Reviews for the Macbook Air and iPad Pro (2020) and how the coronavirus is affecting tech companies and culture

Stories discussed this week: Amazon warehouse workers are outraged after a coworker tested positive for COVID-19 and they weren’t notified ‘We’re all going to get sick eventually’: Amazon workers are struggling to provide for a nation in quarantine It’s time for a regular Amazon daily coronavirus briefing Twitter locks account encouraging coronavirus ‘chickenpox parties’ Zoom is 2020’s hottest yoga studio Apple says customers must wait to pick up repairs locked inside its retail stores Best Buy moves to curbside pickup only as it sees surge in orders for home office equipment Disney Plus and Facebook are also reducing streaming quality in Europe Amazon and Apple are reducing streaming quality to lessen broadband strain in Europe YouTube joins Netflix in reducing video quality in Europe YouTube creators figure out how to film during a pandemic Fashion influencers are rethinking their curated aesthetics because they can’t leave their houses Fox will broadcast NASCAR’s substitute sim racing ‘season’ on television Pro drivers are competing with gamers after F1 and NASCAR canceled races How to watch movies with friends online Everything you need to know about the coronavirus Subscribe to Home Screen: a newsletter to brighten your inbox Apple MacBook Air (2020) review: the best Mac for most people Apple iPad Pro review 2020: small spec bump, big camera bump Never buy hardware today based on a promise of software tomorrow The new MacBook Air and iPad Pro are already discounted on Amazon Huawei hopes the P40 Pro can lure you away from Google Living a Google-free life with a Huawei phone Dell now lets you control iPhones from its PCs 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 how the coronavirus is affecting tech companies and tech culture, big and small. We go into our MacBook Air and iPad Pro reviews, talk a little bit about the Huawei P40 Pro. There's an Android history lesson in there somewhere. There's a weird little Dell app that we think is interesting. Coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  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 in Bev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:46Speaker 02

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• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Working From Home. I mean, that's the easiest trick. I'm sorry, it was there and I took it. I'm your friend Neelai. Dieter Böhm is here. Hi, I'm also at home. Paul Miller.

• 1:32Speaker 05

  Hello, I'm at home.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if you're like, I'm at a rave.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  But I think you're at home.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  It is week two of us doing this from this setup, which we're all at home. I hope it sounds good. I think it does. We're changing some things up. Let us know. We're obviously trying to improve it week by week, but we are all working from home, just like all of you should be if you have the ability to do it, the people who are out. Going to work every day, we thank you. But if you have the ability to work from home, you should be, just like us. We're trying to make this show as good as possible. Let us know how we're doing. Okay, it is a strange time to do a podcast that is nominally about computers, because there's the world's biggest story, which is the coronavirus. I do want to call out, first of all, the Verge science team, which is absolutely slammed covering the coronavirus, the response to the worldwide pandemic, and the many, many stories inside

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  of that. So, point you at them, they're doing great. We're gonna have Nicole, who is our health reporter, she was on the Verge last couple of weeks ago, we'll have her back, we'll have Mary Beth, who's our science editor back, and we'll have Liz Zapata, our deputy editor. We're gonna have them coming back on the show in the future. As events warrant, there is a bunch of stuff that we need to talk about, but did you review the iPad this week? I reviewed a MacBook Air. We're definitely gonna talk about those reviews. But I do want to call out some less, sort of like, directly virus-related stories, and more of the effects of the pandemic that are absolutely in the Verge zone. So, first, I'm just gonna say, it's been two weeks since there was a flowchart presented at the White House. By the time

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  you're listening to this, it will have been two weeks since Donald Trump got on in front of the podium and said, "Google's making us a website," and they held up a flowchart about how you can get tested. That flowchart, in case you forgot, because why would you remember it, that flowchart said you would go to a website that was maybe or maybe not made by Google, you'd enter your symptoms, it would say you need a test, it would direct you to a place where you could drive through a testing clinic in the parking lot of a major retailer like Walmart or Target or something. You would get a test, you would drive home, and then the website would give you the result. That was the promise. They literally held up a flowchart, saying that was gonna happen. It has been two weeks. That website does not exist, as near as we can tell.

• 3:53Speaker 05

  A website exists. Google made a website. The website has state-by-state information, links to your state health, you know, department, and other, other things you might want to know. But it is not the other website. The other website that does do this stuff, Verily, they did it just for the Bay Area. That website still exists. I haven't checked recently if they, like, opened up to more people, but reports said it was, you know...

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Twenty, it was like 20. They tested 20 people on the first.

• 4:19Speaker 05

  They recently published a YouTube video that says this is what the drive-through, this is how the thing works, and what a process looks like, which is great. It, like... You would go and you'd sign up and then like you get a number and then you go in your car and the first step you keep your window rolled up and like show your driver's license through the window and then the second step they like give you a like QR code and your windshield wiper and the third step you get tested. All that looks fine.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember when Microsoft released the Courier concept video? That's what you just described to me. It's a beautiful Microsoft concept video. It's a book that opens and turns into a tablet. Anyway, it's been two weeks. I don't want to forget about it. There are, it is true that Walmart did open to drive through testing facilities in and around Chicago, but only for first responders and medical workers. But a big underlying story here is testing who can get a test, when you can get a test. We're going to keep tracking it. It is somewhat coincidental that the Virgcast comes out on Fridays, which is the day that the promise was made. So it's very easy for me to remember how many weeks it's been. But that's one big story. I just want to keep calling it out because the testing

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  is really, it's really critical to getting it under control and that was a promise I was made. So it's been two weeks since then. We're going to keep tracking on it. Then there's the other part, which I think is, touches a lot of the companies that we usually talk about in the Virgcast. So Amazon is still functional. They have changed their entire product mix. Jeff Bezos put out a note saying it was all he was thinking about was his response to COVID-19 and Amazon's role in it. Their warehouses are still working. Josh Jezza has two great stories on the site now about warehouse workers who are extremely fearful because they're still going to work, working in close proximity with each other. There was a warehouse where, and Josh has a bunch of reporting here, where someone got sick, tested positive, Amazon didn't inform the rest of the warehouse workers.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  And they found out from news reports, they found out by demanding HR. So there's, I think there's going to be a lot of Amazon related information that comes out because obviously those people, those folks are still going to work and that's, it's really important that they still go to work as all of our consumption sort of shifts online and they, they become responsible for delivering so many supplies to people. I want to connect that to what Casey has been doing on the interface, which is his newsletter about social platforms and democracy. He wrote a really good piece calling for Amazon, Facebook, the big platforms, Google, that we rely on to hold their own infrastructure briefings, just like we're getting from the government because we are deeply reliant on Amazon now. We're deeply reliant on Google and Facebook.

• 6:49Nilay Patel?

  It would be nice to know how they're doing, particularly Amazon, which is going to be delivering a lot of stuff. So that's like just one big set of reporting that we've done.

• 6:57Speaker 06

  I thought this would be a good time to go get a job at Amazon warehouse. And I looked it up and the nearest one to the city is, is New Jersey. So that means everything that I buy is all like sorted or processed in, I don't know. So I gave up on that, that dream.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Isn't there one in Queens?

• 7:14Speaker 06

  Uh, not that I didn't know of one, but that there weren't any jobs listed at least.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Amazon has said they're going to hire a hundred thousand people to work in these warehouses. I mean, the, the scale of demand is very high for their service.

• 7:27Speaker 06

  Right. That was my thinking, like, and I'm in the prime of youth. I'm ready to work. Put me to work.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, Paul, stay home.

• 7:33Speaker 06

  I want to sort things and, and run ragged and, and become sad and, and broken down as a, a, Amazon employee.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  Look, Paul, you thought being managed by me was like being managed by a robot.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  Wait until Amazon gets hold you.

• 7:48Speaker 05

  I do think that the daily briefings are a good idea, especially when, as people get more and more concerned about the welfare of the workers in the warehouse. There should be a lot more transparency about what's going on there for those workers. And for everybody that wants to know if it's like even ethical to be ordering stuff from Amazon right now.

