◼   ► but they didn't have a native Apple Silicon version

00:08:02 ◼   ► until like the night before reviews came out

00:08:05 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:08:06 ◼   ► But I thought it was interesting.

00:08:07 ◼   ► I thought it was an interesting test of Rosetta.

00:08:09 ◼   ► It was like, well, you know, Chrome is super popular.

00:08:12 ◼   ► People use it for all sorts of things.

00:08:16 ◼   ► So it's a great, this is a great app to test.

00:08:19 ◼   ► And it ran great.

00:08:20 ◼   ► It, you know, it wasn't as fast as Safari,

00:08:23 ◼   ► but it was definitely as fast as Chrome is on Intel,

00:08:27 ◼   ► brand new from this year, Intel MacBook Pros.

00:08:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, it ran all my tests in Chrome.

00:08:34 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:08:35 ◼   ► - It's, Chrome is what I use.

00:08:37 ◼   ► I think there's like an element of being a reviewer

00:08:39 ◼   ► where you can't just do what they tell you to do.

00:08:42 ◼   ► You're like, no, this is my laptop.

00:08:44 ◼   ► I'm gonna use it like my laptop.

00:08:46 ◼   ► And I might, you know, I run my workday in Chrome.

00:08:49 ◼   ► And so I was really motivated to push Chrome

00:08:52 ◼   ► because Chrome is a dog,

00:08:54 ◼   ► even on the fastest Macs that have Intel chips.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And here it was, I think a hair slower.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And then I think the M1 build

00:09:01 ◼   ► that they released, Apple Silicon build,

00:09:03 ◼   ► in a bizarre way.

00:09:04 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:09:05 ◼   ► - Is definitely faster,

00:09:06 ◼   ► but it's definitely still slower than Safari.

00:09:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, and like Slack,

00:09:11 ◼   ► Slack came out with a beta that's Apple Silicon native.

00:09:15 ◼   ► And again, I guess perhaps that's, I don't even know.

00:09:17 ◼   ► I haven't followed that,

00:09:18 ◼   ► if that's what all of Electron is doing,

00:09:20 ◼   ► but the way that Electron is this native,

00:09:24 ◼   ► quote unquote native app framework

00:09:25 ◼   ► based on the Chromium engine.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And that Chrome for now is gonna ship Intel

00:09:32 ◼   ► and Apple Silicon versions,

00:09:34 ◼   ► as opposed to a universal download

00:09:37 ◼   ► that runs natively everywhere, I guess,

00:09:39 ◼   ► because it's so big and so much of it is compiled code

00:09:42 ◼   ► and they're worried about the footprint.

00:09:45 ◼   ► But I upgraded to Slack's native beta early,

00:09:49 ◼   ► and it was fine.

00:09:50 ◼   ► But I had been running the Slack Intel version

00:09:54 ◼   ► for days on the machine too, and it was fine.

00:09:56 ◼   ► And whatever, I have lots of complaints

00:09:58 ◼   ► about Slack as a Mac app, but it's not slow.

00:10:02 ◼   ► It's never really slow.

00:10:04 ◼   ► It's just bloated and uses weird UI conventions,

00:10:07 ◼   ► really weird UI conventions.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And it uses a lot of memory because it's based on Chrome.

00:10:14 ◼   ► And so the Moreheads review actually got me

00:10:18 ◼   ► to uninstall the native beta I'd been using,

00:10:20 ◼   ► go back to the Intel one, and I was like, no, this is fine.

00:10:24 ◼   ► This is, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:10:26 ◼   ► I mean, maybe your Slack is different.

00:10:27 ◼   ► I don't know, but the Slacks I'm on, this is amazing.

00:10:31 ◼   ► Basically, I feel like we've thought for years,

00:10:36 ◼   ► and there is, there still is.

00:10:38 ◼   ► It's not like the M1 defies physics,

00:10:40 ◼   ► but we know that there's a trade-off

00:10:41 ◼   ► between how fast a computer runs.

00:10:44 ◼   ► And you can just say computer.

00:10:46 ◼   ► You don't even have to get into CPU,

00:10:47 ◼   ► GPU, machine learning, et cetera.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Just the faster it runs, the more energy it uses.

00:10:53 ◼   ► The more energy it uses, the hotter it gets,

00:10:55 ◼   ► and you run into heat problems.

00:10:57 ◼   ► And so you can have cool computers, basically,

00:11:00 ◼   ► which is what we've accepted.

00:11:02 ◼   ► You can have cool computers that are too slow

00:11:04 ◼   ► for the sort of software people use on a daily basis,

00:11:08 ◼   ► or you can have fast computers that run hot

00:11:11 ◼   ► and have loud fans.

00:11:13 ◼   ► And the M1 is saying, well, actually,

00:11:16 ◼   ► you can have your cake and eat it too.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Here's a computer that is actually very fast,

00:11:19 ◼   ► and it single core competes

00:11:22 ◼   ► with world-class desktop workstations,

00:11:25 ◼   ► even though it's shipping in $699 Mac minis

00:11:30 ◼   ► and $999 MacBook Airs.

00:11:33 ◼   ► It literally competes head-to-head

00:11:34 ◼   ► on single core performance

00:11:36 ◼   ► with multi $10,000 workstations,

00:11:40 ◼   ► and it runs cool as a cucumber.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And that seems too good to be true.

00:11:47 ◼   ► It is a inflection point in the industry.

00:11:52 ◼   ► There is no other chip, and it's not about ARM

00:11:56 ◼   ► versus x86 instructions.

00:11:58 ◼   ► There are ARM laptops.

00:12:00 ◼   ► There are multiple AMD and Intel laptops,

00:12:04 ◼   ► but there is no other machines that that's true for.

00:12:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's true.

00:12:09 ◼   ► You know, I wonder, over time, we're gonna see.

00:12:13 ◼   ► This is one of those questions you're never gonna be able

00:12:15 ◼   ► to answer until you see the performance curve

00:12:17 ◼   ► of the chips over time.

00:12:20 ◼   ► But there was a huge process transition

00:12:22 ◼   ► that Apple just went under, right?

00:12:24 ◼   ► It was the big shift to five nanometer,

00:12:26 ◼   ► the first company to ship five nanometer at scale.

00:12:29 ◼   ► Intel is still sort of struggling its way to seven, right?

00:12:33 ◼   ► Like, those process transitions are where you get

00:12:38 ◼   ► the leap in energy efficiency.

00:12:40 ◼   ► And what we were always talking about

00:12:42 ◼   ► was when the MacBook Air went to the Haswell chips,

00:12:45 ◼   ► and the battery life just skyrocketed.

00:12:47 ◼   ► That's what this felt like to us.

00:12:48 ◼   ► The performance is great.

00:12:49 ◼   ► The battery life jump is more meaningful

00:12:53 ◼   ► for more people, I think.

00:12:54 ◼   ► And so the real question is whether they reaped

00:12:57 ◼   ► all those benefits at once because of the process transition

00:12:59 ◼   ► or they can keep scaling that over time.

00:13:02 ◼   ► Like, I don't know the answer,

00:13:04 ◼   ► but it's like one of the big outstanding questions

00:13:07 ◼   ► of what are the limits of what Apple made here

00:13:10 ◼   ► is do they just pick it up this time because of

00:13:12 ◼   ► an enormous and very difficult process transition

00:13:15 ◼   ► that is years ahead of Intel,

00:13:18 ◼   ► or is it baked into just sort of their architecture

00:13:21 ◼   ► versus something like Snapdragon?

00:13:24 ◼   ► - Well, and is there something to the fact of,

00:13:27 ◼   ► I think there is, I think it's human psychology,

00:13:30 ◼   ► that there is something to having the bar raised

00:13:34 ◼   ► that forces everybody to accept it

00:13:38 ◼   ► and elevate their games, right?

00:13:41 ◼   ► Like, you know, Steve Jobs famously described

00:13:45 ◼   ► the original iPhone as being five years ahead

00:13:47 ◼   ► of the competition, and that's such an abstract

00:13:50 ◼   ► Bezos Chardian thing, five years ahead of what, you know?

00:13:54 ◼   ► But in some sense it was true, you know?

00:13:58 ◼   ► In some sense you could say that it took about five years

00:14:01 ◼   ► for Android phones to sort of get into,

00:14:04 ◼   ► just be in the ballpark in certain regards,

00:14:08 ◼   ► but they did, right?

00:14:10 ◼   ► And that's not me saying that Android phones

00:14:12 ◼   ► within five years of the iPhone were equal to the iPhone,

00:14:15 ◼   ► but they were certainly closer than other phones were

00:14:19 ◼   ► in 2007, right?

00:14:21 ◼   ► In 2007 it was like the iPhone, you know, famously,

00:14:25 ◼   ► it made the people at RIM after the announcement

00:14:28 ◼   ► held a meeting the next day,

00:14:29 ◼   ► and their conclusion coming out of the meeting

00:14:31 ◼   ► of their executive leadership was that Apple had just lied

00:14:34 ◼   ► and made up, you know, said that the things they're saying

00:14:38 ◼   ► that this iPhone does can't be true,

00:14:40 ◼   ► and sort of spent six months until they could like buy one

00:14:44 ◼   ► and see it spinning their wheels on that disbelief, you know?

00:14:49 ◼   ► But then, you know, RIM obviously didn't catch up,

00:14:52 ◼   ► but the industry did, and I feel like this might,

00:14:54 ◼   ► you know, the result is that Apple's laptop chips

00:14:58 ◼   ► may not be so far ahead of the competition in a few years,

00:15:01 ◼   ► not because Apple doesn't have the headroom,

00:15:03 ◼   ► but because everybody's gonna have to catch up.

00:15:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's right.

00:15:07 ◼   ► I mean, when you talk about that phone,

00:15:09 ◼   ► I sat through, I cannot tell you how many ill-fated briefings

00:15:14 ◼   ► about why resistive touchscreens were superior

00:15:17 ◼   ► to capacitive touchscreens.

00:15:19 ◼   ► Like, it was just like horror, and I was like,

00:15:21 ◼   ► you know it sucks, but that's what they had.

00:15:24 ◼   ► That was like, that was the technology

00:15:25 ◼   ► that was available to them at scale.

00:15:27 ◼   ► Apple had their, you know, they were starting from zero

00:15:31 ◼   ► and going to a small base so they could spend

00:15:33 ◼   ► on superior technology that was harder to build,

00:15:37 ◼   ► whereas the big companies just didn't have access to it.

00:15:39 ◼   ► - It did wash out a lot faster.

00:15:41 ◼   ► I think one of the big stories with phones,

00:15:43 ◼   ► and you can see it actually with the M1,

00:15:45 ◼   ► the big story here is that phones are such a huge market

00:15:48 ◼   ► that they've commoditized all of these other little bits

00:15:51 ◼   ► and bobs that make a phone.

00:15:53 ◼   ► And so now you have an M1, which is just a, you know,

00:15:55 ◼   ► a supercharged phone chip that Apple has learned

00:15:58 ◼   ► to build at scale, even through a difficult

00:16:01 ◼   ► processor transition.

00:16:02 ◼   ► You can just see how that will, like TSMC knows

00:16:05 ◼   ► how to build five-millimeter chips at scale.

00:16:07 ◼   ► They make Apple's chips.

00:16:09 ◼   ► They're gonna sell that to all their other customers

00:16:10 ◼   ► over time, and that's gonna get commoditized.

00:16:13 ◼   ► And Apple will stay ahead of the curve

00:16:14 ◼   ► 'cause that's the thing that they do,

00:16:15 ◼   ► but I think that that catch-up period is a lot shorter

00:16:18 ◼   ► than it used to be.

00:16:20 ◼   ► - I, see, and I don't think you're gonna disagree with me,

00:16:23 ◼   ► but I'm gonna object to one phrase you just used,

00:16:26 ◼   ► which is calling it a phone chip.

00:16:28 ◼   ► And I think I'm as guilty of that as anybody,

00:16:30 ◼   ► that we've all collectively believed that these are,

00:16:33 ◼   ► that what Apple's been making with the A14, A13, A12,

00:16:36 ◼   ► going back in time, are really, really good

00:16:39 ◼   ► and ever better phone chips,

00:16:41 ◼   ► because that's where they've been used.

00:16:44 ◼   ► And the iPad, if we really wanna just boil down

00:16:49 ◼   ► what could be a two-hour episode easily of itself,

00:16:52 ◼   ► what's wrong with the iPad is that it is still largely

00:16:55 ◼   ► just a big phone, you know?

00:16:58 ◼   ► And limited by iPad OS in many ways based on limitations

00:17:04 ◼   ► that make perfect sense for phones to preserve battery life

00:17:08 ◼   ► and extend availability and this, that, and the other thing

00:17:13 ◼   ► that maybe don't make sense for the way people want

00:17:16 ◼   ► to use iPads as personal tablet workstations.

00:17:21 ◼   ► And we've internalized that, and then it's like,

00:17:25 ◼   ► no, they're actually just good, they're just computers.

00:17:28 ◼   ► Like if you just sort of take a step back

00:17:29 ◼   ► and stop thinking them as phones, as tablets, and laptops,

00:17:33 ◼   ► and just think, well, they're all just computers

00:17:35 ◼   ► and they're instantiated in different form factors.

00:17:38 ◼   ► They're just great computer chips.

00:17:40 ◼   ► And it just so happens that they're making

00:17:43 ◼   ► and selling most of them.

00:17:44 ◼   ► And even by the standards of the iPhone 12 Pro Max,

00:17:49 ◼   ► little, little tiny pocket-sized Unix workstations

00:17:54 ◼   ► that you put in your, they're just great computer chips.

00:17:57 ◼   ► - So I agree with you, and I think if Dieter was here,

00:18:00 ◼   ► he would be like shaking his fists at you,

00:18:02 ◼   ► that he's been saying they're all just computers

00:18:04 ◼   ► for a decade, 'cause it's our expectations

00:18:07 ◼   ► of what they do that define their limitations.

00:18:10 ◼   ► I think what, again, this is prognosticating the roadmap

00:18:14 ◼   ► of these chips, we'll see how it goes.

