Mac Pro and Pro Display review, TCL's folding phone concepts, and rumors of an iPad keyboard with a trackpad

Stories discussed this week: Everything you need to know about the coronavirus The Verge Guide to 2020 Election Congress proposes anti-child abuse rules to punish web platforms — and raises fears about encryption The Verge tech survey 2020 Apple reportedly releasing an iPad keyboard with a trackpad later this year Apple is planning to launch a 14.1-inch MacBook Pro with a ... Mac Pro review: the price of power - The Verge Apple Pro Display XDR review: category of one TCL’s new foldable and rollable concepts imagine a wild future of phones Vivo’s Apex 2020 concept has breakthrough cameras and an ultra-curved screen Get a closer look at the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha in MKBHD’s hands-on video New Google Pixel features coming this month include more emoji, dark mode scheduling, and Google Pay improvements Samsung launches its 2020 lineup of 4K and 8K QLED TVs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, we go over some Apple rumors. We go deep on the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR reviews. We talk about all the folding phone concepts from TCL. And we spend more time than you think talking about obscure Samsung television features. That's it. Coming up with Vergecast now.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  What if managing company spend took less managing? Introducing AMX Corporate, one intelligent platform connecting cards, expenses, and payments so you can keep work moving. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMX Corporate. Get started at go.amex/ammxcorporate. Terms apply.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multi-core performance. Does that sound pretty good? Yeah. I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm also your friend. Oh, it's good. Usually you're vaguely threatening. Well, depends what kind of friends you have. Fair. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Uh, how's it going, Paul? It's good. It's going pretty good, actually. All three of us are in different places today. Mm hmm. I've gotten really spoiled because Paul and I have been in the same room the past few shows. I feel like it's, we've really grown closer. Yeah. I get like, I'm like, I pay more attention to you and your, like your reactions to things. But now I've got like, I've got like really listened. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot going on this week. We got some reviews to talk about. We got

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  some floppy phones to talk about. It's just a fact. But I want to just start by pointing to some things. First of all, the big story in the world is obviously the coronavirus, which is having an effect on lots of people. Lots of tech events are being canceled. Google I/O was canceled. People are pulling out a South by Southwest left and right. We are not going to talk about in this show. Verge Deputy Editor Liz Lopato, Verge Health Reporter Nicole Wetzman, they sat down with me for an hour. That's coming out on Tuesday. So all the coronavirus stuff you need to know. Wait for that interview on Tuesday. It was really good. We actually found out Google I/O was being canceled while we were taping it. Like, that's how much news is happening. Oh, wow. So that's really good. Nicole is all over that story. Verge Science Team all over that story.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Check out the site if you want to know what's going on from that perspective. But Nicole went through the sort of health side of it, and Liz and I talked about the sort of business supply chain aspect of it. So that's coming out on Tuesday. Wait for that. We're not going to talk about it today. And then, obviously, the election is off and running. It was Super Tuesday. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic primary today, right before we taped the show. On this past Tuesday, McKenna Kelly and I talked for an hour about the policy issues of the election. Our big election guide went out on Tuesday. And then today, just before we started taping, the Earn It Act hit, which is, sort of wraps all these themes up together. It's a bill that proposes to take away Section 230 unless companies provide an encryption backdoor. So you just take the two big issues and just jam them together.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  What is Earn It an acronym for? Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglective Interactive Technologies Act. Earn It. Come on. Yeah. There's another act today called the Kids Act, which would ban all influencer marketing on platforms aimed at children, specifically called out unboxing videos. Wait, I love this idea. This is great. Really something. McKenna is going to cover that one a little bit later. So the issues are here. The bills are being proposed. You know, that the sort of Congress is about to go into election, reelection campaign mode again. So this is like the last window. So we're covering all this stuff. Listen to that conversation with McKenna if you're interested in it. We're deep on it. But we just did an hour on it, and I don't want to burn our time on this show, talking

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  about that, because McKenna was great. It's all on the site. Check it out. That said, we did do something a little related to politics this week. You know, you're a run a publication. It's an election year. Everyone's doing polls. Yeah. I wanted, I wanted to do a poll.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I felt left out. So we did our tech survey again.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Second annual, right?

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just took two and a half years. The second annual. So we did the first one in 2017. We did another one this year. We will probably do it again now that we kind of figured it out, how to do it. We'll probably do it again closer to the actual election. I think that'll be really interesting to see how all of this stuff affects attitudes in the course of this year because it's almost being talked about so much. But I just want to call out some really interesting results from the survey. So we, we went to our revenue team, which has a market research division. We asked them to help us do the survey. So it's a group of people with like, like decades of experience in market research, did a nationally representative survey of 1,123

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  people. It has like a 95% level of confidence, 3% margin of error. There are some details on how that works. We're, we're gonna, they're, they're all at an offsite this week, so we didn't, we didn't publish that part of it. We're gonna get those details from then and publish them because I know people are curious. But rest assured, we feel very confident in the folks who did the survey for us. Just some top lines. 56% of the people, again nationally representing the United States population, said the government should break up tech companies that control too much of the economy.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  72% of people said Facebook has too much power. This one's really interesting. 51% of people said Google and YouTube should be split up into separate companies. At the same time, only 40 some percent of people even knew that Google owned YouTube.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  How can one of those numbers be larger than the other number?

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I imagine like if you embedded in asking the question, should they break up Google and YouTube is the like dawning awareness that, oh shit, they're the same company.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the share of people who knows Google owns YouTube is 47%. The share of people who knew that Facebook owns Instagram is only 38%. That Facebook owns WhatsApp is 29% and Amazon owns Twitch is 12%. So it's a such a good reminder for me because we're just so deeply in it, right? My assumption is that everybody knows what we're talking about all the time. And I, I would say maybe 100% of the people I talked to professionally are aware that Google owns YouTube.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  So it's just like a fair bet. So this number, we're less than 50% of this nationally representative sample.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Less than 50% of them knows that Google is YouTube. It's like, oh, we're not even on the same planet.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're not, we haven't even started from the same underlying, like, that's not like an alternative fact situation, right? It's not like you can spin it one way and I can, like, I Wikipedia'd some other stuff, like, either they own it or they don't.

• 7:01Nilay Patel?

  And, uh, yeah, they, they don't know. And I think that's, it's so interesting to see the heat on our side of the conversation about what, I mean, we talk about it every week. How should these companies be run? Do they have too much power? What is moderate blah, blah, blah? And we're not even at the same place of, do you even know that Google is in charge of this?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  Do you think Google's, and I think that is actually great on balance for Google and Facebook. Because whatever happens on those platforms doesn't redound to them and their reputations. And I think they kind of like it that way.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  The other incredibly fascinating thing to me, uh, having, you know, in like the, the bubble that I am often in, is looking at the favorable, unfavorable for different companies. So, Apple has a favorability rating of 81%. Uh, Google is 90 and Amazon's 91, just like much more beloved than Apple, which is surprising. And then when you look at, uh, like, how does it impact society? Apple has got like 62% positive and 3% negative. Google's like 72% positive and 4% negative. There are more people that think Google's had a positive impact on society than think Apple. So like, to me, what that says is,

• 8:11Speaker 03

  I don't know, it, it makes me hear Apple's talk about privacy in a different tenor, you know? Like, it's, they're not, it's not them in defending a lead and, uh, making, making, you know, everybody else. They're, they're actually like trying to play catch up in people's feelings about whether or not they're helping society in some way.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I think it, I, I agree with you. I think it also, we have talked about this, and like, my iPhone, which is very expensive and I bought it.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  Is a window to Google's services.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, it's constantly, I'm using it to use Google's services. Uh, when I buy things, I'm often using my iPhone to interact with Amazon. So you have this constant relationship with the service providers that are very, very good at what they do. Right? You like want something to show up at your house tomorrow, you push a button, Amazon. Exploits a number of people along the way and then the thing shows up at your house. You want the answer to some question, you ask Google, something happens, Google shows you the answer. You hope it's credible, but it's doing it. It does the work over and over again. The third one on that list, by the way, is YouTube at 90% favorability.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  Right? And those are just service relationships. Like, I need something, you provided it to me. And that is self reinforcing in a way that, yep, you bought a beautiful computer from Apple. You bought a beautiful phone. It takes great pictures. You don't have that ongoing service relationship. It's just a thing that you bought. And I think that is, Apple cannot push that privacy part of it forward because it's not really a service. They're protecting you from yourself.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  Or they're protecting you from bad actors, but they can't, they can't insert that into all these constant, ongoing interactions. And I think that, that's one of the reasons I think they want a services business is to get that thing. And I do think all of their posturing is why their, their unfavorable is high because some people are just turned off by it.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I, to me, I think that you should go look at this, like, Microsoft ranks really high. People love Microsoft. Casey wrote a whole piece about it. It's like, you would not expect Microsoft to come in above Apple on a favorable, unfavorable ranking. This is the second time it did that. It did it in 2017, too. And so here's, Microsoft has faded in the background. Casey described it as a cloud services provider that makes video games as a hobby.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:25Nilay Patel?

  That's what it is. And that means people trust it. They see it in the background. They see Sachin Adella, he's out there. Casey described him as kindly. It's a pretty good phrase.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  And they're, you know, they're just talking about making you more productive and doing a good job at work. And like, we're going to be everywhere. And also here's the Xbox. And they're not, they're not actively in the middle of this conversation about like, how expensive should your phone be? Or should we step in the way of your decision to buy a book on the Kindle app? Because we want to regulate, like, they're just not in any of those conversations. So just by being sort of neutral.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  Like, of all these companies, Microsoft seems like they use their existing influence to get you to do other things the least. Obviously, they still do it. But, you know, Like you, Google feels a deep lack in its soul of a social network. So like, well, what if YouTube was kind of like a social network? We'll put, we'll put stories on YouTube, you know, like, so they're always kind of like pushing in that direction. Facebook is disliked and mistrusted. So, you know, it pushes Instagram sort of stuff. But like, Microsoft just has this sort of palette of things that, yeah, are somehow in offensive. Like they're not aggressive in some way.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  I, I still, I still have a deep dislike for, for, I know it's, maybe I shouldn't hold a grudge, but they really tried to kill Linux and it pisses me off.

