The two cryptos and the future of the iPad

Today on the flagship podcast of all-screen designs: 02:38 -Verge senior audio director Andru Marino dives into the world of a different type of crypto community. 17:51 - David Pierce examines iPadOS 16, Stage Manager, and Apple's attempt at task managers. iPadOS 16's Stage Manager is not the future of multitasking you were hoping for 34:05 - Dan Seifert and Monica Chin join David to discuss and explain Apple's confusing iPad lineup. Apple iPad (10th gen) review: stuck in the middle The new iPad makes no sense Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! 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.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of all screen designs. I'm your friend David Pierce, and if I sound kind of hoarse this morning, it's because I just spent all weekend in Texas at the Formula One United States Grand Prix.

• 0:17David Pierce?

  Normally, that's not really a tech thing, but this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook waved the checkered flag.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Possibly the worst checkered flag waving in Formula One history by the Apple boss, Tim Cook.

• 0:28David Pierce?

  So the good news is, I think this is all technically a business expense now. That's how that works, right? This worked out great for me, and not so great for Tim Cook. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. We're going to go deep inside the world of crypto, but not the crypto you're thinking of. Then, we're going to talk about the new iPadOS and the new iPads, and we're going to try to make sense of Apple's whole tablet strategy, because it seems like Apple's kind of losing the plot. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I need to go practice my flag-waving skills, because honestly, you never know when it'll be your turn, and I'm not going to blow it like Tim Cook did.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  And all the iPhones and iPads and everything can't give you a strong wrist and a nice action to do that. So come on, Tim Cook, you can do better than that. Yeah, rather than... But anyway.

• 1:13David Pierce?

  This is The Vergecast. We'll see you in a sec.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Our first segment for today is a segment, if I'm being completely honest with you, I know almost nothing about. So here to help us explain what's about to happen is our Senior Audio Director, Andrew Moreno. Hi, Andrew.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Hi, David.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  Let me tell you what I know about what's about to happen on this podcast. It has to do with crypto.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:06David Pierce?

  But it doesn't have to do with Bitcoin. If this has to do with Bitcoin, you and I are going to have a fight.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  It kind of does.

• 3:13David Pierce?

  Okay. Oh, no. Tell me, tell me what we're about to hear. You, you went to investigate a different kind of crypto world, as I have come to understand it.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, cryptozoology. What that means is someone who goes out and tries to discover new and unknown animals.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  And then convince them to buy Bitcoin.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  No. And however, a lot of that is associated with creatures like the Mothman, Bigfoot, Chupacabra. So there's cryptozoology, which was also shortened to be crypto. But crypto is a whole different thing now.

• 3:49David Pierce?

  Right.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  So I wanted to talk to cryptozoologists to see what they think about the new crypto.

• 3:55David Pierce?

  What happens when you stop being the wildest crypto out there?

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:59David Pierce?

  I love it. All right. Anything else we should know before we get into it?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 4:03David Pierce?

  All right, let's do it.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  The mention of the word cryptocurrency can be exhausting, especially in the past year or so. The television advertisements. I'm getting into crypto. With FTX, you in? The memification of digital currency investments like NFTs. Yes, everyone.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  The ups and downs of the price of Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Luna, and others. All that stuff is often shortened to the word crypto, a catch-all term for any sort of blockchain technology. But before it was the hottest topic in tech, crypto had a much different meaning in the English vernacular, at least in a certain community.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Crypto to me meant cryptozoology.

• 4:50Speaker 03

  That's Lauren Coleman, a cryptozoologist and founder of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. Lauren has been writing about cryptozoology, or the study of hidden and unknown animals, for over 40 years with books like Creatures of the Outer Edge, Bigfoot: The True Story of Apes in America, and Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Ness Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature. Lauren has been called the modern popularizer of the word cryptozoology, though its origins go back before he got started in the field.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  Cryptozoology was being bandied around in correspondence between French scientists, French writers in 1959. Then in 1961, Ivan T. Sanderson wrote the first use of cryptozoology in English. What Sanderson did was really examine all of Bigfoot, the Yeti, crypto reports from around the world.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  So then crypto has often been used as shorthand for cryptozoology.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  I mean, even my mother-in-law doesn't ever call me Lauren, she calls me crypto.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Crypto, the shorthand for cryptocurrency and the blockchain and the Web3 stuff we hear about, was adapted from the practice of cryptography, the study of techniques for secure communication. And looking into both cryptos, I started to realize they were more closely related than I thought. But the first thing I needed to know, has this double meaning of the word crypto caused confusion between the worlds?

• 6:27Speaker 03

  Lauren says he has experienced a bit of that confusion on the internet, especially since his Twitter handle is @cryptoLauren.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  I have to constantly spend my precious time doing tweets that CryptoLauren is not about crypto coin, it's about cryptozoology. I get tagged to, you know, news about a new crypto Bitcoin or this or that.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  This happens not to just Lauren, but many people in the cryptozoology community. Lauren says that his followers now pick up on this and start threads campaigning that crypto means cryptozoology. I've talked to a few people in the space who are podcasters or bloggers who use the word crypto to mean cryptozoology, and they're often met with pitches about Bitcoin and NFTs in their email. But then again, who doesn't get those emails?

• 7:23Speaker 05

  First of all, it's going to ruin your Google searches, right?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  That's Sharon Hill, a researcher and writer of paranormal phenomena. She also runs the blog Pop Goes Decryptid, which covers the way pop culture has interacted with cryptozoology.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  I studied the social phenomenon of paranormal investigation groups of all kinds. So ghost hunters, Bigfoot seekers, ufologists, to find out why they did what they did. And if they said they used science, and if they said yes, how did they use? Or if they actually did use scientific processes in their work.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  I asked her a bit about the interaction between cryptozoology and cryptocurrency communities on the internet.

• 8:03Speaker 05

  It certainly caused some consternation for the people in the cryptozoology community, and me too. You know, there are social tribes that are based on specific interests. And the crypto zoo scene was fairly small. And if you were actively involved, you knew everybody that was participating. It was kind of a closed circle. And it's easy to understand that that tribe or that group would adopt the prefix crypto for some things. You know, their websites, their usernames, et cetera. And then suddenly, out of their control, comes this ragingly popular new use of crypto that isn't related to them. And I think it perturbed some people. They felt a sense of ownership with that original usage, that prefix. And then their words and concepts are being used for something completely different,

• 8:47Speaker 05

  especially when it's related to money and for-profit projects. They resented it. So they're just guarding their boundaries.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  For the most part, the cryptozoology community has been using the word cryptid instead of crypto to talk about unknown creatures, which helps steer away some of that confusion. For example, cryptocurrency conventions are called cryptocons, while cryptozoology conventions are called cryptidcons. But make no mistake, Web3 crypto enthusiasts have attempted to bridge the two communities together.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  I was approached by someone in the cryptocurrency field that wanted to take advantage of my notoriety and being a museum director. And they wanted to start, I can't remember the term. It's what's the NFT?

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Oh, NFTs?

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, they said, would you sell NFTs for us? We'd have one that was Yeti and one that was a, you know, they'd take over the names of cryptids, make them, whatever that word is you just said.

