Apple announces new iPad Pro and Macbook Air, Sony reveals PS5 specs, and confusion around the coronavirus testing website

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss the new iPad Pro and Macbook Air that Apple announced this week, the confusion around Google's coronavirus testing website, and the specs revealed for the PS5. Stories discussed this week: Comcast modestly raises slow internet speeds for low-income users because of coronavirus AT&T is suspending broadband data caps for home internet customers due to coronavirus AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others agree not to overcharge customers during coronavirus Verily’s coronavirus screening website launches with very limited access Trump’s Google testing announcement mixed up several real projects The White House still can’t explain what’s going on with the coronavirus screening website Coronavirus testing shouldn’t be this complicated Apple announces online-only WWDC 2020 due to coronavirus spread Apple announces new iPad Pro with trackpad support and a wild keyboard cover iPadOS 13.4 adds full mouse and trackpad support The iPad Pro is ready to supplant the Mac just as the MacBook Air is great again Logitech’s iPad keyboard case with trackpad costs half as much as Apple’s The new iPad Pro’s LIDAR sensor is an AR hardware solution in search of software The new iPad Pro’s LIDAR scanner can turn a living room into an AR game of Hot Lava You can try the iPad’s new trackpad and mouse support right now with Apple’s public beta Apple announces new MacBook Air with improved keyboard, faster performance, and more storage Moog and Korg are offering synth apps for free while we’re all stuck at home PS5 vs. Xbox Series X: a complicated battle of SSD and GPU speeds Sony says the PlayStation 5’s SSD will completely change next-gen level design The Xbox Series X specs look impressive, but that’s not enough Here’s how Xbox Series X removable storage will work 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 talk about that Google website that Trump was talking about. We go into Apple's new iPad Pro and MacBook Air, and we get deep into the weeds of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:12Speaker 01

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• 0:38Speaker 02

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• 1:12Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of staying inside, just staying inside. I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your friend too, but we should all be friends this week, just distant friends. Distant, distant friends. Paul Miller is, Dieter's in, you're in your closet recording. I am. Paul, are you also in a closet?

• 1:31Speaker 03

  I'm in the, the living room of my sister's apartment.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  That's nice. I'm in a bedroom that I have somehow arranged into a podcast studio, which is better than my toddler's bedroom with her crib, because she often likes to be in there. And I don't think we're quite at the point where Max should be on The Vergecast. We're getting ever closer to it. Yeah. Not today. There's actually a lot going on. We're gonna, we have to talk about some coronavirus stuff this week. It's gonna be inescapable. You know, The Verge is a site about technology and culture, and those things are colliding now because so many people are at home working on broadband. We obviously, McKenna Kelly and I talked to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosen-Worcel on Tuesday

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  in the interview episode. There's a lot to talk about with broadband. There's a lot to talk about with services like Zoom and Slack. We're gonna talk about some of that stuff later. But then there's also just like a lot of news that happened this week. Apple put out some new products. Microsoft and Sony are announcing the details of their next generation consoles. There's still stuff going on. So we're gonna try to balance it out. Let us know if we're getting that balance wrong over time. It's new for everybody. We want your feedback. We want to be here for you. We want to make sure we cover the important news of the virus. We want to make sure we cover the important news that's happening elsewhere. We just need to hear feedback on how do we get that balance right? Because otherwise, we're just gonna guess every time. I do want to start by doing something I never do. Okay. I want to offer a compliment to our nation's ISPs.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow. I never do it. Everyone knows we're very critical of ISPs. We're very critical of Ajit Pai, the chairman of the FCC. But because of the virus, the FCC has put out a pledge for ISPs around the country. Every day, they announced that hundreds of more ISPs of every size are taking this pledge. They are waiving payments. They're waiving late fees. They're lowering some prices for lower income folks. They're raising the speeds on some of their base packages. This is all good stuff. So I know it's a hard time. It's, it's good the FCC pushed ahead on that. And then other bigger ISPs are getting rid of their data caps. So Comcast is not doing data caps. AT&T is not doing data

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  caps. They're also adjusting their prices in certain ways for lower income folks. That stuff is really good. And I know that we are often very, very critical of these companies. And there's ways to be critical of the fact that they're making these moves inside of a crisis. I assure you, it was my first thought too. But they are making these moves. They're very positive for everybody. So I just wanted to to give that compliment in a time of of a little bit of chaos in the world that I think these are, these are solid moves. Dieter, you laughed because the criticism embedded in this is very obvious. Do you want to?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Sure. Well, so I will say that the lowering prices for low income people waiving late fees, it's super important. I completely agree. That's great. I think that the data cap thing is especially important because so many people are on these big ISPs, but embedded in the data cap is the possibility that maybe those data caps were just kind of bullshit in the first place. You could just get rid of them when, uh, when things are serious. Maybe they were arbitrary, you know, to begin with. Maybe it could be that in addition to getting rid of the data caps, they've had to like massively beef up their infrastructure to handle, you know, the effects on their network because there's no more data caps on people. But I don't know. I've never been a fan of data caps. So.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm, I'm trying to do a compliment. It's right there for the taking if you want it.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  I, I've never experienced the heavy hand of data caps in the US. Who, who does feel that?

• 5:09Nilay Patel?

  So I hear about it all the time. You know, if you are an entirely streaming household and you've got a couple of kids who are playing video games and you're streaming a couple of 4K movies, you're going to blast through a one terabyte Comcast data cap every month. You're just gonna, you're gonna get right up to it. Um, when we were talking, I streamed the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl was like 30 gigs of data for three hours, right? It was like just some huge number. Once you start to do things like that and everyone's at home, the entire family's at home, um, and you're streaming all of your entertainment and you're playing video games and you're downloading video games, you're just going to hit those numbers.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  You can't have otters playing on your TV in the background from a live stream. Like you just can't do that. That sucks.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  Or if like us, we're, we're producing this entire podcast now using, using video conferencing. Everyone's video conferencing on Zoom all day long for work. The people who are able to work from home, I should say. That's just going to burn through a lot of data. So I don't think that Comcast, like, maybe they made some huge investment, like, maybe they were waiting to buy the most powerful router ever made and put it in the network. I just don't think that. I think they just turned it off. I should say Comcast investment box media parent company. Now you know that information. There is a lot of that criticism embedded here. Did we ever need data caps? In this time of the most increased usage, did this tool that the networks always said they needed to manage overuse, they just took

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  it away. And it seems like it's gonna be fine. We're gonna keep tracking on it. I don't want to overdo it. I am trying to, I am trying to offer this as a compliment. They are taking the moves, they're taking the steps. We're usually very critical of these companies. I would like to support their positive moves for consumers. By the way, the pledge specifically is for the next 60 days, companies cannot terminate services for residential or small business customers, which is huge. You can't get knocked offline if you miss a payment. You waive any late fees incurred, and all their public Wi-Fi hotspots will be made open access.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Some cases, those public Wi-Fi hotspots are a big deal. Comcast actually has a lot more of those than you think about, because you never log on to them. But like, they are actually kind of everywhere.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then another thing that's happening is Dish Network, Dish Network has a bunch of unused spectrum, which we've talked about a lot. And that spectrum, where it is useful for other carriers, where the phones support it, where their networks support it, they're actually turning over chunks of that spectrum in certain cities to beef up AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile's networks. So

• 7:33Speaker 04

  That's huge.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  It's huge. And it's all just sort of happening. You know, these aren't like deals. These are just like, you know, the FCC didn't pass a law, didn't regulate it. It said, here's a pledge. Do you want to take it? And everyone took it. Comcast didn't get regulated into doing data caps. They just did it. So, you know, I think there's just an element here where a lot of assumptions are getting reset. I think it's useful. And I certainly hope it is helpful to the people who are being most impacted by what's going on in the country

• 8:01Speaker 04

  It's almost like a bunch of people suddenly decided that internet access was a public good and should be treated like a communal utility.

• 8:10Nilay Patel?

