The case for the iPad Pro

Today on the flagship podcast of tandem OLEDs: The Verge’s David Pierce and Chris Welch discuss the new iPad Pros with an OLED screen, Sonos’ controversial new app, and Sonos’ leaked headphones. Apple iPad Pro (2024) review: the best kind of overkill The new Apple iPad Air is great — but it's not the one to get The new Sonos app is missing a lot of features, and people aren’t happy Sonos Ace headphones will have magnetic ear cushions and 30-hour battery life The Verge’s Will Poor buys a bunch of broken iPhones on eBay, and pits the Apple Store against independent repair techs. Jet City Device Repair iFixit’s iPhone 8 charge port repair guide Hugh Jeffreys’ iPhone 12 investigation Apple’s plan to allow used parts in iPhone repairs David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about why some people think the iPad should be a Macbook replacement. Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from 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 Tandemo LED. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am outdoors at a coffee shop testing iPads. I try, when I review devices, to use them the way that people use them. So that means like trying to do work, playing games, using the pencil even though I'm a terrible artist. But I feel like for me, when I think about the iPad, the single most charming, romantic, iPad-y use case you hear for the iPad is the people who just bring their iPad to a coffee shop, get a cup of coffee, sit and do the Sunday crossword. I love it. That's what iPads are for. So I am here, I have coffee, I have the iPad Pro, I have the iPad Air, and I have a ham and cheese croissant, and I'm gonna do the crossword. I have a Monday crossword on the iPad Pro, I have a Sunday crossword on the iPad Air.

• 0:47David Pierce?

  I'm worried that I'm gonna kill the battery on the Air before I finish the crossword, not because the Air's battery life is bad, but because I'm very bad at Sunday crosswords. It's gonna be something. But anyway, we have a lot coming up on the show today. We're gonna talk to Chris Welch about OLED screens on the iPads. We're gonna talk about Sonos, because there's a lot of stuff going on with Sonos. We just have a lot to catch up on with Chris, so we're gonna do that. We're also gonna talk about right to repair. Will Poor, our producer, as you've heard a few times on this show, has been deep in the right to repair world over the last few months. And this time he has a really fun, different kind of update on what it means for us, the device owners and users, when we can actually have them repaired in new ways. Super fun story, then we're gonna get to the hotline. Like I said, lots to do in this episode. All that is coming up in just a second.

• 1:30David Pierce?

  But seriously, I have a lot of crosswording to do, and I only have this one cup of coffee and that one croissant. So it's possible it's not gonna happen. But I'm going for it. Wish me luck. This is The Vergecast. See you in a sec.

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• 2:45David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right. I crushed the Monday crossword. Just crushed it. Top to bottom, like eight minutes, nailed it. Everything was great. And then I did so badly on the Sunday crossword that I gave up almost immediately. My mom can just sort of sit down with a pen and do the Sunday crossword, and I think it's remarkable. It's like watching somebody who's really good at Excel or PowerPoint or something just sort of use their tool, like somebody who knows all the keyboard shortcuts for Photoshop. I am not one of those people. I found a bunch of words I had never heard before in the clues and was like, this isn't going to happen. So I gave up. I came home. Here we are. Let's get into the show. I don't know if you've noticed it yet, but it's kind of officially become gadget season over the last couple of weeks. We had a quiet couple of months there, but now it's developer conference time.

• 3:29David Pierce?

  Graduations are happening, so there's deals everywhere. Back to school starts shockingly soon. Everybody's got stuff they want to sell you for Christmas that is somehow already coming out, even though it's May. It's just going to be a deluge of gear for the next few months. And to be clear, that is awesome news. But this week, there are two particular gadgety topics that I'm especially interested in. I want to talk OLED screens, now that I've reviewed the new iPad Pro. And I want to talk Sonos, because a lot has been happening in Sonos world the last couple of weeks. Some of it exciting and some of it extremely not exciting. And there is no one better to talk about either of those things with than The Verge's Chris Welch. Hi, Chris.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 4:07David Pierce?

  We haven't done this in a while. It's like, we have a lot to catch up on. We haven't subjected anybody to terrible microphones in a while.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  Yes, we're very overdue on that.

• 4:16David Pierce?

  We are. We have a bunch to catch up on. Basically, two big things I want to talk about while we're here. I want to talk a little about iPads and then I want to talk a lot about Sonos. But let's start with the iPads. And I want to talk to you in particular because you were very intrigued from the beginning with the new iPad Pro. Tell me why.

• 4:32Speaker 04

  I just use the iPad Pro quite a lot, honestly, for work, for photo retouching, for lots of stuff. There's no device quite like it among like all the gadgets that I have. Say like the new 13 inch model has definitely caught my interest. It looks kind of samey, but also much nicer at the same time, which I can appreciate.

• 4:49David Pierce?

  That's kind of the story of the iPad, like samey, but much nicer in a way I can appreciate is like a perfect summation of the whole review I wrote of the iPad Pro.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Hey, man, you've held it, you've used it for a while now. What do you, what are your, your thoughts? What's your takeaway?

• 5:01David Pierce?

  I mean, it's, it's exactly that at this point for me, right? And I think part of the reason I'm curious for your thoughts is you're more of an OLED expert than I am. So I'm curious how you read it, but my takeaway so far has been that in a certain way, this is like the platonic ideal of an iPad. Like it's very powerful, it's very thin, it's very light. Like, I don't know how you'd spec this thing better than it is currently specced.