00:18:17 ◼   ► Yeah, they are just all great computer chips,

00:18:21 ◼   ► but the constraints, the design, customer experience

00:18:24 ◼   ► constraints of a MacBook Air and an iPhone 12 Pro Max

00:18:29 ◼   ► are pretty similar, especially 'cause the phone

00:18:31 ◼   ► is almost as big as the laptop.

00:18:33 ◼   ► So you're still looking at battery life,

00:18:36 ◼   ► you're still looking at heat, you're still looking

00:18:37 ◼   ► at portability to whatever extent.

00:18:40 ◼   ► You take that chip out of that context,

00:18:42 ◼   ► where it has always sort of been designed for that context,

00:18:45 ◼   ► and Apple will even tell you, we think performance for a lot,

00:18:48 ◼   ► that's the metric, and we will never go beyond it,

00:18:51 ◼   ► we're never gonna break this ethos.

00:18:53 ◼   ► And then you say, okay, we actually have to make

00:18:55 ◼   ► a Mac Pro out of this.

00:18:56 ◼   ► And people are actually still gonna want external GPUs

00:19:00 ◼   ► on that computer, and so we have to spin up PCI Express

00:19:04 ◼   ► for this machine.

00:19:05 ◼   ► There's a bunch of stuff computers outside of this envelope

00:19:09 ◼   ► need to do that we've never seen this architecture do.

00:19:12 ◼   ► Whereas I think with the Air, and to some extent, the Pro,

00:19:16 ◼   ► actually the Pro's a really interesting one

00:19:17 ◼   ► we should talk about, but definitely for the Air,

00:19:20 ◼   ► the sort of design constraints are so similar

00:19:25 ◼   ► to what you want from an iPad, that the OS letting you

00:19:28 ◼   ► do more with it unlocks the chip in a very powerful way.

00:19:33 ◼   ► What you wanna do with a Mac Pro is totally different.

00:19:35 ◼   ► And I think even the MacBook Pro to me is by far

00:19:38 ◼   ► the odd man out of this entire lineup.

00:19:42 ◼   ► I know why the Mac Mini exists, it's because people love it,

00:19:45 ◼   ► and they can make one, and you can do all kinds

00:19:47 ◼   ► of stuff with it, why not put a fast chip in it?

00:19:50 ◼   ► You can see why there's no Intel MacBook Air available,

00:19:54 ◼   ► like why would you?

00:19:56 ◼   ► The Pro is like, if you need the power that a fan gives you

00:19:59 ◼   ► because you're rendering for a bit longer,

00:20:02 ◼   ► you definitely want more than two ports.

00:20:04 ◼   ► That's the one I'm like, why did they make that one?

00:20:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, and they've been making it ever since we were stuck

00:20:11 ◼   ► without a retina MacBook Air, right?

00:20:14 ◼   ► And famously, it was when they first introduced

00:20:18 ◼   ► the two port 13 inch modern Intel MacBook Pro,

00:20:23 ◼   ► at the end of the introduction, Phil Schiller even said,

00:20:27 ◼   ► by the way, some people have been waiting

00:20:30 ◼   ► for a retina MacBook Air.

00:20:33 ◼   ► Well, look at this 13 inch MacBook Pro,

00:20:36 ◼   ► it actually has a smaller footprint,

00:20:38 ◼   ► like stacked on top of it.

00:20:40 ◼   ► It's actually smaller by volume,

00:20:42 ◼   ► even though it's not wedge shaped,

00:20:44 ◼   ► and it's faster and it starts at $1,300.

00:20:48 ◼   ► And without saying, so this is the 13 inch MacBook Air,

00:20:54 ◼   ► which it wasn't, right?

00:20:55 ◼   ► They eventually did come out

00:20:56 ◼   ► with a retina 13 inch MacBook Air,

00:20:57 ◼   ► which is why he didn't say it.

00:20:59 ◼   ► But a lot of people read between the lines and thought,

00:21:01 ◼   ► oh, there's never going to be a retina MacBook Air,

00:21:04 ◼   ► you're supposed to buy this

00:21:05 ◼   ► and they're just calling it a MacBook Pro.

00:21:07 ◼   ► But it is one of the weirdest naming things

00:21:10 ◼   ► in Apple's lineup because there's clearly,

00:21:12 ◼   ► it sounds like a very subtle difference, right?

00:21:17 ◼   ► You say to somebody who doesn't really know the details,

00:21:20 ◼   ► well, some of the 13 inch MacBook Pros have two ports

00:21:23 ◼   ► and some which cost more and are a little,

00:21:26 ◼   ► they're faster and they have four ports.

00:21:28 ◼   ► And you think, oh, well, that's a natural way

00:21:31 ◼   ► for a 13 inch Pro laptop to span the mid to high end, right?

00:21:36 ◼   ► That some have two ports, some have four ports,

00:21:39 ◼   ► and then the four port ones are faster chips.

00:21:42 ◼   ► Okay, but it's like two different product lines.

00:21:45 ◼   ► It really, they should not have the same name.

00:21:48 ◼   ► Only no other company but Apple

00:21:50 ◼   ► would give them the same name.

00:21:52 ◼   ► And they shouldn't, therefore shouldn't have

00:21:54 ◼   ► quite the identical form factor

00:21:56 ◼   ► other than the ports either, right?

00:21:59 ◼   ► And it's specific to the word Pro

00:22:02 ◼   ► where it's just, Apple uses Pro,

00:22:06 ◼   ► I keep hammering this over and over again.

00:22:08 ◼   ► Apple uses Pro, sometimes what they really mean

00:22:11 ◼   ► is what everybody thinks Pro means,

00:22:12 ◼   ► which means professional.

00:22:14 ◼   ► And sometimes they just mean more expensive and nicer.

00:22:17 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:22:18 ◼   ► - It's like--

00:22:20 ◼   ► - But I would never, this is like the old game,

00:22:23 ◼   ► like do you just spend the incremental money

00:22:25 ◼   ► to have the slightly nicer thing?

00:22:26 ◼   ► Is it worth it?

00:22:27 ◼   ► And so with the iPhone 12 Pro,

00:22:30 ◼   ► which is nominally what I am on this show to talk about.

00:22:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:22:35 ◼   ► 30 minutes deep in the laptop.

00:22:37 ◼   ► But I think the money to get the Pro phone this year

00:22:42 ◼   ► is like extremely well worth it.

00:22:44 ◼   ► And especially if you're looking at the Pro phone

00:22:49 ◼   ► and you can deal with the size,

00:22:50 ◼   ► the money to get the Pro Max is like a no brainer,

00:22:53 ◼   ► assuming you can deal with the size.

00:22:55 ◼   ► And all that's fine, right?

00:22:56 ◼   ► Like I just, on my podcast decoder,

00:23:00 ◼   ► we had Phil Spencer from Xbox.

00:23:01 ◼   ► And I was like, why do you have two Xboxes?

00:23:02 ◼   ► He's like, the names are bad, we know it,

00:23:04 ◼   ► but people walk into a store

00:23:05 ◼   ► and they just see the price points

00:23:06 ◼   ► and that's all they care about and you can understand it.

00:23:08 ◼   ► So I totally buy it, right?

00:23:09 ◼   ► With the phones, it's like you spend more money,

00:23:11 ◼   ► you get one more camera lens and then the phone gets bigger.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Great, it makes sense.

00:23:15 ◼   ► With the MacBook Air and the Pro,

00:23:18 ◼   ► they're so similar that I would never spend the money

00:23:21 ◼   ► to go from the Air to the Pro unless I had that need

00:23:24 ◼   ► for sustained performance, which very, very few people do.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And if I do have that need,

00:23:30 ◼   ► I'm gonna wait to see what the better Pro looks like.

00:23:34 ◼   ► - Right.

00:23:35 ◼   ► - Because I almost certainly need more ports.

00:23:38 ◼   ► And I think, and this goes back to your,

00:23:40 ◼   ► are they phone chips or computer chips?

00:23:42 ◼   ► I have no idea what this thing looks like

00:23:44 ◼   ► when it has more than 16 gigs of RAM.

00:23:46 ◼   ► - Right.

00:23:46 ◼   ► - And 16 gigs, it does appear

00:23:48 ◼   ► to be a little performance managed.

00:23:50 ◼   ► - Right.

00:23:51 ◼   ► I don't know, I feel like they managed it right.

00:23:55 ◼   ► I wish that these 13-inch MacBook Pros

00:23:58 ◼   ► somehow could have a different name.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I don't know what it would be.

00:24:03 ◼   ► - MacBook.

00:24:04 ◼   ► - I know, but they already spoiled that with the one,

00:24:06 ◼   ► I'm not that Apple's supposed to--

00:24:07 ◼   ► - Like they care.

00:24:08 ◼   ► - Right, like they care about reusing names, but--

00:24:11 ◼   ► - Like what is a MagSafe connector?

00:24:13 ◼   ► Like, who knows?

00:24:14 ◼   ► But I do think, I do kind of think that they misused

00:24:17 ◼   ► the just plain no adjective MacBook name

00:24:20 ◼   ► for the adorable little 12-inch no fan.

00:24:24 ◼   ► This is what we'd clearly like to build

00:24:27 ◼   ► and we're trying our best with what Intel has to offer,

00:24:30 ◼   ► but yeah, it's kind of slow.

00:24:32 ◼   ► MacBook.

00:24:33 ◼   ► But I still feel like that was,

00:24:35 ◼   ► that should have been like the MacBook Nano or something,

00:24:37 ◼   ► because like the most striking element about it was,

00:24:40 ◼   ► oh my God, this makes the MacBook Air

00:24:42 ◼   ► look thick and heavy and big and it's tiny,

00:24:45 ◼   ► as opposed to just plain MacBook

00:24:48 ◼   ► should be like the iPhone 12, right?

00:24:51 ◼   ► Not the 12 Mini, not the Pro, not the Max,

00:24:55 ◼   ► just the iPhone 12.

00:24:57 ◼   ► This is like the main new iPhone

00:25:00 ◼   ► and then you can define all the other ones

00:25:02 ◼   ► based on how they relate to it.

00:25:04 ◼   ► That that, the 13-inch MacBook Pro

00:25:07 ◼   ► should be the 13-inch MacBook.

00:25:10 ◼   ► This is a MacBook.

00:25:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I think you're running into the,

00:25:15 ◼   ► well, you're doing fine.

00:25:16 ◼   ► I think Apple is running into,

00:25:17 ◼   ► they just have a billion customers.

00:25:21 ◼   ► - Right.

00:25:21 ◼   ► - So they're not, they have to consistently re,

00:25:24 ◼   ► and they're very good at this.

00:25:25 ◼   ► They have to reinforce and build on what people already know.

00:25:28 ◼   ► This goes to your point about

00:25:30 ◼   ► slow developer transition Apple Silicon, right?

00:25:33 ◼   ► This year, you know this,

00:25:34 ◼   ► next year we're gonna give you one more fact.

00:25:36 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:25:37 ◼   ► - I think with the names, they're eager to reuse names.

00:25:40 ◼   ► - The front camera on the iPhone

00:25:41 ◼   ► is still technically called the iSight.

00:25:44 ◼   ► - Is it really?

00:25:44 ◼   ► I thought it was the FaceTime camera, I don't know.

00:25:47 ◼   ► - Everyone calls it the FaceTime camera

00:25:48 ◼   ► and Apple's like, our four megapixel iSight.

00:25:51 ◼   ► It's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:25:53 ◼   ► But I think they keep that consistency from year to year

00:25:57 ◼   ► just because their market is so big

00:26:01 ◼   ► that any change carries an enormous communication cost.

00:26:04 ◼   ► I think that's what happened with the Air.

00:26:06 ◼   ► The Air was their most popular laptop.

00:26:07 ◼   ► They tried to make it go away and people kept buying it.

00:26:09 ◼   ► So they're like, screw it, we're just gonna make a new Air.

00:26:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, and I kind of feel like they know things,

00:26:15 ◼   ► they know some things about the people who buy them

00:26:18 ◼   ► that they're never gonna tell for competitive reasons.

00:26:21 ◼   ► Not just, oh, we're secretive and we just don't talk.

00:26:23 ◼   ► But, you know, and I wouldn't be surprised

00:26:26 ◼   ► if there's just a segment of the MacBook buying population

00:26:29 ◼   ► who thinks of themselves as having, quote, unquote,

00:26:33 ◼   ► pro needs and so they want a MacBook Pro,

00:26:37 ◼   ► but they really, they don't need a pro version.

00:26:40 ◼   ► They need, you know, something that, you know, like $1,300.

00:26:43 ◼   ► And so, okay, we'll give you one that has the pro name on it

00:26:46 ◼   ► and that way you'll buy it, even though honestly,

00:26:49 ◼   ► honestly, you wouldn't come close to taxing the MacBook Air.

00:26:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's right.

00:26:54 ◼   ► And I think Apple's brilliant

00:26:56 ◼   ► in just getting that extra little,

00:26:57 ◼   ► I think that's the iPhone 12 Pro.

00:26:59 ◼   ► It's a little bit better because it costs substantially more.

00:27:03 ◼   ► But if you're gonna be there, you might as well be there.

00:27:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:27:06 ◼   ► All right, we can come back to the MacBook.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Let me take a break while I'm thinking about it

00:27:09 ◼   ► and thank our first sponsor.

00:27:10 ◼   ► It's our good friends at Linode.

00:27:12 ◼   ► Linode, the company that hosts Staring Fireball.

00:27:14 ◼   ► I love this company.

00:27:15 ◼   ► You know, they're headquartered right here in Philadelphia.

00:27:17 ◼   ► Great company.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Whether you're working on a personal project

00:27:20 ◼   ► or managing enterprise infrastructure,

00:27:22 ◼   ► you deserve simple, affordable, and accessible

00:27:24 ◼   ► cloud computing solutions that allow you

00:27:27 ◼   ► to take your project to the next level.

00:27:30 ◼   ► It's hosting for nerds, really.

00:27:32 ◼   ► That's what it is.

00:27:33 ◼   ► Simplify your cloud infrastructure on Linode's.

00:27:36 ◼   ► Linux virtual machines to develop, deploy,

00:27:40 ◼   ► and scale your modern applications faster and easier.

00:27:42 ◼   ► And you can get started today with $100 in free credit.

00:27:45 ◼   ► This is the best deal in podcast advertising.