  And if you are interested in that conversation, we did it for one hour with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenorcelle, who is also, we really did it for an hour. She's also very focused on the homework gap. That was, that's like the key pieces puzzle. All the kids are staying home from school. They're doing distance learning. The FCC can now, they passed a ruling, schools can get direct connectivity help from carriers. Commissioner Rosenorcelle herself has a big push to send Wi-Fi hotspots to schools directly using some authority the FCC has. So listen to that conversation. You may have been in the weeds on it. I just wanted, we are usually so, so critical of the carriers. I am personally so critical of a G-PY, and I wanted to focus on, that's some good stuff that's happening.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Hear me out. What if Fortnite was school? See, you join, you join a match, five, five minutes into the match, a bell rings, and then you have to go to a specific zone and sit down and listen to somebody talk for an hour. And then you get five minutes of fragging, you know, and then bell rings, repeat.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no child will ever find a way to game that system. I like it. It's an, it's an A plus in the, in the category of emerging things I would like to call pandemic pitches. But speaking of the pandemic, we, we should talk about this thing that happened last week. Dieter, I'm gonna make you do it. For better or worse, this became your story. I just have been calling it the website.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Capital T, capital W.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  I will let Dieter tell the whole story, but I will say by the time this podcast goes out, it will have been one week since the president held a press conference and a flow chart was held up describing a website that you would go on to, you would check your symptoms. It would say either you don't need a test, or it'd say you do need a test. It would direct you to a drive-through testing center in the parking lot of a major retailer. They had Target and CVS and Walgreens and everybody on stage with them. You'd get tested in a drive-through testing center and then, you know, some time would pass and then you would get results on that website. They literally held up a flow chart saying this was going to be happening.

• 10:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  And for, for, who knows? I'll let Dieter unpack all the details, but the president said Google was going to do it.

• 10:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's two ways to tell this story. The first way is to tell the story as I experienced it as a, as a journalist and how he has all of us experienced it as a bunch of journalists tried to chase down the story. Uh, that's too painful for me to go through again. So I'm going to tell the story chronologically based on all of the reporting that has come out. Uh, a little bit of mine, uh, some great reporting from the New York Times, from the Washington Post and from Wired. And, uh, I might be forgetting one other person, but really good reporting. So here's what happened. A bunch of tech companies are talking to administrative officials in the White House saying, all right, here's what we're doing. What do you want us to do? Let's all work together. And Google mentioned to reportedly Jared Kushner, hey, we're making this website. Verily's going to do it.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  We think it's going to be able to, you know, like direct people to get some testing. It's a test thing in the Bay Area. Verily's this weird little startup part of Alphabet, which is a sister company, or it's just the parent company of Google, blah, blah, blah. All this gets explained. Uh, so he wanted to tell Donald Trump some of this. So, uh, it has been reported that he overpromised what, uh, he was told by Google to Donald Trump. And so Donald Trump had it, uh, had been told or believed that Google was going to make a website that would solve this nationwide where you could just find out if your symptoms made you, uh, you know, qualify for a test and then where to go get a test.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  Can we just stop there for one second and say that the funniest part of this, absolutely the funniest part of this is that Alphabet's stupid corporate structure.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  Caused like a nationwide testing panic.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  Because no one knows how that works.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Well, so you have to, you have to like start parsing out, uh, does he not know what the real answer is? Is he lying or is he just confused by Alphabet's corporate structure? Because all of us are. It may have been a combination of all three of those things. So the next thing that happens chronologically is Google goes, uh, why is he saying our name? What's happening? Are, are we making a website? Where did the 1,700 people number come from? Oh, it came from the fact that 1,700 people inside Google like raised their hand and said they'd be willing to help. What do we do? So they scramble Verily, you know, says we're launching a site. It's only going to be for the Bay Area. Maybe we'll expand it if things go well. Google says, uh, yeah, we're making a website, but it's going to be mostly informational.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  Wait, no, I want to defend ourselves a little bit in the middle of this.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  Trump says, Google's making a website.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay, everyone prints, Google's making a website.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  The American media is hardcoded to just put the words a press, any president says in a headline, president says X is why all everyone is like, well, that's the headline. He's making an announcement. Then we go and ask Google, hey, what's up with your website? Hours pass, like a long time passes. I would say that Dieter, you are among the world's best reporters of Google does a thing.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  I do it. I do it a lot.

• 13:21Nilay Patel?

  You're very, very good at it. Uh, we're like, this is weird. Google tweets a statement that says from Verily.

• 13:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Everyone literally emails. I mean, we know Google's press people, everyone me like me, Dieter, other reporters. Hey, this is a statement from Verily. What's, what's up with Google's website? And they say, this is the work that's being referred to because they cannot say there's no Google website, right? Google's in this very difficult position that I have a lot of sympathy for. They cannot say, we're not helping.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:54Nilay Patel?

  No, it's not great for them to contradict this president in particular, or any president, but this president in particular. And a lot of people at Google want to help.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  So they cannot say we don't know what they're talking about. We're not helping. They just say, here's what we're doing and very conspicuously limited to what Verily is doing.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  So you're right. Okay. Google's not making a website. Like we have it.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  Cause they weren't.

• 14:19Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 14:20Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't happening at that time.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 14:22Nilay Patel?

  Then there's a scramble where they decide they're going to do it, which is the right choice.

• 14:28Speaker 04

  But they, they just, Google decides they're going to do it, but it's unclear. Like Google also knows, like straight up, you can't actually just go make a website that collects a bunch of people's health information nationwide, just for the hell People rag on Google all the time for collecting too much data, justifiably so. But like HIPAA still exists. It hasn't been completely waived yet in this moment. And so Google doesn't know if it can do it, if it's possible to make this website. It seems silly. Of course, can you make a website with a quiz on it? Yes, that seems doable. But like, there's rules. Maybe they should ask BuzzFeed.

• 15:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Do you have a fever and are you coughing? You should get tested.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Which coronavirus symptom are you? Well, the other X factor here is like, in order to direct people to drive through testing facilities, they need to exist.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's the other problem.

• 15:20Speaker 04

  Right. So Google makes the call. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make like an informational website. We're gonna do as much as we can as Google. We're gonna pull information from WHO, from CDC, all the local state authorities. We're gonna be an official canonical source of information that you can trust. Meanwhile, on the side, every big tech company is signing a pledge that they're gonna help tamp down misinformation, which is, put a pin in that, we should come back to that. And then they put out like a series of like six tweets from the Google comms account, saying, "We are aligned with the administration. We are making this website. Verily is making this other website. This website that Google is making is gonna like have information on it. Verily's website, it's gonna be limited to the Bay Area. This is what's happening."

• 16:02Speaker 04

  And then the president gets up and says, "See, see everybody?" He holds a printout of the tweets up and says, "See, I was right."

• 16:08Nilay Patel?

  Can I just, again, pull this out of the... There's nothing funnier than holding up a printout of tweets and claiming you were right, in any circumstance. If you find yourself being like, "What I should do is print out a series of tweets, and then brandish them at someone saying, 'I was right,'" it doesn't matter who you are. Just reconsider that choice.

• 16:29Speaker 04

  And Google still is not making the website that the White House, with its flowchart and its tweets, claimed that Google itself was making. But at this point, we're now in the world of like nitpicking, is Google making it? Or is Google's sister company Verily, which is another division of Alphabet, when they both happen to share the same damn CEO in the first place, and who knows, making it or what? Verily's website launches. It like lasts for about 12 hours before it shuts down and is full, and no one else can subscribe, you know, to go see if they can get a test. It's Bay Area only. It's very, very limited.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  It is reported that they have only conducted 20 tests.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:07Nilay Patel?