• 5:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:24David Pierce?

  And yet I feel like that has increased my enjoyment of the iPad Pro by like 1%. It's like, the iPad is just really good and it's been really good for a really long time. And now here we are, but you, again, part of the reason I wanted to talk to you about this is when Apple talks about like who uses the iPad? They like literally describe Chris Welch, right? They're like, do some work tasks, lot of photo retouching. It's, it's like, it's a great sort of creative canvas. And I feel like you use it more fully than most people I know. And this is again, where the OLED comes in, like for you as a photographer and person who spends a lot of time with photos. What does this new screen do for you?

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I mean, the brightness is pretty much the same as the prior one, but there's no more blooming, which is nice. So you've got those, you know, perfect OLED blacks and whatnot. I haven't seen it that much in person, but I'm, I'm certain there are going to be like a bunch of people like obsess over like, you know, like the uniformity of the screen. Like there are these forum posts where people go into a dark room with their iPhone and like load up like a gray screen. And like, see like how uniform it is, like is one side like slightly warmer? Like people like obsess over like the smallest panel like issues. So that's going to be like a whole new wave with this one, I'm sure, once they actually get out to customers.

• 6:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's just so much of it to look at now. Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Two OLED panels, that's kind of cool. But yeah, I don't get the whole thinness thing. Like I wish they They'd like just put more battery. They've they've said 10 hours for years and years and years at this point. And like, that's true. Like when you use it as an iPad, but like, once you like, do like laptop laptop tasks with it, uh, you're not getting 10 hours anymore. So I wish they'd kept the same thickness as before, but added more battery. But we said that about their stuff all the time. So.

• 6:59David Pierce?

  I know. It's been true for so many years at this point, but I actually think I have found that argument somewhat compelling over the years, because I think in most cases thinner genuinely sort of is better in a lot of cases, and especially lighter is better for the iPad.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Lighter especially.

• 7:14David Pierce?

  But I think at this point, we might have tipped to, I would actually take slightly heavier. It's so light and so thin, like it feels amazing, but then I pick up last year's Pro and that also felt great. I still have zero complaints about it, even compared to this new one. So I'm like, just if if I were to hand back a little bit of that thickness and weight and we can get rid of the camera bump and and more battery.

• 7:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:38David Pierce?

  I think I'd make that trade. I had it. But yeah, we've been asking for that trade for years now. I don't think we're ever gonna get it.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  How's the keyboard?

• 7:45David Pierce?

  Oh dude, it's it's so good.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  They got rid of my favorite smart keyboard folio.

• 7:48David Pierce?

  I know.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Very upset about that. Uh, I'm hoping it'll still work. Like, I haven't tried it, so maybe it'll still work.

• 7:54David Pierce?

  I have to confess, I have zero feelings about the smart keyboard folio. I just, just none at all. Why? Why? Tell me all of your feelings.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Cause it was like a perfect on the go keyboard. It was lightweight, so lightweight. And like, the keyboard was like, very mediocre. But like, it was there when you needed it. And when it wasn't, you would just like flip it behind and use the iPad for other stuff. Whereas with the Magic Keyboard, you're just constantly like taking it off, putting it on, taking it off, putting it on. There's no natural like secondary mode. And so I wish there was like a, some kind of keyboard accessory that had that same kind of versatility.

• 8:26David Pierce?

  That is fair. I will give you that. The Magic Keyboard now, even though it's lighter, is still heavy. And it like doubles the size of the iPad essentially. And the thing I liked about the folio, the folio was the one you could actually pull the keyboard off and just have the case be a kickstand, right?

• 8:41Speaker 04

  No.

• 8:42David Pierce?

  Oh, that wasn't that one. See, there's so many accessories. How am I supposed to keep all of these straight?

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Uh, no, the folio would just fold behind. And so you'd like, hold the iPad and like, the keys would be in your fingers, which was kind of strange, but I don't know. I got used to all of it. It was quirky. It was made terribly. Like that material they use is just god awful. But like, you know, the keyboard felt so nice and it was like waterproof and had a lot of benefits. I mean, you know, it's not as nice as the Magic Keyboard by any means, but $300 for a keyboard in any, any context is kind of silly.

• 9:08David Pierce?

  Oh, it's lunacy. I mean, and I continue to be in a hard position with all of this iPad stuff of like, if I recommend that you buy an iPad, I'm basically saying you should buy an iPad Pro, plus a pencil pro, plus the new Magic Keyboard. And at this point, I've just recommended like $1,800 worth of gadgets to you.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  What size iPad Pro, though?

• 9:29David Pierce?

  I'm personally forever a fan of the 11 inch. Like, the 13 feels great this year. It's much more wieldable than it was. But I still, for my own uses, the 11 inch is the one. The keyboard's a little smaller, but I can hold the thing a lot better. It's a little just more manageable for me personally. But I would imagine for you, the 13 inch is the only one.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, just that bigger canvas. Like, I love those rumors of like a 15 inch iPad and like a 16 inch iPad. Give me that tomorrow. I'll absolutely get that.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, just make it bigger and bigger, and I'm here for it. But yeah, I can see a case for the 11, especially now because the screen is the same, the OLED on the 13 inch, so.