00:27:47 ◼   ► $100 in free credit for listeners of this show.

00:27:51 ◼   ► You can find all the details at Linode,

00:27:53 ◼   ► L-I-N-O-D-E.com/thetalkshow.

00:27:57 ◼   ► They have 11 global data centers.

00:27:59 ◼   ► They provide 24/7, 365 human support

00:28:03 ◼   ► with no tiers or handoffs when you need support.

00:28:07 ◼   ► You get their great support staff, period.

00:28:10 ◼   ► Nice and easy.

00:28:11 ◼   ► No if, ands, or buts about it.

00:28:13 ◼   ► And in addition to their shared and dedicated

00:28:16 ◼   ► compute instances, you can also use your $100 in credit

00:28:20 ◼   ► on their new S3-compatible object storage.

00:28:24 ◼   ► So in other words, if you have some kind of application

00:28:26 ◼   ► that's programmed up to use AWS S3,

00:28:28 ◼   ► you can just swap it out with their S3-compatible APIs

00:28:32 ◼   ► and host the stuff on Linode.

00:28:34 ◼   ► They've got managed Kubernetes, which

00:28:37 ◼   ► I keep being told I am pronouncing right, and more.

00:28:40 ◼   ► Visit, once again, linode.com/thetalkshow

00:28:44 ◼   ► and click on Create Free Account.

00:28:46 ◼   ► That's the button to hit to get started.

00:28:48 ◼   ► You can create an account for free.

00:28:50 ◼   ► Use that thetalkshow code.

00:28:53 ◼   ► You get $100 in credit at linode.com/thetalkshow.

00:29:00 ◼   ► So basically, the bottom line of the M1 reviews--

00:29:05 ◼   ► and I finally get into the bottom of reading them all--

00:29:09 ◼   ► it is-- they've done something that seems too good to be true.

00:29:13 ◼   ► It's super fast and runs cool.

00:29:16 ◼   ► And they've got a translation system that is pretty fast.

00:29:21 ◼   ► It's not magic.

00:29:23 ◼   ► It doesn't run Intel as fast as native Apple silicon on this.

00:29:26 ◼   ► But because the chip is so fast and the translation

00:29:30 ◼   ► is so good, most stuff runs at like 70%

00:29:34 ◼   ► the speed of native code.

00:29:37 ◼   ► And because the chips are like more than 150% faster,

00:29:43 ◼   ► it actually runs faster than most Intel MacBooks,

00:29:46 ◼   ► even when you're running Intel code.

00:29:48 ◼   ► And those seem to defy people's beliefs.

00:29:51 ◼   ► People seem to think you can have fast chips or cool chips.

00:29:55 ◼   ► And translation or emulation, whatever you want to call it,

00:29:58 ◼   ► stinks and is riddled with compatibility errors.

00:30:02 ◼   ► And even when it does work, it runs too slow.

00:30:05 ◼   ► And none of those things are true.

00:30:07 ◼   ► And I think people are having a hard time getting

00:30:09 ◼   ► their heads around that.

00:30:11 ◼   ► Yeah, the only thing keeping me from instantly buying an M1 Mac

00:30:15 ◼   ► Mini-- which I just love the Mac Mini.

00:30:18 ◼   ► I've wanted one for some reason, for a long time.

00:30:21 ◼   ► And I've never had a good reason.

00:30:23 ◼   ► And I need an M1 test machine, seems

00:30:26 ◼   ► like a good enough reason-- is that I hate Big Sur.

00:30:29 ◼   ► And that's-- I just don't like the way it looks.

00:30:33 ◼   ► And I have a long personal history

00:30:35 ◼   ► of skipping OS X versions.

00:30:38 ◼   ► I've done it almost subconsciously for like 10 years.

00:30:42 ◼   ► I think I was probably the last person to use Snow Leopard.

00:30:45 ◼   ► Like Apple was looking at their stats dashboard,

00:30:47 ◼   ► like who's that one person?

00:30:49 ◼   ► It was me.

00:30:50 ◼   ► I think there were a lot of people

00:30:51 ◼   ► who held onto Snow Leopard for a long time.

00:30:53 ◼   ► It was great.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And so Big Sur to me feels like they've

00:30:56 ◼   ► got a lot of new ideas in this OS,

00:30:59 ◼   ► particularly around notifications and Control Center.

00:31:02 ◼   ► I'm just going to wait for them to figure it out.

00:31:05 ◼   ► And that is the only thing that would keep me from instantly

00:31:07 ◼   ► buying one of these machines.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Because it turns out I get a lot of notifications.

00:31:13 ◼   ► So to have that broken in any way for me

00:31:15 ◼   ► is-- it's just a real mess.

00:31:17 ◼   ► So that's literally it.

00:31:20 ◼   ► That's the only thing-- that-- and I think you and Joanna

00:31:22 ◼   ► have probably done like 45 rounds on the webcam.

00:31:25 ◼   ► But that's like whatever.

00:31:26 ◼   ► I have external webcams.

00:31:29 ◼   ► But yeah, to me it really comes down to these

00:31:33 ◼   ► are great machines.

00:31:35 ◼   ► There's a lot of new ideas in them.

00:31:36 ◼   ► And one of those ideas, for me anyway,

00:31:39 ◼   ► is just the workflow notifications

00:31:42 ◼   ► has changed so dramatically with the OS.

00:31:43 ◼   ► I'm not going to upgrade any of my Macs for a year.

00:31:46 ◼   ► I don't think there's any hesitation in my mind

00:31:48 ◼   ► to say that the most disruptive thing about switching

00:31:52 ◼   ► to an M1 Mac is Mac OS 11 Big Sur.

00:31:55 ◼   ► And only in the exact same ways that it

00:31:59 ◼   ► would be if you upgraded your existing machine to Mac OS 11

00:32:02 ◼   ► Big Sur.

00:32:04 ◼   ► No question in my mind that that's the most disruptive

00:32:06 ◼   ► thing for most people.

00:32:08 ◼   ► To me, Catalina was the one that I just never liked.

00:32:12 ◼   ► And I didn't upgrade my main machine to Catalina

00:32:18 ◼   ► until like August.

00:32:20 ◼   ► And by then it was mostly ironed out and I didn't regret it.

00:32:25 ◼   ► But that's almost like 10 months after it shipped.

00:32:28 ◼   ► I was definitely not going to upgrade to Catalina,

00:32:30 ◼   ► but it has one feature.

00:32:32 ◼   ► One extremely-- this is how precious I am about workflows.

00:32:36 ◼   ► There's one thing in Catalina that made my workflow better

00:32:39 ◼   ► and I upgraded.

00:32:40 ◼   ► It's when you take a screenshot and that image drops

00:32:42 ◼   ► to the bottom right corner.

00:32:44 ◼   ► You can click on it directly and drag it into a window.

00:32:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and do something with it.

00:32:48 ◼   ► And do something with it right from that little preview.

00:32:51 ◼   ► And you couldn't do that in the older version.

00:32:53 ◼   ► I was like, well crap, here I go.

00:32:55 ◼   ► Yeah, but I have to say, so I've only used Catalina full time

00:33:00 ◼   ► since like August.

00:33:01 ◼   ► And then I started splitting a lot of time with Big Sur

00:33:04 ◼   ► on a test machine while it was in beta.

00:33:07 ◼   ► And now that I'm using this, I have to be on Big Sur.

00:33:10 ◼   ► And so I'm OK.

00:33:12 ◼   ► And there are-- again, talk about a two hour

00:33:14 ◼   ► episode of a podcast.

00:33:15 ◼   ► I do have some complaints about the Mac OS Big Sur UI design.

00:33:19 ◼   ► And I can't wait to write about them

00:33:20 ◼   ► once I catch my breath on all this review stuff on Daring

00:33:23 ◼   ► Fireball and hopefully try to get some of this--

00:33:27 ◼   ► the attention of people who can fix it.

00:33:30 ◼   ► But overall, I like it.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And I kind of feel like it's a better take on this style.

00:33:38 ◼   ► I mean, it's obvious what they're going for

00:33:40 ◼   ► and what they've been going for with iOS 7 inspired Mac OS ever

00:33:45 ◼   ► since-- whatever the version is.

00:33:48 ◼   ► Mac OS 10.10 or 10.11, whatever it

00:33:50 ◼   ► was when they first switched to something that vaguely looked

00:33:55 ◼   ► like the iOS 7 look and feel, flat, flatter.

00:34:00 ◼   ► And it's like it never sat right.

00:34:04 ◼   ► And it's like those--

00:34:05 ◼   ► like they switched-- they wanted to get them on the same branding

00:34:11 ◼   ► universe.

00:34:12 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:34:13 ◼   ► But they did it before they had the San Francisco

00:34:16 ◼   ► typeface ready to go.

00:34:17 ◼   ► So those first two years, the Mac was using Helvetica

00:34:21 ◼   ► as the system font, which never looked right.

00:34:24 ◼   ► It was just-- it's just like, what is this?

00:34:27 ◼   ► And it's like, you could use it for a whole year.

00:34:29 ◼   ► And every time I'd look at it, I would think,

00:34:32 ◼   ► that just looks weird.

00:34:34 ◼   ► That just doesn't look like a Mac system font.

00:34:37 ◼   ► And it's not like, oh, I'm stubborn

00:34:39 ◼   ► and I don't want the system font to ever change-- what was it?

00:34:42 ◼   ► Lucida Grandi?

00:34:44 ◼   ► I don't know how you pronounce it.

00:34:47 ◼   ► It was Lucida Grandi for the whole Mac OS 10 era from 10.0

00:34:51 ◼   ► through whenever they switched to this to Helvetica.

00:34:54 ◼   ► But then as soon as they switched it to San Francisco,

00:34:56 ◼   ► it was like, ah, Ice Water in Hell.

00:34:59 ◼   ► This is a font.

00:35:01 ◼   ► Maybe it's not somebody's favorite font,

00:35:03 ◼   ► but it's like, this could be the Mac system font.

00:35:06 ◼   ► Nice.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:08 ◼   ► I feel like Big Sur, they went back

00:35:11 ◼   ► and it was like they gave a different team of designers.

00:35:14 ◼   ► They said, OK, forget about what we've been using

00:35:16 ◼   ► for the last five years.

00:35:17 ◼   ► Just forget it.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Make a version of the Mac OS system

00:35:21 ◼   ► that looks like more inspired by the general look of iOS.

00:35:26 ◼   ► And it's sort of like a retry at the same thing

00:35:28 ◼   ► that they've been trying for five years.

00:35:30 ◼   ► You're walking into it, man.

00:35:34 ◼   ► This whole game is to make the things look like each other

00:35:37 ◼   ► so that the huge audience of iOS users

00:35:40 ◼   ► feels comfortable and at home using a Mac

00:35:43 ◼   ► and switches at a higher rate.

00:35:45 ◼   ► That's what you want.

00:35:46 ◼   ► You want it to be a seamless ecosystem.

00:35:49 ◼   ► You know what the biggest holdup is?

00:35:52 ◼   ► You touch an iPhone.

00:35:55 ◼   ► And so you're showing people all of these controls

00:35:58 ◼   ► and all of these interface elements

00:36:00 ◼   ► that look like the things they used to touch

00:36:03 ◼   ► that are harder to use with a mouse than before.

00:36:06 ◼   ► And you're not letting them touch them.

00:36:08 ◼   ► That, to me, I spend more time--

00:36:11 ◼   ► I bet if you measured it, I spend more time

00:36:13 ◼   ► clicking in the upper right of my screen

00:36:16 ◼   ► than anything when I use a Mac.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Because I'm closing notifications

00:36:19 ◼   ► or I'm monkeying around with the Wi-Fi and the volume

00:36:22 ◼   ► and audio inputs and outputs.

00:36:25 ◼   ► I'm going to do not disturb, which

00:36:27 ◼   ► is really easy on Catalina.

00:36:30 ◼   ► All that stuff got harder because all of it

00:36:32 ◼   ► is meant for swipes.

00:36:33 ◼   ► Or it looks like it's meant for swipes.

00:36:35 ◼   ► It's not meant for clicking.

00:36:36 ◼   ► And it's driving me insane.

00:36:38 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's-- and some of it--

00:36:42 ◼   ► I think the stuff that--

00:36:44 ◼   ► like the notification center stuff,

00:36:47 ◼   ► definitely it's true because they actually

00:36:49 ◼   ► are the same widgets, right?

00:36:50 ◼   ► Yes.

00:36:51 ◼   ► Right?

00:36:51 ◼   ► And that is a Swift UI thing.

00:36:54 ◼   ► And I think it's working out pretty well.

00:36:58 ◼   ► And it's sort of the first really serious test of Swift UI

00:37:04 ◼   ► that Apple's doing.

00:37:05 ◼   ► And it's just one of these transitions

00:37:08 ◼   ► that has to take years.

00:37:09 ◼   ► And no matter-- if 10 years from now we look back at it

00:37:13 ◼   ► and we say, wow, the transition to Swift UI

00:37:15 ◼   ► as the UI framework for Apple, wasn't that a breeze?

00:37:20 ◼   ► And it's like you forget that it's

00:37:22 ◼   ► like the first three or four years of Mac OS X,

00:37:25 ◼   ► where it's like, while you were living it,

00:37:27 ◼   ► it wasn't so smooth.

00:37:28 ◼   ► It was actually kind of awful.

00:37:30 ◼   ► And not that Swift UI is awful, but that it just

00:37:34 ◼   ► wasn't deep enough to do anything useful.

00:37:36 ◼   ► And now they've got these widgets that ship

00:37:39 ◼   ► the same across platforms.

00:37:43 ◼   ► And obviously, they have to be designed

00:37:45 ◼   ► for touch on the touch ones and not for touch on the Mac.

00:37:49 ◼   ► I just think-- I just don't see them

00:37:52 ◼   ► going with that style of design for everything

00:37:55 ◼   ► because there are certain aspects of the Mac

00:37:58 ◼   ► where it wouldn't work.

00:37:59 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:38:00 ◼   ► I don't see it as touch being the answer to the problems.

00:38:04 ◼   ► I think the real question for Apple

00:38:08 ◼   ► is that these machines are, in many ways, a chip swap.