  The Verily Web. Twenty, two zero.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  Two zero. Somewhere in this process, it had been promised that this website that Google was making was going to be launched on the evening of Monday, the sixteenth. Google let us know that afternoon or that morning that actually we're going to like take a little bit more time to get this right. I personally think one of the things that they were taking more time for is they actually do want to make a more ambitious, more helpful website instead of just like a Wikipedia page of links to information from the WHO and the CDC. So we'll see, we'll see what they can launch the first time around. We'll see, you know, what happens. But to me, the like, the moral of this whole story is the most important thing in terms of like, understanding what's going on is to get accurate information from institutions that you trust.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  And for all of the shit that Google has taken over the years for data privacy, that again, has been justified. You look at our tech, you know, survey that we did not too long ago, and people overwhelmingly like and trust Google. And so if, you know, the administration is trying to like chill people out, it makes sense for them to say, Google's doing it because people might go, oh, well, I trust Google to make a website. And the thing of all of this is if you asked me like, who should make the website, the national website that has to collect a little bit of data, but they keep it safe and they, you trust them to like, get rid of it if they say they're going to get rid of it, but also has the technical chops to actually pull in a ton of information from a ton of places.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  On the privacy question, I go, I don't know who on the like, actually make the website question, there's nobody that better than Google at making this website. It's like, they're the best ones to do it, but nobody knows if it's being done.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  What are the pieces of the puzzle, right? They need a bunch of people to show up, identify themselves and their location, tell them some health information and maintain it in a private way, direct them, aggregate that newly created database of users with another database of testing locations, scheduling, capacity, direct people there in a way that doesn't overload all those facilities, return results into another database and then match those results with people. And then, you know, hopefully do some second order analysis of that data to figure out what, right? It's Google.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  All I really, I just, I just described ways for a virus. Right? Like, that's all I described. They could absolutely build it. They just didn't get asked before they got, this thing got announced. And then, and Dieter, I think this is your misinformation point. They made a lie true, which is a very difficult position for literally everyone to be in. Right? The thing was not true when he said it. And Google, again, for, for very understandable reasons. And I think from a genuine sense of duty to do the right thing, made the lie true.

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Well, at least half true. We still don't know what the website is gonna do. They made it half true.

• 19:54Nilay Patel?

  Once you're brandishing the tweets, you're claiming it's true. Right? Like, you've arrived at that point. The other thing that I think is the most important here is many people ask us, why do you care about this website so much? We've now talked about the website for 10 minutes. The website, it doesn't matter. I don't care if Google builds it, or Apple builds it, or Amazon builds it, or, I don't know. Like, a bunch of kids get together and do it on Squarespace. Right? Like, it doesn't matter.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  The number of pitches in my inbox from people claiming that they have already done it is out of control. And I'm not posting a single one of them, or tweeting a single one of them, because you know what? I don't know who you are, friend, so I'm glad you made a website, but I don't, like, who are you?

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and there's one in Canada, a bunch of insurance companies have built something similar. Oscar Health, uh, which is Joshua Kushner's company, Jared Kushner's brother has, has made one. Like, yes, this idea exists, people can build it. What doesn't exist is actual testing capacity. And so we're focused on the website because it is step one in the announced plan to roll out massive testing capacity. And so if you can't even get to step one, this is the interface for finding a test, then it kinda seems like maybe that testing capacity isn't there. And that, to me, is like the, there's not the right data to manage the, the crisis. And honestly, we're a tech website. Of course, we're very interested in Google's website. Like, no one has ever, like, you could over-cover Google's messaging strategy.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  Like honestly, we probably over cover Google's messaging strategy. But like, this is of far more critical importance. Of course, we're going to cover every twist and turn of it. The last thing I'll say, and I just want, I think this is the other side of the coin. The ability to manufacture these tests, the ability to get these tests done is the important thing. It is the thing that we are not doing well at. I want to call out Nicole Wettsman, who wrote a piece for us this week about how the testing works.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  PCR testing, which is the kind of testing we're doing right now. I didn't know this. It requires something called thermocycling, which is incredibly energy inefficient. Because you have to heat the thing up and cool it down, heat it up again. There is another way of testing. It's an isothermic method. Anyway, she wrote about this. It's a super interesting piece. It is the other side of the coin. I just want to call out, we're covering the testing side of it as well as the user interface for testing. It's, I think, the, the sort of Google calamity got all the attention, but the real story. And we have been saying this to us, to ourselves, to our staff on Twitter, whoever will listen. The real story is testing.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  Whether or not there's a Google website, I hope they make one. I honestly and sincerely do. It will be good. But the real, most important thing is if you feel sick, can you get a test? We should find out.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  By the way, it will have been a week, right? It will have been a week since that happened by the time this podcast goes out.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Yep. And hopefully it'll be posted by then. And again, like I, if the CDC makes a website, I don't care. As long as people like know when they can get a test or how to get a test, that's, that's it. I mean, the tests have to exist and then like know how to get one. It seems really obvious, but it turns out it's very, very complicated right now.

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  Indeed it is.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  And there's even further things to talk about beyond the testing. Cause you could over test, it turns out, but we're, we're just gonna, we're gonna let that go for another time.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  I feel like we can worry about having noise in the data once there's like a sufficient amount of data.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, that seems about right.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna take a break. We're not gonna talk about the virus the next segment. Well, like a little bit, but not in the way that you think, because we're gonna talk about the iPad, the MacBook. We'll be right back.

• 23:27Speaker 05

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• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I said we were going to talk about it a little bit. So here's just like a tiny little bit. Apple canceled WWDC. It's online only. Great. We were long expecting some new products in this timeframe. This is a timeframe where Apple put out new things and they put them out.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Can I just list the number of products that we're sort of like vaguely expecting from Apple right now?

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  So if you're listening to this, you already know we were expecting the iPad Pro and the new MacBook Air. Those came. We're also expecting new MacBooks that have like 14 inch screens and also getting the new Switch keyboards across the entire MacBook line. We are expecting AirTags so you can locate stuff. We're expecting the iPhone SE 2 slash iPhone 9 slash whatever the heck you want to call it. They cannot call it the iPhone 9. Now we could have that argument when it happens, man.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  There's a hardware refresh of the Apple TV also rumored out in the world and I'm probably forgetting something. So like, there's a lot of just Apple hardware stuff just kind of floating around. And it seems like it's enough to hold like a full on Apple keynote. They don't always do Apple keynotes in the spring, but they often do. But in Instead, they just, you know, they couldn't because you can't have big groups of people in the same space. So they did something in between. It was in between just a press release, go get it, and a full-on keynote. They had journalists get on conference calls. We watched a video that sort of like described what the new products were. And they're, you know, they're announced, the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air.

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  So I, in our little rundown here, I put the iPad Pro first.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Because I think it's the most interesting thing. It's because it has a keyboard cover with a trackpad and there's trackpad and mouse support in iOS 13.4. And then yesterday, you very confidently told me the MacBook Air was more interesting. And I, I do not understand that. So I'm just going to ask you that from the jump.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  So the most interesting thing they announced was not the iPad Pro and it was not the MacBook Air. It was the new Magic Keyboard, which is different because it's also compatible with last year's iPad Pros. And in general, trackpad support is coming to basically every iPad. So any Bluetooth mouse or trackpad should work with it. So that's the most interesting thing by far, but that Magic Keyboard, which we should talk about, isn't coming out till May. But right now, just looking at the like computers that you can go buy, the iPad Pro has a faster processor and a LiDAR camera. And sure, I don't know how I feel about AR right now. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which makes VR, which is sort of like AR, but there's just a different letter in front of the R.

• 27:04Speaker 04

  I just say it, man. But the MacBook, the MacBook Air, I think that it has A, the keyboard we've all been waiting for. B, they doubled the storage and brought the price under the magical $1,000 point that the MacBook Air should be at. And C, the new processor, granted, it's still a Y series, but it seems like it has crossed sort of a invisible threshold where you can say to most people, you will be fine with this. When I reviewed the last MacBook Air, I was like, it's got this processor, you'll probably be fine with it. It'll slow you down a little bit, but it's probably not going to bug you as long as you do kind of standard stuff. So it's like, fine. I'm very curious to see.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  When we review this new MacBook Air, if instead of saying it's like, fine, we'll be able to say, yeah, it's fine. Like, the difference in tone on those fines, those three things together means that this MacBook Air is like, Apple finally, after five years, has gotten back to having a good default laptop for everybody. Like, think how long we have been wandering in the frickin' keycap desert, in the touchbar desert, in the USB-C dongle life desert. It's been five years of kind of crappy MacBooks.

• 28:25Nilay Patel?

  Do you know how I know it's been five years? Because I still have a 2015 MacBook Pro with the street GPU.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Just even if you liked everything about the MacBook Air, Apple's like, three months behind the mainstream PCs getting like these modern processors.