• 8:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, there's, there's a part of this whole thing where I would say the verge is historically obsessed with buttons.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  In general, it's like a thing that we really like. And one of, one of the easiest ways for us to find a story is to say, what happens when you push this button? Right. And we have an entire podcast called, why'd you push that button? And so like, you know, Casey and the Facebook moderator story is really like, when you push the report button on Facebook or YouTube, there's an army of people who have to do the work. I think with Amazon, when you push the button and something shows up at your house, that has been so invisible for so long. And now the, the work that they're doing in the world carries an heightened element of risk. And I think this whole thing for me is, is really like, you push the button on the internet on the screen. Other people now have to put themselves at some amount of risk. And I think it's really brought that into relief for me. So that's one set of things.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Just Amazon as a whole, Josh is covering it, Casey's covering it. I want to call that out. Then there's what is happening on the social platforms. I think another really interesting dynamic that's playing out is we have talked a lot on the show about how social platforms moderate content, who should be responsible for it, whether the government should be involved. Here, it's pretty clear that there are right answers and wrong answers. And there's what the CDC and the World Health Organization say. And then there's like, you should drink bleach to cure yourself from the virus. So the platforms have all taken stronger lines on moderating themselves because there's no controversy.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, what's interesting about this is they've not only have they taken stronger lines, but they've also said explicitly, a couple of platforms, we're taking a stronger line, and that might mean that we're going to moderate stuff. We're going to err on the side of moderating too much. We might hide something that we shouldn't. And that's, we know we're going to, we're going to make those mistakes. Get ready for it. It's going to be fine. And everyone's like, yep, cool, fine. However, in terms of their actual actions, there have definitely been some tweets and some other things from like, high profile politicians that really crossed the line and didn't, didn't get taken down because they, you know, reasons.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  I don't want to go too far into this, but I, I disagree that there's an obvious right and wrong with some of this stuff. Like, like, it is not certain or clear or obvious that all of the recommendations made by world health organizations have been accurate. Like, it is not obvious. I think there's an open debate about the early recommendations of not wearing a mask, whether that was to, for the supply of masks, or if that is actually a health recommendation.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  You know, I think you're right. I think it's more like, you don't usually see Medium issue guidelines on what you can post on Medium, right? And yesterday, they put out guidelines, and Casey and Zoe covered them in the newsletter. Like, they put out guidelines that like, if you publish a blog post on Medium where you're like, burn the CDC down, they're going to take your post down. And that's, that is just an easier call for a platform like Medium, which usually doesn't do stuff like that. Twitter is locking accounts that are encouraging coronavirus chicken pox parties, right? It's just an easier call. So Paul, I agree, like, the mask thing in particular, right? Like-

• 11:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I just think there's lots of things that are worth debate.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think that what, okay, fine. And I think the substance of the debate, we do not need to do right now. Like, I would hand that over to the particular science reporters. I'm saying here, the platforms have taken a side in a way that they feel is much more supported than their usual model.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  One platform I did not expect to have to deal with, like, moderation issues and improving moderation tools was Zoom. Because you think of Zoom as just like, the only people that are ever on your Zoom are your coworkers. But that's not what Zoom is anymore.

• 11:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and there was a, I think, Taylor Lorenz and Mike Isaac and some other folks at the Times, there was many bylines in the story, had a whole story about Zoom. And in the middle of it was, now that all the teenagers are on Zoom, they're getting bullied and there's calls for Zoom to moderate the Zoom platform. I would never let Zoom employees into our work Zoom.

• 12:08Speaker 05

  Nope.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  There are no reasons. And I would never want a button in our work Zoom that like, hit a recording and could send it out to Zoom support. But I think on the consumer side, they might need that stuff.

• 12:19Speaker 06

  Discord is like that. I mean, Discord is a lot of teens hanging out with each other and bullying each other and talking about suicide. As a Discord has some pretty strong, I don't know the efficacy, but has some pretty strong moderation.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's just the split between Discord is a consumer product, they know who their audience is, and Zoom is an enterprise product that is now being used by consumers in deeply unexpected ways. And that is just, we're seeing, like Slack broke its user records, because everybody's working from home and everybody's communicating on these platforms. Jake wrote an entire story about how all these yoga studios are now doing their classes on Zoom. Like, those are unexpected use of the technology. Like, in normal circumstances, unexpected use of technology are like, what we do here. That's what the verge is about. You know, it's like, these are like, somewhat joyful, unexpected emergent behaviors. They're being caused by something horrible. But enterprise software being used by millions of consumers in unexpected ways to potentially like bully and harm each other. That means Zoom has

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  to quickly become a consumer company in a way that it was never conceived of from the start, even though it did have that free tier. I think that free tier was to get like, your startup to use it, so that one day your startup would be successful, and then you would pay Zoom. It wasn't so that like, a bunch of teenagers would use it. And I think that we're going to see that play out over time. It's a really hard moderation question. Speaking of working from home, the laptop sales are up according to a bunch of the analyst firms. You know, if you are in a state with like shelter at home, stay at home regulations. Best Buy, you know, says it's like an essential business. It has to stay open so people can buy office furniture. They've closed down in store, so you can only order online and then drive to the curb side and they'll put it in.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  If you forget to order something online, you can order at the curb from the Best Buy employees, which is like a remarkable outcome. Apple is doing the same thing, their stores are closed. If you have a repair, if you have something that you gave to Apple for a repair, you just can't get it. You just gotta wait. Like, that's just a ripple effect of this that I don't think anybody, anybody saw coming. And then this is, this next one is kind of the big one for me. It's something that we have just been watching, playing out. We're asking a lot of questions. Particularly in Europe, the internet is being strained. And so you see all these services say they're going to slow things down. So Disney Plus and Facebook are reducing their video streaming quality in Europe. Amazon and Apple are reducing their quality in Europe.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  YouTube and Netflix followed in reducing their video quality in Europe. YouTube overall is reducing its default video quality to SD for the next month. And then Sony is slowing down PlayStation downloads in Europe, but they promised that multiplayer will remain fine. That is, I mean, how much do we talk about broadband policy on the show? We had Jessica Rosenthal from the FCC on, Gigi Stone just wrote an editorial for us. The day that recorded on Thursday, you should go read it about how we kind of like walked into this mess. But one thing we always talk about is your European internet is more highly regulated. They get faster service for cheaper prices. And here in this moment, when everyone is using it,

• 15:25Nilay Patel?

  their capacity is limited in a way that it does not quite yet appear that American capacity is limited. We'll see, like, obviously, Europe is ahead of the curve, so maybe it's. Going to happen to us too, but that is a really interesting split and sort of an unexpected outcome.

• 15:40Speaker 05

  I do wonder if there's a tiny part of it where in Europe, because they have on average faster speeds that maybe HD is more the norm, like, you know, super like 4K, like just high, high resolution streaming is more the norm. And so like down ressing makes a bigger difference, whereas broadband in the US by and large is not that fast. And so maybe fewer people are getting those, those very, very high bandwidth streams in the first place.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're saying we've all just been so deeply conditioned to paying $70 a month for 25 down, then Comcast tolling us for access capacity is like.

• 16:11Speaker 06

  That would be a really cool number to know the average, not available to them, but not on paper, but the actual gigabytes per capita transferred in a day and see what that is like per, per country.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  I mean, Europe is, is known as a continent of pixel density enthusiasts. So.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Paul, I've always thought of you as being a somewhat secret European.

• 16:38Speaker 06

  I don't think, I don't think I like that. Um, well, Europe's fine. I don't know. It's a lot of people in Europe have bad internet. Um, and I, I would say that, that I'm curious, would this, would this situation call for quote unquote reasonable management?

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  I think that remains to be seen.

• 16:55Speaker 06

  That's the net neutrality term, right? Like a ISP has, should have some right to manage its network so that it works.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so that's the term in the States. I don't know across Europe what the equivalent term is. I don't know that those ISPs have asked for this to be done. Certainly what they're not, what we're not seeing is a bunch of ISPs across Europe throttling Disney Plus on their own, right? We're seeing the companies voluntarily doing it before the ISPs do it. What we have not yet seen here, or at least heard about. Is our ISPs, which have no net neutrality regulation, which if you've been listening to this show, you're deeply aware of, they have not taken those steps. In fact, what our ISPs have done is, and we talked about this last week, they have removed a bunch of restrictions and toll bridges that consumers usually face. So data caps have gone away, late fees have

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  gone away, the idea that they're going to throttle anything is sort of like they're really backing off of that stuff. So I think it's a really interesting time. Like, if all of Comcast Network, and I will disclose Comcast Investor and Vox Media, which is their parent company, but if all of Comcast Network was slowed down by people staying at home, and Comcast said, you know what, screw it, it's Netflix, we're just like, we're going to block Netflix today, they would be legally able to do that. No one could stop them from, I think, obviously, if Comcast decided to block Netflix while everyone was working from home, there would be some sort of market response to that, but.

• 18:21Speaker 06

  You know, like how old GIFs with like the low color and you have the dithering? What if you had like dithered Netflix?