00:38:14 ◼   ► And that's how they manage the Intel transition to.

00:38:18 ◼   ► You already know everything, tried and true design.

00:38:21 ◼   ► They're just faster because of one part

00:38:23 ◼   ► that we can identify, the chip.

00:38:25 ◼   ► As you go beyond that and you say,

00:38:28 ◼   ► now we can build around the chip itself

00:38:30 ◼   ► and what can we accomplish, it feels natural

00:38:32 ◼   ► that that endless--

00:38:35 ◼   ► here's your two-hour podcast--

00:38:36 ◼   ► that endless iPad versus Mac conversation

00:38:39 ◼   ► is going to get even harder.

00:38:42 ◼   ► And the number of people who just want a touchscreen

00:38:47 ◼   ► on their Mac because there's one game they want to play

00:38:49 ◼   ► and touch alternatives is a horrible way

00:38:52 ◼   ► to play an iOS game on a Mac.

00:38:54 ◼   ► That number is just going to grow.

00:38:56 ◼   ► Whereas the number of people who value

00:38:57 ◼   ► the iPad because it's way more simple is also going to grow.

00:39:00 ◼   ► And I think that tension cannot be resolved by saying one

00:39:03 ◼   ► has a touchscreen and one doesn't.

00:39:05 ◼   ► Yeah, but if the screen doesn't detach like a tablet,

00:39:08 ◼   ► I don't know that the games are going to be that fun anyway.

00:39:11 ◼   ► Has any Windows laptop manufacturer ever just

00:39:14 ◼   ► sent you a Windows laptop with a touchscreen?

00:39:16 ◼   ► No.

00:39:17 ◼   ► Yeah, but if one of them is out there listening,

00:39:19 ◼   ► just do it for a month.

00:39:22 ◼   ► It's really nice.

00:39:24 ◼   ► Even on Windows-- and Windows 10 has gotten better over time.

00:39:26 ◼   ► I mean, I use my iPad--

00:39:27 ◼   ► But it is actually very nice to just swipe up on a screen.

00:39:30 ◼   ► Nah, I use my iPad as a laptop.

00:39:31 ◼   ► You use your iPad like that.

00:39:32 ◼   ► Yeah, and I don't really-- if the touchscreen stopped

00:39:35 ◼   ► working when it was in the keyboard,

00:39:37 ◼   ► I wouldn't even notice.

00:39:39 ◼   ► I honestly-- every once in a while, I touch.

00:39:42 ◼   ► And I certainly don't play games while it's

00:39:45 ◼   ► in that form factor, right?

00:39:46 ◼   ► When I do play a game on the iPad, it's like I pick it up.

00:39:49 ◼   ► It has to be detachable.

00:39:50 ◼   ► And all sorts of other stuff has to happen.

00:39:54 ◼   ► It's this weird-- I don't know.

00:39:56 ◼   ► I feel like you and Joanna and others who see this as coming

00:40:02 ◼   ► are underestimating the way that Apple

00:40:04 ◼   ► looks at these sort of things.

00:40:07 ◼   ► I don't think Apple looks at it and-- now, I could be wrong.

00:40:10 ◼   ► Because according to my logic, Joanna and I went over this.

00:40:14 ◼   ► By the same logic, they shouldn't

00:40:15 ◼   ► have shipped the iPhone apps running on Big Sur at all.

00:40:20 ◼   ► Period.

00:40:21 ◼   ► Because the basic idea is it should be very nice

00:40:24 ◼   ► and designed for what it does from top to bottom, A to Z,

00:40:29 ◼   ► or just not at all.

00:40:31 ◼   ► And so if it's not designed for touch in every way,

00:40:36 ◼   ► with every button, then you shouldn't have touch,

00:40:39 ◼   ► even if touch would be nice just for scrolling.

00:40:42 ◼   ► I mean, that's what--

00:40:42 ◼   ► Ben Thompson is always telling me.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Even if it just worked for scrolling,

00:40:46 ◼   ► it would be nice to just reach up and be able to flip

00:40:48 ◼   ► your finger and scroll something.

00:40:50 ◼   ► And I get it that it would be nice,

00:40:52 ◼   ► and that people do if they've spent time using another device

00:40:56 ◼   ► that is touch, and then they sit down at the MacBook,

00:40:58 ◼   ► and they see a web page, and they want to just scroll it,

00:41:01 ◼   ► and they touch the screen.

00:41:02 ◼   ► And they're like, oh, yeah, it doesn't work on this machine.

00:41:04 ◼   ► But I'm telling you that Apple's way of looking at it is,

00:41:07 ◼   ► well, wait, if we give you touch for that,

00:41:08 ◼   ► you're going to want touch for everything.

00:41:10 ◼   ► And the red, yellow, green buttons

00:41:12 ◼   ► need to be made twice as big and put twice as far apart.

00:41:15 ◼   ► And then that eats into the space,

00:41:17 ◼   ► and et cetera, and so forth, all the way down the line.

00:41:20 ◼   ► And how do you select text, right?

00:41:22 ◼   ► Selecting text is still a nightmare on iOS.

00:41:25 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess what I would say, and I'm almost certainly just

00:41:28 ◼   ► recapitulating Joanna and Ben, is Apple is wrong.

00:41:33 ◼   ► And by extension, you are too, John.

00:41:35 ◼   ► And people are smarter now than we give them credit for.

00:41:41 ◼   ► And the idea that there are things

00:41:42 ◼   ► that are good to touch on a screen interface,

00:41:46 ◼   ► and things where you want to use your more precise input method,

00:41:49 ◼   ► is not out of the realm of what people understand

00:41:54 ◼   ► about computers anymore.

00:41:56 ◼   ► And I think maybe Apple's still just

00:41:58 ◼   ► gun-shy because every Windows Touch experience for two

00:42:01 ◼   ► decades was horrible.

00:42:03 ◼   ► And they never want to build that.

00:42:05 ◼   ► But I just--

00:42:06 ◼   ► Lightroom, beyond scrolling, I edit photos in Lightroom

00:42:09 ◼   ► at least three times a week.

00:42:11 ◼   ► And when I do it on my iPad, I'm like,

00:42:12 ◼   ► I just wish I had a mouse.

00:42:14 ◼   ► And when I do it on my laptop, I'm like,

00:42:16 ◼   ► I wish I could just pinch to zoom.

00:42:18 ◼   ► And there's no reason that I can do that on a Windows PC.

00:42:22 ◼   ► Right, or just smudge your finger over a face.

00:42:25 ◼   ► And it's funny because Lightroom editing is exactly the thing

00:42:28 ◼   ► where it's like the computer world has come full circle

00:42:32 ◼   ► to the way that--

00:42:33 ◼   ► that's like what dodging and burning was in--

00:42:37 ◼   ► that's the origins of the term in Photoshop,

00:42:39 ◼   ► is that people would actually, in a dark room,

00:42:42 ◼   ► just rub the photo as it was developing

00:42:45 ◼   ► to lighten the spot.

00:42:48 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, it just--

00:42:50 ◼   ► I think they're on the path to it.

00:42:53 ◼   ► I think Federighi said, why would--

00:42:54 ◼   ► that's not even remotely on our mind, which I think

00:42:57 ◼   ► is a classic example of saying--

00:43:00 ◼   ► Apple saying something is a horrible idea right

00:43:02 ◼   ► until they do it.

00:43:03 ◼   ► And they're like, we did it the best way.

00:43:05 ◼   ► I'm very much hoping they are setting that curve for the next--

00:43:08 ◼   ► like I said, the evolution of the Mac

00:43:09 ◼   ► is about to get very interesting.

00:43:11 ◼   ► What does a touchscreen iMac look like?

00:43:13 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:43:14 ◼   ► But they have given themselves the ability

00:43:16 ◼   ► to make that thing in a way that I don't think the Intel

00:43:19 ◼   ► ships ever let them do.

00:43:21 ◼   ► I don't want to get distracted by touchscreen arguments, but--

00:43:26 ◼   ► Again, my-- so about those phones.

00:43:29 ◼   ► I will say this.

00:43:29 ◼   ► Here's the other thing.

00:43:31 ◼   ► The other thing that I come back to--

00:43:33 ◼   ► because my podcast machine here is this 2014 MacBook Pro.

00:43:37 ◼   ► It's one of my most beloved computers I've ever owned.

00:43:40 ◼   ► I still do love it.

00:43:41 ◼   ► But it does get hot.

00:43:43 ◼   ► It does have a fan that turns on less than most Macs of MacBooks

00:43:47 ◼   ► of that era.

00:43:47 ◼   ► But it's funny how just being in Mac OS still to this day,

00:43:55 ◼   ► like using a computer, it was clear you were

00:44:00 ◼   ► running a physical machine.

00:44:02 ◼   ► And the older you go in history, and the older you are,

00:44:05 ◼   ► the more you remember it.

00:44:06 ◼   ► Like floppy drives made noise.

00:44:10 ◼   ► Spinning hard disks made some amount of noise.

00:44:13 ◼   ► And if they made a lot of noise, then you

00:44:15 ◼   ► knew you were in trouble, right?

00:44:17 ◼   ► It was like a red alert back in the spinning hard disk era,

00:44:23 ◼   ► especially when drives were less reliable,

00:44:25 ◼   ► that if you started to hear a clicking noise from your hard

00:44:27 ◼   ► drive, immediately save anything that wasn't saved.

00:44:30 ◼   ► Immediately back up as best you could,

00:44:34 ◼   ► because it was extremely high likelihood

00:44:36 ◼   ► that your hard drive was about to go bad.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Because it was making a physical clicking noise,

00:44:40 ◼   ► a physical thing.

00:44:42 ◼   ► Fans come on.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Heat is generated.

00:44:46 ◼   ► When we used to have spinning disks,

00:44:48 ◼   ► and you could watch movies, you could put your hand over--

00:44:50 ◼   ► you knew which side the disk drive was on because it spun,

00:44:54 ◼   ► and you could feel it.

00:44:55 ◼   ► And it is sort of freaky.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Even though we've had phones that don't have fans,

00:45:02 ◼   ► and iPads that don't get hot and don't have fans,

00:45:05 ◼   ► and do computer-like things, when you're using a Mac,

00:45:08 ◼   ► and you're just used to, well, if I do this,

00:45:12 ◼   ► if I export a video, and it's a 10-minute video,

00:45:16 ◼   ► I know that it's going to get hot,

00:45:18 ◼   ► and the fan's going to come on.

00:45:19 ◼   ► And that doesn't happen.

00:45:20 ◼   ► It is weird.

00:45:22 ◼   ► It's just freaky.

00:45:24 ◼   ► My story-- I told this last week,

00:45:25 ◼   ► but I have to tell it again-- was I double-checked with Jason

00:45:28 ◼   ► Snell before I published my review to see if--

00:45:31 ◼   ► because I couldn't make the fan come on the 13-inch MacBook

00:45:34 ◼   ► Pro.

00:45:34 ◼   ► And I had this panicked moment of--

00:45:37 ◼   ► I'd just written over 1,000 words about how the fan--

00:45:41 ◼   ► it doesn't come on for me, even when I'm trying to.

00:45:44 ◼   ► And I thought, what if I have a lemon hardware unit?

00:45:48 ◼   ► And he was like, no, it's really hard to get the fan to come on.

00:45:50 ◼   ► And I'm like, oh my god, thank god.

00:45:52 ◼   ► It was just panic.

00:45:54 ◼   ► But it's just weird because I just associate Mac OS

00:45:58 ◼   ► with a machine that, in some ways--

00:46:01 ◼   ► even though they've been getting lesser and lesser as fewer

00:46:04 ◼   ► and fewer parts of the computer actually spin--

00:46:08 ◼   ► they manifest themselves physically in a way

00:46:11 ◼   ► that the M1 Macs don't.

00:46:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:15 ◼   ► I found it very hard to get the fan and the Pro to spin up too.

00:46:18 ◼   ► We ended up doing very synthetic things.

00:46:21 ◼   ► We ran Cinebench for 30 minutes on a loop.

00:46:26 ◼   ► We have a render test we do.

00:46:27 ◼   ► We render out the same review video.

00:46:30 ◼   ► So we all download the gigabytes and gigabytes of project files

00:46:33 ◼   ► and then render it out through Premiere.

00:46:35 ◼   ► Towards the end of that, I could get it to do it.

00:46:37 ◼   ► But again, it was just hard.

00:46:42 ◼   ► It's just a difficult thing to do.

00:46:43 ◼   ► And Dieter's MacBook Air, on that same render test,

00:46:46 ◼   ► which is very real world, in Intel emulation--

00:46:49 ◼   ► or in Rosetta translation in Premiere,

00:46:53 ◼   ► which you're not even really supposed to do.

00:46:55 ◼   ► His was only a little bit slower than mine.

00:46:57 ◼   ► And the Air was clearly--

00:46:59 ◼   ► doesn't have a fan to spin up.

00:47:01 ◼   ► So it's like even just the value of that fan,

00:47:06 ◼   ► it really feels subjective.

00:47:08 ◼   ► Where I think the actual difference for me

00:47:10 ◼   ► in terms of a machine--

00:47:12 ◼   ► and I think this is less M1 and more iOS versus Mac OS--

00:47:16 ◼   ► the Mac will just tell you about itself.

00:47:19 ◼   ► You can just open System Profiler,

00:47:21 ◼   ► and it'll tell you that it doesn't have a SATA port.

00:47:26 ◼   ► It just reveals itself to you.

00:47:28 ◼   ► You can open Terminal and screw around

00:47:31 ◼   ► and see actually how fast the cores are running,

00:47:34 ◼   ► whereas no iOS device ever does.

00:47:35 ◼   ► And I think that abstraction, to me,

00:47:39 ◼   ► is the last bit of this is a piece of hardware

00:47:43 ◼   ► that I actually have control over.

00:47:45 ◼   ► Whereas the things you're talking about hard drive,

00:47:48 ◼   ► the hard drive starts clicking.

00:47:50 ◼   ► And you know, I better get any hard drive.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Or the fan spins up, or the disks start reading.

00:47:54 ◼   ► You can hear that stuff.

00:47:55 ◼   ► That was a very tactile sense of this is my machine,

00:47:59 ◼   ► and I'm responsible for it.