• 28:45Speaker 04

  Wait, so let's focus on this processor of the $1,000 one, because it is 1.1 gigahertz dual-core Core i3.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Nothing about that says to me, this is an adequate processor for everyone. Why, what, what has made you think that? I will, the, the $1,200 or the $1,300 one, which is 1.1 gigahertz quad-core i5. Okay, I buy it.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  That's probably fine for almost anything. The base model dual-core i3 does not, to me, scream no compromises. I think that dual-core i3 of the 10th gen is like a significant difference from the last generation of the MacBook on, whatever it was. Again, I don't know, I haven't actually used it and benchmarked it, so I could be wrong. But I'm just saying, like, the possibility exists for, I think, the first time in five years of a, like, good default MacBook for everybody. We'll see, it all depends on how fast that, that default processor is. But I kind of am hopeful, I don't know, Paul, am I crazy? Is this processor like, is there any chance that it's, it's good? Am I just, am I just like?

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Naive.

• 29:47Speaker 03

  I mean, the way I've been following PC, I haven't played extensively with like a 10th gen, like, like, mobile, like, super mobile processor, uh, Windows laptop, but reviews wise, this has been a huge win. Like, Intel, this is a bit, this has been a true generational leap. And Intel, it's been a long time coming to have a generational leap. So, yes, the I3 will be very, relatively slow, but it's gonna be way better than a previous low-end MacBook Air. Like, like, up to like 50% faster.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow. Well, so we gotta get them, we gotta review them, we gotta do all that. I will say the other thing to call out is obviously the keyboard with scissor switches, and they changed the key layout, so it's inverted T arrow keys. The amount of walkback that this computer represents, right? They basically put the MacBook Air out to pasture, and then they brought it back because people wouldn't stop buying a non-retina MacBook Air with ports. And then, now they've walked back a bunch of design decisions they made on the Pro computers, butterfly keyboards. They have basically made the MacBook Air that like Joanna Stern was asking for in 2016, right? Just give me a MacBook Air with a retina

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  screen. That's what this looks like, save for the lack of an SD card slot and some USB ports. If this thing had one USB port and an SD card slot, I'd be like, no one should ever buy any other computer, this is the only computer that exists in the world. It's still gotta live that long a life a little bit.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  Can I just tell you that I, I went back and reread and rewatched my, um, review of the original MacBook, MacBook MacBook, the tiny little 12-inch, which I still deeply love. Um, and my whole take there, the, the ending of that review was, um, the, the thing that sucks about the future is that it isn't here yet, so hurry the hell up. Uh, because holding that thing, I was like, this is what the lap, this is what the future of laptops is gonna be. All they need to do is like, uh, make the key, like, I actually, I thought the keyboard was gonna be okay, I didn't know it was gonna turn into disaster. I was like, all they need to do is make it a little bit faster, um, maybe add a port, and like, things will be great. Um, five years later, I was right, it was the future of laptops. It just turned out that that future was kinda, sure.

• 32:01Nilay Patel?

  Just went a little sideways.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  Heribata.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Okay, well, so that's the ma, I mean, there's, we gotta get it, we gotta test it.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, are we going to run Premiere on it and say Premiere is slow? We're probably not going to do that. We'll find some meaningful way to test this thing. But that leads right into the iPad.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:18Nilay Patel?

  It's hard to talk about this iPad without the keyboard, but.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  Try. Let's just try.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Real quick, there's two things. It's got a new processor. Uh, I believe it's the A, is it 13 or 12?

• 32:29Speaker 04

  A12Z.

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  A12Z. Nilay, why is it a Z instead of an X?

• 32:36Speaker 04

  I will tell you that a senior Apple executive said confidently, because it's better than X.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  That's the answer that I have.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  So it's presumably faster. Uh, not that the, uh, that last year's iPad Pro is slow in any way, shape or form. And then there's LiDAR. Um, so there's a wide angle camera on the back. Good choice. There's a standard on the back. Fine. Uh, standard wide. And then there's a LiDAR camera. Um, Apple, uh, wants you to know that it works on the photon level, which, um, that's, that's how lasers work.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Nothing has ever made Dieter this mad. There's some extremely bad marketing copy here.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Here is the iPad. It is built with atoms. It works on an atomic level.

• 33:23Nilay Patel?

  This laser goes at the speed of light. It's like, yep. Got it. Understood.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  But it allows you to do AR, uh, without having to like wave the iPad around to like, get a sense of the room. It can just get a sense of the room almost instantly. It allows you to put, um, augmented reality objects on like arbitrary objects instead of just the floor or a wall or some other flat surface, because it's able to use the processing power of the iPad and the like immediate detection of like depth in a really like granular way. So you can like stick a pillow on a couch or like a, you know, a weird, weirdly shaped chair instead of just like on the floor.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  Can I explain why I'm stoked about LiDAR?

• 34:04Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, this is just a very exciting that this is becoming a truly consumer level, mass-produced sensor, because that's going to be great for like robotics applications and stuff like that. Uh, and that's just been the story of LiDAR over like the past five years. What I'm really stoked about is for content creation. Uh, there's this app, uh, called Displayland. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's been making the rounds. So it's like an I, an iPhone app. And it's for photogrammetry. So you can scan an object, you just walk around an object slowly, or walk around a whole room or apartment or whatever. And it creates a detailed 3D scan and the texture to go on to that scan. And then you can like

• 34:49Speaker 04

  3D print it?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  No, you could, well, you could 3D print it, but you could also like, put it into a VR. And now you, you, you can put it into a game, you know, that, that something that's become so expensive and something that's so difficult in game development is, is the objects themselves.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Like, you know, I'm laughing right now, Paul.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Why?

• 35:08Speaker 04

  Samsung, Samsung claims to have already done this. They did this on the Note 10. You can like rotate the Note 10 around like a little model and it'll like give you a model of it. It's terrible, but.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  So that's the thing. It's pretty bad right now. In Displayland, it's a lot better. But if you had LiDAR, because right now they're just doing it with like cameras and accelerometer and gyroscope information. If you also have LiDAR, you can do some, I believe, very, very good scans of this kind. And then there's just a few more tools that we need to help simplify them so that they run well in games. But I just think game development has gotten so democratized and like people, people are all hanging out in VR right now and, or, or in like, you know, VR type spaces or Fortnite or whatever, you know, like a video game is

• 35:59Speaker 03

  a really cool social space right now. And it's very easy to do the rudimentary game development of just like a camera that moves around in 3D space. But the assets are very difficult to produce right now. And so if we, if we can democratize the, the production of game-ready 3D assets.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Then gamers will be able to rise up.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Fortnite School, for instance, could be really on the table.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  That was the longest buildup to the pitch for Fortnite School I've ever heard.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  I've only ever heard one other pitch report in a school, so it's not a big data set, but I'm going to say that's the longest one. Can I, can I do my irresponsible speculation now? Yeah. All right. Apple cares a lot about AR of all the companies. It's an area of intense interest, Neelai. It's an area of intense interest. Every time you go to an Apple event now, there's like, there's one empty table and then just a bunch of confused people walking around it, holding iPads in the air because instead of putting the product out, they put the product out in AR. Like they love it, like they, they love it. And there's all these rumors of them building glasses. Well, Apple just told us that to do AR right, you need a LiDAR sensor, right? I mean, they, they have, they've made a technology bet on the iPad now that people are going to build

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  to and build around. They're not going to take it away. And so my guess is that whatever Apple's future AR products are, are going to involve some sort of LiDAR sensor because they've now made, they've just put it out there that the best AR they offer is the iPad Pro with a LiDAR sensor. And they can't necessarily do it with like 45 cameras or any of the ways other people want to do it. So like in self-driving cars, for example, which is a slightly different space, there's a huge argument over whether you need a LiDAR sensor in a car, which is the bet that many, many companies are making, or whether you can do it all with cameras, which is the bet that Tesla is making. And Elon Musk has called LiDAR, quote, "a local maximum," right?

• 37:59Nilay Patel?