• 11:49Speaker 04

  But yeah, I mean, like, I use GitHub all day, every day. And it, it's truly been like a gift to the world. Obviously they didn't build it, but they bought it and then they didn't screw it up. So far.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the best you can ask for with an acquisition.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  Well, no, but like, you know, that's the thing. It's like Google would try to integrate YouTube with Google Plus or something like that, you know? The, the only flavor of Microsoft that I can find on GitHub is that below AWS cloud stuff is, is a button for Azure. Like deploy to AWS comes first and then deploy to Azure is the second button. Like that's.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  You know that they have a meeting about that every week, right? Like a bunch of VPs at Microsoft fight about that every, every week for like two hours. Like, when are we going to put Azure above AWS in this dropdown?

• 12:38Speaker 04

  Sure, but it's, it's, their inaction is my, is, is my blessing.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  We'll see how it goes over time. By the way, Paul, to your point about Google and the social network thing, we also asked people who was better at what? And Google beat Facebook at every single one of these questions. Providing useful services, help you manage your life, giving control over the display of your geographic location, giving control over info provided by other businesses, communicating its privacy policy. Google won all of those versus Facebook. You know, providing useful services, 83% of people thought Google is better than that. And Facebook communicating its privacy policy was 64, 36, right? So along a spread, but Google's like handily ahead in all of them. Except for helping connect with friends and family. Google only came in at 21% and, and Facebook has it 79.

• 13:30Nilay Patel?

  So like, there's one thing, one clear utility for Facebook that everyone sort of agrees on. But in terms of who's communicating with who better, who's more useful, Google's ahead. And I think that that usefulness argument, that utility argument for Google and Amazon, as long as it remains high, they actually have a pretty big moat against all this regulation stuff that we're talking about.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  Because people love them. And they love them because they're useful. And I think all they have to do is keep saying, we're really useful. People really like the services we provide.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  I mean, Google's like entire line for the past two years has been, call us helpful. We're helpful. We help you. We're helpful.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  What do you think Google's 21% connect you with friends number would be if they hadn't killed off G chat? Just curious.

• 14:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's 21% of people who understand its messaging strategy.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  They're all Google employees. I don't know, man. The Google messaging, like they canceled I O. And like, what? We're not going to find out about any messaging product this year.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, no, but we're all going to get to use Hangouts and whatever to watch their presentations.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  I think Teams is free now. Microsoft made Teams free. That's the year of remote work, everybody. Anyway, that's the survey. It's on the website. Go check it out. I think the answers are really interesting. I know some people had some questions about the methodology. We did not anticipate that people want to go deep. I don't know why we didn't. It's who's our audience? Of course, we should have anticipated it. But our friends who helped us do it on our revenue side, they were just at their conference this weekend. So they're they're coming back. We're going to pull out some of those answers and we'll make sure we update them, probably in the interface, because that's the audience that's been asking for it. So subscribe to Casey's Zoot or give you some more detail about the methodology. But rest assured, it was rigorously done. We just didn't publish all those details because it's only the second time we've done it. And I didn't know that people would want to see it. Next time, we'll make sure we do it all front.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  And if you have ideas for things we should be asking, let me know. I'm interested. Okay. That said, some Apple rumors to go through. Dieter, you want to go through?

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Well, there is supposedly supposed to be an event in March. The number of things that could be on in that event is starting to get a little bit out of control. Like, possibly a new iPad Pro, possibly AirTag, maybe a new Apple TV. We're still waiting for a new 13-inch MacBook with a better keyboard. The big one, obviously, is the, what everyone is sort of coalescing around calling the iPhone 9, which is like the iPhone SE2, or maybe it's like the iPhone 7, but, or modernized, whatever, however you want to think of it. There's, I mean, there's other stuff. Overear headphones from Apple. There could be any number of things.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  And so typically, when you're in the run-up to an Apple event, there's a bunch of rumors that, like, of what's coming, and you can start to see some stuff in code. And one of the things that has sort of popped out is that it seems pretty obvious that sometime this year, Apple is going to make a keyboard that has a trackpad on it. The information has, has the story from, I think it was earlier last week. And I'm currently using a tablet that has a trackpad on it. It's a Surface, and I am positive on this development, but I'm a little bit worried about it. Why are you worried about it? Because there's been a whole lot of discussion about whether or not the iPad's interface makes any sense, if it's too complicated, if it's actually useful, blah, blah, blah,

• 16:54Speaker 03

  blah. I've talked about this ad nauseam, where I land is that it is very complex, not intuitive at all, but it can be useful once you learn it. I think that Apple could simplify some things, and it really needs to make it more learnable and discoverable, but that if they just put a trackpad on it and be like, you know what, whatever, Windows, then that's gonna be a mess. Because like, I'm currently using a Surface here. It has a tablet mode and a window mode that are distinct, but also kind of overlapping and sometimes weird, and it's bad. Like, it's not, it doesn't feel cohesive. And so if Apple's gonna let you manipulate Windows with a trackpad, or whatever the iPad's version of Windows are with a trackpad, they better be really

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Really, really careful how they do that because the whole thing is built on the idea that you're directly interacting with stuff with your finger. And so if you add an abstract layer of input, you've got to do it right. And they've, we've already seen them do it wrong with the keyboard itself. Keyboard is one level removed from a touchscreen. And you just never really know if you've got keyboard focus on the app you're using. Like you, you just gotta start typing and see what happens.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  Does a trackpad imply Windows, though?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't imply Windows, but what, what does a trackpad do?

• 18:07Speaker 04

  It's for clicking.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  What do you get? It's for clicking on things. It's for scrolling, precise controls and text, text manipulation.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  No, I, wait, I, there's one thing it gets you that is critically important. You get to keep your hands down.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think that's like, Apple's religion with a touchscreen on a Mac is you don't want to move your hands. I don't know that anybody buys it anymore.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  I do not.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like their whole gorilla arms thing, like what, whatever they called it. Your arms are going to get fatigued by lifting them two inches to jab at the screen. But that is the, the basis of their ideology there, right? Is keep your hands down here. The mouse is best because the Mac is built around precise controls. You don't want to touch that screen anyway. It follows to me that the reason they're putting, like my iPad Pro, I never use it in its tablet configuration.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Really?

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  I never flip the keyboard all the way around and just like hold it and swipe around. It is always basically a laptop.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  The trick is you rip that keyboard off and you go full freedom. The lightweight, I don't know. It feels great, but I see how, what you're saying in the sense that it's not very productive.

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  No, it's fine. Like I, I buy it, but I think that was the heart of the whole like consumption versus productivity argument with the iPad to begin with is if you're, if you're being productive, it stands to reason that you need to type. If you need to type, you need a keyboard. Now we've just made a surface. Now we might as well go all the way and not make you move your hands.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Right. But like, how are you, how are you going to manipulate the window? How are they going to get you to not have to touch the screen in order to bring slide over, over or deal with split screen? Or, you know, have any multi-window interaction whatsoever?

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Four finger gestures.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  I mean, probably.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, a menu bar.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 19:56Nilay Patel?

  Thought about a menu bar, like a dock that appears at the bottom of the screen. They could make every window could have three little buttons at the top that close it, minimize it, maximize it. There's a lot of solutions out here for making windows.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just think this is so interesting because there's been a lot of rumors for a while that Apple will make an ARM Mac, you know?

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  And so what's the difference between an ARM iPad with a touchpad and ARM Mac?

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Battery life?

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of apps that aren't optimized for multi-core processors.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't think there is one. That's kind of what I'm getting at. Like, they might as well just have the iPad turn slowly into the ARM Mac that everybody wants and say, "We're actually going to emulate your lower stakes productivity applications on ARM. They'll be slower, but fine, this is what you wanted. All the developers are here anyway." Instead of being like, "Hey, developers, make bad catalyst versions of your iPad apps for a Mac audience that is not receptive to them."

• 20:55Speaker 03

  I think they're not going to give up on that as quickly as we want them to.

• 20:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying I want them to. I just, you see the two paths.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  Give up on which?

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Which? Catalyst. Like, Tim Cook is bringing up catalyst on, like, investor calls to, like, Wall Street bros.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  They, I think Apple thinks of iPad and Mac app development as slowly morphing into the same thing.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will just say, the more I try to use my iPad Pro as the computer, the problems with it are not, "I need a trackpad," right? The problems are, "I have to invent some wacky solution that was completely undiscoverable but there in order to do something very simple."

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  I think the one that we were all tweeting about like two weeks ago was, "I want to upload a bunch of photos from Lightroom to Google Photos." And the way to do that is to export them from Lightroom into files and then do, and then open Google Photos on the web because the Google Photos app doesn't have a native importer. And then like, hold one with one finger and then like, stack them up. Like, none of this makes any sense. And you can do it. It is possible to do, but there's no way that anybody figured it out unless you have a relatively large Twitter audience and you start complaining and then like, you crowdsource this.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  A million people tell you you're an idiot for not knowing how to do it.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's actually the best part of the iPad for me is routinely dozens of people telling me I'm an idiot for not knowing extremely unintuitive things.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  Helps stay humble.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, Google Photos on Android, you could just tell it to watch whatever folders you want it to and it'll just automatically import anything that shows up in those folders. The end.

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. So there's that. There's like the capability of the applications when Apple allows you or doesn't allow you to do.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  Then there's just an ergonomics problem, which is that Bridge case, B R Y.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  Brit, you know what I'm talking about? Is like a better solution for the iPad keyboard cover and it just makes it a laptop. Like the iPad Pro keyboard case, especially if you have the 11, because the angles are different on the 11 and the 13. I have the 11. The angles are just like bad. Like the thing is too vertical. And it's like, I just wanna, I just want this to be a laptop. I would love to use this as my laptop if it would just be in that form factor. And I think Apple's just getting there.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I maintain that as much fun I made of it, the first smart keyboard was better because it felt more tablet-y when you had it folded up in the back. You could put it in an easel mode. You could put it in a like, lay down on the table drawing mode and it just felt more portable and tablet-y. This, and so the new smart keyboard isn't so much of a better laptop that it's worth the trade-offs, losing all those other things that the old Origami keyboard could do.