00:48:01 ◼   ► And now, as those mechanical things go away,

00:48:04 ◼   ► in the sense that you have to change your engine

00:48:06 ◼   ► oil on your computer or whatever starts to disappear,

00:48:09 ◼   ► what's left is I'm still responsible for how

00:48:12 ◼   ► this computer operates in a way that I've never

00:48:15 ◼   ► felt that way about iOS, and even to an enormous extent,

00:48:18 ◼   ► Android.

00:48:20 ◼   ► And it just feels weird.

00:48:23 ◼   ► It's like this weird world's colliding, right?

00:48:27 ◼   ► It does.

00:48:28 ◼   ► There are many ways where you're using an M1 Mac,

00:48:31 ◼   ► and you're like, this is just like using an iPad.

00:48:33 ◼   ► But only in the sense of it being a physical device, right?

00:48:36 ◼   ► It's like your mental model of what you can do

00:48:39 ◼   ► and how you expect things to go.

00:48:41 ◼   ► Like, you just don't expect that you can run a thing

00:48:45 ◼   ► in the background and compile some big project that's

00:48:49 ◼   ► going to take 30 minutes in Xcode,

00:48:52 ◼   ► and just leave it--

00:48:54 ◼   ► Command-H it to put it in the background,

00:48:56 ◼   ► and just go about your business catching up on email

00:48:58 ◼   ► and reading in Safari or whatever,

00:49:01 ◼   ► and just know that it's still running as fast as it

00:49:03 ◼   ► can in the background.

00:49:06 ◼   ► You just don't think like-- you don't do things like that

00:49:08 ◼   ► on the iPad, I mean, literally, because there is no Xcode

00:49:11 ◼   ► on the iPad.

00:49:12 ◼   ► But when you put things in the background on the iPad,

00:49:15 ◼   ► you just expect that they get suspended,

00:49:17 ◼   ► not that they keep flying.

00:49:20 ◼   ► No, beyond suspended, you expect that when you reopen the app,

00:49:23 ◼   ► it'll reopen.

00:49:25 ◼   ► Yeah, hopefully it's still right where I left off.

00:49:28 ◼   ► And for the most part, in recent years,

00:49:30 ◼   ► it's gotten a lot better at that.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Things don't start over from scratch.

00:49:34 ◼   ► Or if they do, the apps are written

00:49:36 ◼   ► to handle it in a way that it's almost

00:49:39 ◼   ► indistinguishable from just having been

00:49:41 ◼   ► suspended and reanimated.

00:49:43 ◼   ► But it just-- I don't know.

00:49:46 ◼   ► My big takeaway from this is that the M1 and the Mac

00:49:50 ◼   ► experience just makes me think, well,

00:49:52 ◼   ► what is going on with iPad?

00:49:54 ◼   ► I'm more curious about the future of iPad

00:49:56 ◼   ► than I am about the future of Mac,

00:49:57 ◼   ► even though I have lots of exciting questions

00:50:00 ◼   ► about what they could do with truly pro chips.

00:50:03 ◼   ► It's like-- it just really makes the iPad, to me,

00:50:07 ◼   ► seem so hamstrung by its OS.

00:50:11 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's the secret of the iPad.

00:50:14 ◼   ► They could have launched the first iPad with an Intel chip,

00:50:17 ◼   ► right, assuming an appropriate chip existed.

00:50:20 ◼   ► It wouldn't have made a difference.

00:50:22 ◼   ► The whole point was, here's a new form factor of computing.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Here's a new set of assumptions.

00:50:27 ◼   ► We're effectively starting from scratch,

00:50:29 ◼   ► and we're going to build up over time.

00:50:31 ◼   ► And what they've built up to over time

00:50:32 ◼   ► is something that looks almost exactly like a Mac.

00:50:35 ◼   ► And now the Mac has the M1, and they look even more

00:50:37 ◼   ► like each other.

00:50:38 ◼   ► And I think-- yeah, maybe that thing you're talking about,

00:50:41 ◼   ► that 12-inch MacBook that's just called a MacBook,

00:50:44 ◼   ► maybe that thing just is an iPad.

00:50:46 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:50:47 ◼   ► At the end of the day, maybe there is a convergence point.

00:50:51 ◼   ► You ask anybody at Apple about this,

00:50:52 ◼   ► and they just look at you like you're the craziest person

00:50:55 ◼   ► to ever live.

00:50:56 ◼   ► They're like, no one cares.

00:50:57 ◼   ► People just buy what they want to buy,

00:50:59 ◼   ► and we make them all at the end.

00:51:00 ◼   ► We're the richest company in the world,

00:51:02 ◼   ► and this plan has been working, and these problems

00:51:04 ◼   ► are all in your head.

00:51:05 ◼   ► And I think, to a certain extent, that is an enormous

00:51:08 ◼   ► source of power for Apple.

00:51:10 ◼   ► It's true that they make these things.

00:51:13 ◼   ► They sell as many as they can make.

00:51:15 ◼   ► On the other hand, there's just a lot of confusion

00:51:18 ◼   ► right in that zone for regular people.

00:51:20 ◼   ► And especially now, when you can get a MacBook Air that

00:51:23 ◼   ► goes for 12 hours on a charge, why would you

00:51:26 ◼   ► tell anyone to buy an iPad?

00:51:28 ◼   ► Yeah, and you can do it without--

00:51:30 ◼   ► you can do it while using Chrome as your browser, right?

00:51:33 ◼   ► And that, to me, is sort of the other--

00:51:36 ◼   ► When you go to watch Netflix, you're

00:51:38 ◼   ► not immediately sucked into a spiral

00:51:40 ◼   ► of extremely weird politics.

00:51:43 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:51:44 ◼   ► You just do it.

00:51:45 ◼   ► It's fine.

00:51:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:51:46 ◼   ► You just do it, and it looks great.

00:51:50 ◼   ► It takes complete advantage of the resolution of your screen,

00:51:54 ◼   ► and it's nice and bright, and the video just plays,

00:51:56 ◼   ► and the machine doesn't get hot.

00:51:58 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, I better not put it on my lap,

00:52:00 ◼   ► because it'll literally make my lap hot.

00:52:04 ◼   ► It just runs.

00:52:05 ◼   ► It just runs the way you think that it should.

00:52:07 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, actually, watching a TV show on Netflix

00:52:11 ◼   ► shouldn't tax your computer, or like you said,

00:52:14 ◼   ► get you into this weird politics of, oh, wait--

00:52:16 ◼   ► There's not a button that says, please email Phil Schiller,

00:52:19 ◼   ► so you can subscribe in the app.

00:52:21 ◼   ► There's a whole world where iOS actually

00:52:23 ◼   ► has gotten more complicated than a Mac, because of how they

00:52:27 ◼   ► manage the application ecosystem.

00:52:30 ◼   ► I also do wonder, too, though-- and it seems like that is--

00:52:35 ◼   ► before we leave off the Mac segment--

00:52:37 ◼   ► I mean, they clearly are leaning on some of the, hey,

00:52:41 ◼   ► here's the reason why we're letting iPad apps run

00:52:44 ◼   ► on the Mac now is for video.

00:52:46 ◼   ► And they keep promoting HBO Max, because you

00:52:49 ◼   ► can get the HBO Max app.

00:52:51 ◼   ► And it's so much worse than watching in the web browser,

00:52:55 ◼   ► other than the fact that the app lets you download

00:52:58 ◼   ► for offline viewing.

00:52:59 ◼   ► And A, who's doing that now?

00:53:02 ◼   ► I mean, I know that we're not going to be permanently

00:53:05 ◼   ► in a pandemic quarantine, but everything else about it

00:53:08 ◼   ► is so much worse than just going to your web browser

00:53:11 ◼   ► and typing HB and auto-filling the rest.

00:53:15 ◼   ► And again, like with Netflix, people

00:53:18 ◼   ► just know when they're on a laptop-type thing,

00:53:21 ◼   ► how do you get to Netflix?

00:53:22 ◼   ► You don't go for an app.

00:53:23 ◼   ► You just go to your browser.

00:53:24 ◼   ► You type NE.

00:53:25 ◼   ► It auto-completes.

00:53:26 ◼   ► You hit Return, and there you are watching whatever

00:53:29 ◼   ► show you were just watching.

00:53:31 ◼   ► Yeah, one of the funniest things--

00:53:34 ◼   ► this is a total engine, but we covered the rise and very fast

00:53:39 ◼   ► fall of Quibi very closely.

00:53:42 ◼   ► Because it's like this--

00:53:44 ◼   ► here's a car crash we're going to look at.

00:53:46 ◼   ► And one of the problems they had was

00:53:47 ◼   ► they didn't let anybody screenshot and make memes out

00:53:50 ◼   ► of their shows.

00:53:51 ◼   ► And Julia Alexander at the Ridge wrote all this stuff about it.

00:53:54 ◼   ► It was great coverage.

00:53:55 ◼   ► And Tom Conrad, who was the CTO of Quibi,

00:53:59 ◼   ► had an entire threat.

00:54:00 ◼   ► We finally built a screenshot capability.

00:54:03 ◼   ► But because of DRM, both at a technical level and our deals

00:54:07 ◼   ► to use DRM, we can't just let you take a screenshot.

00:54:10 ◼   ► We had to build an entire other iOS flow for screenshots.

00:54:14 ◼   ► And I think they had to build one similarly on Android.

00:54:16 ◼   ► On the Mac, people just open Netflix and Chrome

00:54:19 ◼   ► and take screenshots.

00:54:21 ◼   ► And that is a huge earned media opportunity

00:54:24 ◼   ► for all these shows.

00:54:25 ◼   ► And I think that level of the mobile operating systems

00:54:31 ◼   ► are just built differently with different assumptions,

00:54:33 ◼   ► with different capabilities.

00:54:36 ◼   ► When you get to that point where what people want to do

00:54:39 ◼   ► is just take a screenshot of Tiger King and tweet it,

00:54:44 ◼   ► it's way easier on a Mac.

00:54:45 ◼   ► Like, by far, it does not require the CTO of a company

00:54:49 ◼   ► to build a screenshot tool.

00:54:52 ◼   ► And I think that stuff just keeps redounding to the mat.

00:54:54 ◼   ► Because I think people are just getting smarter and smarter

00:54:57 ◼   ► about how to use computers.

00:54:59 ◼   ► Makes total sense.

00:54:59 ◼   ► It's just the progression of time.

00:55:01 ◼   ► But eventually, you're like, I just want to do this thing.

00:55:03 ◼   ► And Mac always lets you do it.

00:55:06 ◼   ► And it's just such a crazy mindset, too,

00:55:08 ◼   ► that it ever got into it that, hey, we can't even

00:55:11 ◼   ► let people take a screenshot of one frame of the show

00:55:13 ◼   ► because they might somehow--

00:55:14 ◼   ► It's going to reduce the value of Quibi.

00:55:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:55:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:20 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like some version of the famous step two is dot,

00:55:24 ◼   ► dot, dot.

00:55:25 ◼   ► Step three is profit.

00:55:26 ◼   ► But except in this case, it's like, one,

00:55:29 ◼   ► allow them to take a screenshot of one of our shows.

00:55:32 ◼   ► Step two, dot, dot, dot.

00:55:34 ◼   ► Step three, piracy.

00:55:35 ◼   ► But it was just a screenshot.

00:55:39 ◼   ► And it's like, all they wanted to do is have a piece of artwork

00:55:42 ◼   ► to put in their article or put in the social media post

00:55:45 ◼   ► or just show a funny frame.

00:55:49 ◼   ► Like, oh my god, this is so funny.

00:55:51 ◼   ► Look at this.

00:55:51 ◼   ► And here's a frame.

00:55:52 ◼   ► And then maybe people would actually watch Quibi.

00:55:54 ◼   ► Well, yeah, but this is true of Netflix, too.

00:55:57 ◼   ► You cannot screenshot Netflix.

00:55:58 ◼   ► You can't screenshot each-- in their apps, on their platforms.

00:56:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:02 ◼   ► I know.

00:56:02 ◼   ► And I think that is--

00:56:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:04 ◼   ► Right, that's because the video subsystems of those OSes

00:56:07 ◼   ► were made for Hollywood because those were the app developers

00:56:11 ◼   ► that wanted to do it and address that audience.

00:56:13 ◼   ► Whereas in a web browser on Windows or the Mac,

00:56:18 ◼   ► those are just general purpose video systems.

00:56:21 ◼   ► And the screenshot system was not architected knowing

00:56:23 ◼   ► that that thing would exist.

00:56:25 ◼   ► And this is just a long way of saying, eventually,

00:56:30 ◼   ► that the iPad problem is going to be that it's

00:56:33 ◼   ► built on all of those assumptions

00:56:36 ◼   ► and looks exactly like a Mac that

00:56:37 ◼   ► has none of those limitations.

00:56:40 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:41 ◼   ► And it has-- it'll be hard for it to grow,

00:56:44 ◼   ► as opposed to already--

00:56:47 ◼   ► it's easier for the Mac to get simpler in certain modal ways,

00:56:51 ◼   ► if that's your use case and that's the type of user

00:56:54 ◼   ► you are, than for the iPad to get more complicated,

00:56:57 ◼   ► because it's going to start running into those limitations

00:56:59 ◼   ► that are sort of hard-coded into the way it works.

00:57:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:57:02 ◼   ► And I think that's--

00:57:03 ◼   ► I don't say this is a problem.

00:57:06 ◼   ► I think it's-- here's one of the most interesting challenges

00:57:09 ◼   ► Apple as a company has.

00:57:11 ◼   ► And then around it, in the ecosystem of computer

00:57:15 ◼   ► companies, it is fascinating to see people try

00:57:19 ◼   ► to solve that problem faster.

00:57:21 ◼   ► So Microsoft is way ahead of that curve with the Surface

00:57:23 ◼   ► line.

00:57:24 ◼   ► Whether or not you want to run Windows is another question,

00:57:27 ◼   ► and whether that's going to work great with your phone,

00:57:29 ◼   ► yet another question.

00:57:30 ◼   ► But you look at any of the Surface products,

00:57:33 ◼   ► and they are trying very hard to make that line as blurry

00:57:36 ◼   ► as possible.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Yeah, definitely.