• 9:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, NFTs, non-fungible tokens.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Right, right. And we talked for a while, a couple of times on the phone, and I just backed off. I said, is there anything that I can get out of this to have as a physical artifact? Because that's what we are basing our museum on, but this makes no sense to me. He said, no. I said, well, I don't think we're talking in the same world.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Lauren says he has no plans currently to start accepting Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies for admission at the Cryptozoology Museum. But he clarifies, no hard feelings against the other crypto people.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  There seems to be a little battle. I don't care. I really am not antagonistic against cryptocurrency people. I mean, it's just a phantom type of currency. Then when we think about it, money in general is all phantom.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  So are the two worlds continuing to stay separate? Are the cryptozoology people in one corner of the internet and the cryptocurrency people on the other corner? Not necessarily. There certainly are some cryptozoologists investing in crypto coin.

• 11:10Speaker 06

  My name is Stephen T. Major and I am the founder and director of operations of Extreme Expeditions Northwest LLC, which is an outdoor adventure company that specializes in guided Bigfoot research expeditions. And Cryptid Coin is a division of Extreme Expeditions Northwest LLC.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Stephen Major started getting into cryptocurrencies on his own, but then realized that he could try to use its potential to support his quest to track down undiscovered creatures in the world, which led to Cryptid Coin.

• 11:41Speaker 06

  We believe that we could capture Bigfoot, but it's all a matter of money. One of the things that Bigfoot research or cryptid research and investigation suffers from is a lack of funding. My ultimate goal with it was to pitch it to people globally that are into cryptid research and investigation or fans of it. And by purchasing some cryptid coin, they would be able to support cryptid research and investigation.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  You know, I was curious, what exactly would the funding go toward? Stephen told me it's all about the latest technology.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  We've got night vision cameras, we've got drones, we have motion sensors, we have audio recorders, we have all this stuff that is readily available within our budget. However, we would like to start raising enough funding to get more, what should I say, advanced devices, military-grade thermals, things like that. You know, one of those incredible, you know, like FLIR gear that they have on the Apaches and some of that stuff.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  While talking to Steven, I started to see a similarity in the discussions about both Bigfoot and Bitcoin. You know, like, if we had this amount of money, we can definitely hunt down Bigfoot. If we figure out the layers in the payment stack, we can definitely make Bitcoin work better. And Steven picked up on this, too. He said that when he talks to people about either subject, he gets similar reactions.

• 13:07Speaker 06

  Dude, I get razzed all the time. You know, I get razzed all the time about Bigfoot. It's your fantasy. They're not real. They're a joke and this and the other thing. And then, on the other hand, it's the same thing when I talk to people about either cryptid coin or cryptocurrency in general. They think it's a joke. It's fake money and this and that. And so there is a lot of that. They're just as skeptical about it because they just think it's a flash in the pan.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  In both cryptozoology and cryptocurrency, there are the skeptics, there are the believers. And of course, not all believers of one thing are believers of the other. Lauren Coleman is proof of that. He's not minting Nessie NFTs. I also reached out to a few cryptocurrency people on Twitter who use the word crypto in their names, asking if they're also interested in cryptozoology, finding Bigfoot, or the study of hidden or unknown animals. No one replied to my query. But Sharon Hill, who has been tracking those spaces, says it makes sense that people like Steven Major are heavily invested in both cryptos.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Probably the most interesting similarity of these two crypto communities is the significance, or I might even say a comfort level, in dealing with what we would call liminal spaces. So that's the gap between the real and the unreal, the light and the dark, the tangible and the abstract or symbolic, and how you comprehend that as part of your worldview. For example, you know, you have a cryptid report. Is that report indicative of people seeing a real animal? Or is it a hoax? Or is it supernatural, magical, or ethereal, if you will? Characteristics of popular cryptids are symbolic, and they manifest complex social concerns, too. So similarly, you've got cryptocurrency.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  Are these NFTs real, even though they are intangible? Or are they ephemeral, that will vanish when you blink? So people are concerned about kind of similar factors of these cryptids versus cryptocurrency things. Maybe both groups have quite an unusual interest and ease about the unknown and the hidden and what could come in the future.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  So far, cryptid coin has not taken off as well as Stephen had hoped. He told me he's pitched a lot of investors, but with no luck of funding. But he still believes cryptocurrency is the wave of the future, and the technology is here to stay. In the meantime, he continues his expeditions into the wilderness of the Northwest United States and Canada, and producing documentaries about Bigfoot.

• 15:47Speaker 06

  If I could get people that are really into cryptocurrency to get interested in this, I think it would work. We want to make believers out of people, not only about Bigfoot being real, but cryptocurrency being real as well.

• 16:08David Pierce?

  All right, Andrew, thank you. Is cryptocurrency the Bigfoot of money? I don't know what that means, but it sounds good. Anyway, we're going to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we are going to talk an awful lot about the iPad. We'll be right back.

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• 17:32David Pierce?

  Welcome back. For the rest of the show, we're going to talk about the iPad, mostly because it's iPad season with a bunch of new models coming out and the lineup is extremely confusing. So we're going to try to help you make sense of it. But I also want to talk about the iPad because, to be honest, I think the iPad is maybe the most interesting single gadget on the planet. It's part phone and part laptop. It has tons of power and tons of battery life and tons of connectivity. It's something totally familiar and simultaneously something totally new. You could imagine the world in which the iPad is like the future of everything. But I don't think that's going to happen. And I think that that's because Apple specifically has absolutely no idea what to do with the iPad.

• 18:17David Pierce?

  To explain what I mean, we have to talk about iPadOS and Stage Manager. Actually, no, hang on. Before we do that, let's set the scene a little bit. I'm going to talk a lot about Stage Manager in a minute, but first I want to play you a clip from the iPad's original launch in 2010.

• 18:31Speaker 09

  Is there room for a third category of device, something that's between a laptop and a smartphone?

• 18:38David Pierce?

  You can sort of picture it, right? Steve Jobs, standing on a stage, he's in jeans and a black turtleneck, just like always, and he's explaining why Apple wanted to build a tablet in the first place.

• 18:47Speaker 09

  In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks. Better than the laptop, better than the smartphone. What kind of tasks? Well, things like browsing the web. That's a pretty tall order. Something that's better at browsing the web than a laptop? Doing email, enjoying and sharing photographs, watching videos, enjoying your music collection, playing games, reading eBooks. If there's going to be a third category of device, it's going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. Otherwise, it has no reason for being.

• 19:25David Pierce?

  And then, a minute later, Jobs sat down onstage in this big comfy armchair and just started playing around with the device. It was very comfortable and relaxed, and he kept talking about how big the screen was and how immersive it felt.

• 19:39Speaker 09

  Using this thing is remarkable. It's so much more intimate than a laptop, and it's so much more capable than a smartphone with this gorgeous, large display.

• 19:49David Pierce?

  OK, to be fair, that was 12 years ago. And a lot about the iPad has changed, mostly in good ways. The iPad is orders of magnitude more powerful now. It has more apps, it has more accessories, including keyboards and styluses. And as it's gotten more powerful, people have naturally wanted to do more with it. Because, like Jobs said, in some ways, it is the best of both smartphone and laptop. The iPad was initially this chill, immersive device for browsing the web and playing music, but eventually, the power users wanted more. They wanted the iPad to be more like their laptop, to even replace their laptop. And that brings us to iPadOS 16, and brings us to Stage Manager. Stage Manager is... how do I describe it? Let me just tell you what the screen looks like.