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  I'm not saying that like, that's the problem, to be clear, but.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  There's a part of me that thinks that old, the older iPad Pro was an ergonom, like far ergonomically, it was a little bit thinner. Right. The thing I was most excited about was like USB C card readers and that has just been an emotional journey. So maybe that's just coloring all the rest of it. I can't say that having the new Pro, I'm doing anything I was not doing with the old one.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, there's also some, some actual laptop rumors right here.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was gonna say, Apple could alleviate some of this pain of trying to make iPads useful Pro machines and just release modern, modern, non 16-inch laptops with good keyboards, but.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  I mean, with good keyboards is the thing. So Ming Chi Kuo, who is the analyst who everybody trusts to have information about what's coming out, says that there's a bunch of like, stuff coming this year, and top of the list is a 14.1 inch MacBook Pro. So in the same way, the 15 inch MacBook Pro became a 16 inch because they got the bezels smaller, we are expecting the 13 inch to become a 14.1 inch, simply by making the bezels smaller. And it's supposed to have mini LED displays, which, do we want to discuss mini LED technology?

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 24:44Nilay Patel?

  I do.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  I do.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm only here to talk about backlights.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  [laughing]

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's, I spent a lot of time thinking about backlights with the Pro Display XDR review, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  But the basic story here is, like, Paul, you're a pixel density enthusiast of some renown.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  I, yes, some type of time.

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  The new spec is backlight density.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  Ah. Right.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, this is real. So if you think about a modern laptop display, it has LEDs along the edges, it's edge lit.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:15Nilay Patel?

  So it can never go to true black because those LEDs just stay lit all the time. So even in the black areas, they're kind of gray. TVs have dimming zones, we will talk about this more with the display, but they put LEDs behind the screen and in a grid, that grid is obviously less, like, the zones are bigger than the pixels on the screen, so the zones turn off.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have a cheap Vizio, and it's the most obvious thing, their spinner is a, it's a black screen with a spinner, and there's like, obviously, four different LEDs that lights up.

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it looks crazy.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  [mumbling]

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  So, mini LED is what if we shrink the backlights, the LEDs on the backlight, super small, so almost as small as the pixels, and illuminate those along with the pixels of the display?

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  Very smart. It can get you some black levels theoretically close to OLED. That is, to differentiate from micro LED, which is very confusing, which is a technology we've seen Samsung come out with, it's ES and other places, where the LEDs are actually small and emissive themselves, and they're the pixels of the display. That is a direct competitor OLED, and OLED pixel is the light source and the color source.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Is this QLED?

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  No, that's a whole other kind of LED?

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Those, QLED was what Samsung invented so that the Q would look like an O.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  Ah.

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  So you'd be confused about whatever you're buying.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it stands for quantum dots, but they definitely named it QLED. So it would be as close as possible to OLED.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  The bottom line here is Apple seems to not think that OLED is a great screen technology for 13 inches or 10 inches. So like, there's rumors that they're gonna move the iPads and this 14 inch Mac to mini LEDs instead of just going to OLED like some other laptop manufacturers have. There may be good reasons for that. And maybe they're gonna have some really great mini LED like quality. It's gonna be look amazing. My feeling is that if moving to a mini LED display delays the release of 14 inch MacBook with the right keyboard a week, screw you, just release one with the current technology.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you know, it's tough. Again, we will talk about this with the display review, but OLEDs are not great in every screen size and they're not perfect. If you get it closer to OLED TV, you can see like the sort of right in between black and like very dark gray, like they get confused all the time, right? Like they're not color accurate the way you want them to be. I think Apple has been very happy with what they've been able to do with the iPhone 10. You know, that's just play is kind of here with the iPhone 11. Like they're, they've gotten in a place where they, they feel okay about the small OLEDs. Yeah, right on their phones, they're, they feel obviously okay with the Apple Watch.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  I think their assumption is no one is doing color correction work on their phone or their Apple Watch. If you are doing color correction work on your Apple Watch, I would like to talk to you.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm very curious about your workflow. But I think Apple feels like it's not so accurate that they can deliver what they're traditionally known for delivering with their LCDs on their Pro machines. And I think you see the other, we don't really evaluate laptops with OLED screens in this way, but if you, if you just like pay attention to the chatter around it, there are some real trade offs with OLED in terms of accuracy all over the place. And TVs have these problems, you're just sitting far away from them and you're not expected to do that kind of work on a television. So to do a laptop display, I think Apple is like, it's not there.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's not, we're not happy with the way it looks. We, we're gonna stick with LCD because we can control it much more carefully. But you're right, if they just use the old display and the better keyboard, people would buy them.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 28:55Nilay Patel?

  And I can't say I'm looking at 16 inch MacBook Pro right now. Yep, it's a little bit bigger than my 15 inch MacBook Pro, the screen. But the thing, the reason I'm using it is because it has a better processor and a keyboard that's not going to kill me.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Wait, it's not the touch bar?

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the touch bar is obviously the most annoying technology that I just keep, I can't quit it. It's like a bad relationship. I'm like, I don't know what you're doing today. Why are you mad at me? I just want to pay more attention to you.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Can I just tell you, I live in a world where I bounce between Windows 10 that's in dark mode and a Mac 13 inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar. But I don't use the Mac's touch bar stuff. I use this utility called POC, P O C K. That basically puts your dock in the touch bar and then puts some like volume utilities and like, you know, other information on the right hand side. If you look at a MacBook running POC, it looks exactly like almost identical to what a Windows taskbar looks like. You got little icons on the left for all your running apps. You got some information and like controls on the right. And so like, I just, no matter what computer I'm using, I've just got a little strip of like information and icons in the same order all the time and it's great.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  So you're saying you're pro touch bar?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  No, I'm saying that the touch, the touch bar's only utility is to replace the dock. Otherwise it's useless.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  I use POC for, by the way, POC is kind of, it's good if you have a touch bar Mac, download it, play with it. It's a little bit crashy.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  A little bit crashy.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes your brightness goes to zero for no reason.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  POC. Um, fine. I use it for one reason only, which is my, the resting position of my hands on a keyboard is such that my like second and third finger, if I don't have POC installed, are right where the volume buttons are on the touch bar. And because they're touch, it's a touchscreen and not buttons, I'm just constantly turning the volume up and down on the computer. Because that's where my hands go. Because there's no value to the touch bar except to just drive me insane. So I have POC and I put, it's literally like a wifi. I just needed to put some information there. So now I'm just constantly caressing a wifi indicator at all times on this Mac.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I love it. It's, it's a real, it's a metaphor for how I feel about computing. All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about these Mac Pro reviews.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 31:42Speaker 06

  Welcome to Sephora.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

• 31:48Speaker 06

  I got you.

• 31:48Speaker 08

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

• 31:52Speaker 06

  Let's get into layering.

• 31:53Speaker 07

  My concealer is making me look worse.

• 31:57Speaker 06

  Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 32:00Speaker 09

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty only at Sephora.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  Hi, I, uh...

• 32:09Speaker 06

  Let's get you a basket.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Neelai Patel.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  We reviewed a Mac Pro.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  We're back.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  We're back.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  It's like the tables have turned. Usually I'm the one that gets getting grilled.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, it's true. We can do it that way. You start.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  No, no, we were going to include all of this and now the joke is gone.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  No, we're going to include it anyway.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  God damn it.

• 32:32Nilay Patel?

  You've been waiting to hear us talk about the Mac Pro, but instead we're doing two minutes of meta commentary on who begins the second segment. There's like three meta stories that I want to tell about the Mac Pro review. But I want to start with the sort of the most important one, which is that we actually ended up buying this machine. So if you've been listening to us over the past few weeks, you've heard me say a thousand times, if a company doesn't do review units, my instinct is that the product is broken.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  That's just true. That's just my, that's my instinct.

• 33:01Speaker 03

  I would say that this, isn't this one different? Because like you would, they need to configure the review unit differently for every single reviewer to the specific thing they ask for, because there's no such thing as one Mac Pro, right?

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  And also, these are super expensive.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  They're very, it would be very expensive. Also, they're not like, they're still just Macs.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:20Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, do I think Apple can produce one Macintosh? Yeah, I do. I'm not worried about that. Uh, they're not trying to make it fold in half. There's no new like, um, waterproofing tech. Like, it's just a Macintosh. It's just happens to be, uh, using very expensive parts.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  However, no, no, no, no, but there are, the, Apple doesn't necessarily always get this right. Because I personally lived through that thermal throttling drama with that MacBook a year and a half ago, or whatever it was. It should have been like a no problem sort of thing. Yeah, there's not enough heat dissipation, but okay. Uh, and they like, they got it wrong and they had to like issue a, an update in the middle of me reviewing it.