00:57:39 ◼   ► And even the names, again, I get so confused as to which one

00:57:43 ◼   ► is which.

00:57:44 ◼   ► It's like, wait, which one detaches?

00:57:46 ◼   ► I don't know, Pro?

00:57:49 ◼   ► Yeah, it's the same as any other Microsoft product.

00:57:53 ◼   ► You know how you tell them apart?

00:57:54 ◼   ► They're prices.

00:57:56 ◼   ► It's like, why are your stuff like Surface Go, Surface Pro,

00:57:58 ◼   ► Surface laptop?

00:57:59 ◼   ► It's like, I don't know, one is $399 and one is $1499,

00:58:03 ◼   ► and that's how you know.

00:58:06 ◼   ► Anyway, the last thing I will say

00:58:07 ◼   ► is that to me the most interesting thing about the M1

00:58:11 ◼   ► hardware advantages is that they do manifest themselves even

00:58:17 ◼   ► if you're not a Mac user, by which meaning

00:58:21 ◼   ► that you don't use a lot of apps or very few apps that

00:58:24 ◼   ► are the Mac apps.

00:58:25 ◼   ► Like maybe you don't use Apple's Mail app,

00:58:27 ◼   ► you just go to Gmail in your browser.

00:58:30 ◼   ► And maybe the browser is Chrome.

00:58:32 ◼   ► And you do all these things that don't put you in the Mac world,

00:58:36 ◼   ► and you don't use these things that Mac users know,

00:58:40 ◼   ► and you're not familiar with the way standard shortcuts are.

00:58:43 ◼   ► And so you're not weirded out by the weird moon man

00:58:46 ◼   ► shortcuts in this app that you use that aren't Mac-like.

00:58:50 ◼   ► But your computer does say MacBook, and it is Mac OS X.

00:58:53 ◼   ► And the way that the M1 makes all that just work better,

00:58:58 ◼   ► even though you're not a Mac user,

00:59:01 ◼   ► you're just a user who uses the Mac,

00:59:03 ◼   ► is a huge advantage for Apple.

00:59:06 ◼   ► And I think it's going to be for a few years,

00:59:08 ◼   ► where even if you just want to use Chrome mostly,

00:59:11 ◼   ► it's really hard not to recommend like $1,000 MacBook

00:59:14 ◼   ► Air as the machine to do it.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:59:16 ◼   ► I mean, again, this was our huge debate over whether or not

00:59:20 ◼   ► you give this computer a 10.

00:59:22 ◼   ► We could have done it, and we would have justified it.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And we could have done it.

00:59:26 ◼   ► We were this close to doing it.

00:59:28 ◼   ► And we took one step back and said, well,

00:59:31 ◼   ► this webcam is really bad, and we're

00:59:32 ◼   ► going to ding at half a point.

00:59:33 ◼   ► Like, that's it.

00:59:35 ◼   ► And that is a huge jump.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Really, what we kept comparing it to was that Haswell MacBook

00:59:40 ◼   ► Air, where for three years, four years,

00:59:45 ◼   ► every time Joanna reviewed a laptop at the Verge,

00:59:47 ◼   ► the last line would be like, for $200 more,

00:59:49 ◼   ► you can buy a MacBook Air.

00:59:51 ◼   ► And that was the standard.

00:59:52 ◼   ► And I think this new Air is easily the standard

00:59:55 ◼   ► that everybody else has to hit.

00:59:58 ◼   ► Yeah, and the one to compare everything against.

01:00:01 ◼   ► Anyway, let me take a break here to thank our next sponsor.

01:00:04 ◼   ► It's our good friends at Mint Mobile.

01:00:06 ◼   ► Breaking up with your old wireless provider

01:00:08 ◼   ► just got a whole lot easier thanks to Mint Mobile.

01:00:11 ◼   ► They were the first company to sell premium wireless service

01:00:14 ◼   ► online only.

01:00:16 ◼   ► And now Mint Mobile is introducing their unlimited data

01:00:18 ◼   ► plan for just $30 a month.

01:00:20 ◼   ► Let that sink in.

01:00:22 ◼   ► $30 unlimited.

01:00:25 ◼   ► How much is-- how much are you paying for your current plan?

01:00:28 ◼   ► Probably a lot more than $30.

01:00:30 ◼   ► For people who hate their phone bill

01:00:31 ◼   ► and are just ready to cut their ties with those big providers,

01:00:34 ◼   ► Mint Mobile offers their premium plan for just $30 a month.

01:00:38 ◼   ► And by going online only, where--

01:00:40 ◼   ► really, today, do you really want

01:00:42 ◼   ► to go into a phone carrier showroom?

01:00:44 ◼   ► Probably not.

01:00:46 ◼   ► They've been online only from the beginning.

01:00:48 ◼   ► It cuts out all the costs of retail.

01:00:50 ◼   ► That's how they're passing savings on to you.

01:00:54 ◼   ► And all of their plans come with unlimited talk and text

01:00:57 ◼   ► and high-speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G

01:01:01 ◼   ► network.

01:01:02 ◼   ► Use your own phone with any Mint Mobile plan.

01:01:05 ◼   ► Just pop the SIM card in.

01:01:07 ◼   ► And you keep using your same phone number.

01:01:09 ◼   ► Just transfer it over.

01:01:11 ◼   ► You don't have to worry about any kind of hassle.

01:01:12 ◼   ► Nobody-- you don't have to tell people you've switched.

01:01:14 ◼   ► Nobody will notice except that your bill will be lower.

01:01:17 ◼   ► And if you're not 100% satisfied,

01:01:19 ◼   ► Mint Mobile has you covered with a seven-day money-back

01:01:22 ◼   ► guarantee.

01:01:23 ◼   ► Couldn't be easier.

01:01:23 ◼   ► You sign up.

01:01:24 ◼   ► They ship you the SIM card in the mail.

01:01:26 ◼   ► And that's how you get started.

01:01:28 ◼   ► Really easy to get started.

01:01:29 ◼   ► $30 a month, and they ship it right to your door for free.

01:01:33 ◼   ► Go to mintmobile.com.

01:01:35 ◼   ► Mintmobile.com/talkshow.

01:01:39 ◼   ► That's mintmobile.com/talkshow.

01:01:42 ◼   ► And cut your wireless bill to $30 a month.

01:01:47 ◼   ► It's time to talk iPhones.

01:01:49 ◼   ► iPhone 12.

01:01:52 ◼   ► I have hardly talked about--

01:01:53 ◼   ► I'm number one, I don't do enough episodes

01:01:54 ◼   ► of my show probably.

01:01:55 ◼   ► But number two, I just feel like I haven't caught my breath.

01:01:59 ◼   ► I was hoping.

01:02:00 ◼   ► I was like, please let me Eli be reviewing the 12 Pro Max.

01:02:03 ◼   ► Please let Eli be reviewing the 12 Pro Max.

01:02:07 ◼   ► And I was so glad that you were, because I

01:02:09 ◼   ► knew that you would push it.

01:02:10 ◼   ► And I'm so averse to the size, I was like, forget it.

01:02:17 ◼   ► I'm spending my week where I had both the Mini and the Pro Max,

01:02:22 ◼   ► mostly with the Mini.

01:02:25 ◼   ► Because it's more of interest to me.

01:02:29 ◼   ► And it's like, if the 12 Pro, not Max,

01:02:34 ◼   ► had the same camera system as the 12 Pro Max,

01:02:38 ◼   ► I guess that's what I would buy for myself.

01:02:40 ◼   ► But I was like, I don't get this camera system.

01:02:47 ◼   ► I see how it should be better.

01:02:49 ◼   ► But my initial testing was like, I don't see it.

01:02:52 ◼   ► I'm not seeing what's better about it.

01:02:55 ◼   ► And then I read your review, and it was like, yeah,

01:02:57 ◼   ► there's some of that in here.

01:02:58 ◼   ► And oh, I see.

01:03:00 ◼   ► And your Twilight pictures really

01:03:03 ◼   ► captured where it has some noise differences.

01:03:07 ◼   ► I'm curious what you think now, for several weeks later.

01:03:10 ◼   ► Are you still using the 12 Pro Max?

01:03:11 ◼   ► Mine is on order.

01:03:12 ◼   ► It's on its way.

01:03:14 ◼   ► But right now I'm using the review unit.

01:03:16 ◼   ► And I haven't since I've had it.

01:03:18 ◼   ► It's still too big.

01:03:23 ◼   ► And I don't think it's too big.

01:03:27 ◼   ► It's unreasonable, but it's bigger than the last one.

01:03:32 ◼   ► And every time I pick it up, I'm like, this thing is--

01:03:35 ◼   ► man, if I was still traveling, this would be it.

01:03:37 ◼   ► I wouldn't even take a computer with me.

01:03:38 ◼   ► It's that big.

01:03:41 ◼   ► And so I think it's right at the edge.

01:03:44 ◼   ► It's the first thing I think every time I pick it up.

01:03:46 ◼   ► This is right on the line of being too big.

01:03:48 ◼   ► The next number up is seven, and a seven-inch screen

01:03:51 ◼   ► is a tablet screen.

01:03:53 ◼   ► So it's right on line.

01:03:54 ◼   ► In terms of the camera, though, I

01:03:57 ◼   ► should have put this in the review.

01:03:59 ◼   ► I didn't.

01:04:00 ◼   ► It didn't even occur to me that this is what I was thinking

01:04:03 ◼   ► until I read Joanna's review and I saw Marquez's review.

01:04:09 ◼   ► And so Marquez was like, these cameras are the same.

01:04:12 ◼   ► I was like, that's not at all-- and I realized what was

01:04:14 ◼   ► happening is what you actually get out of the Pro Max day

01:04:19 ◼   ► to day is it'll just go at a faster shutter speed.

01:04:24 ◼   ► Because it can crank the ISO higher.

01:04:27 ◼   ► And that is-- if you're a photo person, that makes sense.

01:04:31 ◼   ► But no one knows that that's how anything works.

01:04:34 ◼   ► But at the end of the day, it's just a camera, right?

01:04:36 ◼   ► It's got three numbers that it can monkey with.

01:04:39 ◼   ► It can monkey with the aperture, which is fixed on an iPhone.

01:04:43 ◼   ► But on a regular camera, you get a faster aperture,

01:04:44 ◼   ► you get more light.

01:04:45 ◼   ► You can move the shutter speed around

01:04:48 ◼   ► to let more or less light in, freeze motion.

01:04:52 ◼   ► Or you can monkey with the ISO to make

01:04:54 ◼   ► the sensor more sensitive to light and also generally more

01:04:57 ◼   ► noisy.

01:04:59 ◼   ► And there isn't a camera in the world

01:05:02 ◼   ► that doesn't follow that little equation.

01:05:05 ◼   ► And all that's happening with the Pro Max is--

01:05:07 ◼   ► I just pulled it up here.

01:05:09 ◼   ► The regular iPhone 12 Pro has a top ISO of 5,808.

01:05:13 ◼   ► The Pro Max has 7,616.

01:05:17 ◼   ► And so it's an enormous range for a phone.

01:05:22 ◼   ► But all that means is it'll just click the shutter faster.

01:05:25 ◼   ► And so if you were spending a lot of time,

01:05:26 ◼   ► like I did, taking a picture of a toddler at night,

01:05:29 ◼   ► you're like, oh, these photos are way better.

01:05:32 ◼   ► But if you're doing--

01:05:33 ◼   ► and reviewing phones, cameras, reviewing anything

01:05:36 ◼   ► in the pandemic has been so hard.

01:05:38 ◼   ► So all I'm doing is running around.

01:05:40 ◼   ► I'm like, here's a tree that look exactly the same,

01:05:43 ◼   ► because that extra shutter speed doesn't buy you anything.

01:05:46 ◼   ► And I think that's really, really hard for Apple to market.

01:05:49 ◼   ► Just the amount of explanation I just did does not fit into an ad.

01:05:53 ◼   ► They're like 27% more light or whatever.

01:05:55 ◼   ► And it doesn't mean anything except the ISO is less noise

01:05:59 ◼   ► at any given number.

01:05:59 ◼   ► And that, to me, was where it clicked in my head,

01:06:06 ◼   ► because it's like, why?

01:06:07 ◼   ► They wouldn't do this.

01:06:09 ◼   ► I know the way Apple thinks.

01:06:12 ◼   ► And there's no way that they would go through the effort of shipping

01:06:18 ◼   ► an entirely different physical camera system only in the Pro Max

01:06:23 ◼   ► if there weren't very practical advantages to doing so.

01:06:27 ◼   ► I mean, it's just common sense.

01:06:28 ◼   ► You don't have to be in operations to think it would be cheaper if they just

01:06:34 ◼   ► put the same system in that the 12 Pro has,

01:06:37 ◼   ► because then they could just mass produce the same one.

01:06:40 ◼   ► And it's obviously a little cheaper and just stick it in the big one, which

01:06:44 ◼   ► is what they've been doing the last few years between the 11 Pro and 11 Pro

01:06:48 ◼   ► Max and the 10S and the 10S Max.

01:06:51 ◼   ► It's just the same camera system in a bigger phone.

01:06:55 ◼   ► But I wasn't seeing what it was.

01:06:57 ◼   ► And boiling it down to faster captures is exactly it.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And that's why I wasn't seeing it.

01:07:03 ◼   ► I don't have a toddler anymore.

01:07:06 ◼   ► I have a 16-year-old who doesn't move.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Yeah, playing Fortnite, right?

01:07:10 ◼   ► Rock still.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Yeah, let me get a--

01:07:13 ◼   ► turn around.

01:07:13 ◼   ► Let me get a picture of you playing with me.

01:07:15 ◼   ► And even the sensor shifts, they changed the stabilization.

01:07:19 ◼   ► They went from-- it's optical.

01:07:20 ◼   ► It moves the lens and the smaller phones.

01:07:22 ◼   ► On the bigger phone, they moved to sensor shift,

01:07:24 ◼   ► which is very much like what Sony and Panasonic do in their mirrorless cameras.

01:07:28 ◼   ► That's because the sensor is bigger.

01:07:30 ◼   ► I mean, I asked.

01:07:31 ◼   ► I was like, what do you get out of this?