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, isn't that like Disney plus an SDE? Like, that's what we're describing. So that stuff is happening. We're going to keep paying attention to it. I think the two big stories that I want The Verge to get into more aggressively are the role of enterprise software turning into consumer software on Zoom, and then the broadband story, because everybody at home is a big broadband story, and services going up and down in the capacity of our networks. I think those are our stories. We talk about them forever. We're going to pay a lot of attention to it. And then a few more things, just like unhappier emergent behavior notes. The creator economy is obviously responding to this. Ashley

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  has a great story about how fashion influencers are rethinking their entire strategy, because they can't go out and curate and do photo shoots. So go read that story, it's really interesting. And then Julia had a great story today about YouTube creators, who, some of whom are like, yeah, we just film everything at home anyway, so we're good. And then other ones, one of my favorite channels is B is for Build. She talked to, she talked to them, they decided that they were going to basically quarantine as a group and not see anybody else, so they could continue doing like their car build videos. So I think it's just really neat. So go check out those stories. Like, these are ripple effects beyond what you would ever expect. Sean O'Kane had a great story about how professional race car drivers in F1 and NASCAR, and I just like racing online as fans.

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  And that blew up over the weekend and then Fox decided it was just gonna broadcast not NASCAR races, but the virtual racing league with the NASCAR drivers in it, which is like you were talking about esports last week, like this is like the best.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  I love this story, like the how naturally they they just slipped over to just like, we'll just, we'll just, you know, we're playing, we're like testing ourselves on these rigs anyway. We're racing in video game style all of the time anyway. So they just like became Twitch streamers essentially. And it just worked. I mean, it's more complicated than became Twitch streamers, but just how smoothly this transition happened is actually like circumstances aside, like really like fascinating and kind of fun. It is a bummer, like actual NASCAR events are the best. I've been to one, I know you've been to one or two, right?

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  So that's still sad, but like how quickly they were able to just like turn this on and make this change is like incredible.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  Can I read you my favorite factoid from this? At one point, I'm just reading this paragraph. At one point, while fighting for the league, Klegerman's computer tried to force a Windows update, sending him straight into the wall.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  So good.

• 21:01Speaker 06

  Some things never change.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  It's like he's gotta make a pit stop to get his D L L swapped out.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing. What was really interesting about this story, you should read it, Sean story. He's like, all these race car drivers, they all have full setups at home. They all have wheels, they all have pedals. It is obviously a different thing, but like the physical controls of what they're doing map one to one. And so they were, they were eager and ready. Whereas like, you know, if we, if LeBron James was playing NBA 2K, like some middle schooler could like beat him. It's a different set of physical controls. That's a great story. I think it's, it's really neat. Paul, you wanted to talk about watching movies with friends online?

• 21:42Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, this is something, this has been like, like my, what's in Moby Dick where it's a whale? Is it a white whale?

• 21:49Speaker 05

  It's a whale.

• 21:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, this has been my white whale.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  The whale is called Moby Dick.

• 21:53Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  That's the name of the whale.

• 21:55Speaker 06

  The titular whale of the novel.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  Paul, you know what happens to Ahab, right?

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 22:03Speaker 06

  Does the whale eat Ahab like?

• 22:06Speaker 05

  The whale, the whale wins. Okay.

• 22:10Speaker 06

  I want to watch movies with people who aren't in the same place as me, right? So you can, the, the, the low tech version of this is you both queue up the movie and you go three, two, one, play, right? And now you are probably three seconds off from each other from just accidents of, of the world. So there's a lot of services now, and, and these have existed, but obviously getting a lot more use, uh, like Netflix party is a big one. So you've got like, uh, chat, but you're all watching in sync. But the problem and like the irony of it all is that how do you watch a movie that you paid for? Like if you buy a movie on iTunes, right? If you have a physical copy of a movie, like, like you can't, you can't screen share it because

• 22:55Speaker 06

  of HTTP, like basically DRM makes this way harder. And so now the only way to have these shared experiences is for like, the movie has to be in the cloud. Unless you, and this is what I'm recommending, you buy the movie and then you steal it and then you distribute the stolen copy. And then one of these services, uh, it's, uh, 27 or, yeah, 27, 27 allows you to watch a file simultaneously with someone else. So if you've distributed the movie that you stole on Google Drive and then you watch it. So there's still hope, but I just love that DRM always pushes us to the worst solution.

• 23:38Speaker 05

  This is a audio only show, but I want you to know that while Paul was, um, recommending, uh, that you do crimes, Neil and I were both staring up and to the right thinking about, how are we going to deal with this? Just like, I don't know.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  What's good is that I don't think the police are going to find it worth making contact with us in person if it's time for that crime. So it's like, you know, your, your mild teen crimes, now is the time to do them. Wait, Paul, here's my pushback though. DRM has also made it way easier because if you are a Netflix subscriber and you live in their DRM Walgarden, you just like download this Chrome extension and watch the thing, right?

• 24:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, but Netflix has a trash selection. Like Netflix has a lot of unique, interesting, new content that you've never seen before, and it has like four movies. Like it has four good. Films that are touchstones, you know what I mean? Like that, those kind of movies are almost always pay these days.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Okay, well, if you have a better non-mild crime solution to this problem, tweet it, tweet it us at Future Paul. Keep Paul out of jail. That's our only goal here. Okay, I wanted to make sure we talk about, it is the biggest story in the world. It is going to reset a lot of things. We have a whole guide, everything you need to about the coronavirus. Again, the science team in particular, um, just doing an incredible job covering the stuff. So go look at that guide. And then Verge Executive Editor TC Sodik has a new newsletter called Home Screen, uh, which is about the weird and wonderful things that are happening on the internet when everyone's at home. Subscribe to that in case you just need a break. And I think everybody kind of needs a break from time to time right now. So check out Home Screen. It's just my hope, my, I don't know if this is a hope.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if you're allowed to hope for things as outcomes of this. Um, my instinct is that more people are spending time on their laptops and not their phones right now. And so like a return of like desktop internet culture is upon us. And I think that is very exciting. But TC is tracking that on Home Screen. Check that out. Okay, speaking of laptops, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back and then Dieter and I are gonna fight about iPads versus MacBooks.

• 25:38Speaker 06

  Why are we fighting?

• 25:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:13Speaker 02

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• 26:19Speaker 03

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup?

• 26:23Speaker 02

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

• 26:31Speaker 04

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

• 26:38Speaker 02

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

• 26:44Speaker 06

  Dieter, let's fight.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  No, you reviewed the iPad Pro, uh, which

• 26:51Speaker 05

  I did.

• 26:52Nilay Patel?

  It's just hard because the whole, the thing people are excited about is the keyboard. And the keyboard isn't here yet.

• 26:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, the keyboard's not here yet, uh, and the iPad Pro itself is, um, a super minor spec bump. They, uh, improved the GPU on it, uh, for reasons. If you, if you are rendering 4K video on your iPad Pro, you might want it. Uh, and they added a LiDAR sensor and, um, there are no apps that take full advantage of the LiDAR sensor, like zero that you can download right now.

• 27:20Speaker 05

  There are apps that get like free benefits of the LiDAR sensor because it can instantly map a room. You don't have to wave your iPad around, um, and it's able to do better occlusion. So you can like, put like a bowl or a cat or something else in front of your virtual object. So just a person and, you know, they can do some other things. Okay. And I had this whole thing that I sort of gesture to in the review where I'm like, you're paying for this thing that let's be honest, you're not going to use, right? Like who really is using AR with their iPads that much that it's worth the extra cost of this thing? And I think that's true, although I need a desk because I don't have one. And so I started using

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  You did it, didn't you?

• 28:03Speaker 05

  On the iPad to like, test out different desks in my

• 28:08Nilay Patel?

  Did the LiDAR sensor made shopping for a desk that much better? Or could you have waited the four seconds?

• 28:13Speaker 05

  Wayfair's, uh, VR thing, Wayfair's AR thing only works on a phone. Uh, because if you try and visit it with the desktop class web browser on the iPad, it doesn't realize that you have cameras that it, and it doesn't give you the, the AR button.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  That is the worst catch 22.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  I kind of thought where you were going with that is that you need a desk and you are going to AR yourself a desk. But you're AR yourself to shop for a desk.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  Correct.

• 28:42Speaker 05

  Well, because otherwise you'd just be sitting there pretending to have a desk.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  Yes, I know. That's why I thought it was a little silly.

• 28:49Speaker 06

  It's interesting as the iPad becomes more laptop, like, because I like your point about the iPad could theoretically be a lot or not theoretically be somewhat cheaper if it didn't have Barker's cameras and LIDAR on the back. And we wish our laptops had those nice front facing cameras. But those, if you imagine a lap, if someone tried to sell you a laptop that costs, you know, a hundred dollars extra. And there's a Barker's camera on the back of the screen. You're like, well, I don't need that.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. To me, the more Apple put out a camera that it can't quite use yet. There's a online version of WWDC coming like, okay, the hardware is ahead of the software for the first time in Apple history. That's unusual, but so it goes. The more interesting to me is they added this processor that doesn't seem any faster than the previous processor.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  It's only faster in the GPU. And I asked Apple, I'm like, why, why, why did you, why'd you do this? And they're like, look, look, like there are people that like have genuine pro workflows. Like you, there are genuinely people who need to like, I don't know, fold stuff and with molecules or export 4K or whatever. They're using their iPads for that. And sure, I believe that. But the big question with maybe not this processor, but in general with the iPad is always perennially. This hardware is great. Will the software be able to take full advantage of it? And that answer I think is always going to be maybe next year, right? iPad, iPad Pro lives in the Bluetooth zone now, only it works, you know, pretty well.