• 10:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, the one last thing on the OLED, and then let's switch and talk about Sonos. This whole tandem OLED idea, you've been covering the TV world for forever. There's been this sort of march of OLED in those devices forever, OLED in gigantic TVs. It's getting a little cheaper and a little better. Where does what Apple's doing fit into kind of the overall OLED universe for you?

• 10:28Speaker 04

  It seems pretty innovative. Like, there aren't too many TVs that do that at all. So I think like their thinking is that like two OLEDs can get brighter and like stay safe longer. Whereas like if you push like a single OLED panel that hard for years and years, it might not kind of age as well. So it seems like a smart way of going about it. I haven't seen it in person. I'm sure people are going to do like all sorts of like close-ups and, you know, like deep dives on the tech there. But it's pretty cool. You know, it's a very Apple-y thing to kind of put that in the iPad, so.

• 10:53David Pierce?

  Do you think if this is the sort of thing that works, we might start to see it other places? Like a tandem OLED television, is that a thing that makes any sense over time?

• 11:01Speaker 04

  I don't think it makes sense for the TVs because they're already like pretty bright, like past like 2000 nits these days. So they don't really need that up of laptops. Maybe I could see it being a thing, certainly. Uh, so we'll see how it goes and see if it has like burn in or any kind of like negative effects over time.

• 11:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  But yeah, for now it just looks very pretty.

• 11:17David Pierce?

  Okay. Yeah. The, the timeline of all of this is going to be interesting. Like I've, I've had the iPads for six days now. And you can do a lot with an iPad in six days, especially like we've used a lot of iPads for a long time. But the two biggest questions I have are A, are there going to be burn in issues on this screen because it's OLED? And Apple's theory about why that might not happen tracks, at least sort of philosophically. But like, we just don't know. And in six months, it'll be really interesting to see. Uh, and then the other one is, is literally just like breaking and bending. Like every single morning I take this thing out of my backpack or my suitcase as it was over the weekend, or just like pick it up off my desk and just look at it. I'm like, did it bend? Are we good? And so far it's fine. So far it's fine. But like, am I going to be shocked?

• 11:59Speaker 04

  I saw some story that there's some kind of like new steel like rib inside there for like added strength. So it's got some kind of a new component in there, uh, to keep it, uh, from bending ideally. Cause we started that whole like new cycle back in like 2018 when they were shipping bent out of the box, which was, was pretty lousy.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  I'm sure there are those, those pictures of the bent ones still like haunt the memories of people at Apple. It's good stuff.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:23David Pierce?

  All right. Let's talk Sonos for a little bit because Sonos has been, I would say largely because of you, uh, very in the news the last couple of weeks. Let, let's talk about new products and then I want to talk about the app and the kerfuffle around the app.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  Oh, the app.

• 12:34David Pierce?

  We're going to get to that, but the, the big new thing that you have revealed is coming. Uh, and that has been kind of a semi-open secret for a while is coming, uh, is the, the long awaited Sonos headphones. Tell me about the headphones.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Uh, they're called the Sonos Ace. Uh, there are photos on the site. Uh, they look very nice. Uh, they've seemed pretty high end. They're going to cost around $450, I believe is the rumor. They're gonna have like noise cancellation, all the usual high-end headphone stuff. They're gonna do tie-ins to your home theater. So if you own like a Sonos Arc, you'll be able to hear TV audio and do like spatial audio with head tracking for Atmos content. And so yeah, Sonos wants this to be their next big hit because they kind of need a hit. They've had like a few soft quarters and people aren't buying their speakers as much as they were during COVID lockdowns and all that. So they really need some kind of pick-me-up and they're really hoping that this is gonna be that.

• 13:24David Pierce?

  So I can imagine a world in which Sonos basically just says, we're very good at making audio products. We've made home audio products, now we're making a different kind of audio product. Is there more to the advantage of buying headphones from Sonos other than just they will probably be very good because Sonos is making them? Like, what in theory do you think people gain by buying Sonos headphones as a Sonos thing?

• 13:49Speaker 04

  I think we'll see what they say once they actually like, you know, actually announce them. But yeah, I think it's gonna be just a story of, you know, we built our brand on audio, we know audio. But it's hard to compete with like Bose in terms of noise cancellations. Come out of the gate and like challenge Bose in terms of ANC or Apple, you know, has the best transparency mode on the market. And like, and it sounds like Sonos thinks that like they have the best everything. So we'll see how that actually bears out in practice. But in terms of like what they'll offer, some kind of tie-in with home theater, I don't think they're gonna play like Wi-Fi audio or anything like that. So it's gonna be somewhat limited, the tie-in to the Sonos ecosystem, but we'll see. I don't know. They look cool and they had to put out this new app because of the headphones.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  So that's why there was a rush to get the new app out and the Sonos community has not received it that warmly.

• 14:39David Pierce?

  All right, fine. You wanna talk about the app? Let's talk about the app. It's fine. We waited long enough. Let's talk about the app. Yeah, so the story is, I understand it and I confess I am a Sonos user to the extent that I have Sonos speakers and I play them through the Spotify app. So I have almost no knowledge of the Sonos app, except that it is the thing I use to set up my Sonos speakers and then essentially ignore because I just use Spotify. What has happened with this app? What is going on here?