• 20:34David Pierce?

  The feature is off by default, but when you turn it on, you get the app you're looking at in the middle of the screen, taking up, I don't know, 3/4 of the display. That space in the middle is known as the stage. Your dock lives down at the bottom, and off to the left, there are four thumbnails, representing the four apps you most recently used. These thumbnails are what Apple calls piles, which is an amazing name for it. And you can have up to four apps in each pile. Here's how Apple's software chief Craig Federighi described it at WWDC this year. He had just finished introducing Stage Manager for Mac, and then explained why it works on the iPad 2.

• 21:09Speaker 10

  Today, on iPad, when you use apps, you get the full-screen experience that we're all familiar with, like in photos here. With Stage Manager activated, I can now resize windows, exposing a powerful new way to work with apps on iPad. And the dock is visible, so I can easily get to all my apps. Let's open Music. You'll notice that all my recently used apps appear on the left, so switching between them is really fast. And Stage Manager gives me powerful new layout capabilities to create my ideal workspace. For the first time on iPad, I can work with overlapping windows.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  The idea behind all this, if I'm going to be really charitable to Apple here, is to give you a quick way to move between the apps you use most. You can have a pile with Slack and your email, and then with one tap, jump to another with your browser and Excel. That's a couple of taps faster than swiping to go home, or even swiping and holding to get to the app switcher. And that's something. But here's the thing. The way Stage Manager works makes absolutely no sense. Like, none at all. I've spent months now trying to figure out the mental model of what goes where, and I've got nothing for you.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  Okay, so you open an app, and it opens into Stage Manager. That kicks the fifth most recent pile out of Stage Manager, because you can only have four open at a time. But then, if you reopen an app from that old pile, it comes back into Stage Manager along with the rest of its pile. So that pile wasn't gone. It was just hidden, and you weren't allowed to find it somehow. If you have an app open in two piles, there's no way to know which pile will open if you click a link to that app. And if you click a link in a pile, it might just take you to another pile for no particular reason. You can't rename a pile or pin a pile, and you can't put one in your dock. You can't see piles by command tabbing between them. They just kind of come and go, and there's no rhyme or reason to any of it.

• 23:08David Pierce?

  The one exception is the app switcher, which interacts with Stage Manager in a way that actually works. You swipe up and hold to open the view of all your windows, which includes both your fullscreen apps and whatever piles you've created. This works. This makes sense to me. But that view doesn't match what's on the left side of Stage Manager, and it should. I could keep going on this forever, but let's just do a couple more. Say you decide you want to fullscreen a window. So you tap on the three-dot button at the top, and you select Zoom. Sometimes, nothing happens, just nothing, which is weird. But even when the app does snap to full size, it still stays in the pile. The only way To get it out of the pile is to tap on the three dots and hit minimize, which effectively hides the app. And then you go open the app again, and it's now separate. Not minimizing, but sure. But if you minimize a non-fullscreen window,

• 23:53David Pierce?

  it sends that app to its own pile, but leaves it in Stage Manager. But it only does that if there are other apps in the pile that you are currently using. Does any of this make sense to you? Because it doesn't make any sense to me at all. All of this is not even to mention all the stuff about Stage Manager that is just fully broken. Apple actually delayed the launch of iPadOS 16 in order to get it right, which is why the public launch is actually version 16.1. And it's still missing one of Stage Manager's core features, which is using the software on external displays. Big screens, in theory, would be even more useful for Stage Manager, but we don't get that yet. And even after all that extra work, it's nowhere close to ready. I've had the on-screen keyboard randomly appear when I resized an app.

• 24:38David Pierce?

  I've had apps crash as soon as I touched the bottom corner to resize them. There are a million hilarious bugs everywhere. Apple's camera app switches from landscape to portrait as soon as you shrink the window. And if you take your iPad and you turn it to go from landscape to portrait mode and then back, it resizes all your windows for some reason. Since you can resize apps, developers have to make sure they look good at lots of different sizes. Some of them really do. Imagine going from a landscape iPad to a portrait iPad to an iPad Mini to a big iPhone to a small iPhone. Some apps can handle all of those different sizes, but a lot of them can't, including a bunch of Apple apps. So you get this just scrunched up view, and it just looks bad. Again, I could keep going on this for a really long time. But if you haven't figured it out by now, I really don't like Stage Manager.

• 25:23David Pierce?

  It doesn't work very well, and most importantly, it just doesn't make any sense. But the weirdest thing about Stage Manager is that for the people who want more control over how their apps appear on the screen, there is a better answer. Users have been asking Apple for true free-form multitasking on the iPad, like a Mac where you can just have Windows wherever you want them, since basically the beginning of the iPad. And every time Apple has even made so much as a gesture in the direction of helping people do more at once, they freak out. Just listen to the crowd in 2015 when Federighi mentions multitasking at WWDC.

• 26:00Speaker 10

  But now I want to turn to the big one, and that's multitasking.

• 26:06David Pierce?

  They're cheering for multitasking. What a world. For a long time, Apple's excuse for not offering true do-many-things-at-once multitasking was that it was about performance and battery life, which was fair enough. But now, the iPad Pros run chips as powerful as MacBooks, and they have plenty of battery life to spare. That excuse, performance and battery life, just doesn't work anymore. So what gives? Here's my theory, and it's the only one that makes any sense to me. It's just that Apple doesn't want to. 12 years after that first iPad, I think Apple still holds tightly to the idea that the iPad is about focus. It's about simplicity. It's about making your computing life easier, even if that means not letting you do some things.

• 26:50David Pierce?

  One thing you have to understand is that when Apple talks about multitasking on the iPad and iPhone, it doesn't mean what you think it does. Apple has always used that word not to mean doing a bunch of things at the same time. Actually, Jobs hated that idea. He believed in focus above all else. He liked the idea of fullscreen apps. What Jobs and Apple actually meant by multitasking was quickly switching between things and making sure those things were up to date. Here's Jobs introducing iOS 4, for instance.

• 27:17Speaker 09

  So let's get into it. Let's start off with the first one, which is probably going to be the biggest one, and that is multitasking.

• 27:27David Pierce?

  Again, the cheering. People want multitasking. Anyway, sorry, back to it.

• 27:32Speaker 09

  So here I am in Mail. I'm going to look at a Mail message. This Mail message has a URL to a website, so I'm going to go to that website, and I just click on it, and I'm taken to the browser, right? So far, this is what we do every day on an iPhone. And here I am at this Mount Kilimanjaro website. Now, I want to go back to reading my Mail. I'm done looking at this website. What do I do? I could navigate back to the home screen and then click on Mail again. But rather than that, I can just double-click the Home button, and the window raises up, and it shows me all the apps that are running. These are all the apps that are running. And I want to go back to Mail, and I go right back to where I left it. Want to go back to that webpage? There I am, right back at the webpage. Very simple.

• 28:12David Pierce?