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  So you can see how there's two sides to the story.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, here's a fancy new high-performance Mac with a new cooling solution. We've lived through some problems with Macs before. The previous Mac Pro had a set of issues. Long story short, we're, you know, we are reasonably friendly with Apple. Teeter and I are on the phone. And like, give us your unit. And they're like, we're not doing that. And I said, well, we'll buy one then. And they said, great. Let us know when you buy one and we'll expedite the order. And then we hung up and I was like, so I guess you have to buy a Mac.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Really, really bluff myself into $17,000.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  I'm opening up my credit card, my credit limit, he likes looking at his.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  I guess I'm doing this. I'm like texting my wife. I'm like, we're getting some credit card miles.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  So we, thankfully, we do work at a much bigger company than people think, and that's by design. We don't need to talk about like our corporation all times, but Boxman is a big company. 1,600 people work here. We make TV shows. So I went to our IT department and I was like, hey, can we, uh, can we buy a computer? And they're like, sure. And I was like, okay, it's a Mac Pro. And they're like, great, just send us the spec. And then in Slack, I was like, it's $17,000. And then the typing indicator comes up and it goes away.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  So they're like, fine. It turns out they were gonna upgrade the computer in our color correction suite, which pretty lucky set of circumstances because we're doing the display as well. And they, they, they bought it for us. This sort of started the whole process of reviewing the computer because now we were talking to Marillo, Marillo Silva in our studio, who's the director of post-production technology, who specs all those machines, designs our workflows. And then we were talking to him about it. And I was like, we should actually spread out. Like, yes, The Verge makes a lot of stuff. Yes, we have our own art and photography and motion graphics, like, team. But this company is doing a bunch of pro stuff. So Alex Deaconis, our video director,

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  she somehow got everyone to come talk to her. Estelle Caswell, who works on Explained on Netflix, the Vox show, she also has Earworm on YouTube, which is great. And you should, you should actually go watch the episode she was making in our review about the Bach cello suite that is like really hard to play. It's like just a great episode. So she was working on that. Stevie Remsberg at New York Magazine, she's their senior art director. She works on the culture pages in the print magazine. She came through, we'll talk about that in a second, because people were, there are some questions about how she was working. Noam Hassanfeld, who's a reporter producer on Today Explained, came and made an episode of Today Explained. And then Grayson, The Verge's senior motion graphics person. This was actually really cool. So we gave him the Mac Pro. And he was working on an illustration for a story that was going

• 36:45Nilay Patel?

  out the next day. And he said, I actually got to do something more ambitious because this computer could render it out to meet the deadline.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. So he knew that he knew it would render twice as fast. So he had, like, the time to get it done.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like, we just wanted to give it to people and say, like, we're not bench, we did run a bunch of benchmarks, and we can talk about that. But the main thing was, we're gonna give it to people who are doing their jobs. And they came back, and by and large, they're like, this isn't faster than my Mac. And by and large, the answer to that was because we use Creative Cloud and Adobe has not updated Creative Cloud to use any of Apple's technologies. And that is, I would say, the biggest criticism of our review, and I think it is totally fair. We did not spend, you know, a bunch of time talking about how Affinity Photo runs in this thing. We didn't spend a bunch of time talking about Final Cut Pro and the After winner card. We gave it to people who were doing their jobs, and this is what they told us. And I think that is, it's the heart of the story. I think it is also why, if you look at Apple's benchmarks that they're publishing about

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  this computer, if you look at the sort of people they've given it to, like, it's a large number of people they've given it to. They've given it to scientists and like, it's all people who are working inside of their ecosystems. And it's what they talk about is the software that's optimized as they should. I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. But the biggest question for any pro customer, especially in a creative field, is how well does Photoshop run? And the answer is as well as Adobe wants it to.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  It's just, and there's like conspiracy theories out there over how many cores Photoshop can really address. It's somewhere between zero and 10. Like, a lot of people are like, what if it's zero? Like, what if it's not doing anything? There's conspiracy theories about After Effects and like, whether it's truly multi-threaded. Those arguments are raging in the comments or YouTube video. But to me, the real, the big revealing piece of this was Apple's, like Catalina is built around big ideas from Apple. It's built around Metal II graphics. It's built around how they want you to use multi-core processing.

• 38:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  And Adobe, which is the big monopoly vendor, has not adopted those ideas. And so like, that's just an impasse for this computer right now. And I don't think Apple can get, they can't make Adobe do it. And I think they've got to prove, they've got to market people who want to use computers of this caliber before Adobe's going to shift.

• 38:56Speaker 04

  And that's a little bit on Adobe, because obviously Adobe could go above and beyond to please its customers. But also, Apple chose to explicitly avoid Vulkan. And Vulkan is on Linux. Like, you're talking about scientists, like, if you're, if you, if you're wanting to accelerate your, like, machine learning workload or something, it's either going to be through, like, a Vulkan compute type thing, or like, open CL, or Nvidia's CUDA, or something like that. But it's probably not going to be on Metal. And for Adobe, they have to, you know, write all these shaders twice, the once, write a lot of logic twice,

• 39:37Speaker 04

  once for Metal, for Mac, and then either they can use DirectX for Windows, or they can use Vulkan for Windows. But if Apple had adopted Vulkan, Adobe could theoretically write it once.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, this is also true of like CUDA, right? Like, you cannot plug an Nvidia card into this computer with slots. Like Nvidia is not allowed to write drivers, and Apple certainly, there's no way to like, address CUDA and have multiple GPUs going if you have Nvidia cards. Like, there's just a lot of that going on here, where a bunch of technologies that are like widespread on the PC and Linux side just don't exist on the Mac. And there are replacements. Apple has built its own replacements for those ideas. But there's, the incentives are misaligned for these cross-platform vendors.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Hmm. And by all indications, Metal 2 is absolutely amazing. But I was listening to, like Jonathan Blow was on this oxide computer, something like that, podcast. And he was explaining, but it's wild, like, if you think, what is an operating system for? It's to abstract across disparate hardware. But now we're in a case where you have, you could buy a computer, run three different operating systems on it, and you'd have to write, you'd write three different programs to successfully address those. So like, the operating systems are anti-abstractions.

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this is like, you know, I'm reading sort of reactions to a review, I'm reading comments, like, I want to know what people think. I care that we're doing a good job and useful. And like, I would say like, the vast majority of people are like, this is a review I was waiting for. Because it is true that there are not a lot of like, premier benchmarks for the new Mac Pro in the world yet. It is true that there's not a lot of reviews that have focused on Creative Cloud. Great, so I'm happy we're useful about it. And then there's another group of people, smaller, it's always more vocal group of people. That's like, why don't you test optimized software? And Paul, I think to your point, it's like, the point of this thing is to make your work go faster. It's actually, it's- It's just a faster computer. So you should be able to drop it in to what you're already

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  doing, not even know that the computer is different and be faster. Right? Like, that's another layer of abstraction. Like, it's still a Mac. It's just has way faster components in it. You know, the work that you're doing should automatically benefit. And here's a $17,000 box that should benefit you. And it, it kinda, it does and it doesn't, depending specifically on what applications you're using.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Well, what if the answer is that Apple doesn't expect anybody to use Adobe on this thing? Like, I know that's not actually true, but there's a world in which they released this computer and they're like, this computer is for people that use Final Cut and Affinity. It's not for people that use Creative Cloud. If you want to do it, that's on you, whatever. But like, buy this thing, switch to our tools, switch to the things that are optimized for us, change your workflows because you, the benefits you will get out of using this computer with the stuff that's actually optimized for it is so vast that it's worth changing your tools over.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't think the benchmarks bear that out.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  That's the thing, right?

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like, someone tweeted me that they had built a $6,000 PC with a slightly faster Intel chip in it, liquid cooling. So it was, and it was like, almost as fast as our Mac Pro. And it was obviously less than half the cost, right? We obviously also bought that Threadripper PC, which was $12,000. It was so loud. But that came from a workstation vendor that we use that comes with a support contract, all the stuff you need when you're running a business and that, like, enterprise. And that, you know, that thing just blew our Mac away. Like, on every benchmark, except Premiere playback benchmarks, which, fine. Like, you know, it was close, but like, the

• 43:28Nilay Patel?

  Mac was faster. Okay. But like, we can get into that part. But I, to me, the, the real question is, is it so much better that you'll switch your workflow over? That, that could be Apple's argument. But at the same time, like, shouldn't they be trying to capture market share? Like, they haven't had a product in the game for so long, that they have actually lost more market share to Linux than anything else. Like, there are lots and lots of production houses now that that run Linux. There are lots and lots of production houses that have like rows of Windows computers that are just sort of like hidden away and they're they think of them as appliances that happen to run these apps really fast. I think that's that they should be trying to capture that market, not trying to convince a bunch of people that they need to switch over their entire workflows.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's, you know, we had Scott Belsky on the Vergecast. I really liked talking to Scott. Like, that was a really fun conversation, but certainly I was like, want to be updating your software. And he was like, we're always working with Apple. At the same time, Adobe's onstage at Apple being like, here's Photoshop for the iPad. And it's like, you should work on Photoshop for the Mac a little bit.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  And I just think that's like, that is a tension that needs to get resolved. These are two gigantic companies that are, we know, we have the benchmarks now. Creative Cloud runs faster on PCs that are cheaper. Yeah. Our staff wants to work on Macs. So like, Apple just has like a moat of familiarity, but these are companies that need to work together to extract the power of this machine. There's one thing I do want to talk about very specifically. It's very in the weeds. We left this line in our video to be transparent. It was Stevie from New York Magazine. She said, I was working off a server on a VPN. This is probably the number one, why do we include that, the VPN? So I think we got, we confused people unnecessarily. So I just want to clarify.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  The Mac Pro was in the Verge's office, connected to our network, which is a brand new network. The office is three years old. We have a SAN. So even our like, video directors, they work off our SAN, our storage area here. It's all fiber. Great. But brand new network here in the office. New York Magazine works in a brand new office. It opened like, the beginning of the year. So another brand new network, but it's like, a few blocks away. So the VPN connection was between our corporate networks. So she was just working off of their file system. So she was doing all of her work here, locally, on the Mac. Yep. But she was doing her real work. So the file system was over there. But it's like our fiber networks. She wasn't like VPNing through like, you know,

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  like Nord VPN in Europe to cheat Netflix. She was just had a private connection between the two corporate networks. And she was only working in Photoshop. So our feeling was all that's in RAM anyway. At the same time, is it true that we could not 100% guarantee that weird corporate networking software wasn't getting in the way? We cannot. So we kept it in for transparency. I think we confused people. There were people who thought that she was like controlling a remote desktop.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, that's not what a VPN is. So I just want to make that really clear. Like, we were comfortable with the results, but because we couldn't guarantee it, we want to just like make it clear, like, it's possible.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  And it's not like she had a bad experience, right? She just didn't need a speaker. Her stuff was already going fast enough, basically, right?