• 15:05Speaker 04

  So they redesigned the whole thing to make it faster and easier to get to your speakers and just like change settings and search for music. So it's got a whole new coat of paint. But they've taken out like many, many features like local music. Search is gone. You can't like edit your queue. Like if you make like a playlist, you can't do something that basic until June, they're saying that'll come back. So people are gonna have to wait a month for some pretty basic.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  The queue thing is is wild to me. I think I want to come back to the local music thing because I I have both questions and a lot of thoughts about that. But but I honestly feel like one of the core benefits of a Sonos system.

• 15:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:43David Pierce?

  Is the way the queue works.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:45David Pierce?

  And it's a thing people love. It's a thing they like to manage. It's a very good system. And it is of all possible features to leave out for Sonos, I would put that like mere last on the list. It's so wild to me that that wasn't here.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a music app. And they took that out. Best stuff like sleep timers are gone until like May or June, late May or June. So it's just stuff that's been taken out just so this app could be more, you know, somewhat faster. I think Nilay likes it quite a bit. So it depends like how you use your Sonos app. Like some people don't have like, you know, local music to deal with, or some people just use AirPlay to play stuff on their Sonos gear. So if they do that, and I doubt they even care. But yeah, there are a lot of like, downgrades, you could say, like the accessibility has gotten worse, which is terrible for people who like need those features. And so that'll be hopefully fixed by the end of this month. But stuff like that just has people asking like, what the hell was the rush here? Like, why didn't you put this out as like a beta option and like have the old app still there alongside it? You know, which are fair questions, honestly. Versus just like forcing everyone onto it right away.

• 16:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. What is your sense of the backstory there? I think this does seem like a somewhat surprising kind of own goal from Sonos on this front. Like, what what is your sense of what's going on there?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's all about the headphones, really. That was just kind of strange that they're like putting all this like pressure on a product that no one owns yet. And so they're like making life less convenient for people who have bought their stuff and their speakers, just in the name of these Ace headphones, once they're out.

• 17:08David Pierce?

  So why do the headphones require this new app? Like, the last time they did a big update like this, it was to basically change the whole infr- Structure of the system, right? And that's, that's always going to be challenging. I get that that is a thing you eventually have to do. It's going to be messy. I don't know that Sonos handled it perfectly, but like, I feel like that went fine and everybody hemmed and hawed and then kind of got on with their life. This one seems like it just could have been easier and Sonos kind of whiffed it. What is it about the headphones that is forcing all of this?

• 17:37Speaker 04

  I think they're trying to make it so you can like, set them up easier out of the house. You know, like most Sonos carry up to like, be, be home on your wifi before you set it up. Whereas like headphones, you don't want to have to deal with that. So I guess that was part of the stack that they had to change. But as far as like, why a whole new app design was necessary, or like, if these things just kind of like, happened to coincide at some point. But yeah, people are upset. Very, very mad. If you go to the Sonos subreddit or their forums, they're saying, we're listening. And like, they're like, talking to like, their customers, like on the forums and stuff. And they're saying like, this is when this feature will come back. This is when this feature will come back. But yeah, I don't know. It just seems like a very big unforced error that they've made here. And it's kind of shaken, you know, trust in them again after the S1, S2 thing, which was overblown, like you said, like they never like, killed any products. They left

• 18:21Speaker 04

  some of their very oldest devices on the S1 platform and like, everything else is still supported on S2. So that was kind of ugly, but they did it and it was fine. This is just different. It's like a change for the sake of change. And I think that's just not going over super well, but maybe the headphones will come out and like, they'll be mind blowing and you know, all will be forgiven.

• 18:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Let's see.

• 18:40David Pierce?

  I mean, I think part of the reason I'm so hung up on the local music side of this is that it feels like a microcosm of Sonos sort of losing its core audience. That like, this company has been the company for people who are willing to spend

• 18:54Speaker 04

  Some of their oldest customers, especially.

• 18:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. And who are like, willing to spend a lot of money to get really good audio. There was just nothing like it for a really, really long time. And people spent a lot of money. They bought into these systems. They did a lot of work to maintain these systems. And then it feels like, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad reasons, and recently for very bad reasons. Sonos has just kind of blown all of that up. And it feels like, it's like when Apple forgets about the Mac Pro for like, a decade at a time. It's just like, all you have to do is just sort of keep reminding these people that you love them. And all that means is just to keep supporting local music. Like, just let people upload their MP3s to your thing and there is a set of people on earth who will love you forever.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I'm one of those people.

• 19:33David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I can't tell if Sonos is like, Trying hard to push away from those people in the name of like finding a much bigger audience with things like headphones, or if it's just screwing up unintentionally. But it's it's just a really odd move to me to look at the people who have had your stuff for damn near 20 years at this point and are like the people who care the most about their music.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:56David Pierce?

  And just say, oh, we redesigned an app and we have nothing for you. That seems nuts to me.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  I don't think it was intentional. I think it was just like they had their, they just like really mixed up their priorities as they were building this app and now they're hearing about it. Obviously, there are good parts to this app, but don't get me wrong. So there's a web app now, which is very cool. You can like access your system from like anywhere. And so that wasn't a thing before. So that's great. There are other odds and ends. Like it is faster to like move around your system, like access your speakers and stuff like that. But it's just like lots of change all at once. And I think like people are fair when they say like, you should have just done a beta or had them, you know, side by side, or, you know, like a preview app for a while, just to kind of like ease people in versus like, just here's the new app. Half the stuff is missing and it'll be back in like two months. So, you know, that's never going to go over well. And it hasn't.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  But I think they're learning again, their second painful lesson after the S1 and S2 fiasco. And now we're here. So.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, let's hope.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  We'll see where things wind up in like late June. Hopefully it'll be at parity with the old app again.