  What Jobs describes there is not multitasking. It's not even close. That is task switching. And that is what Apple has always meant when it says multitasking. Things like getting calls when you're in other apps or playing music in the background. That's the closest to true multitasking Apple ever wanted. Actually, Apple talked about Siri as a big multitasking win. It's a way to do quick things without losing focus on the thing you're actually doing. And over the years, even as Apple has embraced the idea that the iPad is a productivity tool, that you can and should use it to do real work, whatever that means to you, it's still trying to hold on to that same idea. The iPad can't multitask, truly multitask, because Apple thinks it shouldn't. But it also kind of thinks that it should, and a lot of people want it to.

• 28:57David Pierce?

  And so everything is kind of a mess. Let me go back to Federighi for a second. At an interview he did for John Gruber's Talk Show podcast right after this year's WWDC, because he says something I think is incredibly telling. Stage Manager was built for the Mac, he says, and only came to the iPad later.

• 29:13Speaker 10

  The Mac experience is messy by default, right? You open one thing and then you go to get the next thing and it piles on top of that mess. And you go to the next thing, you pile on top of that mess.

• 29:21David Pierce?

  And so Okay, let's skip ahead a bit. He talks about this for a while. Here's the iPad explanation.

• 29:26Speaker 10

  It was truly coincidental. I have to say that we found ourselves coming from a completely different direction with iPad and realizing they arrived at the same place. And it was, it was almost weird when that happened. But we realized with iPad, you had what was a clean experience by default, single window at a time. But where you wanted to be able to bring in more, have more access to things, more multitasking. So we were able to capture part of the spirit of the iPad and yet open it up in such a huge way to overlapping windows, that broader sense of access for multitasking.

• 30:00David Pierce?

  One half of that equation makes total sense to me. The Mac does get messy. It's true. And giving you some structure on top of that can be useful. It's why people like Spaces or think of like the Stacks feature on the Mac, the one where you can right-click on your desktop and have it automatically make folders for all the different types of files you have. It's great, right? It doesn't force you to work a specific Way, it just kind of helps you clean up. That doesn't work on an iPad. The iPad is already much more iPhone than Mac. It's already controlled and structured and it has so many guardrails that actually Stage Manager is just more structure on all of that structure. Now you have a million different ways to do everything and none of them just give you control.

• 30:42David Pierce?

  Yes, Stage Manager lets you have overlapping windows and that's nice, but it's too complicated for simple use cases and it's not nearly powerful enough for the real power user stuff. Because Apple is trying to make the iPad all things to all people, because it can do so much, so many different ways, it tried to make something that is both super focused and simple and super powerful and versatile. And that just turns out to be impossible. And so Stage Manager is kind of a bad idea badly implemented. And as you'll see with the iPad lineup this year, confusion is a bit of a theme. What is the iPad? Who is it for? How are you supposed to use it? Apple's answer used to be very clear.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  Now it's all about choice and versatility and you can do anything with it any way you want. I think that's a bad answer and I think Apple needs better ones quickly. But we'll get to all of that in just a second. First, a break. We'll be right back.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 32:05Speaker 12

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 32:29Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:42Speaker 07

  This series is presented by EY.

• 32:46Speaker 07

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• 33:24Speaker 07

  This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 33:33David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Apple is about to start selling a couple of new iPads. There's the 10th generation iPad model, the base model, which has some new colors, an all-screen display, which I'm saying with super sarcastic air quotes, a front-facing camera that is finally in the right place, and basically just, you know, the base model but with the current design. It's also substantially more expensive than it was, but you can still buy last year's model if you're still looking for a $329 iPad. Besides all that, there's the new iPad Pro, which has an M2 processor inside and which, as far as I can tell, won't actually be all that different for most people. So, right now, you have the option to buy the iPad 9th Gen, the iPad 10th Gen, the iPad Mini, the iPad Air, or the two sizes of iPad Pro.

• 34:16David Pierce?

  And they're all both very similar and strangely very different. Apple sells two models of pencil and six different models of keyboard attachment, and it honestly just feels like this whole lineup is kind of losing its mind. The Verge's Dan Seifert and Monica Chin have been writing about and reviewing these devices over the last couple of weeks, so we're going to get into trying to make sense of this lineup and which one might be for you. Dan, hello. Hello. Monica, hello.

• 34:43Speaker 13

  Hello.

• 34:44David Pierce?

  Thank you both for doing this. I feel like we've all been in insane iPad chaos hell for the last week or so. So I'm sorry for putting you through this again, but thank you for being here.

• 34:53Speaker 13

  Anything for you, David.

• 34:55David Pierce?

  So my goal here is basically like, I just want to try and help people figure out if you want to buy an iPad, which one should you buy? And I feel like I've had a bunch of like heuristics for this over the years where it was like, okay, if you, if you just wanted an iPad, but you wanted it only for very simple things. I was like, perfect. Just buy the base level iPad, $329. You'll be very happy. It'll be great. If you want to like do stuff, I mostly recommended people buy the Air. And then if it was like, if you are a person who knows you want a Pro, buy a Pro, you'll probably love it. Now I feel like everything is like wildly massively up in the air.

• 35:29Speaker 14

  Everyone should just own an iPad Mini. End of story.

• 35:32David Pierce?

  I mean, if I'm honest, that's my actual answer. It's the wrong answer, but that is how I feel in my heart. But Dan, let's start with you actually, because you just reviewed the iPad 10th generation, which is like ostensibly the default iPad. It should be the one that if it is like, I want an iPad and I want to answer no follow-up questions, the answer should be the 10th generation iPad. But you just reviewed it. What's the verdict? How do you feel?

• 35:57Speaker 14

  The verdict is it should be the default iPad, but I don't think it's the right iPad for basically anyone. That's not really a knock against the device itself, because in a vacuum, the 10th gen iPad is a really great tablet, performs really well. It's got reliable battery life, has all the iPad apps, the screen is good, if not perfect. It's got a new updated design, the sound is really good, all that kind of stuff. And so like, it's hard to like knock the device itself. But when you put it in the context of like, Apple's iPad lineup, it's like too expensive for what it is, if you are really price sensitive. And then it is like, not nice enough to put up a good fight against the iPad Air, which is like the next level up.

• 36:37Speaker 14

  So it's like kind of this weird in-between spot. And I'm sure Apple wanted to bring that in at a lower price, but like, right now, the way it's priced at, it's just a really tough sell, especially because The entry level iPad that you just mentioned is still available and still being sold. So if you're really price sensitive, there's a lot of reasons to just buy that one, which is still a really good tablet. Like it's not a bad tablet at all. It's a great iPad.

• 37:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. Monica, I'm curious what you think too, because your perspective on this is super interesting in that you come at it from like a, should you buy a $500 laptop or should you buy an iPad? Kind of thing. And I feel like, like reading your reviews always, it's been like, well, if you just want to do basic stuff, like maybe you should consider buying an iPad. And you wrote last week, and my sense would be having now like seeing these things in the wild and Dan's review experience and all that stuff that like, this is sort of confirmed your priors, that this is now like a mid-level laptop that is maybe not the mid-level laptop you should buy.

• 37:30Speaker 13

  Yeah. What I would say, David, is there is a big difference and I recognize that some amount of this difference is psychological, but it is there nonetheless between $329 and $449.