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, well, so you also got to try out the mouse and keyboard, mouse and keyboard, just the trackpad support.

• 30:23Speaker 05

  So the trackpad stuff, I mean, we should talk about that. It's great. I am concerned about how it's going to be if you don't have a magic trackpad. So I want to, I'm getting the bridge keyboard, which is like a hundred bucks less than Apple's keyboard. So Sam Byford is going to review it. I'm going to make a video with it. Stay tuned for that next week.

• 30:44Speaker 05

  But I don't think that they can support all of the three finger gestures. We'll see, I could be wrong, but if, if there's a world where like the only way to get the best like gesture experience on the iPad is to buy the magic keyboard and everything else is kind of like eh, in comparison. That would suck. Yeah, but there are Windows trackpads that do multi-finger gestures, right? Sure. Find me a standalone trackpad to work with an iPad on amazon.com right now. Sure, I guess I'm just thinking about the Apple also announced a Logitech case. Yeah, so presumably that'll support all the gestures. So I think it's gonna be fine. And this bridge thing, you know, we'll see when I try it out. It'll presumably it'll all it's gonna turn out just fine. But there's just like a tiny, tiny little fear in me that Apple's gonna reserve something for itself.

• 31:29Speaker 06

  When you use your iPad with the Magic Trackpad,

• 31:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:33Speaker 06

  do you feel silly? Or do you feel like, oh, this, this works, this could be a setup just like this?

• 31:40Speaker 05

  You feel silly for like half a second and then you, it just feels pretty natural. You know, the, the acceleration's not quite the way that I'm used to it. It has like, I made this, I made this reference to the Apple TV and Neil, I got real mad at me.

• 31:55Speaker 05

  It does sort of have that sort of acceleration, deceleration. Somebody actually pointed out, I forget who it was, that it actually like, when you stop moving it, it like has a little bit of inertia, like the, the thing that keeps going a little bit, which is really interesting.

• 32:08Speaker 06

  Wait, just the, the, the Apple TV cursor stuff or the actual?

• 32:12Speaker 05

  No, the, I think the cursor. Anyway, the, I think that the icon, when the icon changes shape. Text selection isn't quite as good as on a Mac or a Windows PC, but it's also like, man. I know they, Apple made the choice to make text selection with your finger worse in iPadOS. They made it like harder to do and the idea was, well, no, the AI will figure it out and they'll, you know, they'll just know if you're trying to select text or not. And what they actually did is they prepared their cursor for trackpad support and then they backported it to touch, right? They would never admit it. They, they would in fact tell me that I'm wrong, but that's what it feels like.

• 32:51Speaker 05

  The native text selection experience on the iPad is second class to the way it used to work and to the trackpad.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  So what is particularly galling about this is they also ruined it on the iPhone, where you were almost never going to plug in a trackpad. If you were the person who's like Bluetoothing a trackpad in your, I don't even know if that works, but it's also, because it's iOS, right? That's the part of it. So it is also worse on the iPhone, which is maddening because I miss that little loop magnifier every time I try to select text on the iPhone. Like, I just wish it was there and it's gone. And your, your claim, which I would say is 38% conspiracy theory?

• 33:34Speaker 05

  Oh, it's, it's way more conspiracy theory than that is. It's definitely like 64.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, 64% conspiracy, but your claim is they made the shift in text selection because they knew they were going to add trackpad support.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  Oh, no, that, that part is, that's not a conspiracy theory. That I believe 100, 100,000%. They needed to have consistent text selection experience across touch and trackpad. But in my, my conspiracy is they like, it's not a conspiracy. Like, I think that they optimized for trackpad too much and for touch too little. And this gets at like the choices that they're making for the iPadOS now and what they're going to do with the next version. Are they going to like try and maintain a consistency of user experience between like using a trackpad and not? Because on Windows, there's a quote unquote tablet mode, right? And like, things work a little bit differently when you're in tablet mode. And on iPad, everything basically works the same. And I'm wondering if they're going to try and maintain that or not.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  I think this all comes down to how much of a different operating system is iPadOS. Because you remember when they announced iPadOS, they told us over and over again that they were just naming it different so that people would know it was different, but it wasn't really different. And we're like, that makes no sense. It purely makes no sense. Like, why would you give it a different name if it wasn't going to be different than iOS? And they're like, yeah, because obviously. And that was more or less the conversation that went around in circles. Like, is it different? Is it going to fork off? Is it going to be its own thing? And they're like, no, no, it's all the same. And we did this a lot. Now we're at a point where, okay, well, what you want is for text selection on the phone to maybe be different than text selection on the iPad. And maybe when

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  the iPad isn't in a keyboard case, you want its text selection paradigm to be like the phone, but you put it in a keyboard case and the text selection paradigm changes to the thing you have now. And that means iPad OS has to have multiple modes. It has to be very different than the phone. And you can just quickly spiral that out into the iPad as a different, a whole different thing, which they have maybe set themselves up for by calling it something else, but they have yet not admitted that it will be something else.

• 35:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's two things there. I think that Apple does not want to have different modes. I think they think that's fundamentally inelegant, the way that Windows does it. And Chrome OS does it that way, too, actually. I think they want there to be one mode.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  But I think if you can get around the mode problem, if you're like, when you put it in the keyboard cases, it magically understands. And you never call it a mode. Or the neural engine takes over. You just don't admit that it's a mode.

• 36:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, they could do that. We'll see what they're gonna do. Like, they've, they've promised big things, and I don't know if they're, if when Federighi said, stay tuned, or whatever, if he was referring to this, or to something coming with iOS 14. Is it gonna be iPad OS 14? iPad OS 2? The number that they put at the end of iPad OS is gonna be really telling. Because right now, they basically refer to it as like iPad OS 13.4, I think, or they're like iOS 13.4. So, yeah.

• 36:35Nilay Patel?

  Like, do they call it iPad OS just to satisfy the number of like critics, and ourselves included, who are like, the iPad should be a different OS. So they're like, here you go, dummies, we named it different, shut up.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  Probably.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  It's just like a reasonable, like, you know, you imagine like, what would you do if you ran Apple? I'm like, I would just do that. And I'd be like, shut up, Neil, like, we did it. But then there's like, the, the easier, or the harder part, which is, is it different? Is it a, the way that tvOS is a different operating system that shares a lot of frameworks and code? I mean, the real question is, what does this feel like with the keyboard on it? Is, does it feel like a radically different product when you had that case? And assuming this thing ships in May, I think, honestly, do you think we have to review the whole iPad experience again, or just the keyboard?

• 37:27Speaker 05

  I mean, both. I mean, we could review the whole iPad experience here, but it doesn't change the iPad experience that much in terms of like the like nitty gritty of like how you do stuff. It changes the affective experience of what is it like to have this thing and use this thing? We can review that. And that in some senses is both, but it's mostly a review of the keyboard and like how it changes your feelings about the iPad. But like even then, even with the keyboard, even after everything and all the new stuff that it can do and down the line, it's still just like every now and then I'm just like, what are you doing? It does not work with like a really old legacy webpage that I need to use to write the newsletter. Just doesn't work. Trackpad, no trackpad, doesn't matter. Really?

• 38:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's there's just like, there's still just things that you just have to go through two or three extra hoops to make work on the iPad. And then even when you do it, you don't know if it's going to work. So for example,

• 38:27Speaker 05

  one of the things that I use to write my newsletter is Pinboard. Pinboard's great. Love Pinboard. It's how I save all my links. But I want to be able to copy my links out of Pinboard and put them into our content management system into our editor. And you know, it's like kind of a hassle. And there's like, I could like learn a bunch of programming and write an API and create a script that exports the thing and save it in the cloud or whatever. Or I could do what's easy and just Google some JavaScript and jQuery commands and write a Tamper Monkey script for Chrome and Edge and Safari or whatever. And it will rewrite the page as soon as it loads so that it's in the format that I want to copy and paste into our CMS. Are you with me so far? Yes.