01:07:32 ◼   ► They're like, well, once the sensor gets to about this size,

01:07:35 ◼   ► it's faster and easier to move the sensor.

01:07:38 ◼   ► And maybe there's some little bit of performance advantage

01:07:42 ◼   ► at the extremes of the scale.

01:07:44 ◼   ► But they were like, look, the 12 Pro is a great camera.

01:07:48 ◼   ► And you should-- its performance is good enough for us

01:07:53 ◼   ► to ship it, which means it's very good.

01:07:54 ◼   ► And so I think they just backed themselves

01:07:56 ◼   ► into a corner in how they talked about this camera,

01:08:00 ◼   ► because they want to tell you that the things that

01:08:02 ◼   ► are the most resonant, which are faster shutter speed,

01:08:07 ◼   ► captures more light, bigger sensor.

01:08:10 ◼   ► And that just gives you a bunch of expectations that aren't there.

01:08:14 ◼   ► And it's not their fault. When you hear bigger sensor, what you think of

01:08:18 ◼   ► is dramatic depth of field.

01:08:20 ◼   ► But it's still a tiny sensor in the grand scheme of things.

01:08:24 ◼   ► When you hear sensor shift, you're like, oh, I'll

01:08:26 ◼   ► be able to just shake my hand.

01:08:28 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, maybe, but it's still the same.

01:08:30 ◼   ► What really comes down to-- and I think this

01:08:32 ◼   ► is where every camera company is guilty of this, not just Apple.

01:08:36 ◼   ► When they say it captures more light, that actually means something.

01:08:40 ◼   ► And what it means is it either has an enormous top end ISO,

01:08:46 ◼   ► and DSLRs are cruising their way to 200,000 ISO,

01:08:50 ◼   ► or it means at any given ISO, you get way less noise,

01:08:54 ◼   ► so the ISO is more usable.

01:08:56 ◼   ► You can't put that in an ad.

01:08:57 ◼   ► I think even Apple would not--

01:08:59 ◼   ► maybe Phil Schiller would have done that in a keynote,

01:09:02 ◼   ► because he was such a camera nerd.

01:09:04 ◼   ► But they're not going to do that, especially

01:09:05 ◼   ► with the infomercials that every company is making now.

01:09:07 ◼   ► They're not going to do a 30-second infomercial on ISO.

01:09:11 ◼   ► But it's really what it means.

01:09:12 ◼   ► It means that at any given ISO, it captures more light and less noise.

01:09:17 ◼   ► But then on top of it, there's Smart HDR 3.

01:09:19 ◼   ► And I was talking with Seb from Halide, and he was like,

01:09:23 ◼   ► they're still running Smart HDR 3 as though they're getting 12 Pro photos.

01:09:27 ◼   ► So the RAWs have less noise, but the final product,

01:09:30 ◼   ► they're still running the noise reduction in Smart HDR 3

01:09:33 ◼   ► kind of as aggressively.

01:09:35 ◼   ► And I think that's like--

01:09:37 ◼   ► you have two camera systems that are different.

01:09:39 ◼   ► You're running your software the same, and you're generating--

01:09:42 ◼   ► it's arriving at the same result, because it's not so much different.

01:09:45 ◼   ► And I think that's where something like ProRAW,

01:09:47 ◼   ► this new format they're going to ship, will let us really see the differences.

01:09:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:53 ◼   ► And I know that--

01:09:54 ◼   ► I worry that for some people who aren't photo nerds,

01:09:57 ◼   ► that their eyes start rolling back in their head

01:09:59 ◼   ► when they start hearing aperture and exposure times.

01:10:03 ◼   ► But it really is kind of simple.

01:10:04 ◼   ► And when you think back to the film era, you really could see it.

01:10:09 ◼   ► So the aperture is just the iris in front of the lens.

01:10:12 ◼   ► And when it's open more, it lets in more light.

01:10:15 ◼   ► And when it's a smaller circle, it lets in less light.

01:10:19 ◼   ► And that changes everything else.

01:10:23 ◼   ► The exposure time is how long are you taking the exposure for, right?

01:10:27 ◼   ► Is it 1/64 of a second or 1/200 of a second or a really slow one,

01:10:33 ◼   ► like a half a second?

01:10:35 ◼   ► Just let light hit the piece of film or the--

01:10:38 ◼   ► now it's a sensor, a digital sensor, for a half second.

01:10:42 ◼   ► And obviously, try to hold the camera as still as you can,

01:10:45 ◼   ► while that's happening.

01:10:46 ◼   ► Getting that exposure time shorter for a subject who is in motion,

01:10:51 ◼   ► like a toddler or a dog or something like that,

01:10:54 ◼   ► really has a large practical advantage.

01:10:57 ◼   ► Like, I took a lot of photos from people's mouths.

01:10:59 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:11:03 ◼   ► That's very true.

01:11:04 ◼   ► And what I saw as somebody who understands the way that those things

01:11:12 ◼   ► interplay-- and I am sort of a photo nerd.

01:11:15 ◼   ► And I was looking for things-- and you mentioned it in your review--

01:11:20 ◼   ► like depth of field.

01:11:21 ◼   ► Can you see, without going into portrait mode where it's fake,

01:11:24 ◼   ► do you get more of a bokeh effect just from this?

01:11:29 ◼   ► And I was like, I'm not seeing it.

01:11:31 ◼   ► But it's really not like a photo nerd thing.

01:11:33 ◼   ► It really is a very practical--

01:11:36 ◼   ► I'm just a person with a three-year-old.

01:11:39 ◼   ► And I pick up my phone when they're doing something funny or cute,

01:11:42 ◼   ► point it at them, frame it, and tap the button.

01:11:45 ◼   ► And if you get a better result because it is a much shorter exposure

01:11:51 ◼   ► and therefore captures the subject in motion without blur,

01:11:55 ◼   ► that's a practical reason to prefer the camera.

01:11:57 ◼   ► And you're getting better.

01:11:59 ◼   ► It really could be the difference between a keeper and a,

01:12:02 ◼   ► ah, that's no good at the start.

01:12:03 ◼   ► Yeah, and again, I come back to just how hard it is to do these reviews,

01:12:07 ◼   ► especially on mobile devices during the pandemic.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Before-- every other year I come on, and I'm like, we're both exhausted,

01:12:15 ◼   ► and iPhone season is complete.

01:12:16 ◼   ► And I always, I think, say to you something like,

01:12:20 ◼   ► it's so much fun to work with my entire team for this week.

01:12:24 ◼   ► Right?

01:12:24 ◼   ► Right?

01:12:25 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:12:25 ◼   ► And it's still true.

01:12:27 ◼   ► I mean, we have an amazing video team and copy editors and designers

01:12:31 ◼   ► who work on these reviews.

01:12:32 ◼   ► And it's great.

01:12:34 ◼   ► We did it as best we could remote.

01:12:35 ◼   ► But the thing that I missed the most was having the video team with me.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And then for the past several years, our video producer, Maria and I,

01:12:45 ◼   ► have just had photo shoots around New York City.

01:12:47 ◼   ► We just constructed things we wanted to test,

01:12:50 ◼   ► lighting situations we wanted to test.

01:12:52 ◼   ► And I would be like, Maria, go stand in front of this backlit window.

01:12:55 ◼   ► And we're going to see how all these phones do.

01:12:57 ◼   ► And I could not do that.

01:12:59 ◼   ► And I think, like most reviewers, I don't want

01:13:02 ◼   ► to put my kid in every review 50 times.

01:13:05 ◼   ► Like, there's-- for a million reasons, you don't want to do that.

01:13:07 ◼   ► So in the end, I was like, well, I guess these stuffed animals

01:13:11 ◼   ► are going to be the iPhone review this year.

01:13:12 ◼   ► I have no better choices.

01:13:14 ◼   ► And they don't move.

01:13:15 ◼   ► So I could-- that's like, well, it'd be great

01:13:18 ◼   ► if this stuffed animal would start moving.

01:13:20 ◼   ► But it's not going to do that for me.

01:13:21 ◼   ► So I think it was hard to communicate that value this time around because

01:13:27 ◼   ► of the conditions in which we were reviewing it.

01:13:29 ◼   ► And I think because it was hard to set that up and see it every time,

01:13:33 ◼   ► it was even then harder to communicate it to everyone.

01:13:36 ◼   ► Because you can write 1,000 words about how a camera works.

01:13:39 ◼   ► People just want to see the photos.

01:13:41 ◼   ► And in particular, what they look for in photos--

01:13:44 ◼   ► we've learned this after years, this--

01:13:46 ◼   ► they look for which photo is brighter.

01:13:47 ◼   ► That's the one I always think is better.

01:13:49 ◼   ► And then if you punch in and show them that one has more detail,

01:13:52 ◼   ► they say, no one zooms in on a photo.

01:13:54 ◼   ► So you have to do some work to convince people that this stuff matters.

01:13:59 ◼   ► And we were just limited with what I was generating to even show people.

01:14:04 ◼   ► I love this-- I'm going to quote from your review.

01:14:07 ◼   ► But I can't shake the feeling that the iPhone 12 Pro Max very much feels

01:14:12 ◼   ► like the perfect phone for the life I led before the pandemic.

01:14:17 ◼   ► I used to spend a lot of time commuting and on airplanes

01:14:19 ◼   ► and otherwise out and about getting work done on my phone.

01:14:22 ◼   ► I used to go to a lot of events at night and take a lot of photos in bars.

01:14:26 ◼   ► My notes indicate that I used to care a lot about mobile network speeds.

01:14:31 ◼   ► This phone would have made significant improvements to all those things.

01:14:35 ◼   ► But right now, it just feels like another screen

01:14:37 ◼   ► for social media on the couch.

01:14:39 ◼   ► And I could not help but feel the same way.

01:14:43 ◼   ► And I also wonder if my very positive feelings and reviews for the 12 mini

01:14:51 ◼   ► were biased by that.

01:14:53 ◼   ► Because to parlay this into a discussion of the opposite iPhone 12, the mini,

01:14:59 ◼   ► clearly battery life is the single biggest hit,

01:15:02 ◼   ► because it has a smaller battery.

01:15:04 ◼   ► And Apple's quoted numbers are all some percentage, 15% to 17% lower

01:15:11 ◼   ► than the regular iPhone 12.

01:15:13 ◼   ► And I'm using it, and I'm using the hell out of it during the election night

01:15:19 ◼   ► week.

01:15:20 ◼   ► I was on my 12 mini nonstop surfing news and updates and vote counts

01:15:26 ◼   ► and all this stuff.

01:15:27 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, the battery went down.

01:15:29 ◼   ► And I could kind of see, just without even using a stopwatch or taking notes,

01:15:33 ◼   ► I was like, yeah, I'm not getting the battery life out of this

01:15:35 ◼   ► that I would get on the bigger ones.

01:15:37 ◼   ► But I was still in my living room and not far from,

01:15:41 ◼   ► oh, I could just plug this in while I go to the bathroom and then come out,

01:15:44 ◼   ► and it's got 10% more battery again.

01:15:47 ◼   ► And the things that would most stress an iPhone with limited battery life

01:15:57 ◼   ► are irrelevant when you're at home and the times when I would most

01:16:02 ◼   ► want the extra reach of a 2.5x telephoto lens or the better camera--

01:16:09 ◼   ► this ultimate best camera system you can get in an iPhone from the 12 Pro Max.

01:16:14 ◼   ► Well, I'm not leaving the house.

01:16:16 ◼   ► How many pictures of my wife and son during pandemic

01:16:20 ◼   ► are they going to even let me take?

01:16:22 ◼   ► Right?

01:16:22 ◼   ► It's--

01:16:23 ◼   ► This is just another place where I think having a toddler dramatically

01:16:25 ◼   ► changed my feeling with the camera.

01:16:27 ◼   ► Because I'm like, we take 400 photos of her a day until she tells us to stop.

01:16:31 ◼   ► Right.

01:16:32 ◼   ► We're not going to stop.

01:16:34 ◼   ► That's funny.

01:16:34 ◼   ► I have all these battery packs from when I did travel all the time,

01:16:37 ◼   ► all these USB batteries.

01:16:38 ◼   ► And now I just leave them.

01:16:39 ◼   ► They're just scattered on the couch all the time.

01:16:42 ◼   ► Because I'm just always charging the phone again.

01:16:44 ◼   ► And so my phones are all--

01:16:46 ◼   ► at home, they're more charged than ever before.

01:16:49 ◼   ► I really think that that line about mobile network speeds,

01:16:52 ◼   ► it's obviously a dig at 5G.

01:16:55 ◼   ► That's the one thing where every reviewer unanimously

01:17:00 ◼   ► was like, don't care about this.

01:17:03 ◼   ► Everyone stop caring about this.

01:17:04 ◼   ► First of all, you shouldn't be leaving the house.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Second of all, even if you do, it's not going to be great.

01:17:09 ◼   ► Third of all, when it is great on millimeter wave,

01:17:12 ◼   ► you take a huge hit to your battery.

01:17:15 ◼   ► I think that would have played out on the mini reviews very, very differently.

01:17:20 ◼   ► Because when you're not on Wi-Fi, that battery necessarily dies faster

01:17:24 ◼   ► with every cell network.

01:17:26 ◼   ► And chasing ultra wideband on the mini, because it

01:17:31 ◼   ► is one of the only small phones that has that radio, has that capability,

01:17:34 ◼   ► I think the only small phone that has capability, we would have seen,

01:17:38 ◼   ► oh, this battery cannot support this technology in a way

01:17:42 ◼   ► that you'd want to use it every day.

01:17:45 ◼   ► But--

01:17:45 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

01:17:47 ◼   ► It's just--

01:17:47 ◼   ► It's a good question.

01:17:48 ◼   ► My 12 Pro, when I was using an ultra wideband,

01:17:50 ◼   ► I was like, oh, I'm ripping through this battery right now.

01:17:54 ◼   ► Like--

01:17:54 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

01:17:56 ◼   ► I've gotten-- I mean, I got over 2,000 gigabytes, gigabits per second.

01:18:03 ◼   ► I don't know what the-- whatever the measurement is in speed test.

01:18:06 ◼   ► And which is amazing.

01:18:07 ◼   ► It's absolutely amazing to get two gigabit wireless networking, period.