  He's like, you get this far and that's as far as you're going to get. We've got to figure out with cameras because that's the real way to do it that'll let us do everything. I'm not saying that's one-to-one with AR. I'm saying it's just a similar kind of conversation. Apple is clearly making the bet right now, at this moment, that to do it right, you need a LiDAR sensor. And I think that's just kind of interesting. Like you don't see them play their, their cards that way very often, but I, I would bet you that if they're doing it, their glasses, the glasses will have some sort of time of flight depth sensing system that is not just multiple cameras. Cause they've been at multiple cameras depth sensing since the iPhone 7, right? Like they've been, they've been cranking away at sensing depth with two different cameras for a long time now, and they've decided, all right, we need to add a LiDAR sensor.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  If you guys had to guess when Apple glasses? I still think it's like three or four years out. Like that is still a, I mean, they're not even at the place where the watch can keep its face on all the time. That's a, that's really hard.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  I could imagine along with what you're saying with LiDAR, that theoretically LiDAR is going to be a lot. If the sensor can gather all this depth information and you don't have to synthesize it from like three cameras. Right. You're doing way less GPU work, basically.

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Because you just have straight up 3D data. So like, maybe that, that's going to be more efficient.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  But Paul, the A12Z is the world's most powerful processor. It's unparalleled. It offers both the performance of a high-end workstation, a rack-mounted server, and 45 different generations of Xboxes.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Right. But your glasses aren't going to be able to hold an iPad-sized battery.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. And this is like, one of those things where, you know, they can do almost anything with an iPad. They've got a giant battery. They've got a big processor. They've got a lot of surface area, so that processor gets really hot. You know, like.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  The iPad is, is the place where they can push their sort of arm ambitions faster than anything, harder than anything. And this is kind of where we are. I just think it's like, it's a very interesting piece of hardware to reveal. Because there still isn't a killer app for AR at all, as near as I can tell. And they're desperately trying to get there and they're adding more and more tools to it. They're more committed to it than anybody else.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  It's hot lava. You could like, you can put lava in your living room. I can't wait for that. It's gonna be super fun.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think three, I think three years on glasses is still my guess.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  Okay. On the processor front, though, I, I want a bake-off of this versus the MacBook Air so bad.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  But it's like impossible to do.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  I, it's kind of, it's not truly impossible. Like math, math is math.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Paul, do you know how many emails I got from people who are mad at me that I baked off Premiere on a Mac versus PC? And the Premiere wasn't optimized. It's like, there's no way to do this right.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  I didn't know. Yeah.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  If you can figure it out, tweet it us, tweet it. Paul's at Future Paul. He's, we've got nothing but time on our hands.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  The reason that you can't bake off the iPad Pro to the MacBook Air is that the iPad Pro is not a computer.

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  According to Apple.

• 41:00Nilay Patel?

  All right. Let's, let's, let's turn the page to this keyboard.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  This keyboard made, made of gold.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  It's made of platinum, like in Dungeons and Dragons, there's gold and there's platinum.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  $3,000 for a keyboard.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  300 or 350, 300 for the 11, 350 for the 12.9. I still think they should just call it 13. I don't know why they don't. It's super annoying. So here's what it does. It's a backlit. It's scissor switch. It has this fancy hinge where you open it up with one hand, apparently, or in one motion. And then it kind of breaks about a third of the way up on the back of the iPad. So it floats a little bit over the keyboard or over the deck. And it has a little itty bitty trackpad on it. We haven't seen one in person. The, looking at it, there's like, you know, some space behind the keyboard where the iPad floats over it. My hunch is that trackpad is actually pretty small, which is interesting.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it seems very small.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  You look at the trackpad on a MacBook and it might as well be the whole deck. Like the whole palm rest is basically a trackpad, right? And this is very small. Like there's no palm rest on this thing.

• 42:13Nilay Patel?

  There's a palm area.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  There's like a knuckle, like a thumb knuckle joint rest area.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  And there's a lot of dead space behind the keyboard deck where the display hangs over.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And we don't know how much it weighs. We do not know how much it weighs.

• 42:29Nilay Patel?

  Right. So we're going to do the thing where you try to describe a 3D object to you in audio. And I would normally say if you're in your car, pull over, but I, I suspect most of you are not in your cars.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, fair.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  But metaphorically, pull over.

• 42:41Speaker 03

  The profile reminds me a little bit of the iMac G3 lamp. Or was that G4? The lamp iMac.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was a G4.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  All right. Here's what's going to happen. You're at home. You're not in your car. Go to your bathroom, turn on the faucet and Neelai is going to describe this thing to you in 20 seconds. The perfect amount of time for had washing in three.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to draw this out to 20 seconds.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Go.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. Imagine a book. You unfold the book, but vertically. So you're unfolding the book side. I'm just, I really am just stretching this out. So turn the book sideways so that the spine is pacing away from you. And then you open the book like that. And then magically, the bottom of the first half pulls towards you. So that the, the bottom of the book is flat to the ground. But then you can change the angle of the top part independently of the hinge.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Yeah. You got a two hinge situation.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:35Nilay Patel?

  You got a first hinge that opens out away from you. And then the bottom of the top pulls towards you. And then you can adjust the angle there. Another choice you have, now that you've finished washing your hands, is to just look at a picture on the internet.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Because you are almost certain.

• 43:55Nilay Patel?

  They did this because they did not want to build a traditional laptop shape. And capitulate to the fact that they're very close, right, with a trackpad now, to just making a laptop.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  They're also very close to a Surface, right? If they had just done the traditional, you know, like laptop deck, it would have looked exactly like a Surface. They would have had to have figured out a kickstand solution.

• 44:18Nilay Patel?

  You know, the Surface kickstand, some people love it, some people don't. It definitely stops the, oh crap, my, my iPad flipped over in my lap problem.

• 44:26Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Right. Which if you have a current iPad Pro, and you just try to use it in a bunch of places, it just like flops over way more than you would expect.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  It also solves the, I would like to look at my big, beautiful iPad screen without a keyboard in front of it problem.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So they got this keyboard and a trackpad. Dieter, would you like to discuss its single USB-C port?

• 44:47Speaker 04

  It has a single USB-C port that is on the left-hand side of the keyboard. And it is, uh, only does USB-C pass through power. One thing we don't know actually is how like what the wattage is of that USB C pass through because often USB C pass through is not as powerful or as many watts as you want. So that's interesting. Wait, so it's definitely lower because think about what it is passing through to.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  You gotta clarify, what do you mean pass through?

• 45:14Speaker 04

  So you can, it doesn't do like full USB, right? You can't plug an accessory into it. But if you plug a power source into it, it will pass that power source through. And USB pass through, it's like, you know how you can like, you can buy like a USB cable that like doesn't do data? It just has the wires for power and that's it. That's what USB pass through is. So this thing will not transfer data. Maybe that's a security thing, I don't know. Probably the pogo pins can't handle it, I don't know. But it will transfer power, but it's transferring power through like a physical pogo pin, you know, connection. So the idea that it would be able to do that at, you know, 30, 45 watts is like, I don't know. It seems a very sketchy idea to me. Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 03

  So when I sit down at my iPad to play Fortnite School and I want to plug in my gaming mouse, I will plug that into the bottom of the iPad where you would normally charge it.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Right, which is halfway up the iPad on the right hand side. So you'll have a USB pass through at the corner of the deck on the left hand side. And then you'll have a USB cable.

• 46:17Speaker 03

  And that's where I'll, I'll charge it because Fortnite School is incredibly power hungry. So I'll charge it on the bottom left with pass through and my gaming mouse will be plugged on the top right. Or right, right ish.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  And those, so that, those pogo pins are the smart connector. So this thing clips into a frame, basically a flat surface with the pogo pins. And then it has wires down to the USB C port on the side of, basically in the hinge.

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  And there's, there's just no way that those pogo pins are doing, they will probably do as much power as the iPad needs. There's no way Apple's going to let it not charge at its sort of standard spec. But I doubt if you plugged in an 85 watt MacBook Pro adapter, it's going to give the iPad the full 85 watts.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's no way.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  So we'll see.

• 47:04Nilay Patel?