• 20:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, again, it's it's just been, I think I'm really sensitive to it right now because we had Humane and Rabbit both being like, oh, don't worry, our products are awful now, but they're going to be so good this summer. And then it was like for Sonos to basically come out and say exactly the same thing. It's just like, oh no, like I've heard this too many times now. I just don't believe you. And also, if that's true, why did you ship it now? Like, just, just support everything for two months. It'll be fine.

• 21:24Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 21:26David Pierce?

  The other product that you you scooped is a new Bluetooth speaker coming from Sonos, which is, I would say of all of the new Sonos stuff, maybe the one I'm most excited about. What's going on there?

• 21:36Speaker 04

  The Rome 2 is coming soon as well. It looks just like the old one. So not much has changed there. Still very small. I have one. I like it. Fine. I think the Move 2 is my favorite like Sonos overall product. That's bigger, obviously. Can't quite travel with it the same way as you can with the Rome.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  That's the one with the big handle, right?

• 21:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:53David Pierce?

  That thing is a brick, but boy, it's good.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. But the Rome was like a perfect shower speaker, like you were saying. So that could be an option for you. Uh, but I think like, you know, it's just pretty samey. And there's a new button on the back so you can like pair it easily. Whereas before, again, you had to like be on your home wifi so you could set up a Bluetooth speaker. It's like, what are we doing here? Uh, so now there's a button, you can just set it up right away and that'll be simpler. Uh, so that's like the main change in the first gen model. But yeah, there were some concerns with like the battery over the long term. So hopefully they've fixed some of that stuff so it'll last longer. But yeah, it's a tiny little thing. Sounds decent for its size. And I think that'll be out sometime this summer as well. So yeah, tis the, tis the season for new speakers.

• 22:32David Pierce?

  I'm curious whether you think Sonos is pushing more towards trying to be a company like Bose that just kind of has a lineup of very good audio products? Or is going to keep trying to find a way to like build a whole system? Cause like the thing that worked for Sonos for so long, I feel like was that it got better the more Sonos stuff you used.

• 22:51Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 22:52David Pierce?

  But then I look at things like the headphones and the Rome and again, like any push that Sonos is going to make to sort of make a true like mainstream product.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:01David Pierce?

  Seems like it pushes up against this idea of like building a beautiful little walled garden system for people who love good audio. Do you think, can Sonos be both of those things? Or is it just going to have to lean into like, we just sell audio products? The end.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  I don't know. I think, uh, they certainly can make a very, very good speaker. Uh, we've learned that before. Can they like stand toe to toe on headphones with Bose and Apple and Sony and whoever else? Um, that remains to be seen. And like there are all these rumors of like a TV streaming device. It's like, how, how can Sonos really play in that world and stand out versus Apple TV or Google TV? It's like, can you really like make a statement there?

• 23:39David Pierce?

  I forgot about that.

• 23:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's kind of curious to me. Like what would a Sonos streamer look like and why? So there's just a question of why as they go into these new product categories. I'm sure they're going to have like a great reason for the headphones, you know? Uh, but as far as like a TV streamer, I don't really understand like what Sonos could do to really, you know, stand out from the pack. Uh, but we'll see. I mean, they do want to build out, obviously. So it should be a pretty fascinating next year for the company.

• 24:02David Pierce?

  And it does that strategically, I can see the idea of just saying, we make very good audio products. We would like to make audio products that are accessible to more people. That totally tracks for me, but then I had, I honestly had totally forgotten about the TV streamer thing. And there was, but, but this is like, now all of this is pouring back. Sonos trying to be like, we are an operating system company, like our main thing is the platform, which I feel like is such a fundamental misread of what people like about Sonos. That they've like tolerated crappy apps for so long because the sound is great. And now Sonos is being like, forget the sound, it's all about the apps.

• 24:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know if people want Sonos to become Roku, but we'll see, we'll see what that looks like.

• 24:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a boy. I don't want anybody to become Roku right now. All right. So what's your sense of when are these headphones coming out? Any, any news?

• 24:50Speaker 04

  The rumor is June, so it should be pretty soon, honestly. So hopefully we'll get a pair and be able to do our tests and review. And we'll see how that microphone compares to competition. I'm really curious to see how they like, how the soundbar integration works and like the home theater support. People love like private audio from the Roku and stuff. And so I think that would be a pretty compelling feature. So yeah, June sometime is the belief and yeah, should know more than.

• 25:15David Pierce?

  Fair enough. They do look good. The pictures you got, they're like simple. They, they had that sort of like almost a prototype look in a way that I really like. They're sort of undesigned in a very designy way. I'm into it.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Pretty snazzy, not as heavy as the AirPods Max thankfully, because the AirPods Max are

• 25:32Speaker 04

  they're heavy on your head after a while. So these will be less heavy than that, but yeah, they look nice. So how, how they'll sound, we should know in a few weeks.

• 25:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right. Well, when you get them, I'm thinking for the next mic test, we're going to send you in like a cave somewhere and just do the most echoey possible situation we can. And we're going to have you test a bunch of mics. It's going to be a lot of fun.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  I'm here for it.