• 37:42David Pierce?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 37:42Speaker 13

  $329 to me is a very fine, I will buy this for my kids or I will buy this to just like, watch the watcher on, but like everything else I do on my computer. $329 for that is fine. $449 just seems like too much. And like, if that were just me, that'd be one thing, but I think most people think that $449 is getting to the point where that is too expensive for a device for which like, those two things are the primary use case. And that's without adding the keyboard, which like, if you want to buy the keyboard, that's another $250. At that point, you're at 700. Like, I can give you like tons and tons of laptops you can buy for 700.

• 38:26Speaker 13

  You know, it's like the $329 iPad 9 has been a real like pain for me as a reviewer, frankly, because every time I review a budget thing, I have to caveat like, well, you could buy this or you could buy this $329 thing. And when someone asks me like, oh, I want something under, you know, $600, what should I buy? It was hard for me to come up with an alternative to that $329 iPad 9. The more you increase the price, because price is like the main benefit of these things when you put them up against laptops, right? The higher that price goes, the easier it is for me to come up with something else that I can recommend to you as a budget shopper. And especially at 450, but going up to 700 is way easier for me to come up with some alternatives.

• 39:05Speaker 14

  Yeah, and it's important to note that like these iPads are great tablets, but not great laptops. Like you can add the keyboard to them and you can get keyboard cases for them. But ultimately it's a really small screen to try and like spend a lot of time working on. They are limited in how many, you know, apps you can run side by side and things like that. And so the higher end iPads do have things like Stage Manager, which we kind of have established is not in a great position now, but it's an idea for better multitasking. They have the ability to scale their screen down differently. So you can fit more stuff on the screen and makes it easier to multitask and stuff like that. These are really like, if you're trying to like do laptop like work with it,

• 39:46Speaker 14

  it's very light laptop work, sending a few emails, reading a couple of things, you know, stuff like that, not really like spending all day on it.

• 39:54Speaker 13

  I do want to add to that too, that this, I'm not trying to say here that the fact that the iPad is so limited, like is an insult to anyone who loves the iPad. Cause this is like something that's been a big deal on Twitter with some people. Like I have lots of devices that I own that I love, that I think are great. And I also don't think they should cost $700.

• 40:11David Pierce?

  Yes, 100%. Well, this comes to like my basic conundrum, which is like my, my general stance on most technology now is like, buy the best thing you can afford and upgrade as rarely as possible, right? Like buy the nicest thing you can figure out and then keep it as long as you possibly can. And that is like a happy way to live your technological life. Whereas if you just keep buying crappy stuff, you're just going to have to keep buying crappy stuff and that sucks. But I'm kind of at a point now where it seems to me like last year's $329 iPad is probably still the right choice if you're just a person who wants an iPad. Like I certainly don't imagine there's any particular like performance issues. It has a now two generations old chip, or maybe more than that, Jesus, if you include the M chips.

• 40:55David Pierce?

  But like it's still faster than you need, Dan, to your point to like check your email and browse the internet. The camera's pretty good. It has Touch ID and Lightning, both of which are old. And so I end up like spinning out of control where it's like, okay, this thing is going to be obsolete faster than some of these other devices. So I'm like reluctant to tell people to buy it. But also for all the things most people want to do on their iPads, it's still plenty right now. And I think the new iPad is both too expensive and in certain ways like overkill for that stuff. I don't know, this is the part I can't figure out.

• 41:25Speaker 14

  There's multiple like components here, right? So you mentioned the processor and performance. One thing that really struck me with reviewing this iPad 10.9 or 10th gen iPad recently is that I typically use an M1 iPad Pro. That's like my personal iPad. I use it all the time. I'm very familiar with how it works. I reviewed earlier this year, the iPad Air with the M1. And then I'm reviewing the iPad 10th gen with an A14, an arguably lower end chip. But I couldn't find an appreciable difference in performance in all the things that I do on my iPad, whether I'm zooming with colleagues, or I'm in Slack, or I'm bouncing between tasks, or I'm opening multiple tabs, or I'm writing the review on the iPad itself. Whatever it is, all of my typical office productivity work is like not limited by the

• 42:10Speaker 14

  processor. It's limited by the OS, but it's not the processor. So it's like you have all these different levels of processor performance in the iPad, but I'd be very hard pressed to be if most people could be able to tell the difference between the different iPads. There are other quality of life things. The Air and the Pro have nicer screens and that's immediately noticeable. And I think that's, if it is something that you care about, it is a very important thing. That screen is arguably the most important part of a tablet. It's the thing you're looking at the most and interacting with the most.

• 42:37David Pierce?

  It's the whole reason it exists.

• 42:38Speaker 14

  It is worth paying for a little bit nicer screen if you care that much. But then like, if you're not particular about that, then the ninth gen has a little bit of a smaller screen, but it's so much less expensive. And I, there's other things that it does have that the 10th gen doesn't have. And I think a big one at this price point for this type of device is the headphone jack. We've kind of like gotten away from like complaining about no headphone jacks on phones because we had to accept that there are basically no phones without, with headphone jacks anymore. And like, we have to live in that reality. But tablets are a very different product and they have a different type of consumer or user. And a lot of the users of a base iPad are kids, whether they're at home, or they're at school, or whatever it is.

• 43:20Speaker 14

  And they don't have their own AirPods and their own Bluetooth headphones and things like that. They're using wired headphones because it's easy. You can get sound limiting ones, which is a big thing for a lot of parents that you can limit the volume with. And so kids aren't blowing their ears out. And you could do that over Standard 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. If schools are sharing an iPad, I know that I can speak for like my kids. We send them to school with their own headphones and they use shared devices and plug their headphones into them. Right. You can't do that if you don't have a headphone jack. You can't give everyone a dongle or expect everyone to pair their headphones to it. Like it just, it's like a really frustrating limitation. So in this context, I think a headphone jack is actually a lot of value. The other part of it is if you're giving this device to a kid, they're probably going to break it at some point. Yes.

• 44:04Speaker 14

  And that goes back to Monica's point about the price. That $450 price versus $329 and realistic in the real world. Most people are not paying $329 for that iPad. It's been out long enough that it's easy to find for 279 or maybe even 250 if you hunt a little bit. That's a huge difference if you think, you know, this kid's going to break it in a year and I got to replace it or repair it or whatever it is. Like it just doesn't make sense to be spending that extra money. If you're buying something for yourself, that's a different story. If you're like, you know, looking for yourself, but then I would say, look at the iPad Air. It's that much closer in price to the standard, the 10th gen iPad and has a nicer screen. And we didn't even talk about like the pencil situation. It's got nicer accessories options there and it has an even faster processor, which might last longer in terms of like

• 44:47Speaker 14

  future support and updates and other new features coming down the road.

• 44:51Speaker 13

  What I would add to that too, from the perspective, from like the childless adult perspective is I think there's maybe something to be said for like, there's probably some constituency of people who's interested in paying a premium for like a slightly more modern look. And speaking between the ninth gen and the 10th gen, I do think though, that if I were a budget shopper myself, who was in the base iPads target audience, I'd be buying the 329 over the 449 right now. And I also think another option I'd have would be to wait for the 449 to come down to 329, because that's something to, to Dan's point about being able to find deals currently on the 329 one. Like the 449 one's price is very likely to fall in the future.