  Then there's the sort of larger question. I want to talk about how the mouse works a lot, actually, but then there's my just sort of all time question of the smart connector on the back of an iPad. We have been told over and over again is an open connector.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  It's not in the made for iPad program. Anybody can do whatever they want with it. And yet, only Apple and Logitech have ever made devices to plug into this connector. It is one of the all time mysteries of the iPad. And now you're in a position where this thing supports trackpads. So like the opportunities for hardware innovation to turn your iPad into a cooler laptop-y thing are sky high. I would really like to understand why there's so little investment into the smart connector ecosystem. And Apple itself is like any USB or Bluetooth trackpad or mouse will work. They're not like, many people will build smart connector products. It is by far like Time Gartner and I sit around talking about MFI, you know, like a bunch of cool

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  kids.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't talk about Apple's licensing restrictions all along? And the smart connector is like, they have said it's not an MFI. And yet, there's not this rush to make stuff. So hopefully we'll see. But there is a Logitech one for the previous generations of iPads.

• 48:22Speaker 04

  I am, you know, I'm a hopeful guy. I, despite being beaten down and broken and lied to my entire life, I still believe that good things can happen. And I believe that someone is going to make a keyboard accessory with a trackpad that uses a smart connector because the competition is $300.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  So there's a, there's a market opportunity there.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  It's a very obvious one. Okay, let's talk about this trackpad. So it's coming out in iOS 13.4.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Yep, you can try it right now in the public beta.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  And then that's going to hit on the 24th.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  So that's, they're not waiting until iOS 14, which is itself interesting. And then there's like how it works. So let's talk about how it works first. Because the vagaries of Apple's feature politics are whatever. It's pretty interesting. Like, you dove into it more closely than anybody yesterday.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I finally got a chance to play with it on the the public beta today, so I can talk about it. So there's no pointer. There's a little dot. That's your pointer. So it's like your finger is like a pointer. And it does the things that you would expect a trackpad to do. You can right click, which is a thing I forgot to mention in my story. You can scroll. Defaults to natural scrolling, which is the right kind of scrolling.

• 49:35Nilay Patel?

  Can you change it?

• 49:36Speaker 04

  You can unfortunately change it.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  You, and then you can also do like, it works well with like, the standard sort of mouse actions on a website, for example. So we have a backend thing on our website where like, you want to drag and drop stuff, and you could never do that on an iPad because the drag and drop web thing didn't work, and now it does. So they did a lot of super traditional, not wackadoo mouse stuff with it when it starts interacting with things that expect a mouse. So, good job. Second, they did something interesting. So it looks like a little dot. When you hover over a UI element that you would normally tap with your finger, the shape of the like shaded little mouse area thing changes to match the shape of the button that you're hovering over.

• 50:25Nilay Patel?

  Does it snap?

• 50:26Speaker 04

  And it snaps a little bit too. There's a little bit of acceleration where it's sort of like, it goes over the thing. If you've ever used a touch, this is gonna sound so bad. I'm gonna say a thing so that you understand what I'm talking about, and you're gonna get super mad, but I promise you it is way better than the thing I'm about to say. Are you ready?

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  This is such a promise.

• 50:43Speaker 04

  It feels like when you like, mouse over to one of these little icons and it like hits the thing and like, it's sort of like, like snaps to it just a little tiny bit. It feels just a little bit like using the touchpad to go to an icon on the Apple TV with the Apple remote.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  I promise you it's okay. You can turn it off.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Wait, so you can totally turn off the capture thing?

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Yes, you can turn off to like change the shape of the thing to match the thing.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Okay, my worry is that I'm gonna, I've got this little gray circle, it's going around, that's my mouse cursor. A little hard to find, would prefer maybe an arrow, but whatever, I'll live with it. And then I'll lose it. It will like, it will be absorbed into a button and then like, oh, where did my cursor go? Does that the sensation or is it better than that?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  No, it's just there. It's just, it's just, it's like when you're playing a first person shooter in easy mode. And it just like handles a little bit of extra aiming for you. So you can get that headshot, even though you actually suck at it. It's just like that. It doesn't actually like go flying around where you don't expect it or get locked on something or whatever. It's just like a little bit of assistance to like hit the target.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Aim assist. I mean, I like, when I first saw it, I was like, is this the true great compromise between mouse and touch? And this is like the, the, the table stakes idea that was there all along? Or is there a reason that mice don't work like this? And I obviously need, I need to try it to find out.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  Well, Paul, so it turns out that you want to do more than select text and scroll and click on buttons with the mouse. You want to like navigate your operating system, right?

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, three finger swipe, no problem.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Three finger swipe up goes home, three finger swipe up and hold takes you to multitasking. Three finger swipe to the left or the right switches apps. But if you happen to have a slide over app open, three finger swipe, as long as the mouse is inside the slide over app will switch between slide over apps. Similarly, three finger swipe up will open up the slide over stack. If you want to open up those slideovers in the first place, you throw the mouse all the way to the right hand side of the screen. It sort of stops and then you like keep scrolling or keep, you know, dragging your finger. And then the slide over, as you slide to the right, jumps in, moving left. That disconnect between the direction of the mouse and the direction of the thing that happens. That is where things get weird between the touch interface and the mouse interface because.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  With the dock coming up from the bottom, or notification center coming down from the top, or the slide over coming in from the right, the motion of your hand for like, becomes the opposite of the motion of the thing on the screen. You know what I mean? So like you to get the dock, you you throw the mouse at the bottom, and then you sort of keep dragging your finger, and then the dock slides up. It's like you're you're digging for the dock. Yeah, it feels a little weird. You'll probably get used to it. It's probably fine. Uh, but that is like one odd element to like you like what your mouse does and where it is like is a little bit contextually dependent, and that could theoretically get a little bit like.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay, here's what I've heard so far, just to to back this up.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 53:58Nilay Patel?

  It works a lot like the Apple TV interface. Doubles down on the insanity of the iPad multitasking interface. Why would I want this in my life?

• 54:09Speaker 04

  Because you could actually like highlight text without having to learn finger gymnastics.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Sure, I just.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Because you don't have to lift your arm up off of the the deck of the table to like get gorilla arm to tap the thing on the screen.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I mean, I buy all that. It just seems like the amount of reinventing the wheel to avoid just doing it like the Mac is at an all time high.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there's like, there are things that are better than the Mac for sure. So for example, uh, you slide up to the top, it highlights the time if you're in the upper right, and that brings down control center. It's like continue your slide up. You don't even have to click on it. Control center comes down. You bring your mouse over to the brightness scale, and you want to adjust the brightness. Well, what do you do? It's like it's a Mac, you like click down and then drag it. On the um, touchpad on the iPad, you just hover your mouse over that slider, and then you just use two fingers to scroll it, and it changes.

• 55:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 55:01Speaker 04

  It's cool, right? Like, basically, like, the metaphorical equivalent is like, one finger taps, two fingers basically acts like a drag all the time, like scroll, basically. And then three fingers is for like, universal iPad OS system level stuff, right? Um, and like, if you have that sort of framework in your head, everything makes sense, uh, except I still think the like edge bring elements in is a little bit weird. And you like, you gotta trust me on the snapping thing.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  When I think of the people who most often buy iPads, I think of people who. Instinctively and intuitively build a framework for how many fingers operate at which level of abstraction in the interface.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  Well, the idea, Neil, is that you learn it intuitively through just playing around with it, not having to watch how to videos. That's the problem with the iPad's overall interface is to understand how the shit works. You have to like, watch how to videos for a split screen and slide over.

• 55:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So how much of this are they gonna throw away with 14?

• 55:58Speaker 04

  That is an excellent question. I have no idea. Like, if they, if they give you like, a window mode in 14, then they have completely capitulated to the Surface.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Do you have any idea if, if, I can't imagine Apple allowing this, but well, let's say a developer's been sitting on the fence like, hey, we can make a, a, what's, what's, what's that word when you make a Mac app, but you use iOS?

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Catalyst.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  We can make a catalyst app, no problem, but we have a truly mouse-driven UI, and we would love to put this on the iPad, but it really does not work without a mouse. Could someone put it, an app in the store, and there's a big warning, this is a mouse-preferred experience?

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  No. That's like, if you're gonna capitulate to Microsoft, do not capitulate to your software having mouse-preferred logos on it. Like, that is some truly 90s Microsoft stuff.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  What about mouse, mouse-enhanced?

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god. It's like, you don't want any of that. Works with Microsoft, Bob. Like, you don't want those logos on your software at all.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Well, and you don't want your, like, how you navigate around the operating system to change depending on if you're in tablet mode or not. This is the problem with the Surface is, I, I bet you 90% of people never bother with tablet mode. And if you get stuck in tablet mode or not, and you don't know exactly what's going on, it's super confusing and annoying.