• 25:53David Pierce?

  Until then, thank you, Chris. Appreciate it as always.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 25:57David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about right to repair. We got a fun update for you on that front. We'll be right back.

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• 27:34David Pierce?

  Welcome back. We've been covering rate to repair a lot on this show over really the last couple of years. And it turns out just in the last couple of months, a lot of stuff has been happening. Oregon just passed what is probably the strongest rate to repair bill we've seen yet, which includes a ban on parts pairing. Apple is slowly and somewhat sketchily starting to change some of its repair practices, especially around parts pairing. There's just a lot going on and the rate to repair industry is changing really fast. Will Por on our team has been looking into this for a while and is now back, I think, after breaking several phones. Will Por, welcome back.

• 28:09Speaker 06

  Hi, thank you. Yeah, I have a growing drawer full of really brutalized iPhones after doing this story, and we will get into why, but I am now going to be a used iPhone broker myself after all of this. So we'll see how that goes.

• 28:27David Pierce?

  So what have you been up to?

• 28:28Speaker 06

  So I have been following all this legislation that you're talking about and the companies changing policies, all this really high level stuff, and it was starting to just feel abstract to me. And so as I have been following it all, wanted to just take a break and get some stuff fixed to just see what these repair practices actually look like in real life and see what repair issues bubble up over the course of doing real repairs. So my idea was to just collect a bunch of broken iPhones, take them to the Apple Store first for kind of unofficial diagnosis, and then take those same phones with the same problems to an independent repair shop and see what repairs each store offered, how knowledgeable the Apple Store was and

• 29:12Speaker 06

  an independent store was, how much the repairs would cost. I just wanted to see what repair advocates are fighting for specifically and why they're fighting so hard for these independent shops. So that was the plan. And for the record, I know a lot of the issues we're going to talk about here are not unique to Apple, but as we've talked about, Apple products are just so ubiquitous that so many of these repair shops literally live or die based on how repairable Apple devices are. And the company has just fought against repairability so hard for so long that Apple is just the center of this story. So lots of iPhones in this story.

• 29:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's a good caveat. I forget who it was, but somebody a while back said to me, basically, Apple is not the only company that matters in right to repair, but none of the other companies cumulative matter as much as Apple does. So it is the center of the story, it feels like exactly the right way to describe it. It's not the whole thing, but it is the most thing.

• 30:06Speaker 06

  Yes, and every repair expert I talk to will say the exact same thing, and then all the examples they'll use are Apple.

• 30:13David Pierce?

  Okay, so I love the first task of this, which is that you had to find a way to have a bunch of broken phones. How does one acquire a bunch of broken phones?

• 30:21Speaker 06

  I mean, I like, I started with the company Slack. I started asking friends and family. It was like a really weird thing to go looking for. Turns out eBay, the answer is eBay. There are 1 million phones that are broken in very specific ways on eBay.

• 30:36David Pierce?

  What's the lineup that we ended up with?

• 30:38Speaker 06

  So I saw a ton of broken screens and dead batteries. I wanted to skip those because we know the Apple Store will repair those. They've got the prices listed. They have this DIY repair program for those. Independent shops will do it. That is the most common churn for repairs. So I went looking for, I don't know, slightly more interesting repairs than that. The things that I found, one, I bought a working iPhone 8 with a broken charging port. That I hear happens a lot. We're just going to call that one the charge port phone. The second one was a second gen iPhone SE with a cracked screen that also, for some reason, the listing said just rebooted itself every few minutes.

• 31:20David Pierce?

  Oh, weird.

• 31:21Speaker 06

  So that seemed interesting. We're going to call that one the boot looper.

• 31:24David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  And then one wild card that I could not resist buying was a really nice looking iPhone 14 Pro that the listing said was, quote, "in saltwater for a while." I had to see what everyone would say about that one. We're going to call that one rusty.

• 31:40David Pierce?

  "In saltwater for a while" feels like a euphemism for how terrible this thing is that I'm now very worried about what's going to happen to this phone.

• 31:47Speaker 06

  This is the thing, it looked really nice. It just had this like, kind of artful corrosion along the metal rim of it. It actually, like, it looked really nice. I was really hoping that I could get it fixed, just that I could use it myself.

• 31:59David Pierce?

  What was the total budget for the broken phones here? What'd you end up spending for these three phones?

• 32:04Speaker 06

  Too much because I fell into the eBay trap. I like, I like, saw these phones and I wanted them because I thought that they would be like fun storytelling devices. The first two were fairly cheap in the, I think I spent 40 bucks on one and 60 on another or something. The 14 Pro, I think I spent like $75 on.

• 32:25David Pierce?

  Oh, that's not bad. I mean, that's last year's phone. I almost expected it to be significantly more than that, actually.

• 32:31Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 32:31David Pierce?

  All right, so we're a couple hundred dollars in. You've got some deeply busted phones. And what, step one was you, you said you were going to take them to the Apple Store, right?