• 39:10Speaker 05

  You can't run like other programming languages on iOS. You can't run a script. You can't like have Tamper Monkey, the Tamper Monkey extension. They won't allow it. So I'm like, well, I guess I can't use the iPad. But you know, you think about it, you look around, you see who else has had this problem. And it turns out that you can, if you like, like find the website that helps you do it, convert a full on like Tamper Monkey script into a JavaScript bookmarklet. And so you just like plug into this website and you make a bookmarklet. And then you like save the bookmarklet in Safari and that like mostly works. And then the next step that I need to do is I need to edit a bunch of HTML source code, but I want to do it automatically. And so I've got solutions to do that in Windows and Mac that I just like hit a button,

• 39:53Speaker 05

  it runs my little search and replace scripts with regex and blah. It's really hard to do on the iPad. Grabbing source code is actually really difficult to do on the iPad off a webpage. But you know what can grab source code? Siri shortcuts.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I I mean, we were gonna get there. Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  I have written a Siri shortcut that's like 50 steps long. That's like, grab the source code, copy it, get rid of all of the ID equals random number tags. After every paragraph tag, put two blank lines. Oh, by the way, you can't put blank lines directly in the search or replace, so you have to create a variable that's two blank lines and then put that in. Just like, blah. I got there. Got all the way there. I created my bookmarklet, I created my Siri shortcut. I was so fricking proud of myself. I found the text editor that I wanted that wasn't too much overkill, just the right amount of overkill. And then I went to my newsletter editor to publish it and be really proud of myself and tell everybody I did it and I couldn't.

• 40:53Speaker 06

  What happened?

• 40:54Speaker 05

  The webpage doesn't work. It's an old, it uses CK editor from like 2014 or something. And then on top of that, the preview pane is in an iframe and so it just displays all text as white. And so all I can see are the links and so I just can't.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  It's perfect.

• 41:07Speaker 06

  I bet, I bet, just a tiny little tamper monkey script, I'm sure you could clear that right up.

• 41:12Speaker 05

  God damn it.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  So the counterpoint to this, I mean, Dieter, I think you and I feel the same way about the iPad, which is you can goof around with Siri shortcuts and hacks and workflow extensions all day and all night. And you can probably get there, but then you always hit a wall. And I always end up hitting a wall too. The counterpoint I would just point to, Matt Penzrino over at TechCrunch wrote an entire review of the iPad Pro. He just spent several, a week or so with it. This is his only computer. And he was like, this is great. I'm never going back. You should read it because it's it's sort of the opposite viewpoint. But like, even in his review, he's like, the first thing I had to do was like, create and assemble the share sheet that I wanted with all the shortcuts that I needed.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  And all of these other like, well, you have to actively make the iPad do the thing you need it to do in a way that I, and maybe it's just because I've been using Mac for so long, in a way that I never, but I want to see the source code of web page on the Mac. It's like, you just go to the view tab and just like, do it. Right? There it is. Or like you open the development menu and so far you just do it. And so I think that that's like the split, like, the iPad in many ways is so much more complicated. And if you understand that complexity, it feels great, but it's held back by the wall around that complexity.

• 42:28Speaker 05

  Well, so the, the, the iPad, like, the, the learning curve on a Mac is like, one, two, three, four, six, seven, nine, 15, right? Like that, that's the, that's the arc of the learning curve. On the iPad, it's like, one, one, one, you're like, you're advancing, you're learning stuff really fast. And like, it's really easy to use and you have no problem. But then, like, once you start to want to do something complicated, it spikes way higher, way sharper than it does on the Mac. Cause you like, you all of a sudden have to, you don't progressively just naturally learn how to do this stuff. You go looking for tutorials to do complicated things on the iPad way faster than you do on a Mac.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  And that's not because like the iPad, it's not because the Mac is like magical. It's, and it's not because I've used it for 40 years or however long. It's because like, the, the, the way this thing works is it progressively teaches you things naturally without you noticing it.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  I could probably argue with this. I'm sure, certain someone will argue with me about this. I think the level of abstraction on the Mac is so much lower. Right? There's obviously still some level of abstraction, but you're not held away from what the computer is actually doing all the time in a way that the iPad wants, just like, absolutely wants to hide that from, right? It absolutely wants you to, to go through whatever system level abstractions are the computer operating, as opposed to the Mac, which is like, it's doing computer stuff. Would you like to look at it? Or in the case of Catalina, would you like to hit 45 dialogue boxes and say approve before you open one application from the internet? But look, it's just trying to keep you safe.

• 43:58Speaker 06

  And I feel like iPadOS is in the process of reforming. They are in a sense, they have admitted wrongdoing with files. They're saying, okay, turns out computers, whatever those are, need something kind of like files. So we'll do some files, but like that, I feel like that's progressively going to require rethinking the operating system because I feel like the operating system was designed with a lot of things that computers normally do, don't do. And if the iPadOS is going to move towards it does all computer things, then I feel like that is, there's some sort of fundamental redesign needed.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  And this is like the question of iPadOS. Like, did they give themselves license to do that redesign in a way that doesn't touch the phone? And then we're just going to have to find out. I will say, and then I'll just, we can transition into an accurate view. People ask two questions. You know, what do you want to know about? I tweet it, people tweet me. One is like, how is the performance compared to the MacBook Pro, the 13 Pro? By far the most common question. And then two was, should I buy this or the iPad Pro, the Magic Keyboard? Those are the, those were the two absolutely most common questions. I can tell you about the 13 Pro, whatever, that's easy. The iPad Pro question is like, I, there's no way for me to, first, the keyboard isn't out, so I don't know. Two, I don't know how frustrated you want to be, like on, on the daily.

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, is it a lot or a little? Like, are you interested in learning how a new computer works? Like, I can't, I honestly cannot tell you.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think your answer in the video, in your review video was like, look into your heart. And like, that's, that is, that is the answer.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  That is basically Apple's answer is like, people already know, like, we don't have to worry about it. And I think that the collision course, the two platforms is, it's in many ways more apparent than ever. But it also, on the flip side, like, they're just radically different things. There's no way I would, after reviewing this air, I would ever be like, A person who's like really happy with their iPad, I'd be like, actually, you should use this MacBook.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  Okay, so Neil, tell us what to hear.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you've reviewed two of them now, right? So like, it's interesting to follow up to Dieter annual MacBook Air reviews and be like, well, what am I gonna say now? So obviously, the big news, well, it's just like, even your review last year was like, well, what the hell do you say? Like, they upped the processor, the keyboard's still a big question mark. To me, I think, I started in this place in the written review, not so much the video, because I don't think anybody wants a history lesson in these videos. I went back and I watched the introduction of the butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros. And there's this like incredible moment where Phil Schiller is like, we think these are so great that we challenge the team to make a 13-inch MacBook Pro that MacBook Air users would want.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, we're gonna keep selling the MacBook Air, but check out this 13-inch MacBook Pro without a touch bar. It's smaller, it's lighter, it's faster, it's got a better screen, and we think MacBook Air owners are gonna want, or MacBook Air buyers are gonna choose this over the MacBook Air. It's remarkable, like, Apple never just nukes its own products on stage. They're never like, we're gonna keep selling this one, but here's 10 minutes of Schiller, like, going down the spec list of the new thing and being like, don't buy that thing. We think people, it is, it's remarkable, especially now in hot takes. So you can watch it. It didn't work. Like, that's actually the crazy thing. People kept buying the Air. And so they were forced in this position, you know, the entire consternation of what is gonna happen with the Mac.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  And I think what they wanted, and I think this is where that whole iPad Mac thing happens. They wanted people at the cheaper price points to buy iPads. Right? Because that 13-inch Pro started at $14.99. So I think they were hoping to get rid of the entire bottom price segments of the Mac. Habit for pro users in that way and then all the consumers would buy iPads. I think that's what they were really hoping for. But people kept buying the Air because it was cheap and what the people wanted was a Mac. So they ended up rebooting the Mac, recommitting to it, all the stuff. We talked about it at length. And then they put out the new Air with the retina display two years ago. The processor was not there to drive that retina screen or do what it wants. I think the first line in your MacBook Air review from two years ago was like, the fan is running.