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think InDesign in particular is not good.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think it's a particularly chunky experience. So that was the one where it was the number, it was the number one question, question mark, concern.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  But I, it wasn't that we were like, she wasn't like, we'd have like a dial up modem to the other office, right? It was like, the thing was on our fiber network, connected to their fiber network. We just needed a bridge between the two offices. And that is how a lot of people at our company work. Like, the today, the vox.com team is distributed between here and DC, New York, here in DC. Our video team is distributed in San Francisco and New York. I would say that we don't love, like, using the SAN, Dieter.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  I can't say it's like always the best experience, but it is legitimately a part of our workflow. So we wanted to keep it in to be transparent, because that's like a real thing that people do. But I don't think it was the core.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  Did you get anybody that did light up the afterburner card for any reason?

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  We did, we did. We, I mean, I think Alex moved the project in the Final Cut Pro. She was using 4K files. That's not something she could do on her existing iMac that she uses for work. It works. It does the thing it's supposed to do.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  There is something really compelling to me. Like, it really feels, in a sense, it's like an admission that we're not getting as much performance from our CPUs and GPUs as we'd like to get to make an. Like FPGA, you're like halfway to like an application-specific chip. But like, you know, if it's, if it works, it works. And I just, I really, I really like the idea. Like, you know, obviously, our phones now have a lot of very dedicated hardware for like machine learning and camera processing and stuff like that. I mean, it makes sense that things that you do a ton on your computer that are really demanding would have specialized hardware for. And there's something so compelling about the idea of the afterburner card.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  But yeah, it would, you'd want it to light up for a lot more tasks and be broadly supported somehow.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  The number of conversations I had is we were doing the review, is I was reporting it out, going back to Apple. Yeah, because I, I don't know that everybody knows that we do this, but it is true. When we review things, we like review the products, we like write everything down that we have issues with, we go back to the company, we report that stuff out.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  And Apple just kept on, you know, it's programmable. And I was like, well, are you going to program it? You're like, well, it is programmable. We've made no announcements about it. But you keep telling me it's programmable. Are you gonna, you gonna program it?

• 49:28Speaker 04

  Could Adobe program it if they wanted to?

• 49:30Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Yeah, anybody can. Why not? Apple, Apple, Apple's totally open to let anybody do anything. I think, I think, I don't know this for sure. I think you, I think you do have to like use Apple's frameworks to get to it.

• 49:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right? But you can program it. I think Red has hinted very strongly that they're going to move their stuff to Metal 2. And I think somewhere in that, there's like a secondary wink, wink hint that it'll light up afterburner. Like, there's some stuff there. There's a lot of stuff here that is deeply related to like formats and codecs, my favorite subject. But it is like so outside the realm of what anybody, like any consumer cares about. It's like, what formats are we shooting our cameras in today? And what does that buy us on the backend? So we don't, we don't shoot in ProRes, we don't shoot in Redraw. Like, we don't do those things. So the afterburner was just not useful to us until we changed that part of our workflow too.

• 50:21Speaker 04

  Neil, you said that codecs was your favorite subject, and that's a lie? Your favorite subject is actually backlight methods for displays.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  Do you want to talk about the display?

• 50:31Speaker 03

  This display ended up being so much more controversial, I guess, but like fascinating. And I don't even, it's not even divisive because everyone kind of agrees, but it was not what I expected.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  It is not what I expected. You know what I, you know, you write a review and it's a little less positive than maybe everyone is expecting. And you, you sort of just like wait for the wave. And yeah, so that's like, here are the criticisms I know about our Mac Pro review. We talked about them like down the line. We issued some pretty harsh criticisms of the display and there's been no feedback at all. And I think that is super interesting. I think that is partially true because it's very easy to have an opinion about computing. Like we do it for hours every week on the show.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  But it's, it's, it's much harder to have an opinion about what an expert color grader in a Hollywood film studio should use to do their job. Right. And I think that's, there's a little bit of a gap there. The main thing I would say, so we, we get to display. This is Apple sent them out to reviewers to their credit. They, they were very confident in this display. We get this way, we get the stand. Murillo, who worked in the color house that did Game of Thrones, he's done this for a long time. Like saw it instantly, like zero seconds went by and he said, there's light fall off to the edge. Yeah. It was the first thing he saw. It was, it took him seconds to see it. Grayson, who's worked on a lot of like literally advertising is our motion graphics director, saw it instantly. He's like, there's light fall off to the edges. I watched Marquez's review of this. He pointed out when you look off angle.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Flat panels test, I think is what it's called. Noticed light fall off. Quinn Nelson, stands a huge channel on YouTube, noticed light fall off to the edges. It's just, it's there. Like you just see it. The light fall off comes with color shifts. It's there. It's just a little blue. So I asked Apple, like, this is just how LCDs work. And the thing is it's better than most cheap LCDs by far. It's obviously a better construct. It costs $6,000. It's better than a cheap TV. Like I assure you. But like, I don't know, like I've got Max's baby monitor here. Like you get one degree off axis, the thing washes out to purple. Like, okay, it's not that bad.

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  But if you're, if you are Apple and you stand on stage and you say, this holds up next to a $43,000 reference color monitor from Sony. We think it's better. We think it's, of course, you are inviting that comparison. I think they actually just like, they shifted everybody's perception of what, what this thing should do by making that comparison. And they didn't make that comparison shyly. It was a very aggressive, we think we're better than this $43,000 Sony display. And the first thing that everybody saw was because of that, everyone's looking at it very closely.

• 53:15Speaker 04

  The, the, just to, to clarify, right? So there's, there's off axis. Which could lead to like, at your peripheral vision, it's a big screen. So just the edge of your vision, it's like vignetting.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  You're always off axis to this thing at a normal working distance.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  But even if you step back a bit, you see the vignetting.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  No, if you step far enough back, like those, those angles sort of, sort of flatten out, right?

• 53:41Speaker 04

  But you have like close up shots of the, of the edge. Like, don't you think there's something especially bad about the edge of this display? Or, or, or am I, am I off?

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  No. I, I, I think it's so hard to show this stuff on a video. We published that photo that I, I, you know, I took a photo and sent to Apple. I just took a photo on my iPhone. Like, you can see it, right? That was about as good of a demonstration of that as I could show. Like, in a video, which isn't, you know, like, it's like trying to show HDR in a video. Like, you just can't do it. You have to go look at it. Like, you should not look at our photos or videos of the display to judge the quality of the display. You should not do it. You should go look at it yourself because none, no capture technology is going to ever show you what a display really looks like. Just can't be done. So you should go look at it. And I think some people are going to grade color on it. And I think the other part of that is, Apple did not say, oh, to do all this reference work,

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  you actually have to shift it into these reference modes, which are only for use in controlled lighting situations calibrated to certain standards.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Very dark rooms with no lights.

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  Basically dark room.

• 54:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:49Nilay Patel?

  And it, the default mode is basically like a consumer mode. And that's when most of the technology displays on. So there's light sensors front and back for True Tone. That is just for like, office worker use.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  Right? You switch it in that like HDR calibrated mode, like all those light sensors turn off in this thing. Cause of course. Right? You can't calibrate color if the color of the display is changing. So I think there's just this like mashup of what the technologies can do, what they're proud of, what the reality of doing that work is. And then the reason that Sony and Flanders Scientific can charge $36,000, $43,000 for calibrated color displays is because those people are very, very picky. And so they, those displays use a ton of power, like ridiculous amounts of power. They, they actually, some of them have themselves horrible off-axis viewing.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  They are, because they have dual-layer LCDs, so you get a weird parallax effect. You would never use Excel on them, right? Like you just, you wouldn't use that thing as your monitor. So you have this product that's way more flexible, but they made this comparison to this very small niche. And so now they're being held up against that niche. And I think that, that's just an error. Like, I think Apple just, they put themselves, you know, like classic disruption theory, right? Like, why did the PC take off? It's because IBM had like a mainframe business and like the PC came up and could do some of the work, but it was much cheaper and like the mainframe people were like, that's a toy. Like, Apple's in that zone. Like, they're in that, this hard curve where like very cheap LCD monitors can do the job of showing you stuff.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  So that's like that part of the zone. Then very, very expensive color accurate monitors exist for that market. Apple's like, this is better than your $200 LCD, but it's not as good as that. And like, it's just a weird flat part of the curve and they've like stuck this thing right in the middle of it.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, my big question is, if it, if it can't be for like professional colorists, it can be, maybe it's for shops where like the last stage is that $43,000 monitor, but like you need the best of the best in like the three stages before that. So maybe it fits in that sort of workflow. But beyond that, other than people that just want to blow money on the nicest thing, like who actually is this for? What, what person, what person's needs will be filled by this $5,000 monitor that aren't filled by even a $1,000 monitor, $1,500 monitor?

• 57:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, people who like fancy things.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of those. I think, you know, Apple's argument is it's better if you have calibrated displays throughout your entire production chain. So sure. And I think a lot of like photo editors are going to be super interested in this thing. You know, that light fall off to the edges is like. Is it the worst thing in the world that you could ever see? Like, no. If you just back it up a little bit, does it slowly go away? Maybe. That's what I mean. Like, you have to go look at it. Like, maybe you will love it. But it is not the thing they said it was. And that's the thing that dings them. Right? And that's what I mean. It's like so hard to, there, it doesn't have any competitors. So you can only review it based on the claims they've made about it. Whereas like, you get a phone. And like Samsung's marketing materials about the phone, like you're kind of, you just discard them.

• 58:02Nilay Patel?

  Does you have this entire? Cause we have this, all this context, like.

• 58:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's competitors, there's other companies, you know how other phones work, like. There are just very, very few competitive products, one to one with this display. The other thing I'll say is, they promised these black levels. This is, now this is local dimming. I would say I got to publish like 2,000 words on local dimming on the verge of calm, and I'm like very happy, like, why did we find the verge of calm? So I could just like geek out about local dimming and like four people would read it and like, great. Like, mission accomplished. But they're like, you know, 576 local dimming zones, blue LEDs, these custom layers, blah, blah, blah. It's still local dimming. Paul, that thing you're talking about with the spinner, you can just see the zones light up?

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it does that. It does it more granularly, but it definitely just like blooms.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  You're saying they should have held out for, for many LED?

• 58:47Nilay Patel?