• 32:39Speaker 06

  Yes, step one was just walk into an Apple Store. So I made an appointment. I showed up at the store with these, these three phones in my bag. I didn't even try to get permission to record at the Apple Store because I didn't want to be like, I'm a journalist doing an experiment. So I had to just go in and go out and then just record some voice notes. But I can tell you exactly what the Apple texts said about each one of these phones. So first, the iPhone 8 with the bad charge port, just not repairable by Apple. It's, charge ports are not a thing that they fix. Instead, their best offer was $350 for a refurbished iPhone 8 if I traded this one in, which didn't make a lot of sense.

• 33:20Speaker 06

  Walmart sells the same model and the same configuration refurbished for like $125. And then their other option was a new SE for $430. So that's the charge port phone. The rebooting SE 2 with the cracked screen, I explained what was going on. They did try to run a diagnostic on it, but the phone kept rebooting before the test could finish. So instead, they poked around in the settings and they saw that the phone had a third-party battery in it. And that was kind of it for them. They decided that must be the culprit. They didn't say why a battery would cause a boot loop. They were just like, ah, third-party batteries cause problems. And that was the end of the conversation. So they said that they could replace the battery for $89, but they also said that the screen would shatter

• 34:04Speaker 06

  when they've tried to remove it. So I'd need to pay another $269 for a new display. So grand total for that phone was $358. And fingers crossed it, the battery was actually the problem and that it would fix it. Or again, I could get a new SE. They really, they kept on trying to sell me a new SE. So that was that one. And then the, and then the iPhone 14 Pro was just a full nah. The guy checking me in at the store told me that they just don't repair anything with water damage, which was a little surprising to me because like water damage is a repair category on the Apple repair website. So, long story short, that was the Apple Store. I was in and out in 10 minutes with zero phones fixed.

• 34:48David Pierce?

  So on the one hand, I'm not shocked by that. On the other hand, I'm starting to think, what does Apple fix? You know, you mentioned batteries and screens. These are fairly straightforward. Is there a list, sort of official or unofficial, of the repairs Apple actually will do at an Apple Store?

• 35:05Speaker 06

  You can't really tell from their website. Whenever I ask an independent repair tech about this, they tell me to just go to the "Schedule a Genius Bar Visit" page because it has these big buttons for selecting the repair that you need. There's a "Cracked Screen" button, a "Dead Battery" button, "Camera Problems." And they basically say, "If there isn't a button you can press, then they're not going to do the repair."

• 35:29David Pierce?

  So this is a successful case potentially for why there should be other people in the world repairing these things than the people at the Genius Bar. And that's where you went next, right?

• 35:39Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah, I basically, I live here in Seattle. I poked around on Yelp. I landed on a place called Jet City Device Repair. They've been around for more than 15 years. They've got a couple of locations in the area. They've got good reviews. So I just, I made an appointment to bring my phones in and chat with the owner.

• 35:56Speaker 07

  Can somebody respond to Julia and let her know that if she's close enough and can make it in by 5, we can still take her in? If not, we have plenty of time tomorrow.

• 36:04Speaker 06

  So the shop was like the opposite of an Apple Store. It was a little cramped, a little messy, a little scrappy. There was this cushy front of house where customers can hang out on a couch and wait for the repairs. And in the back were three or so people working at desks that had mats and lights and microscopes and some tools. And then in the back, there was a storeroom with like a million tiny little bagged parts for every major cellphone that you could really name. Jet City's owner, Savas Popal, brought me back to the storeroom to check out my phones. So I brought a couple of things to look at. I figure I can just show you what I brought and tell you what the Apple Store said about each of them.

• 36:47Speaker 07

  That's exciting.

• 36:48Speaker 06

  So first, the charge port phone. The Apple Store said it was a non-starter, but Jet City fixes charging ports all the time, in a lot of cases because the Apple Store won't. Savas quoted me $90, which is getting kind of close to a similar used phone online, but I don't know. It'll keep one more phone out of the garbage dump. So I said, "Go for it." So Savas took the phone and used his microscope to look at the tiny little pins inside the lightning port.

• 37:15Speaker 07

  What are you seeing? I'm seeing all the pins are damaged. They weren't great to begin with though, because they have a little bit of corrosion on them.

• 37:24Speaker 06

  From what Savage has seen, the Apple stores just aren't built for a repair like this, even though it's a really common one. Instead, he says Apple has this wildly over-engineered process for just a few select repairs, like screens and batteries.

• 37:40Speaker 07

  It's like extra with like extra X's. You know, it's just so much going on.

• 37:46Speaker 06

  What do you mean by that?

• 37:47Speaker 07

  They have this one device that sort of holds the whole phone together, so it doesn't move around. There's another device that holds the screen open for you while you're removing the screen. It's like so much going on that you don't really need. And you see my kit, it's this tiny little thing.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  His toolbox is one of those pencil cases you used in grade school.

• 38:09Speaker 07

  I see a toothbrush, I see an X-acto knife. Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 06

  So for the repair, Savage took two little screws out of the bottom of the phone, then slid a little plastic tool around the edge of the screen and popped it off to reveal the guts of the phone. And then he just starts removing screw after screw from different components to get down to the charging port. So why do you think a charging port is something that is just outside of Apple's supported repairs?

• 38:37Speaker 07

  It's complicated. There are a lot of screws.

• 38:40Speaker 06

  God, those are tiny.

• 38:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're very small and you don't want to mix them up because most of the screws are different from each other.

• 38:47Speaker 06

  I actually just combed through an iFixit repair guide for this model of iPhone and I counted 14 different sizes and kinds of screws for this charge port repair.