• 48:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  Last year, they bumped the processor, still a dual core i5. I think it was like eighth gen. It was still behind the curve. Great, still the butterfly keyboard, the whole butterfly keyboard thing. So then this year, you've got Magic Keyboard and you've got these 10th generation chips. I think the Magic Keyboard is right. They put it in the MacBook Pro first because so many people were mad about the escape key and just generally the 15 inch MacBook Pro not being great. It's also more expensive product. They sell less volume. They could put it out there and make people happy. Great, they did it. What was the next one they were going to add it to? Their most popular laptop. The MacBook Air is their most popular laptop and they added the good keyboards to that one next. And then sort of we assume that the 13 inch Pro will come along for the ride. It's a great keyboard.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  There's no, I really like typing on it. I do not like the touch bar. So I have thoroughly enjoyed having physical brightness and volume keys again. So I think that part is settled. Okay, the big question mark, can you buy this computer and will it be reliable? The other question mark is like, is it, does it perform? And they didn't give us the i3, so I can't answer that question. I suspect it will be fine. The 10th generation i3 is like a well regarded part. The quad core i5 that I have, yeah, I can make that fan turn on whenever I want. It's, you know, like you open Lightroom and like you see like a little bit. And then you like do a couple of things and it's like going. Yeah, you run Cinebench, which is like hardest benchmark. That's full blast.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  And then there was a little bit of like YouTube controversy and like whatever. But the thermal design of the machine does not let it run at the full turbo boost speed for very long. Right. So it's a 1.1 gigahertz part that turbo boost to 3.2 gigahertz. It can do that for a little bit. It'll hit 100 degrees Celsius and then it like throttles. And like if you just install the various Intel PowerGadget stuff, you can just like watch the curve happen.

• 50:03Speaker 05

  But the throttling for the MacBook Air is like a different feel and vibe than it is on a MacBook Pro. When there was the throttling controversy on the MacBook Pro, it was like, yo, what's going on here? I need, I bought this thing for those faster clock speeds. What, what the hell? And like, Apple genuinely did need to fix something there somewhat. They're still, you know, thermally constrained in, you know, interesting ways. But for the Air, it's thermally throttling. I guess it just doesn't make me that mad.

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I wouldn't, right. It never dips below, it's like advertised clock speed, at least that I've seen. So like they'd sold you a 1.1 gigahertz part that claims it can turbo boost to 3.2. And like, if you just like run it really hard, it'll run at 1.5. Still a little bit faster than advertised, it says on the, like, there's nothing about this that made me mad. There, it's complex enough that I felt that I had to explain it in the review. And I had to go ask Apple about it. And to their credit, they did not dance. They're like, yes, this is how it's designed. Like straight out, no hesitation in that answer. And so that's good. I, I think most people use these machines for, you know, browsing the web and playing podcasts. Oh, this is, this is actually what I wanted to talk about the most because they didn't put it in either one of the reviews really.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  Catalina is out of control. It is constantly asking you questions like, there's a dummy element to Catalina that I just, maybe that's what everybody wants. And maybe Apple is going to get great uptake of Apple TV plus because they put this one icon in the dock. And I'm certain there's a growth hacker at Apple who like made that call, but. Chill out, like just please, it's so close to bloatware.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  Do you think that like, Apple engineers are used to setting up a new iPhone every year? Cause they buy a new iPhone every year. So they like, they're like, oh, this sucks. We should fix that. But they only set up a Mac like once every three, four years. And so they don't know, they just don't see it.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, you set up a new iPhone, it's like seamlessly turns into your old iPhone. Like you get a new Mac and it's like, you're mostly starting from scratch. It doesn't like carry over your dock preferences or whatever. You gotta like do it all over again. And it's like, have you thought about pages? It's like, no, dude.

• 52:14Speaker 05

  Haven't thought about pages in years.

• 52:17Nilay Patel?

  There's that. So it's like, right. The performance is fine for all the things I need. Like I got through a workday just fine. I tried to push it, heard the fan. I think that is totally fair. I think most people will never be in that. I don't think like a lot of people use Lightroom, right? It's like basically I'm getting.

• 52:30Speaker 06

  Okay. So Lightroom was, cause I'm wondering, that, that's my worry is like, cause it's, conceptually, this sounds like a really great blend of, of, of performance and, and efficiency, where you spike for, for workloads and then you go back to, you know, humming along. But will seven Chrome tabs, you know, that's my worry is like, will there be some workload that I thought was lightweight that actually challenges this? Or is it really the actual hardcore, like video editing and, and photo editing type stuff? That, that spins those fans up.

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  So I didn't, I didn't experience it with Chrome. I, I think we, we have like our staff eating, we're like now 70 people are in Zoom. So it's just rendering 70 video feeds.

• 53:13Speaker 06

  No fans?

• 53:14Nilay Patel?

  It wasn't like loud fans. It was just like the computer got a little hotter, right? It wasn't the worst, literally nothing about me, my normal completely insane use of Chrome and like how many tabs I've even got there. It was really the, I need the, I need a CPU to work for a long time. That's when I, that's when I definitely heard the fans. Do most people need a CPU to work for a long time? I don't think they do. And I think that Turbo Boost stuff, you're right. I mean, it's, that's why it's Intel strategy with their processors, right? We'll do variable clock speed.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  So there's something interesting about this processor. It's an Intel 10th generation, uh, which on every other computer that's getting it, like supports Wi-Fi six. Um, and then you look at this MacBook Air and it doesn't. And then like you look at the iFix teardown and like. The module is way smaller than it is we thought it would be.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Speaker 05

  And so it turns out Apple's got a special version of it.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Apple appears to have a special version of it. I asked about Wi-Fi 6. They said they were not. So like the big ice like thing, I mean, this is Intel, right? They like build all the components together and they sell you actually not just a CPU, but a package. Apple has a special package that does not have Intel's Wi-Fi controller in it. They're using their own module. Great. That they're using their own module. It doesn't have Wi-Fi 6. So they they've got a different Intel part. I think they're running it at a higher power, like a higher TDW than like the whatever, and then the standard part. So I think they're getting more performance out of it. I look, if you spec out the the base model iPad Air for a hundred dollars more, you can get the quad core I5 over the I3.

• 54:39Nilay Patel?

  That is no brainer money. Like you should scrounge around the cushions until you find that hundred dollars and get two more cores like that's literally, you will see it and feel it, especially to keep this thing for as long as you want.

• 54:50Speaker 05

  How do you have a hundred dollars in your cushions?

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, I have a baby, so she's always, she's just throwing money around. I don't know. Find a hundred bucks like it. And your baby is the monopoly man. Percentage wise against a thousand dollars is a lot of money, but I do think if you're going to keep this computer for a long time, which I think most people will, that that extra performance header is absolutely worth it. The stock configuration is thirteen hundred dollars. You get the I5 and double the storage. It's another thing that I think is worth it. So that's what I think most people should get. Oh, the battery. The thing that is the most troublesome, and I think this comes back to that performance conversation in a big way, is I run in Chrome for like a variety of reasons, including like some of our software works best in Chrome, like some of the CMS stuff that we do works best in Chrome.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  I know a lot of other folks, Squadcast, we're using Squadcast to record this podcast right now, only works in Chrome. I gotta use Chrome. Zoom is an app that is open on my computer all day now. I use Zoom more than ever before. Slack is an Electron app all day, every day. These three apps, just using them as I normally do, battery life is about five hours, which is not great, just like flatly not great. If you use Safari, you use their video rundown test is in the Apple TV app, of course. If you use all of their stuff, you can get like 11 or 12 hours of battery life. So this is a huge gap between and like I don't, people are asking if I blame Apple for this. I don't, you can't, I'm not gonna blame Apple for Slack being a battery hog. Like that's Slack's problem, right?

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  But their claims about battery life are not reflective of like the reality for many people, which is that they will have Slack and Zoom open and they will often find themselves in a position where they need to use Chrome. A lot of people just need to use Chrome for their jobs. Like I, I recognize that Chrome is controversial. I recognize that, yep, Google wrote a web browser that destroys batteries on computers the world over. But then we, I look at our Windows laptop tests, same kind of workloads and we're getting six, seven hours. And so I think that's a big, it's a big discrepancy. And I, at some point, the distance between Apple just assuming that their ecosystem is the best and then what people are actually doing with their computers, it's, it's getting wider in a way that I think is.

• 57:00Speaker 05

  Have you thought about pages, Neelai?

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  It's just nuts. It's like, who is watching 12 hours in the Apple TV app? Like what, how is that a useful metric of like video playback time? No, they're watching Netflix in Chrome.

• 57:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. The funny thing is like the, you know, I saw the five hours and I was like, oh crap. But it turns out that if like, even with an iPad Pro, which we normally think was just lasting forever and ever and ever and ever and ever. If you just like use it as your work computer and just like are going with it and switching between apps and video conferencing when you can, because it only works in the front most app and like all the other stuff that you do for work and you're like really going with it. Like you can kill it way faster than you normally would. Like you can, you can kill it at like six, seven hours. And we're normally like, was just like hanging out, browsing the web when you're picking up off your couch. You don't charge it for three days and over the course of those three days, you get like 12, right?

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't use my iPad Pro as a computer. I find myself charging it way more often. Remember that, Paul, I remember very distinctly when like the first iPad came out. Or maybe it was the second gen. We were on a podcast and you're like, the, I don't know why this memory is stuck in my head, but you're like, the best thing about the iPad is the battery never dies. Right? And it's like, that was, that was the thing. Like, you could have an iPad two and you would just go like, a week and a half, just like using it and the battery would never die. And now we're at like retina screens, faster processors, and you're back to sort of laptop zone battery life.