  You know, their argument is, oh, that is inaccurate. Dual layer LCD sucks power and has poor viewing angles. Like, this is the future. Like, full array local dimming like this is the future. And I, you know, I can't say that I build these displays and I can evaluate their claims that way. It sounds like a reasonable argument. It's in their white paper. You can go read that argument. It's the, the pro display XDR white paper makes that argument in some detail. But yeah, maybe they should have held out for many L, LED, maybe they should have done something different with the zones. Like, there's a number of ways to get, have done it, or they could have just not made this claim. Right? This, keep coming back to this, like, it has a million to one contrast ratio if you use a very specific test pattern

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  that doesn't light up the zones in a way that makes it look gray instead of black.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Like, sure. Is it cool? They built a timing controller that runs at 10x the refresh speed of the main LCD, so the zones move really fast. Yeah. Is it, is it some of the best local dimming I've ever seen, ever? Yes. This is still local dimming? Sure is. And I think this is. This is the thing about these two products for Apple in particular. Most of the products Apple makes, you know, there's like a billion users using them. They cannot hide, right? Like, they say something about the iPhone, lots of people are gonna get iPhones in their hand. We're gonna find out if that thing is true or not. We just are. Five people are gonna buy this display. So they can say whatever they want about it. And like, I think that's like, it's a little bit risky to make these claims because when it, when people do test it,

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  they're the most picky people who are spending the most money. So they're gonna be loudest about the gap.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

  The good news is it's such a professional display, which means that you can get it and then you'll, you'll be able to configure it to the settings that you want to match your workflow, right?

• 1:00:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, only if you use macOS Catalina.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  And only when there's a further software update.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I, I didn't get into Catalina with either one of these reviews because it's just like too much on top of everything else. I feel like Dieter, you, you have spent more time thinking about Catalina as a version of macOS that is a huge inflection point. But it's like, to use a monitor, you gotta throw away all of your 32-bit apps. It's like a lot. Like, it's just a lot to put on people, right? To use a monitor, you have to upgrade your entire software suite because Catalina broke so much stuff is a lot. And I, I didn't wanna like over emphasize it because, you know, who knows? Maybe four people are gonna buy this thing. That is remarkable for a display.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Did Catalina pop up like, is it okay if this display, the ambient looks at the light?

• 1:01:27Nilay Patel?

  You can't use it on Windows unless, you can use it on Boot Camp.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  They sort of hint, again, in the swipe paper, that if you plug it into Windows or Linux, maybe the appropriate display information will get transmitted if you have the right Thunderbolt 3, whatever. But probably, they're like, don't do it. And I was like, what about older versions of macOS? And they're like, it supports Catalina. So like, it's made for one operating system, macOS Catalina. Like, that's what you should use it with. Catalina is getting upgraded to let you make custom reference profiles sometime. They've promised it, it's on the website. They're definitely gonna do it. Should you buy anything based on a promise? You should not, but they said they're gonna do it.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  Catalina is an operating system that's like a, it's like a race car that tried to make a hairpin turn and it like spun out into the dirt. And it, the car isn't broken, uh, but there, there are some things that are a little bit just weird now when it gets back on the road and it is heading in the right direction. But you definitely know that the thing went off, went off the road there.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a little dinged up.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Um, so when I was a, do you want to hear a story from my youth?

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:02:29Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so I had a, I was a teenager with a Mustang. This is a true story. This is very embarrassing. I was a teenager with a Mustang, uh, and some irresponsible friends. And we, uh, we.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  Your friends were irresponsible.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Well, I would say we, we riled each other up.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:02:45Nilay Patel?

  Long story short, one time I crashed the Mustang into a bank. Like you do.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  Uh, like a bank, like a money bank, not like a snowbank?

• 1:02:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, bank, like a, like a, the physical, we were drag racing and there's a corner and I, this car did not, it understeered.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  Tried to pull off a heist?

• 1:03:02Nilay Patel?

  No, we were just, we were literally racing home from the SAT. And it's like, this is a very dumb story.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  He was trying to create a very elaborate analogy for an operating system.

• 1:03:11Nilay Patel?

  You sounded like such a badass. But we were racing, like, V6 cars. Like it wasn't, we weren't even going that fast. Anyway, the car understeered, I popped the curb, rolled into a bank and I, uh, the front end was messed up and there was like grass stuck in it. And so I drive it to the body shop and like, I'm trying to hide it from my parents. I'm like, can you fix it? And he's like, what happened? I was like, I don't know. I came into a parking lot and, uh, it's all dented up. And he was like, looking at it, he's like, well, the front of it's covered in mud and grass. Are you sure you didn't drive it into a ditch? And I was like, I gotta go.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  I'll see you later, man. Don't talk to my dad.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  If you made that argument, if you thought that would work, literally hours after you'd just taken the SAT, obviously the SAT broke your brain.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was not great. Dude looked at me, he's like, I don't know, the front end is like, pretty screwed up. That's Catalina. That's all I'm saying is that's Catalina.

• 1:04:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  Catalina is a teenager lying to the local body shop about why the front end of the car is messed up.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Nilay Patel?

  They had good intentions. It was gonna be a great Saturday.

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  And then they hit a bank.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I, look, all this is to say is like, go, I had a lot of fun making these reviews. This is the worst segue in the world.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  We had a lot of fun making the reviews. I'm very thankful to the people around Vox Media who helped us. Alex, our director, did just incredible, like, this thing was such a puzzle. She had all those people to come use the computer. They had to tell her what they thought. She helped them structure those thoughts in a way that would make sense on video. Like, these are not people who look at cameras and talk a lot. It was great. She did a great job, and I'm very pleased with the feedback we've gotten to it. I think the big question for Apple is, like, you said that result, actually, Paul, I want to talk to you about this. We raced it against that Threadripper PC, which was much cheaper, and it got destroyed. And it's like, that's the question. And there's like rumors of AMD support and some leaked builds of of of macOS, like,

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  is that coming? Could they make that shift? At the same time, they're trying to like, put a trackpad on the iPad. Like, it seems like a lot of change is brewing for Apple.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're holding themselves back right now. And this is a very recent development, but now AMD is king of the castle. So they're holding them back, themselves back by not having AMD CPU option. But then they're also holding themselves back by not having Nvidia GPU option. So they're they're double hamstringing themselves. And it sounds like the cooling is awesome. Like, if Apple wasn't being so Apple about everything, they seem to have engineered, done a lot of good engineering. It's really, it's more their software support that holds this back. Like, if this ran Linux, had AMD inside it, and Nvidia card, it would be amazing.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  Imagine if you could just render Bitcoins on this thing.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  I would love that.

• 1:06:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we have not given this thing enough compliments on the show. It is a beautifully engineered computer. It is incredibly quiet for the amount of power it contains. It is incredibly thoughtful. I love that there is a USB slot inside for dongles. Like, it is the... No one is thinking about this stuff in that way, right? I love that you can disassemble it by hand, basically, one or two screws. But the screws are spring mounted, and so they don't fall out. Right, like, just deeply thoughtful. The double-height MPX card, so you don't need additional power cables and all this stuff. And Thunderbolt still works all the way. It's like, that's like Apple stuff. Like, you control the whole stack and the entire integration.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  You can invent things that are cleverer by half than anybody else can do. Then you hamstring yourself by saying you have to use Metal.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  And I think that those instincts here are colliding in a way that I think is, particularly for this market, very challenging. But it's true, it's a beautiful computer.

• 1:07:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost like, you know, Apple... And people who've listened to the Vergecast know that this has been a big narrative. And Apple stated, they said they were sorry, and then they were gonna work on a Pro computer again. But like, you know, maybe their hardware spun up before their software side really spun up. Like, maybe their whole company hasn't really embraced this move yet.

• 1:07:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't see it that way. This isn't like their software needs more time to catch up. This is a policy decision, right? This is, we choose not to work with Nvidia and AMD. And it's not that they're choosing not to do it because, like, they're not good enough to make the software do it. They've chosen not to for various reasons, which may or may not be rational, especially if, like, you live in Apple world. But this isn't, the hardware is great, the software needs to catch up. This is, the hardware is great, and Apple needs to look into its soul and decide whether or not it wants to try and continue to force people to use its products like Metal or play nice with others. Yeah, and I think that if you sort of walk around the Apple campus talking about Adobe, you'll just hear, like, hissing sounds. You know, like, they don't like it.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  They're not in love with them. That's a relationship where like it has always been tense. It's always been weird. Steve Jobs used to write like open letters called Thoughts on Flash, just dunking on Adobe for caring about Flash at all as a technology. And then Adobe's CTO now runs the Apple Watch. Like, there is just no love lost with these companies.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  I was always baffled that they shut down Aperture, the Lightroom competitor, because I figured they'd just keep that going out of spite.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you know, it's like why Final Cut used to work a lot like Premiere? And then they changed it to work a lot like iMovie.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  That's what it looks like. And that's one of those things where it's like, if you, was it Oppo that put out a a direct clone of the Apple Watch this week, right? One of the reasons that those products are just direct clones is because they figure, you know, if you don't have to learn anything, your switching cost goes down and you buy the, you'll buy the cheaper one. Like, it's pretty cynical, right? Why did Google just adopt all of Apple's swiping gesture nav? Because they want you to switch.

• 1:09:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  They want to lower the cost of you switching to their platform. So you just pick up all the gestures and go along. Well, to switch from Premiere to Final Cut, you have to relearn how to edit video. Like, who's gonna, why? Because your computer's faster? Like, because it has holes in the front of it? Like, that's a thing where like, Apple has to really decide how much of that market they want back. I'm not saying you have to like actually relearn how to edit video. I'm saying like, you have to learn a new interface for a complicated task. And people, some people just don't want to do that. And I think that's why Premiere persists. Like, it is, it has a lock-in, in a way. Photoshop has lock-in in a way. Like, a lot of people like Affinity better. But there are many, many more people who just sort of show up at work and get a Creative Cloud license. We just, Apple's just got to sort that out. We've talked about a computer that six people are gonna buy for like 45 minutes.