• 45:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, it does make a lot of sense to me. Like, I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to play devil's advocate and like, advocate for the more expensive iPad. Cause I think one of the things I have had to learn the hard way over time is that Apple buyers are less price sensitive than I think they are. And Apple has like continued to press that fact over and over and over again. They're, they're raising the prices of services. They're raising the prices of hardware and like, people just keep buying their stuff because they make good stuff and people like it. And but even in this case, like, I just, I'm not sure, other than the design, which I think is noticeably better from the ninth gen to the 10th gen. I can't really think of a thing that is going to be like meaningfully better in people's lives in the new one.

• 46:09Speaker 14

  Yeah. I mean, the screen's a little bigger.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 14

  It's a point seven inch bigger. So that kind of goes hand in hand with the design. But I don't think that the processor difference is appreciable. I don't think having 5G as an option is appreciable because most people buying this level iPad are not adding cellular because that's another $150 surcharge. Plus you have to pay for the service. So if you are in the type that is going to pay for cellular connectivity on it, you're probably looking at an Air or above anyways, because you're in that higher end market. So these other features are just like not adding value outside of the design is nicer and the screen's a little bigger. And for the price difference, that's a really tough sell.

• 46:45David Pierce?

  All right. So let's talk about the Air actually, because when these things first came out, my immediate reaction was like, why does the Air still exist? Because it was always the like, a little bit of a tweener and a little bit of the best of both worlds, depending on how you looked at it. It was like, it was right in that middle spot of like, it's, it's pretty good and pretty expensive and do with that what you will. Now it's $150 more than the iPad 10. But like you said, Dan, it has this better screen. It has support for the newest pencil. It has, I think, the same camera. It has the M1 chip instead of the A14 Bionic chip, which a lot of people got really up in arms again about. But again, I think there's like, this isn't, these things aren't going to be meaningful to most people.

• 47:27David Pierce?

  Like the A14 Bionic is going to be plenty and so is the M1, the M2, like God help you if you are maxing out the performance of the M2 chip on the new Pro, but we'll get to that. Is there a, is there a case for the Air as kind of still that like good tweener?

• 47:40Speaker 14

  I think the Air is actually the most compelling iPad for a lot of people. And I think that if you are buying an iPad, you're falling into two brackets. You're, you're falling into the one that we've discussed extensively, the budget buyer who is just buying a basic iPad for iPad things. Or you are, you are that customer that you mentioned earlier that is like not as price sensitive, is willing to pay more. And the Air actually gives you noticeable, appreciative, better experience and better options for the future, whether you want to add the pencil or add the better keyboard, or there are features coming down the road that will support the M1 but not the A14 processor. So like if you are in that space, I think the Air is actually a really good value. It gives you basically the same performance

• 48:22Speaker 14

  as the Pro. It gives you the same size as the Pro. It gives you the same ability to connect to external displays as the Pro. It gives you the same ability to connect peripherals as the Pro. And it has the same accessory ecosystem as the Pro. And it has almost as good of a screen. Really, the only difference between the screens between the Air and the Pro is ProMotion, which is the higher refresh rate, but you're still getting laminated display, you're still getting a P3 color gamut. It's noticeably nicer. You put it side by side with a 10th gen iPad and it's very obvious which one is a better screen. And so like all of those things are much better quality of life. If you are going to buy an iPad, maybe you're considering, you know, replacing your iPad or your laptop with it. Maybe you're looking for a third device to use on the go commuting. Maybe you are buying the cellular connectivity. Maybe you're planning to keep it for five

• 49:06Speaker 14

  years or more. I think that the Air is actually a really compelling option at this point. And especially as we were just saying, like you can get the ninth gen on sale. You could get the Air on sale too. And it's a lot closer to the 10th gen price when it's on sale. So it's like a $70 difference. And at that point, it's a no brainer to me. Buy the Air. Forget about the 10th gen.

• 49:24Speaker 13

  I mean, I agree that the big benefit of the Air is better accessory compatibility. I just wish they would give that to the iPad 10. And at that point, I think it would make more sense as a buy.

• 49:33Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's kind of a weird position though, right? Because like, it's super weird that the iPad 10 does not support the second gen pencil. Like it supports a first gen pencil and has this weird umbilical charging situation. It's a mess. And then the keyboard accessory for it is a $250 keyboard accessory that's only compatible with attention Air. It's not compatible with the Air, or attention iPad, excuse me, not compatible with the Air or the Pro. But that keyboard accessory is already really expensive. And the keyboard accessory for the Air and for the Pro is even more expensive. And the second gen pencil is even more expensive. So now it's like, if you are wanting to kit out your iPad and like, do the whole thing, get the whole experience, are you going to spend $300 on a keyboard for a $450 tablet? That doesn't seem like a great equation to me.

• 50:14Speaker 14

  Or $130 on a pencil for your $450 tablet. Like, it just makes sense to me that like, if you're adding those accessories, you're adding them to the nicer iPad. I agree that it would be great if these were all cross-compatible. It would eliminate a lot of confusion, but I just can't see a lot of people actually going for that deal on the 10th-gen iPad.

• 50:32David Pierce?

  I agree, but the keyboard lineup to me is the single most insane thing about the way that the iPads were coming out. There are smart keyboards and there are magic keyboards, and there are folios and there are non-folios. And the fact that there is a thing called the magic keyboard folio that only works on the iPad X and nothing else is stupid. Like, to your point, it's ridiculous. And, and Apple has this very simple opportunity to unify some of the things that it has going on. And like, there were a bunch of people who, you know, wrote these stories explaining that where the magnet would go for the Apple Pencil 2 on the iPad X generation is actually where the camera is in the center on in landscape mode now and all these things. And it's like, this is all well and good, but this is just like, this is so deeply like, un-Apple-like to be this complicated

• 51:16David Pierce?

  and make me like draw a diagram of which keyboard works for, for which thing.

• 51:19Speaker 14

  The strangest part of that is that the 10th gen looks identical to the Air and basically identical to the Pro. And so you would look at it and you'd be like, oh, these can use all the same things together. Like, the 9th gen looks different. And you could be like, oh, I can understand. It doesn't fit that keyboard case because it looks different and it's a different size. This is like within a millimeter of the size of the Air in every dimension, has the same size screen, has the same overall design. It doesn't make a ton of sense that they did not make it compatible with the same accessories.

• 51:48David Pierce?

  Agreed. If Apple could figure out how to get the new pencil on the iPad Mini, they could have figured out how to do it on the iPad X generation. But Monica, here's my thing about the Air. So, the Air is $599, but if you go, if you go all in and you, you like get the Apple Pencil and the magic keyboard, this thing is $1,027. And the other thing you could buy for that money is a MacBook Air. And I think a lot of the people who are just making this particular decision are literally going to be deciding between those two things. I, I don't know. What's your sense of how you would even explain that to people? Like, if you're gonna spend $1,000, are you gonna spend it on like, what feels like kind of a super expensive tablet? Or Apple's like increasingly extremely good entry-level laptop?