• 58:30Speaker 06

  Well, and I, it sucks that it sounds like some of the trade off with the MacBook Air is you got a faster computer, but less battery life.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that it's actually faster than iPad Pro, right? Like. Well, it's faster than the last generation Air for sure.

• 58:44Speaker 06

  Compared to the last generation Air, I'm saying.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's true. At the end of the day, you know, like, we're, we're in the weeds. Like, do I think you should not buy this computer because Apple stuck the podcast app in the dock? I do not. Do I think that is getting away from them? I actually think Apple has gotten to the point, after A, first trying to kill this computer, and then bringing it back slowly, where they're on their third revision of it, and I finally am like, this is just the Mac you should buy. Right? Like, if someone says, I want to buy a Mac, which one should I get? I would be like, the, the, the step up configuration of the MacBook Air, just buy it, it's in stock at the store. You're not going to be mad at me because the space bar broke. You're not going to be mad at me because the fans are spinning all the time. Like, it's going to be great. That's a, it's a big deal for

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  Apple to have this, this, that configuration is the one they're going to have to support, I think, the most of all. So I'm like, yeah, these are little nitpicks. I think in the next generation, they should focus on battery life. Quite honestly, that's the thing, that's the only remaining, to me, outstanding issue with the machine is when you use it like a regular person, not just idly browsing the web or watching Apple TV, you don't get a ton of battery life. They could probably fix it. And honestly, like. Google needs to do the most work here. And, you know, I don't know, maybe Apple will block even more cookies until Google like, like whatever they're gonna do, they should do it. But that to me is the only outstanding issue. And honestly, like, just use Safari, it'll be fine.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  I will say what's interesting to me about both of these products. They're already discounted on Amazon. They're already 50 bucks off on Amazon. So that's great. I hope it works out. You know, people are working from home. Lauren Good wrote a review of the iPad Pro where she was, and you should read it because it's beautifully written. But she was like, why are they doing this? Like, there's a massive crisis going on. It's worth reading, it's worth pondering, but a lot of people are working from home. And so that this moment of I need a laptop or a machine I can count on in my home to do my job, I think Apple stepped into it. I'm curious to see if other computer makers step into it as well. But Apple's saying, hey, we can release a computer, ship it to everybody. Our supply chain works. I think it's a statement of confidence on their part. Okay, we're gonna take a break, we're gonna do some stuff. We'll be right back.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

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• 1:01:31Speaker 02

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  Let's get you a basket.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  Paul Miller.

• 1:02:03Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 1:02:04Nilay Patel?

  Every week, the consistency that we rely on in these times.

• 1:02:10Speaker 06

  Every week I do a segment and it's called, "It's my year of the Linux desktop, boys."

• 1:02:19Speaker 06

  I built a PC in quarantine.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  Uh oh. Wow.

• 1:02:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm very, very, very excited. I got a Ryzen 5 3600 for the processor. Got a GeForce 2060 for the GPU. It is the fastest computer I've ever had the privilege to use. It's so nice and I love it so much. And I put, I put, um, why it's the year of the Linux desktop? I put Pop OS on it, which is this distro that's based on Ubuntu. It's made by System76, who, which actually sells Linux-based computers. So they actually have like a financial incentive to, to make a good distro. Um, and it just, it is, it is the first time ever, but just works.

• 1:03:09Speaker 06

  The literally just works. Put the USB drive into the computer, boot to the drive, click install, and now I have a working computer. All the drivers, sound worked right out of the box. Everything totally worked. The GPU works. I have, I have working FreeSync coming out of my 2060 to a high refresh rate monitor. Everything works. It was, it was a miraculous, miraculous experience.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  It's here. Everybody build a Linux PC at home.

• 1:03:40Speaker 06

  Now is the time.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  What else are you gonna do?

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  It's a fun project for the whole family. My sister helped me. She helped me with the cable management. It's clean inside, let me tell you. One thing I'm still curious about, I haven't tried VR yet. Supposedly Half-Life Alyx works on Linux. There's lots of games that work on Linux, quote unquote, like they, there's these wrapper layers that, that make them run. That doesn't mean they'll run well. So that, you know, there's obviously still gonna be limitations. But for what I do, like coding, compiling Rust, like it is so deliciously fast. I just love it. I'm so happy.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Ah, see, there's the hope we need. You're holding us together.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  I've just been playing Animal Crossing.

• 1:04:25Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm so jealous of all this switch people having so many social experiences with each

• 1:04:31Nilay Patel?

  Paul's like, I built a Linux PC.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  I'm alone.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, Dieter, talk to me about the Huawei P40 Pro.

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  So there's the Huawei P40, there's the P40 Pro, and there's a P40 Pro Plus.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  P p p p p. So these are Huawei's new flagships. They have the Kirin 990 processors. They've got waterfall displays, which means that the display curves very aggressively on the side. So aggressively, they like don't have space for a volume button. And then they all have cameras. And if you asked me to tell you which phone has what cameras and what the cameras are supposed to do, we would be here for 12 hours. There's so many different things.

• 1:05:13Speaker 06

  One of the phones, and nobody knows which, but one of the phones has two telephoto lenses.

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

  Yes, one of the phones has two telephotos.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing.

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  They have a top shot feature. They've got, you know, there's a time of flight sensor on a couple of them. Like, there's 40 megapixels, there's 50 megapixels, there's a 12 megapixel hanging out in there somewhere. Just like, if you think that you're going to make a decision between these things based on the spec sheet of the cameras, good luck. What's fascinating to me is you look at these things, and if you were any further away than like, two feet, they look just precisely like Galaxy S20s. I mean, like, the camera module, the rectangle, just down the line. On the front, they look a little different because they've got a wider oblong hole punch

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  because they've got a couple of cameras up there, and like a face detector or whatever. So that's different. But of course, like, all the things I just told you, if you live in the US, they don't matter because you can't get it in the US. And if you live anywhere outside of China, well, do you like working apps?

• 1:06:23Speaker 05

  Because they can't get Google Apps and it also turns out that most of the apps that you know and love depend on Google Mobile Services in some way, or many of them do, especially for location. In the same way that Android turned into this thing where like the web rendering engine was getting hacked all the time. So Google's like, screw this, we need to update it more often. And so we're just gonna like update it through Google Play. And that's what became the, they've done that with location at some point in the misty mists. Maybe it was after they had that lawsuit with that satellite company, who knows? Every single Android app that has a map on it uses Google's location services service. And Huawei doesn't have a replacement for it yet. And there's not like a really great Maps app yet.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  Every, every single app that has push notifications uses Google, Google Play Services.

• 1:07:09Speaker 05

  Huawei's building up basically like one for one equivalents of everything inside Google Mobile Services. It's just gonna take them a while.

• 1:07:17Speaker 06

  Are they doing that in China or are they doing that for their worldwide?

• 1:07:20Speaker 05

  They're doing it in China and worldwide. Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  They should open source that. Huawei could be the, we're the open source transparent company. We open sourced the code that runs our, our 5G spy towers and we're open sourcing our replacement to Google Play Services. We will be the bastion. Cause for me personally, I want to run Graphene OS, which is like a privacy focused fork of Android. But without Google Play Services, so many of the apps are broken or kind of half working.

• 1:07:49Speaker 05

  And so you, you trust Huawei to make those services for you?

• 1:07:51Speaker 06

  No, I don't. I don't trust anybody. That's why I want open source.

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  Gotcha. Neil, I read a some Eric Schmidt testimony from a satellite lawsuit case.

• 1:08:00Nilay Patel?

  I got it. This is like a Neil Patel, this is like a greatest hit. This is from the, this is my next days. We didn't even launch the birds when I wrote this story.

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  What year was it?

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  It was May 2011.

• 1:08:12Speaker 05

  Ah, damn it.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  Google versus Skyhook. Well, I don't know. I'll tweet a link or something. So this is true. So there's, what you're saying is to get location, you gotta use Google Mobile Services, right? Location used to be a phone level feature, not an operating system level feature, right? So you would, whatever app would talk to the phone, would talk to the Android layer, not Google Mobile Services. Motorola before Google bought it and sold it to Lenovo.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  This is where you're so tangled. Motorola before Google bought it and then like auctioned it off to Lenovo to make Samsung happy. Motorola is an independent company. Decided to use Skyhook, which was an independent location provider as opposed to Google as its location provider. Google freaked out. Google wrote emails. They said the Skyhook Motorola deal feels like a disaster. They were mad that Apple had already moved away from Google. Google executives said OEM switching to Skyhook would be, quote, this is a letter, it like discovered emails. OEM switching to Skyhook would be awful for Google because it will cut off our ability to continue collecting data for our location database. Andy Rubin canceled the Droid X launch. Like Motorola's gonna be, remember

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  the Droid X? I'm sure you don't. Before Motorola was bought by Google and sold to Lenovo, they made some phones. Andy Rubin wrote Motorola CEO Sanjay John said, Sky, using Skyhook Wi-Fi is a stop ship issue and he canceled the launch. Google basically cut out the ability for phone makers to do their own location in order to get play services and Google mobile services. And now you're seeing that come true, which is because all the application developers just assumed that Google mobile services was available to them because Google mandated that everybody use it. That's 10 years ago and now you're seeing it happen.