• 1:10:12Nilay Patel?

  But it is a very interesting moment, I think, for Apple as a company. Because they have, they did figure out this market for a long time. They have been trying to move people to the iPad for work. The iPad Pro and the Mac Pro are actually radically different things. But they both have the word "Pro" in the name. And I think the future of their platforms and what people can do with them and how they work is at much more of an inflection point than I think we are paying. That much attention to. Dieter, would you agree with that?

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, they're making the turn, right? And then some of them spun off the road a little bit. The iPad is due for a huge inflection point, that trackpad is coming. They tried to do that with iPadOS, and I think they didn't, now mixing metaphors, stick the landing, you know?

• 1:10:58Nilay Patel?

  They didn't miss the bank?

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  iPhone, I don't know, man. I think that the iPhone is just gonna keep on keeping on with tiny changes in perpetuity.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think that one's fair. And what's the most important one for them?

• 1:11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15Nilay Patel?

  And I think that you can see it, right? It's like

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Same thing with the Apple Watch.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason to not change it because it's successful. And I think all the other ones, they're monkey around the edges.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Nilay Patel?

  Okay, let's take a break. We'll come back, we'll wrap some things up with some foldy floppy phones.

• 1:11:33Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest, or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an Ultra. Because it's not just a superior-like beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 1:12:02Speaker 06

  Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey? I got you.

• 1:12:08Speaker 08

  Serum moisturizer, or moisturizer serum.

• 1:12:11Speaker 06

  Let's get into layering. My concealer is making me look worse? Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 1:12:20Speaker 09

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora.

• 1:12:26Speaker 06

  Hi, I, uh... Let's get you a basket.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  Paul Miller. Mm hmm. Every week, you do a thing. And it always has the same name. It's called Take a Picture of Your Ear. Do it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Such a demanding name. I can't believe we say that out loud every week. I know, I know, right? So Logitech is partnered with or releasing this app called Immers, made by Embodi, a spatial audio company. And the way the app works is you take a picture of your right ear and then they use AI, which stands for artificial intelligence, as I've just read in their copy, and machine learning to create a custom head-related transfer function profile, an HRTF. So somehow, by looking at your ear, they can do better spatial audio. That is the claim.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  It sounds a little snake oily, but I want to believe. You know what I mean? What kind of input? Like, it's just a photo, right? It's a photo of your right ear. Well, it will accept a wide-angle photo, because otherwise I can't submit a photo of my ear. Oh, you have large ears? Oh, interesting. I don't know. I guess, you know, ears are used for spatial stuff, right? Yeah. I don't understand very much about ears. Obviously, these people are claiming to know a lot about ears. And like, because the thing is, is like, it's so hard to test something like this, because if you just make things louder, they sound better to humans. So if you just have an algorithm that turns the volume up. Space, like, spatial stuff is becoming more and more important with games.

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  Was it the X, the new Xbox is supposed to have audio ray tracing? Oh, God, no. Jesus, oh, come on, man. Like, hardware, no. Hardware-accelerated audio ray tracing is the claim. Yeah, that's how audio works.

• 1:14:28Speaker 03

  And it's also, I also hear that the PlayStation, in order to fight that, is going to have audio local dimming.

• 1:14:37Speaker 04

  But yeah, I hope this works. It sounds cool. It sounds fun. Good on you, Logitech. Keep on innovating out there. Oh, and it's a subscription plan.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Of course it is.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  That's it. That's the verb cast.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  Your ears change shape over time.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  We can't be a part of this. It's pods for your ears. They're called ear pods.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. Dieter.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  What?

• 1:15:00Nilay Patel?

  There's a folding phone explosion.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  TCL, we saw them show off a folding phone prototype at CES. They hinted very strongly that they had more that they were thinking about. And since they couldn't go to Mobile World Congress, they had Hyman and a bunch of other people go visit them in New York. And yeah, they've got a tri-fold folding phone, which is, one is the, you know how like, there's this debate with like, should a folding phone have the hinge on the inside and it folds out to a tablet or have the hinge on the outside? You know, like Huawei does. So TCL thought, well, people think the hinge on the outside is not very durable. So we should have a hinge on the inside, but there are some people who think the hinge on the outside makes more sense. What if we just did both?

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:15:46Speaker 03

  They've got an inside hinge and an outside hinge in one device and it folds out to, you know, a tablet-y thing. It's a tri-fold. It's ridiculous.

• 1:15:55Speaker 04

  It's a 10-inch tablet that folds into the footprint of a phone, but something that's also three times as thick as a phone.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's three times thick. And then they have a paper-based prototype of their sliding phone that we talked about. And the way it works is like the screen kind of like rolls underneath like it's a pirate map, right? Like it kind of, you shove the thing closed and the screen like rolls up as you close it. And then it unrolls as you pull it out.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  But it doesn't, it doesn't furl. It's not.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  No, it doesn't furl. It's not a full furl. It just tucks into the back.

• 1:16:29Speaker 04

  It's sliding around the back.

• 1:16:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Well, this is more or less what you guessed, right? This was my guess. As people have noted on Twitter, and I'm really grateful for that, I was right.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  I actually thought that the way this would work is that the screen would be visible on the back. It seems like it could be. I don't know really why, but it goes inside like a pocket.

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that inside like a pocket terrifies me. I gotta be honest with you.

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Oh, everything, everything about all of these concepts is like just damaged city.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  Okay, I, I feel like there's less that can go wrong with this because yes, inside like a pocket. Yeah, maybe you get dust in there or something like that, but there's, there is no hinge. So it is since like the, while the screen is flexible, it's flexing around a ra- a rather static edge. If that makes sense.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  So like.

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  It is, but, but like it's moving.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  It is moving.

• 1:17:22Nilay Patel?

  Like the screen is physically either moving against a protective layer.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? Cause that's how you would seal the edge where it goes in.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  Like you would just wrap the whole thing in, in plastic in some way. I doubt you can do that. Or that edge is, has a gap and like stuff will get in there and then you'll be, you'll, it'll unfurl and like just destroy itself.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Hmm, I see. You know what? I had not considered that. The, the good news for TCL is that there's no screen because this is made out of paper.

• 1:17:55Speaker 04

  The, the, the tri-fold is a real con- like a, a working concept with software and a real screen, but the, the, the, the slide out is, uh, is, is just a paper mock-up right now.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  So meanwhile, uh, Vivo, uh, has the Apex 2020, which is another concept. Uh, it's basically the stuff we've sort of seen. The screen wraps around the sides of the phone, doesn't go all the way around to the back. And then they've got a selfie camera underneath the screen. Uh, so there's no notch and there's no hole. Uh, it looks, you know, it looks fine. I mean, it looks great, obviously, but I mean, it looks fine. I, I don't know what else to say about this concept phone. Um, and then Marques Brownlee, uh, was him and one other, I think one other person got to look at the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha, which is the screen wraps all the way around the phone, uh, almost like completely. There's just one strip on the back for like, uh, for the camera modules.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  It's so beautiful.

• 1:18:52Speaker 03

  It looks dope. It, it, it looks like it would shatter if I just sneezed at it. Um, but it looks pretty dope. And like, you've got a full L, full pant, also you got a full OLED screen right next to the rear cameras. So you like to take a selfie, you just turn the thing around and you've got a viewfinder right there.

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  Right. It can't have like the metal band for, uh, external metal band for reinforcement. So that's like the fear.

• 1:19:19Speaker 03

  There's many things to fear with this phone. Like the power button, I think is like, they might have it like on the top and then they've got like virtual buttons on the side and on the screen. Although I miss power button on the top. Back in the day, all smartphones had a power button on the top.

• 1:19:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they were small enough to fit in your hand.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  This moment we're in where the technology is clearly not ready or durable or practical.

• 1:19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  But everyone's just inspired to make silly shapes.

• 1:19:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:19:44Nilay Patel?

  Is the best.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  It's so much fun.

• 1:19:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's no downside to being like, we made one out of paper.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Nilay Patel?

  Imagine what the future could be, because it's just fun. And no one's trying to sell anything.

• 1:19:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  Except for Motorola. Which is a real, real mess on their part. But it's clear, like, a bunch of designers are like revving the engines for when the tech actually is here.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  It's, uh, someone tweeted a thread of like, bad Nokia designs.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Engage.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  The Engage, there was that one that was like, a circle with corners.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:20:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, it was a circle, and all the, the keys were like around the screen. Like Nokia just went crazy for a while.

• 1:20:23Speaker 03

  They made all those. Those weren't.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  They made them, they shipped them. They're like, here they are.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  There was one that was basically like a lipstick case, and you could like, like, slide it out.

• 1:20:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that was when Nokia, uh, I mean, like, the, the phone, the internals and the software were basically the same across every phone. So the only way to differentiate all the models they had to make for all the carriers was like, this one has stripes.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Um, but it led them to just, like, wild heights of industrial design, most of which was impractical and bad. The Engage. But like, we're sort of like, it's here again.

• 1:20:55Speaker 03

  The side talking, you had to hold it against your head like a taco?

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  I wanna, here's what I said. Wild heights of industrial design, most of which was bad, like the Engage. And then you said, I love the Engage. To talk on it, you had to hold it to your head like a taco.

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  Those are the same idea.

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  They can also play Tony Hawk Pro Skater, though. I don't, I don't wanna, um...

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  That was one of the most powerful phones that existed at that time.

• 1:21:20Nilay Patel?

  It was so powerful that the only way you could talk on it as a phone was to hold it on its side.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  I get why TCL would wanna like, uh, show off a paper phone mockup. But isn't it incredibly expensive to make this trifold mockup unless you're actually making the trifold phone?

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  No, I mean, yes and no. They're not like, that's the sunk cost they're willing to take. I mean, they don't necessarily have to make this thing. They might, because they're TCL and who knows? Uh, but TCL's whole jam right now is they wanna sell phones under the TCL brand. They're releasing phones, they announced them at CES that are, you know, flagship 2020 specs. We'll see how the cameras are on it, obviously, but they wanna get them on US carriers. So like, they're making a big push for you to like, wanna buy TCL phone. I think they're basically like, they just see that LG has like, no chance of anybody caring about them anymore. Like, what if we took that spot? I think that's, that's what their, their, their thinking is.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, they're happy to make these concepts all the live long day. If it just makes you remember, oh yeah, TCL, I heard of them once. Because you're gonna start seeing TCL phones in the store. And so they need the brand to be credible.