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  I would argue that this is the problem with the iPad. It's, well, the iPad Pro, I have one.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  I like using it. It lives in its case all of the time. It never take it out of that case, and I never, that case, even, this one's much lighter, right? The, the current keyboard folio thing is probably much lighter than the one that's coming out. It's still like a little bit heavy, even the 11 is a little bit heavy. And the key, the keys are on the back of the case when you have it open in tablet mode. So I never want to sit around using that thing in portrait as a tablet unless I take it out of the case. And I never do it. And I think that this is like, Apple's just quickly getting to the point where the utility of being able to just make it a pure tablet is kind of, is getting overshadowed.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  But by what its aspirations for the product are with Pro Apps and keyboard support and 15 finger multitasking. So like, that's the, that's the leads right into when they're just going to turn it into a Mac conversation, which I will say to Apple's credit, they absolutely do not care about. What did they do this week? They put out a MacBook Air and an iPad Pro at basically the same price point, right on top of each other. And they said, and they're like, no, they're like, who cares? Like, you people are going to buy whatever one they want to buy. That's fine as long as they're buying them from us. That, that is a remarkable amount of confidence for any company. But it, it does make for, you know, people like us, people listening to this being like, which one's which?

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Ah, like, they just don't care. It's amazing that they don't care, but they clearly do not care.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  Well, and they think the customers don't care. They don't think any, like, the, the thing I put in the newsletter Thursday morning is, uh, they like, nobody is confused when they go to, to the Apple Store to buy something. They know what they want. It's not, it, there's no existential crisis here.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think existential crisis is like, if they're going to put an ARM processor in a Mac, then these things are going to feel way closer than they ever have before. And now it comes down to which Apple operating system do you like better? And one of them is, one of them is still more complete than the other. And the other one is more innovative and has all the energy behind it.

• 59:26Speaker 04

  Yep. Well, so this is like, if you have siblings, I want you to know that even though your parents say that they love you all equally, they love your sibling more than you. And this is the problem with having two directly competitive products is deep in their heart, Apple loves one of them more. And if you are like a fan of the Mac, um, you're a little bit worried about that.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say that has edged off a little bit for me just because they, they have put out the 16 inch MacBook Pro. They put out this Mac Pro, like, they have made very loud statements that they're still investing in these products.

• 59:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the hardware. How about the software, Neil? How's that going on the Mac right now?

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard of Metal 2? Once everyone else supports Metal II, they'll be great. But as long as there's still hardware and people can do it, it's fine. Okay, let's take a break. There is yet more hardware to talk about in this world. Some fancy game consoles. The next generations are coming at us. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:25Speaker 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.

• 1:00:54Speaker 06

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• 1:01:00Speaker 08

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

• 1:01:03Speaker 06

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

• 1:01:12Speaker 09

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• 1:01:19Speaker 06

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

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul.

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  Hold this, hold this country together, man.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Do your best.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  With astonishing consistency.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  I got you, man. My segment that I do every week has always and will always be called, "I'm a Moog man now."

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Or some would say Moog. So, uh, Moog and Korg are, you guys know, I've talked about this so many times, that I love to put synthesizers and all sorts of music creation apps on my iPad. And it's a very expensive habit because most of these cost five, 10, $20 for, for some of them. Well, uh, just as a fun, a musical way to occupy your mind is the quote. Moog has, has come out with, uh, has made its Mini Moog Model D iOS app for free. Korg is making Chaosolater, which is a $20 app.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Free. And it's just wonderful. I've been meaning to buy the Mini Moog, but I just never got around to it. I downloaded it. It's making great sounds. I just, I'll say this until I die. It is feels so cool to download an app onto your iPad and feel like you've got new hardware. You know what I mean?

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  Like, that's just such a, it feels like you downloaded more RAM. You know, you feel like you downloaded a gadget and it's, I mean, Korg calls its main iPad music app. It calls it gadget. That's, I don't know. Anyways, I would just thank you to Korg and Moog. I'm gonna really enjoy it. And I already have enjoyed it. And yeah, yeah, go download those apps because they're free and they make

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  What's SoundCloud, Paul?

• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  Beautiful noise. Uh. Probably, it's, it's probably future, Paul.

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  All right. So Xbox Series X, PS5, again, strange times. No big events, no E3.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  They, they rolled out specs for these things in strange ways, but we know a lot about them now. Paul, walk us through it.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  It is so exciting. Sony did the greatest livestream that I've really seen in, in years. Basically Sony had planned to do a talk at GDC where it would do a technical deep dive on the decisions that they were making for the PlayStation 5. Obviously GDC has been canceled, so they just did it as a livestream and they didn't try to pivot to something that was like consumer facing or, or let's say consumer friendly.

• 1:04:11Speaker 03

  But it was wonderful for someone like me who really wanted to nerd out about it. And so now we know the specs of, of both of the consoles in, in, in the, at least in the abstract. So like, we've been hearing for a while, they're both based on like AMD's Zen 2 architecture. Both have AMD RDNA 2 GPUs. The Xbox Series, Series X is rated at 12 teraflops, right? With 52 compute units. While PlayStation 5 is going to be 10.28 teraflops with only 36 compute units. But, so that's, that's the big distinction.

• 1:04:54Nilay Patel?

  So which one is more powerful, Paul? You, you have to answer right now. You have to go on the record right now, which one is more powerful so that everyone can tweet at you that they disagree. At Future Paul, go.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Can I give you a gut reaction?

• 1:05:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 03

  I think it's going to be the PlayStation 5.

• 1:05:08Nilay Patel?

  Whoa.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  Let me tell you why. More flops is more flops, right?

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  I love me some flops.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Flop, flops are flops. If you are just doing math, right?

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  Flops are floating point operations per second, something like that.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 03

  If you're just multiplying a lot of numbers and you have a problem where you can do all of that multiplication completely in parallel, the Xbox wins, right?

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's a really, that's a really down to earth explanation of how processing works. It's a real, real teraflop.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Wow. Imagine you need to do a bunch of dishes, right? You'll have one sink, right?

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  So it doesn't matter how, well, now you don't have flops anymore in this scenario.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  Nothing makes me happier than like trying to explain like CPUs versus GPUs in this way.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  Let me go, let me go. One sink is, is the compute unit, right? How fast you do the dishes is the clock speed, right?

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Yep.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  So if your work is, can't be perfectly split up into all 52 or whatever, um, compute units of the Xbox, it will benefit from having just the raw clock speed because you're just doing work faster on the PlayStation.

• 1:06:27Nilay Patel?

  Let me try to, let me try to pull this metaphor into something slightly less understandable, but, uh, more visually hilarious. What's faster? One extremely fast dishwasher?

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  Or four slower dishwashers?

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  Right. Cause the, what, what's important to know is that four slower dishwashers are faster theoretically. But when the, the game developer, who's the guy, the guy who's holding the stack of dishes, right? Is the game developer? He's got to distribute work to all of the four dishwashers. If he can't manage to evenly distribute the work to the four, then the single will actually end up winning. That's why my. My gut instinct is that the PlayStation 5 might outperform the Xbox in in an average case because it's hard to always light up everything once in parallel, but I don't know actually for sure, obviously.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  Is there anything, is there anything architecturally that makes it hard to light up everything in parallel on the Xbox? Or is it just that like it's just harder? You just gotta figure shit out?

• 1:07:33Speaker 03

  No, it's like doing things in parallel is is like a computer science problem.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  It's it's just that that sort of that synchronization.