• 1:10:02Speaker 06

  A lot of location data is not, is augmenting GPS with which Wi-Fi hotspots you are close to and like creating a database.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that was back then. I mean, like there's multiple ways to do it. 10 years later, like GPS trips are more efficient.

• 1:10:20Speaker 06

  Right. In 2010. They still use a lot of Wi-Fi.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's Wi-Fi. It's also cell tower triangulation. And this is one of the reasons Google, like, this is one of the reasons that they're just like, who's going to tell us where we are? Somebody figure it out. And Google's like, well, we're going to take all of this, these signals, everything that we know and put it in a pot and have our machine learning figure it out and tell you where you are. And like, nobody has to think about it ever again. So of course they're going to use it. Why would you not? Well, turns out, you can't work on Huawei phones. So, yeah. Yeah. And it's just, this is this like long history. At one point, Samsung started shipping a phone with Skyhook and then Motorola wrote Google a letter saying, why can they do it and we can't? And then Andy Rubin wrote back and said, compatibility is a learning process and Motorola should not be concerned with other OEMs and their devices.

• 1:11:08Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, there are some deep politics in getting devices approved to use Google stuff. And the one that Google wanted the most was use our location services. So, great, now you're seeing it play out that they obviously took over that part of the platform. And so Huawei is saying Android is open, we can just do it, we can replace you. They have to build a thing that everybody just took for granted because 10 years ago, Google got in a fight with Motorola. This is like my first big feature that I wrote for This Is My Nexus. It's like burned into my brain that there's these like Andy Rubin and Eric Schmidt emails out in the world.

• 1:11:42Speaker 05

  Can I just like, can you guys indulge me just because it's the, you know, we're all working from home? Go to the Computer History Museum's YouTube page and find their interview with John Rubenstein, former CEO of Palm and before that, you know, father of the iPod, you know, just that like, he gave a two-hour oral history interview of basically his career. And it's amazing, like his early days at Apple, hanging out with Steve Jobs, getting yelled at by Steve Jobs when he went to Palm, like all this stuff. And, you know, he was really blunt about what was, he's like, look, we were like six months behind. And I came on and Palm was a gigantic mess. And so I had to focus on like making a good product. So that's what I did. Meanwhile, my competitor and guy that I knew, Sanjay Ja at Motorola,

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  had like the Motorola machine just running and making phones. So he just parked himself outside of Verizon. And that caused Verizon to like screw us on a couple of deals and give it over to Motorola. And that's why we lost.

• 1:12:39Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:12:40Speaker 05

  He just like, and he's like, because I had, I like, I couldn't like, sit on the park bench outside of Verizon's offices every day.

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  Sanjay Ja, to his credit, knew what he had to do to win, right?

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 05

  And that's like, the Droid moment was the moment that like set Android as the default alternative to the iPhone.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  But did he win? Because I would remind you that again, Google bought Motorola. And then in order to get Samsung to stop messing with Android, sold Motorola to Lenovo.

• 1:13:11Speaker 06

  He took the eye off the ball to sit on the park bench with a little too much.

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  Anyway, even if you, even if you don't care about Level S a tenth as much as I do, it's a, it's a, it's a super fun interview. You should watch it sometime this weekend.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I just gotta say, that's a story about two guys who did not win.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  In the end, battles were won. The war decisively lost.

• 1:13:37Nilay Patel?

  All right. I just want to talk about one more little gadgety thing.

• 1:13:40Speaker 05

  How do we get off of P40? Anyway, the P40 Pro looks like good hardware.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  It's got, it's got pixels. It's got a high refresh rate. Batteries.

• 1:13:52Speaker 05

  It does have a 90 hertz refresh rate. I mean, that is nice. Anyway.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  All right. Dieter, can you tell me about your investigation into this wacky Dell app that lets you control an iPhone from a PC?

• 1:14:01Speaker 05

  I have not gotten very far. I've been like 15 minutes of Googling. This is not an investigation yet. However, Dell has an app.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  This is not a formal investigation. We have not at this time announced an investigation.

• 1:14:16Speaker 05

  Dell has an app that lets you mirror your phone on your PC and like control your phone like with your mouse and your keyboard. We've seen this before, only they're doing it with iPhones, which is like, what? How? What the heck? I don't know the answer yet. I would tell you that what we're going to do is go into our reviews closet and you know, grab our Dell and see, but we can't get to our reviews closet. So this app was made in partnership with a company called Screenovate. Like innovate with a screen.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 1:14:47Speaker 05

  Yep. Uh, and I don't know how it works, but my hunch, and if you know the answer, please tweet at me. My hunch is that it airplays the screen to your computer. And then your computer with a Bluetooth connection sends trackpad and keyboard signals to the phone. And it, cause it only works with iOS 13 and above, which makes me think like accessibility, like uses the trackpad feature in iOS 13.

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  Whoa. No, there are no third party devices that can do AirPlay video. There are lots of third-party devices that can do AirPlay audio, but you cannot mirror video from an iOS device to anything but an Apple TV, as far as I know, or now a bunch of-

• 1:15:26Speaker 05

  No, that's not true. There's a bunch of wacky apps that you can AirPlay to on your computer. That's actually not the problem. The problem is sending the signals back.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  But all of them are illegal. None of them are official. Like, the things that are officially supported by AirPlay are a bunch of TVs now and the Apple TV. And then there's a bunch of apps that basically spoof an Apple TV.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Nilay Patel?

  So it'd be wild if Dell was shipping an app that spoofed an Apple TV.

• 1:15:50Speaker 05

  That would be wild. You know, speaking of Rubinstein, what would be amazing is if Apple got pissed and sued them, like they did when the pre-worked with iTunes back in the day. Because it's remarkable that you could do this on a Dell, but you can't do it on a Mac. Because you might think it's silly to have a mirror of your phone sitting on your desktop, but it's actually kind of nice. I use the Your Phone app on Windows. And there are times where, like, oh yeah, I just, like, I got a notification from my phone. It shows up on my desktop. I'm like, what is this? I don't have this app on my desktop. Ah, screw it. I'll click the notification. It opens up my phone, mirrors my phone, pulls up the notification. I can do the thing real quick and then go on with my day and never take my hands off the keyboard deck of the laptop.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's funny that Apple advertises how seamlessly the two things work together, but really what I want is just a mirrored phone interface. Like, I would say 25% of the time. Like, what is a better Instagram experience is using it on the phone. Sometimes I just want to check my Instagram notifications without using the web. Anyway, we're going to investigate this Dell thing. It is just a neat gadget. I'm also told that it works on more than just Dell laptops. So if you have a Windows laptop, try it out. Let us know how it goes. But it's a neat gadget to play with right now, so I want to call it a- Okay, we've gone long. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I know it's a weird time. I hope- We're able to distract you a little bit. And I do want to call out again, the Verge Science Team, which is covering this stuff. Actually, the whole Verge team is all over it. Like, our policy team is all over it.

• 1:17:17Nilay Patel?

  Our creator team is all over it. But the Verge Science Team is a small team, and they are slammed with, like, the biggest story in the world. So, want to call them out. Check out The Verge. We're covering everything that's happening with the coronavirus. Like, we talked about at the top of the show, there's ripple effects now into everything. So, we're going to cover it a lot. We're going to talk about it, but I want to make sure we balance that stuff out. I want you to subscribe to Home Screen, which is TC's newsletter about all the weird and wonderful things people are doing on the internet. Subscribe to Processor, which is Dieter's newsletter. The Vergecast is still happening. We're recording from home. I just tweeted out a picture of my extremely elaborate setup. So, we're doing it. On Tuesday, we've got Amy Webb, who is a futurist at NYU. Really interesting conversation about, sort of, our preparedness and our ability to see

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  these events and, like, how they might play out. She puts out a big future trends report, which is really interesting. So, that's coming on Tuesday. We'll be back on Friday with the chat show. Tweet at us. We love hearing from you on @Reckless. Paul's at FuturePaul. Dieter's at Backlon. We'll talk to you soon. Rock and roll. Paul, stay safe.

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• 1:19:08Speaker 09

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.