01:18:13 ◼   ► It's impressive to get two gigabit networking with a cable, right?

01:18:18 ◼   ► And it's like, you're doing it on a phone outdoors.

01:18:21 ◼   ► But practically speaking, my use case for it

01:18:24 ◼   ► was getting an impressive number in speed test.

01:18:28 ◼   ► I mean, what was I doing?

01:18:31 ◼   ► You know, but--

01:18:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I thought Joanna's review where she sat in the middle of MetLife Stadium

01:18:34 ◼   ► was one of her most inspired video reviews.

01:18:37 ◼   ► But yeah, I think when you talk about the Mini,

01:18:41 ◼   ► yeah, it feels like the perfect phone for this moment,

01:18:43 ◼   ► because people have wanted a small phone forever.

01:18:45 ◼   ► And so Apple is the master of just slowly creating demand,

01:18:49 ◼   ► then delivering you the perfect product.

01:18:51 ◼   ► And then you're not stressing it as much as you would if you were taking it out

01:18:57 ◼   ► into the world and commuting.

01:18:59 ◼   ► And maybe you don't even know that you're standing on the right street

01:19:02 ◼   ► corner in Manhattan and the ultra wide band is kicked on,

01:19:05 ◼   ► and now it's using more battery, right?

01:19:07 ◼   ► That is the nature of ultra wide band at this moment.

01:19:10 ◼   ► Just from corner to corner as you're walking around,

01:19:12 ◼   ► that modem's turning on and off.

01:19:14 ◼   ► And so no one has really had that experience yet.

01:19:16 ◼   ► And so I think there's just a lot of questions about that phone

01:19:21 ◼   ► in sort of the before time, and hopefully soon into next year

01:19:26 ◼   ► as this vaccine rolls out into what the next iteration of the world looks like.

01:19:29 ◼   ► But at this moment, yeah, if what you want

01:19:31 ◼   ► is a great second screen for the NFL to read Twitter on,

01:19:35 ◼   ► like the Mini seems perfect.

01:19:37 ◼   ► Whereas, like I said, every time I pick up the Pro Max,

01:19:39 ◼   ► I'm like, man, this thing is big.

01:19:42 ◼   ► I can't get used to it.

01:19:44 ◼   ► I mean, I don't want to.

01:19:45 ◼   ► But the other thing that you mentioned, and I have very strong feelings about it,

01:19:49 ◼   ► especially now that I've spent time with all four phones

01:19:51 ◼   ► and they've all settled in, is the flattening of the sides.

01:19:55 ◼   ► And I think it's really weird because I think definitely it looks cooler.

01:20:01 ◼   ► And this leaked out of the rumor mill a year in advance,

01:20:06 ◼   ► and so we were all sort of expecting it.

01:20:07 ◼   ► But I feel like everybody started expecting it

01:20:10 ◼   ► when the iPad Pros went to this flat side look that's sort of calling back

01:20:15 ◼   ► to the iPhone 4S and 5 era.

01:20:18 ◼   ► Because when the iPads came out, it was like, well,

01:20:21 ◼   ► why don't the phones have this?

01:20:22 ◼   ► This feels great.

01:20:23 ◼   ► I like this.

01:20:25 ◼   ► I think now that we have it, it's weird because I

01:20:28 ◼   ► think it's amazing with the Mini, right?

01:20:31 ◼   ► It really makes the Mini feel great.

01:20:33 ◼   ► I think the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro, it's OK with.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Although I feel like the difference between aluminum and stainless steel

01:20:42 ◼   ► in hand makes--

01:20:45 ◼   ► I just prefer if I just close my eyes and pick up these two phones that

01:20:49 ◼   ► are the same size, the 12 Pro and the 12, the aluminum 12

01:20:54 ◼   ► just feels so much nicer to me.

01:20:57 ◼   ► I mean, it's not shiny, so maybe you don't like the way it looks as much,

01:21:01 ◼   ► but it just has a nicer feel.

01:21:03 ◼   ► It's like the flat sides and the flat buttons

01:21:06 ◼   ► just feel sharp on the stainless steel in a way that's not pleasant to me.

01:21:11 ◼   ► But then with the 12 Pro Max, it's like the flat sides,

01:21:14 ◼   ► they just make it feel huge.

01:21:16 ◼   ► Gotti.

01:21:18 ◼   ► I don't know why.

01:21:19 ◼   ► I feel like it's the oddest thing.

01:21:23 ◼   ► And my wife still-- my wife had the 11 Pro Max from last year.

01:21:26 ◼   ► And it's not that much bigger of a device,

01:21:29 ◼   ► and it is kind of taller in the way that it is bigger.

01:21:33 ◼   ► But it somehow feels so much bigger because of the flat sides.

01:21:37 ◼   ► I don't get it.

01:21:39 ◼   ► It's like rounded corners make things nicer to hold.

01:21:42 ◼   ► So I disagree with you on the 12 Pro.

01:21:46 ◼   ► I have the blue one, Pacific Blue, is what I call it this year.

01:21:51 ◼   ► I think that is one of the most beautiful products Apple has ever made.

01:21:53 ◼   ► The stainless steel Pacific Blue iPhone 12 Pro.

01:21:56 ◼   ► It is-- I pulled it out of the box, and I slacked to the team,

01:22:01 ◼   ► like this thing is amazing.

01:22:02 ◼   ► And then everyone else was like, calm down.

01:22:04 ◼   ► I was gushing over it.

01:22:06 ◼   ► I know Dieter disagrees with me.

01:22:08 ◼   ► He thinks the matte aluminum regular 12 Pro is better.

01:22:12 ◼   ► Personal opinion, the joke in my 12 Pro review

01:22:14 ◼   ► were like, some of you are going to spend $200 because this is the shiny one,

01:22:17 ◼   ► and I'm with you.

01:22:19 ◼   ► That's who I am too.

01:22:21 ◼   ► The mini, right?

01:22:23 ◼   ► It's dense.

01:22:24 ◼   ► I think the flat sides make it feel dense and premium in a good way.

01:22:28 ◼   ► And then I have a gold 12 Pro Max.

01:22:32 ◼   ► So it's a white back with the gold sides.

01:22:34 ◼   ► And--

01:22:35 ◼   ► Yeah, that's my review.

01:22:37 ◼   ► I just think it looks--

01:22:38 ◼   ► it's like too big.

01:22:39 ◼   ► That's what I keep saying.

01:22:41 ◼   ► But the flat sides, they make it imposing in a way that my 11 Pro Max--

01:22:47 ◼   ► right?

01:22:49 ◼   ► In many ways, the 11 Pro Max basic shape is the same as the 8 Pro or the 6

01:22:54 ◼   ► Plus or whatever, right?

01:22:56 ◼   ► Here's a round rack with rounded sides.

01:22:59 ◼   ► The screen got bigger.

01:23:01 ◼   ► And that shape worked.

01:23:02 ◼   ► It's a little surf 40.

01:23:03 ◼   ► But it was nice to hold.

01:23:05 ◼   ► And I think the 12 Pro Max is not nice to hold.

01:23:09 ◼   ► I would never want to put the 12 Pro in a case.

01:23:11 ◼   ► I think it's just beautiful.

01:23:12 ◼   ► And I was sad when I put it into its case.

01:23:14 ◼   ► And the Apple Clear case this year especially

01:23:16 ◼   ► is horrible with that circle on the back.

01:23:19 ◼   ► Like, what are they doing?

01:23:20 ◼   ► I don't get it.

01:23:22 ◼   ► I really don't.

01:23:23 ◼   ► I feel like-- and I've shown it to other people.

01:23:27 ◼   ► And they're like, ah, no, it's all right.

01:23:28 ◼   ► I don't care.

01:23:29 ◼   ► And I'm like, well, no, wait.

01:23:30 ◼   ► Why is there a weird circle on the back?

01:23:32 ◼   ► I get it.

01:23:35 ◼   ► I kind of feel like the back story on that is that Apple had this team--

01:23:39 ◼   ► we should make a clear case, right?

01:23:41 ◼   ► I think Apple's case business is a weird subsection of Apple.

01:23:46 ◼   ► Because it seems to me anecdotally that most iPhone users--

01:23:50 ◼   ► everybody knows famously at least 95% of iPhone users

01:23:53 ◼   ► use a case of some sort.

01:23:56 ◼   ► It also seems to me, though, that of that 95% of people who use a case,

01:24:01 ◼   ► 90% of them use a third party case.

01:24:05 ◼   ► Whether it's because they're cheaper or whether it's just to each their own

01:24:10 ◼   ► and it's a way to personalize it.

01:24:14 ◼   ► You meet 1,000 people, you might see 1,000 different cases.

01:24:17 ◼   ► It's a very personal thing.

01:24:21 ◼   ► But Apple still is very committed to it.

01:24:23 ◼   ► And I think they sell enough of them.

01:24:25 ◼   ► And they're expensive.

01:24:26 ◼   ► They're like $50 for the--

01:24:29 ◼   ► aren't the rubber ones like $50?

01:24:31 ◼   ► And the leather ones are--

01:24:33 ◼   ► I don't know what they are.

01:24:35 ◼   ► They're $80.

01:24:35 ◼   ► More expensive.

01:24:36 ◼   ► But they're-- yeah, something like that.

01:24:38 ◼   ► We did a story--

01:24:38 ◼   ► Ashley Carmen at the Bridge-- a story a long time ago

01:24:40 ◼   ► on the woman who is in charge of case designs

01:24:45 ◼   ► every year at the Verizon store.

01:24:46 ◼   ► So it's like a huge business for Verizon.

01:24:48 ◼   ► It's their single easiest upsell with every phone.

01:24:51 ◼   ► And so they try to get exclusive cases.

01:24:54 ◼   ► They think about case design trends.

01:24:56 ◼   ► It's like they're running a fashion business next to their phone business.

01:25:01 ◼   ► And there's obviously a person in charge of it.

01:25:03 ◼   ► That story-- it was one of those stories where she went and got it and came back.

01:25:07 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, shit.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I never even thought of that.

01:25:10 ◼   ► I'll send you a link.

01:25:11 ◼   ► We can put it in there.

01:25:12 ◼   ► But it's a huge business.

01:25:13 ◼   ► It's free money.

01:25:15 ◼   ► These cases cost cents to make.

01:25:17 ◼   ► And then they sell them for huge numbers.

01:25:19 ◼   ► And they were like, we're so proud of MagSafe.

01:25:22 ◼   ► We're putting a circle on the back of the clear one.

01:25:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:25:26 ◼   ► What I was getting at is I feel sad about putting the two smaller ones in a case.

01:25:31 ◼   ► And the Pro Max has to be in a case just to make it easier to hold.

01:25:35 ◼   ► And that is the sign that it's veering on the edge of too big.

01:25:40 ◼   ► It's already too big.

01:25:41 ◼   ► Yeah, see, where I think that the case thing is--

01:25:44 ◼   ► and Apple does good work with leather.

01:25:46 ◼   ► And the silicon-- to me, their silicon cases for $50

01:25:50 ◼   ► don't last long enough that everybody I know who uses the Apple silicone ones,

01:25:53 ◼   ► the corners rub away.

01:25:56 ◼   ► But in general, Apple's good with materials.

01:25:59 ◼   ► But famously, I've heard from people who like clear cases.

01:26:01 ◼   ► Clear cases tend to yellow.

01:26:03 ◼   ► You buy a third-party clear case, and you love it

01:26:06 ◼   ► because that's what you want, a clear case.

01:26:08 ◼   ► And then three months later, it's kind of yellow.

01:26:10 ◼   ► And six months later, it looks like you had it in a casino soaking up

01:26:15 ◼   ► nicotine smoke.

01:26:18 ◼   ► And I think Apple looked at this and thought, well, people want clear cases.

01:26:21 ◼   ► We're good with materials.

01:26:23 ◼   ► We can make a clear case that won't turn yellow over time.

01:26:26 ◼   ► And they have.

01:26:27 ◼   ► From what I've seen from daring Fireball readers who like the Apple clear case,

01:26:31 ◼   ► it doesn't yellow.

01:26:33 ◼   ► And they're like, so now we have this third type of case, right?

01:26:36 ◼   ► We had the rubber ones.

01:26:37 ◼   ► We had the leather ones.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And now we have clear ones.

01:26:40 ◼   ► And I think they were very proud of themselves for this.

01:26:42 ◼   ► I think maybe they sell well by Apple's case standards.

01:26:45 ◼   ► And then there's this other team making magnetic charging system.

01:26:51 ◼   ► And I feel like there must have been this meeting where it's like, hmm, huh.

01:26:57 ◼   ► Huh.

01:26:58 ◼   ► On the one hand, people are buying clear cases, and we make a really good one.

01:27:02 ◼   ► And on the other hand, we can't really sell a clear case that's clear and

01:27:07 ◼   ► magnetic.

01:27:09 ◼   ► And so they did this thing.

01:27:10 ◼   ► And it's almost like there's a Green Lantern logo on it.

01:27:12 ◼   ► I thought it was a power button.

01:27:14 ◼   ► I can't tell you what it is.

01:27:18 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:27:19 ◼   ► To me, I mean, it doesn't look bad.

01:27:21 ◼   ► And they made it centered around the Apple logo.

01:27:23 ◼   ► And it's strategically placed.

01:27:25 ◼   ► And if you were going to put a circle and a little line coming out of it,

01:27:31 ◼   ► it's as nice as it could be.

01:27:32 ◼   ► But it's not clear.

01:27:33 ◼   ► That's the thing, right?

01:27:36 ◼   ► So the little line, from what I understand, so MagSafe has the magnets in a circle.

01:27:40 ◼   ► And then it has the magnet underneath the circle for positioning.

01:27:45 ◼   ► So you click it on, and then that's the one that aligns it perfectly.

01:27:48 ◼   ► So that's why you need the line.

01:27:50 ◼   ► But man, I don't know.

01:27:52 ◼   ► Have you been using your MagSafe charger at all?

01:27:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I have it on my bedside.

01:27:58 ◼   ► I have mixed feelings about it the longer I go.

01:28:00 ◼   ► Like, there are places where I know I want one.

01:28:03 ◼   ► And on my bedside, probably isn't it.