• 52:30Speaker 13

  I mean, I'd just get an Air.

• 52:31David Pierce?

  To be fair, that could have meant either one. It's the MacBook Air and the iPad Air.

• 52:35Speaker 13

  I would give the MacBook Air.

• 52:36David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 52:37Speaker 13

  Just because I think at that price, you should get an operating system that can do what macOS can do. Again, this doesn't mean that I'm not trying to insult people who love to use iPadOS. Like, I think it's great. I love to use it myself. I think there are great use cases for it. But macOS can just do a lot more. And I think the two are not worth the same amount of money.

• 52:59Speaker 14

  I think it's very interesting that if we were having this conversation three years ago, it'd be a very different dynamic. And the thing that's happened is MacBooks got good again. And now that they are so good, it's made the iPad a lot less compelling.

• 53:12Speaker 13

  Yes.

• 53:12Speaker 14

  We had all these years where it was like, oh, the iPad is the future of computing. Apple's really pushing the iPad as it's, as it's like next level. And it's getting all the features before the, the MacBooks would. And the MacBooks had terrible battery life and they ran hot and things like that. And then the ARM transition happened and MacBooks got good again, whether you got the Air or the Pro. You know, you're getting a really great computer that has the same battery life as an iPad, as, you know, the same quiet, silent performance as an iPad. It's nearly as light. Or if you add a keyboard to an iPad, the iPad is heavier than an Air. So it's like, all of those reasons to go with an iPad have evaporated. And so now it's like, well, where does this iPad sit?

• 53:51Speaker 14

  And I think for a lot of people, it really is not their only device. It is a secondary or tertiary when you count the phone, the computer, the laptop and the tablet. And then it's like, okay, well, how valuable is this thing to you? And then it's like, well, if it's a tertiary device, buy the $300 one and watch your Netflix on the couch. And like, you know, don't try to even think that you're going to replace your laptop with it.

• 54:11David Pierce?

  It is really interesting that there's been this big picture iPad transition. Like, it's almost coming full circle back to what it initially was. Which was like the thing that sits between your computer and your phone. That is like, it's good for consumption. It's nice for sitting on the couch. It's more immersive than your phone. And less chaotic than your laptop. And like, it has a place that it exists. But I think, but I think you're right. We spent a decade being like, well, my laptop kind of sucks. What if we could get this thing that is like smooth and fast and lasts all day to get up? Up to the laptop level of things and with things like Stage Manager, as we've talked about, I'm not super confident that's possible. I'm also not sure that's what we want anymore. It's like, and this, we can, we can have the like, should there be a touchscreen Mac debate all day?

• 54:56David Pierce?

  And I would very much like to, because yes, there should be. But I do think you're right that like the, the distance between those two things, especially again, for what we're talking about, for like, most people's everyday computing is just not that different. Like, if you're the type who is like, oh, I want to do the manipulate the 3D models, like the stuff that Apple likes to show on stage to show the new chips, knock yourself out, buy an iPad, you'll be very happy.

• 55:18Speaker 14

  Use that pencil and draw those drawings and.

• 55:22David Pierce?

  Which brings us to the pros, because these are, the pros, I feel like, are actually the easiest one for me to understand, because it feels very self-selecting to me. It's like, this is for people who either just want the best thing, because it is the best thing, or have some specific use case they know they're gonna like, beat the hell out of their iPad with, and want it for that specific purpose. Is that, that fair? Is that the right read?

• 55:43Speaker 14

  Yeah, I think like, especially when we talk about the 12.9 Pro. I think that 12.9 Pro is like, for the person who wants the absolute best, is like, actually going to commit to replacing their laptop with it. It's got a big enough screen where it's like, it's not as cramped as the 11-inch models, and you can do multitasking and things like that. And there's a lot of people out there who are willing to go through a lot of hoops to work around iPadOS limitations to make it their daily driver machine. They'll plug it into a display, they'll plug in hubs and dongles and everything to it, and, and use it like it's a real computer. And, and that makes sense. I think that the 11-inch Pro is kind of like a forgotten stepchild now. And it's like, we see the 12.9-inch Pro pushed forward each year. Last year, it got the mini LED screen, which is like a tremendous display.

• 56:28Speaker 14

  It matches the display that's on the MacBook Pros at a significant higher price. So you're getting a better screen with that, and that's absolutely important. But like, the 11-inch didn't get that. It didn't get it again this year. So like, what's going on with the 11-inch? Like, is it, was one gonna stick around? Like, why not just have base model, Air, and then 12.9-inch Pro? Like, that's like, seems like to be the mix of that makes sense. Now, I say this as a person that owns the 11-inch iPad Pro. Like, I'm the weirdo that bought it. But like, if I were shopping for a new one right now, and I was not looking at secondhand or special deals or anything like that, it would be a really tough sell to get the 11-inch over. Either the Air, which offers basically the same experience at a lower price, or the 12.9, which offers a meaningfully different experience, even though at a higher price.

• 57:12Speaker 13

  Yeah, my thing with few of the Pro is basically like, if you want to buy it, you know who you are and more power to you. There are some like, features on the Pro that are very clearly the Pro features, like the ultra wide, the Pro motion, the M2. If you need like, one or more of those, then you're someone who should buy the Pro. I'm with you, David, that that one to me is very easy to sort of understand who would be buying that versus who would be buying the other ones.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, that one, I feel like, one easy question I find for people is like, how aggressively are you going to use the pencil? And if people are like, the pencil is very important to me, it's like, that, get the Pro. Right? It's like, you want the higher refresh rate, you want the bigger screen. I will say, I was on a plane last night and this woman sat down next to me, took out a 12.9 inch Pro, had like a clip thing that went on the seat back in front of her. And literally, it was like she had hung up like a projector screen on the screen.

• 58:03Speaker 14

  She had a whole TV with her.

• 58:05David Pierce?

  It was the coolest flex I've ever seen. And it was over the like crappy little seat back display. She's like, no, no. And hung up her 12.9 inch iPad. It was the most amazing thing I've ever experienced. I've never wanted one of those things more than I did in that moment. But yeah, I think that's right. And Dan, this is kind of where I'm at now, too, is like, in a certain way, like, we have these new models and I'm not actually sure the iPad lineup just changed very much. It's like, we have, the ones I'm inclined to tell people to buy are the 329 inch iPad that already existed, the iPad Air that already existed, and the Pro, which I guess got upgraded, but not in like an earth shattering way. So buy the Pro whenever you feel like buying the Pro and you'll probably be very happy.

• 58:43Speaker 14

  Or buy last year's model of the Pro. It's like, basically my recommendation to everybody.

• 58:48David Pierce?

  That's what I was just about to ask. Like, is this where we're going to be with iPads for the foreseeable future? It's like, there's so much performance headroom. These things don't change all that much year to year because they can't really. It's just a screen that you hold.