• 1:22:35Speaker 04

  They have gotten my attention. Good job, TCL.

• 1:22:37Nilay Patel?

  And in the store, they won't be made out of paper.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Nilay Patel?

  That'll be great. Uh, Dieter, a little bit of Pixel news, and we should wrap this thing up.

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  So, uh, Google did another one of its, uh, feature drops, which is what they're called now. Um, and this time, they, they actually like, dropped the features when they said they would. Instead of like, doling them out over the course of like, a month and a half. They managed to get updates out to a lot of Pixel users on time. And there's just a bunch of really neat Googly features. So there's stuff that, uh, there's car crash detection, which is great. So if you, it detects you're in a car crash through magic and machine learning, whatever, it can like, call for help. It has a darks theme scheduling, which it finally should do. It has the new emojis, uh, you know, other stuff.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  They have added the ability to put a boarding pass into Google Pay, whether or not your airline supports it. Uh, I wrote in the newsletter that like, virtually nobody did. That was a little bit mean. A bunch of airlines do internationally. Here in the US, it's pretty hard to get Google Pay support, whereas everybody supports Apple Wallet. Anyway, so that's cool. So you take a screenshot and then Google Pay is like, oh hey, you've got a boarding pass here. And then it will save the QR code and then it will know what the flight is and then Google Assistant will start giving you flight updates for it.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  This is a big thing I missed from iPhone. Like it's pretty well-integrated on iPhone and it's pretty slick.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  It's pretty. And then the other thing they do is they changed the, if you long press the power button, now it brings up your power button options at the bottom and then Google Pay cards at the top. So it's like, it's easier to get to than it used to be too.

• 1:24:15Nilay Patel?

  It's easier to get to, but that is one of those like, solutions that it's such a half, like, here's a single screen on which you can pay for stuff and turn off your phone. Is not, I don't think that was on anyone's like UI roadmap.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  No. I mean Samsung Pay on a Galaxy phone is, what if anytime you swiped up anywhere ever, it brought up Samsung Pay half the time? And the other half, it does like actual OS stuff. That's what Samsung Pay is. It's like, ah. And then the other thing that they did that I think is just perfect, Google wrote about this in the newsletter, is they wanted to make it faster to get to like long press menus. So you know, you long press a thing and then a menu pops up. And so they wrote a machine learning algorithm to see how hard you're pressing just by detecting like how your finger smooshes on the screen over time. So they basically replicated 3D Touch without needing a special hardware layer.

• 1:25:10Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the same as the Apple one, right? Because there's no 3D Touch on the 11, on the 11 Pro.

• 1:25:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just switched to long presses. And Google's like, we can do long presses. We don't need special hardware and we can do long presses faster because we can detect how hard you're pressing on the screen by looking at, you know, the rate of smush as like different capacitive sensors get lit up by how hard, how hard and how quickly you press.

• 1:25:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I buy it.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  It's clever.

• 1:25:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you have it yet?

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little inconsistent, but it doesn't matter because you're not allowed to do unique things with it. So.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's just a faster long press?

• 1:25:43Speaker 03

  It's a faster long press.

• 1:25:45Nilay Patel?

  I see.

• 1:25:45Speaker 03

  It's a shorter, longer press. It's a short or long press?

• 1:25:48Nilay Patel?

  I have missed 3D Touch far more than I ever anticipated.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the number of people that like get angry when I'm dismissive of 3D Touch always blows me away. I just am like, it's, like, the two things that are useful with it are those little pop-up previews, which you can still do with long press and like, I, I always found them like infuriating because you never really knew what they were gonna do. And then accessing the cursor with the keyboard, which you can still do with a long press on the spacebar. And I know that it's not as like instant as like hard pressing, but sorry for your luck. I'd rather have the battery life.

• 1:26:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm not saying like I wake up every day morning 3D Touch.

• 1:26:31Speaker 03

  I mean, that's not like- Maybe you do though?

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  No, that's like-

• 1:26:33Speaker 03

  You just feel it. You just feel it. It tends now and then.

• 1:26:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like a, it's like a wistful longing for times, you know, I was like innocent then. Like I wrote the entire review of like the iPhone success. It was like all about 3D Touch. That was their feature. In like, like many Apple reviews it ended with, this will be great when developers support it.

• 1:26:53Nilay Patel?

  It's a real theme of the situation. Alright, good job. Good job, Google. Okay.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  I think that's enough. Unless you want to make fun of Samsung TV branding again. They, they launched some new QLEDs, but-

• 1:27:06Nilay Patel?

  Can I just read it to you?

• 1:27:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:07Nilay Patel?

  So, so Samsung is like, it's, it's, this is a thing that happens, right? They, they show us all the TVs at CS and then they officially launch them at like prices and dates and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so they're out, they're QLEDs. They've got a whole, a whole line at the very top end. They've got an OLED. Okay, what's the big feature for TVs this year? Paul, you're excited about this? Variable refresh rate.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Stoked.

• 1:27:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right? The new, the two new consoles are gonna have variable refresh rate. It's great. It solves so many problems. Here's what Samsung has decided to brand variable refresh rate. You ready for this? Real game enhancer plus.

• 1:27:43Nilay Patel?

  It's so good. It's so high quality. Good job, Samsung. Thank you.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  Game Enhancer, I get that like you can't just call it game enhancer because who knows what that means, right? Like, maybe you're just like you're screwing with the colors, like game enhancer on Galaxy phones is like the worst nightmare ever. You can't get rid of it. So you gotta call it game enhancer plus. Like, I'm with, I'm with them there. The plus should be there.

• 1:28:06Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what, wait?

• 1:28:07Speaker 03

  No, because you need to differentiate it from the other, other kinds of game enhancers it could possibly be.

• 1:28:11Nilay Patel?

  So your, wait, just to, your theory is that so many people are familiar with game enhancer on Samsung phones that they will, they will bring over that knowledge to their Samsung television.

• 1:28:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Nilay Patel?

  And be confused.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  I actually don't know if it's called game enhancer on Samsung phones.

• 1:28:28Nilay Patel?

  So first, like, step one.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  I, what, the point is that I'm granting them the plus. They can have the plus.

• 1:28:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:37Speaker 03

  Why real? What, is it a real game? Is it a real enhancer? Or is it a real plus? What is the real effecting? And what, what, what would be fake in, in this world, in this context?

• 1:28:48Nilay Patel?

  Every time we do a story about like fixing your TV settings, like how to turn off, uh, uh, uh, motion smoothing, like half of the story is like, here's Samsung's dumb name for the feature. Here's LG's dumb name for the feature. And it's like, how did we end up in this place? They had a meeting. They had a meeting where they named it something in Korean and they had a meeting where they named it something in English and then in Spanish. Like they had to localize the name, to ship it all around the world. Dozens, if not hundreds of people have encountered the phrase, "real game enhancer plus", in dozens, if not hundreds of languages. And they're all like, "Yeah, it's fine."

• 1:29:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't, it's, this company is absolutely, if anyone works at Samsung would just like to let me just like run around and see how it works for a while. I would, I would just, I'd be so happy.

• 1:29:36Speaker 04

  I have two quick points to make. One is, I think I already mentioned this, but on a different episode, but the new, the HDMI 2.1, it sounds like they'll have like a mode, it will negotiate game mode for you. It will ask your television, go into low latency, go into your real game mode, or whatever.

• 1:29:57Speaker 03

  Do you think that, do you think that the Xbox will like, the Xbox plugs in over HDMI 2.1 to a Samsung TV, and Xbox says, "Hey, TV," and Samsung says, "Hey, Xbox," and Xbox says, "Hey, can you turn on that game mode?" And Samsung's like, "Which one?" And I was like, "I'm not sure. What do you call it?" And Samsung is like, "You know, I call it real game-enhanced, plus." And it's like so embarrassed, it just shuts off.

• 1:30:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is like, instead of doing the, like, the link negotiation using like binary or hex, it's actually just like Bixby is talking to Cortana in natural language. And like, they feel shame. That's how the new, that's how HDMI 2.1 works, as far as I'm aware.

• 1:30:37Speaker 04

  My, my second point is that time is an illusion, and therefore, variable refresh rate is probably closer to reality.

• 1:30:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's happening. Well, you, you can, you're gonna be able to buy the TVs this year.

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:51Nilay Patel?

  You'll be able to buy the consoles. Like, it's here. I think it's actually, we have not talked about enough. It is very, it is, it is one of those things that no one will pay attention to, because it's so nerdy, but will actually make everything from like, smart TV interfaces to video games a thousand times better. And we'll do that for 45 minutes on The Vergecast, coming up next week. Because we are like in an hour and 40 right now. Dieter, you've, you've got S20 review next week, right? The regular? I do. We're shooting it this week, and it'll be up next week. So we'll be back with that next week. Like I said, at the top of the show on Tuesday, Nicole and Liz are joining me in an interview episode to go deep on coronavirus. That is the biggest story. It is, rather unfortunately, not local dimming on LCD TVs. The biggest story in the world is coronavirus. So look for that on Tuesday. We'll be back next week

• 1:31:36Nilay Patel?

  with a chat show. It's, it's, it's a busy time, and all of us are stuck at home. So we got nothing to do but come up with spicy takes for the website. So keep paying attention to theverge.com. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  Promo code.

• 1:32:08Speaker 10

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 1:32:38Speaker 11

  Online Deal Days are back at Kroger. Don't miss your chance for extra savings when you shop, pick up, or delivery. You can save $30 on your first online order of $75 or more with your digital coupon. Plus, enjoy unlimited free delivery by starting a Boost Free trial today. But hurry, these extra savings end October 20th. Restrictions apply, see site for details. Kroger, fresh for everyone.