• 1:07:41Speaker 04

  Paul, tell me if this metaphor is accurate. They're both basically using like the same like platform, the same chassis, you might say, like the same basic parts, but Microsoft made a Camaro and Sony made a Corvette.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  I have no idea what the difference is.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  That makes just not enough sense.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  The other big difference between these, and this one is looks like it's looking like an obvious total win for Sony, is that Sony went SSD crazy. And so the PlayStation 5 is going to have an 825 gigabyte SSD. Xbox Series X is going to have a one terabyte SSD. But it sounds like Sony's is going to be about twice as fast. Sony is doing a bunch of, like, they made their own custom control. And this is why this, oh my gosh, this talk was so much fun.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  He's talking about like algorithms for moving data from the SSD to RAM and stuff. One thing I think both of the these consoles are really going to benefit from that he was is Mark Cerny, I believe is his name, the Sony guy who's explaining all the stuff. Both of the, because SSDs are so much faster than hard drives, game developers have been doing a ton of tricks with hard drives to put data all like together so that it can be read sequentially, so it can be accessed in in fast, fast enough times to load something. And that's what what game developers have had to do is duplicate a lot of data. So one of the things he mentioned was that like Spider-Man, there's like

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  400 copies of the same like mailbox in Spider-Man just to have data locality for where it's put on the physical hard drive. So now with SSDs, they're not going to have to do that. So games will be smaller, but also the amount of data that needs to stream from the disk to the RAM is small. It's like everything's getting faster all at once. Sony's saying like, like maybe 100 times speed up as far as disk usage over the PlayStation 4.

• 1:09:56Speaker 04

  So here's the, here's the thing that I latched on to from this presentation. You know, load time, load time, right? Like the load time is faster. You have to spend less time looking at a screen with a tip on it. Great. That's very exciting for me. But what, what the Sony presentation was saying is like, look, if, if you've got faster load time, you can do stuff with like the level design that you couldn't do before. Cause lots of games want to have no loading screen at all. And so you move from like one big, you know, set piece area to the next one. And in between those two set piece areas, the, the old one needs to go away and the new one needs to get loaded. And so they have you walk through like a long ass tunnel, right? You, you, how many times have you done this? I'm doing this right now because I'm replaying Tomb Raider, right? Like you like, you all of a sudden are like walking through a cave for some reason.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  And then you go to the next place, right? But with a faster load time in the background, you don't have to go through a weird, long ass tunnel. So that the next set piece area has time to load. You could just go to the next one. So it will change the design of levels because it will give game developers, like they'll have to do less weird hacky things to work around the limitations of the disk speed.

• 1:11:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it will change how especially open world games are developed in that sense. But I also think it's just like game developers will always do wild hacky things to get the most out of the hardware. But in some sense, like they've made it just, they've made it easier to make a game, which is like really exciting. This game can be slightly less effort to create.

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  Okay. So what is the big takeaway other than specs? Are game developers excited or which one should I buy? Who's going to win?

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  So here's a Darth on Twitter, if you know who Darth is, the red panda, actually asked me this question. And I told him, I don't, I don't give out advice on Twitter. I only give out snark. But I actually like, said, here's how I see it. Microsoft has said that they are not going to have game exclusives at launch. And it is possible that one of these is technically faster and has better specs, etc. But I think that for most people, you don't have an AK TV, you don't have a TV that supports variable refresh rate, you will benefit from like, the improved thing, but it takes everybody, you know, a year or so to figure out how to optimize for console anyway, most of the time. And so, set aside, if you can, like, the spec war, the like, oh, my God, who's got the

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  better faster thing? Like, assume they're both like, way faster and way better, and in each other's range. Then, traditionally, the next thing is, you know, who has the best games? Well, that doesn't apply. So what are we actually looking at here? I think for Sony, it's, we have these games. And for Microsoft, it's, we have this ecosystem. And actually, replying to me and Darth, the red panda, was a guy who works for Microsoft, Frank Shaw, head of comms. And he just replied with Microsoft answer, which was, I'm gonna get this wrong now. It was, I believe, content, community, cloud, console.

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  The four Cs, the classic four Cs of a console generation.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  So content, we have good games, community, like, all your friends are on Xbox, cloud. That's not true, though. You're like, your stuff is like, on Windows 10, and it's on X cloud, and it's on your console, and like, you've, everything's all working together, and you don't have to use Steam, because you can just use Microsoft services, whatever. And then, lastly, the console, the console is good. Like, if you look at Microsoft's thinking about how to build a gaming ecosystem.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Wait, is that an order of priority?

• 1:13:28Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  Like, the most important is content, and then there's community, and then there's cloud, which, I'm still not sure what that means. And then it's console?

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  I think so. I just, I'm, I'm just proud of a Microsoft employee for tweeting out an entire tweet without using the word Azure. Because that doesn't happen very often.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Well done, Frank. You know, they did, what they did not say was, cable box control. Which is a real...

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  Thesis for the last time.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  The cable box control decision, right? The Microsoft screwing up the last generation so badly gave Sony a huge lead, right? And I think that's one of the most important things on the console is that your buddies are playing on the same console, uh, console as you are so that you can easily party together and like play multiplayer games with your friends. So, you know, if your friends are still on a PS4 and you're getting a PS5 or you're, you're looking at which next gen do I want? Well, all my friends are on PS4 still. I think I want a PS5. So that's going to be like a, a, a big decision. Obviously, if one of these consoles is obviously better for some reason, maybe it'll get an

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  edge, but I feel like Sony has a lot of momentum going into this. So if they launch at a very similar price at a very similar time as Microsoft, I would, I would think they'd be doing fine. There is a question like ray tracing is interesting on these because Microsoft can lean in to the fact that has DirectX and it has like DirectX ray tracing stuff kind of all set up. So, so Microsoft can get more benefits from optimizations that people do for PC games can more directly, I think, translate to, to the, uh, to the Xbox. I don't think that's like completely out of the realm of possibility for, you know,

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  obviously people are still going to do these optimizations or similar optimizations for PlayStation games, but I think Microsoft has a little bit of edge there. They also have ray traced Minecraft, which is awesome, but like Sony, like Dieter was saying, like Sony is the only console that has exclusive games now.

• 1:15:36Nilay Patel?

  All right. What are dates? What are dates people need to know next? What happens next?

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Nobody knows.

• 1:15:40Nilay Patel?

  Holiday.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  It there, yeah, they're saying, as far as I know, they're still saying end of 2020, but that obviously. Could get pushed. Oh, one fun note that you guys will love is that the Xbox has a proprietary NVMe expansion. You remember I was talking about that little slot? Looks like an Express Card slot. It is for proprietary. So far, just Seagate will be making these NVMe drives that you can expand storage. Sony is basically saying you will be able to expand the storage, but wait, don't buy because this is going to be a, not only it's going to be

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive. So like a next gen NVMe drive, which most, most right now are PCI 3. But also we did some crazy stuff that's like custom for, and, and we can't promise that will work with all PCIe 4 NVMe drives. So that's gonna be fun.

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:42Nilay Patel?

  There's nothing like a console based proprietary storage war.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  You could still plug in a classic like HDD or whatever to play legacy games. But the new games that use the hot shit, fast loading time stuff require these new proprietary cards. Okay. Can I? Okay.

• 1:17:00Nilay Patel?

  Are they gonna call them memory sticks? That's all I really want to know.

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  I know. I want memory sticks to be like, don't worry. Sony has also developed a new 3D audio format.

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  You're doing this at the end? We're like an hour and a half into this thing.

• 1:17:16Speaker 03

  Uh, that's about all I know.

• 1:17:18Nilay Patel?

  But Sony can't do anything. Sony can't go to the bathroom without doing a proprietary 3D audio format. That's all they know how to do. It's like when they, when they spin up the new Kanban board for making a new thing, like it auto populates. The proprietary 3D audio format. It's just like built into the development template at Sony. It's great.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm very excited to listen to the one like Santana song that they ever release in this format. It will sound amazing, I'm sure. That's great. All right, we got to wrap this up. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I'm confident that maybe listeners have heard my child screaming and running around in the background because that's been happening. Thank you for putting up with the little difference in audio quality as we're going through this at this time. I appreciate it. I appreciate you sticking with us. I hope that we were able to provide you some entertainment at home. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless. Dieter is at backlon. Paul is at future Paul. We're available. We're not going anywhere. Just like hit us up. Let us know what you want us to talk about, who you want us to have on the interview shows.

• 1:18:22Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of the interview show, on Tuesday, we have the CEO of Impossible Foods, Patrick Brown. That was actually a great conversation. He's a really interesting dude. And we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. We're going to power it through this. So yeah, let us know. Talk to us. Tweet at us. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Promo code.

• 1:18:58Speaker 10

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• 1:19:28Speaker 11

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