• 59:00Speaker 14

  Yeah, I mean, I think what we're seeing actually is because of this performance headroom, because of what I was saying earlier, that like, during like, normal tasks, you really can't perceive a difference between this, these different levels of iPads. We're seeing Apple add artificial separators to them. And so the first one was, oh, StageManager is only going to be for the M1 iPads or newer. So that was limited to the Air and the Pro. They ended up backtracking on that and adding it to older Pro models that had older chipsets, but limiting it and saying that it won't do external support. And maybe that's accurate. Maybe that is like, you know, it- The hardware there just can't handle it for whatever reason. A, you know, 2020 MacBook Air with eight gigs of RAM and an M1 processor can let you do all the windows you want, but we're going to limit it on this one. And now we're seeing it with the M2.

• 59:44Speaker 14

  They are limiting this new pencil feature, which allows you to hover over the screen and get a little bit more precise actions with the pencil. That's limited to the M2 for some reason. It's not clear to me why that's limited to the M2. They're not backboarding it to the M1 Pros. So if you bought one last year, you don't get that feature. If you buy an Air, you don't get that feature. They are limiting it to the M2 and it's just starting to feel more and more like they are trying to find different things to segregate these and segment them, but that aren't really based on hardware limitations. It's just more like we wanted to add this feature to the Pro model because it makes it more compelling as a Pro device.

• 1:00:17David Pierce?

  You know what this reminds me of is every other Apple device right now. I mean, we talked about this a few months ago with the MacBook Air with M2, which is like, it has a couple of upgrades, but then it's also like, you can pretty easily land in a place where it's like, well, the M1 MacBook Air is still a terrific computer that's still going to last you a long time. With the iPhones, it's like, okay, the iPhone 14 has some stuff going for it, but it's not functionally all that different in your day to day life than the iPhone 13. Like, we're at this funny moment with a lot of Apple products where it's like, especially with the M series, they got so good so fast that it's like, I mean, the jump from, I still, I'm on a, I just switched maybe six months ago from an Intel based Mac mini to an M1 Mac mini.

• 1:00:59David Pierce?

  And like, once a day, I just reach over and just touch it and the fan is not on and it's not hot and it just makes me happy. Like, still.

• 1:01:06Speaker 14

  With all of those examples that you gave, there are hardware differences, right? So like the M1 Air and the M2 Air run all the same apps, all the same things. They have all the same core features. The M2's difference is it has a bigger screen and a better front facing camera. And so like, those are hardware differences. Where we're seeing segregation in the iPad line is like, okay, so it's got an M2 chip, but like, the feature difference doesn't feel like a hardware difference. It feels much more like a software feature difference. And that's where the weirdness is really kind of coming in to the iPad, because like you said, how much can they go on the hardware that they haven't gone already? It is a slab of glass. That you hold in your hand. I really would like them to move the camera on all of the models.

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:01:47Speaker 14

  Weirdly, the 10th gen iPad is the first one to have the camera in the right spot. Okay, I assume they're going to move it on the rest of them eventually. But like, beyond that, like, I don't know, what, what further can they do with the hardware? So now it becomes a different type of segmentation through the feature set and the software, which is not the experience that you have on the Mac. The Mac, you can run, if you have an M1 chip or an M2 chip, you can run all the same apps. They might run a little faster on the M2, but it's all the same ones.

• 1:02:11David Pierce?

  You're right, and I think it's going to be interesting to see if this line gets any smaller over time, because part of me feels like Apple is now like deeply invested in 50 different iPad product lines, and this is all just going to keep getting weirder. Or, as some people have theorized, like, maybe this is a sort of awkward in-between moment for a lot of reasons, like, the chip shortage is real, and the world is weird, and we're in the middle of a lot of, like, economic changes and all this stuff. And that maybe, whatever it'll be, like, the 2023 iPad, they'll, they'll just, like, blow it all up and be like, look, we have an iPad. It's called iPad.

• 1:02:42Speaker 14

  Yeah, I, I have a feeling like, the 10th gen, or whatever that successor is, will eventually get down to like, the $350 price. It will knock the, the old model out of contention, and like, it'll disappear. And then we'll have a much more, like, obvious type of good, better, best lineup in the iPads, you know, not counting the Mini, which is kind of a weird outlier, but like, right now, it is kind of a weird transition. We have a weird, weird transition where the 10th gen iPad has some features that the Pro iPad doesn't have, that are better, like, the better camera placement, the, the keyboard case is more flexible, gives you more options, things like that, has a function row, which the $350 keyboards for the 12.9 inch iPad does not. So, we're, we're in this weird transition.

• 1:03:25Speaker 14

  It's interesting that Apple decided to roll it out when it did, instead of just waiting, but, you know, that's what they do. Over time, I think it will smooth out. I can't imagine that they're going to keep adding more models to this lineup, because I don't, though, I will say, there's long been rumored a 15 inch iPad some point down the road. So maybe that'll show up at the top end, and, and we'll be like, oh, man.

• 1:03:45David Pierce?

  The iPad Pro Max will get a full hour of this podcast.

• 1:03:49Speaker 13

  But yeah, that's sort of been my read on it, too, is like, if the iPad X appeals to you, and like, like we've been saying, there are reasons it might appeal to you, just like, give it a little bit, it will get down to around 329-ish. And like, especially if you're buying something for kids, I really don't think anyone should be spending more than that.

• 1:04:05David Pierce?

  I think that's right. So Monica, for you, what is now the, like, default iPad to compare stuff to? Somebody asks you the, "I want a laptop, but I don't want to spend $1,000 on a MacBook." And you're like, "Well, have you thought about an iPad?" Which iPad is the one they have to think about?

• 1:04:19Speaker 13

  Oh, well, right now, for me, it's still the 329.

• 1:04:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:04:22Speaker 13

  I mean, as they're still selling that, so that's still the one that's going to give me problems. I mean, I might now have to, you know, mention the 449, but the 329 one, as long as they're still selling it, is still, I think, a problem for people who are making budget laptops that are really bad.

• 1:04:37David Pierce?

  That's fair. Yeah, you just need like a keyboard shortcut that just inserts like four paragraphs explaining the iPad line into every review that you do of a Windows laptop. All right, we should go, but thank you both. This is, this is very helpful. And I'm going to go back to my iPad Mini, which I feel very good about buying, and will never give up for any other iPad, no matter what.

• 1:04:55Speaker 13

  That's an easy one. If you want a small one, buy that one.

• 1:04:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's the best. And it is, you, you, trust me, even if you don't know you want a small iPad, you want a small iPad. They rule. All right, thank you both.

• 1:05:05Speaker 13

  Thank you.

• 1:05:06David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you so much for listening. As always, there is tons more coverage on everything we talked about at theverge.com. Monica wrote a great piece about the iPad in particular that you should definitely read. We'll put that in the show notes. And we'll have reviews of all the new stuff. You can also follow us all on Twitter. Andrew is Onira Murdna, which sounds insane, but is actually just Andru Marino backwards. Dan is DCCFert. Monica is MC squared 96. And I'm Pierce. This show is produced by Andru Marino and Liam James. Norrie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, or you want to draw me a map of how Sage Manager works, you can always email [email protected].

• 1:05:51David Pierce?

  And if you have questions, call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. Tell us all of your big thoughts and questions and feelings about all things tech. Alex, Neelai and I will be back on Friday to discuss the new Surface reviews, GPUs, watch bands, and a whole bunch of other stuff. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:06:38Speaker 12

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:07:02Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:07:18Speaker 15

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