• 38:57Speaker 07

  You have to remove the entire motherboard to get access to the port. Then the port itself has a bunch of screws.

• 39:03Speaker 06

  Does it just feel like it's just not worth the time and effort if you're Apple?

• 39:09Speaker 07

  I think they're incentivized to focus on selling rather than repairing. So if they can say, hey, we provide repairs for batteries and screens, then they can say, we do provide repairs, but if it's anything else, you're just gonna have to buy a new device. They're incentivized to do that because... Because it's a sales conversion.

• 39:29Speaker 06

  I asked Apple about charge port repairs and Brian Nowman, who is the VP of Apple's repair business, told me that the company does offer them if you have an iPhone 12 or newer and if you mail the phone directly into Apple. He didn't explain why they don't work with older phones, which is interesting because as we got deeper into the repair, we ran into a hint that Apple might not want anyone fixing this part.

• 39:53Speaker 07

  So this connector, when you remove it, there is a tape.

• 39:59Speaker 06

  Tiny little piece of tape.

• 40:01Speaker 07

  Well, the neoprene actually hides a screw underneath this, so you don't even realize that there's a screw down there. We didn't realize it until like, we couldn't figure out why the board wasn't coming up.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 07

  And these are delicate boards, so if you don't have experience, you're gonna apply a little bit too much pressure and it's gonna end up cracking.

• 40:19Speaker 06

  Gotcha. And is there, can you think of a design reason for that little piece of tape there?

• 40:25Speaker 07

  No, because it's not coming into contact with any metals.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 07

  Or any, like, anything exposed. So the only reason is to hide that screw.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  Brian Nowman from Apple disputed that the tape was meant to hide anything. He said it was grounding tape there to, quote, "protect the electrical circuitry." Anyway, Savash fished a new charge port out of his wall of bagged parts. He connected it to the phone, tested it, and put the whole thing back together again.

• 40:52David Pierce?

  So just like that, we're, we're, we're up and running again. What, 90 bucks later and you have a working iPhone 8?

• 40:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 40:59David Pierce?

  How long did this whole thing take?

• 41:00Speaker 06

  It took us like an hour, but that was because I was literally like looking over Savash's shoulder and asking him questions every 30 seconds. He says he can swap a charge port out in like 20 minutes because he's done a million of them.

• 41:12David Pierce?

  I'm sure he loved you during this whole process. He's like, "Leave me alone, let me do my job."

• 41:16Speaker 06

  It's, I know, it's a very zen process of keeping track of all of these screws and I am not a zen person when I am. Just on the best of days, but especially not when I'm interviewing. So I can't imagine that went well.

• 41:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, fair enough. All right. Well, repair shop one, Apple Store zero. What's next?

• 41:31Speaker 06

  Yes. So next is the boot looper. This is the, the phone that just reset itself for no reason. I explained the problem to Savash and I gave him the Apple Store's diagnosis. Their best guess was that it was a battery problem.

• 41:46Speaker 07

  No, it's the charging port. It's either the charging port or the power volume button.

• 41:50David Pierce?

  Wait, Will, is everything a charging port? Like, is the secret to repairing your phone just that the charging port is always the problem?

• 41:56Speaker 06

  I mean, apparently, this is what happens when you genuinely buy broken phones and don't know what it'll take to fix them. Sometimes you just end up with a bunch of broken charging ports. The deal here is that it's not the charging port per se, it's the sensor that sits on the charging port. The "charging port" is actually a whole bunch of different components that are all bundled together. There's the port, there's the sensor, there's some speakers, there's the vibration motor. So that's all one part that you can swap in and out.

• 42:26David Pierce?

  Got it. So it's basically like that sort of bottom stripe of your phone is all one thing and whatever breaks, the whole thing breaks?

• 42:32Speaker 06

  That's the replaceable thing. That's the thing that you can buy replacement parts for.

• 42:36David Pierce?

  Got it.

• 42:36Speaker 06

  Anyway, as soon as I told Savage that the phone was rebooting "every few minutes", he said, "Oh, it's every three minutes." This is a thing that he's seen a lot, and it usually means there's a bad temperature sensor somewhere.

• 42:49Speaker 07

  What happens is when the device shuts off every three minutes,

• 42:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:54Speaker 07

  there are temperature sensors around the device that report what the temperature is. If one of those sensors fails and it can't report, then the device as a safety precaution will turn off. It'll turn back on, and then the same thing happens, and it checks every three minutes.

• 43:11Speaker 06

  He booted up the phone, and he found the device's analytics files, which I had no idea existed, and for the record, the Apple tech did not do. The files are actually not that hard to find, they're in the Privacy and Security Settings screen, but you've got to know what you're looking for when you look at them, because it's one of those walls of gibberish text.

• 43:32Speaker 07

  And then you want to find where it says Panic?

• 43:34Speaker 06

  Okay, that's the Panic is the reset.

• 43:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, and then when you go there, in that first big block of text, it'll say Missing Sensors.

• 43:43Speaker 06

  The Panic log told him that, yep, the culprit is probably a sensor on the charging port. So, yes, we needed to replace this phone's charging port too, and just see if that stopped the reboot. So, same process as the last phone. Although, one notable detail, this is the phone with the cracked screen that Apple said, "Oh, if you open it up, it'll totally shatter the screen, so you have to replace that too." But, I don't know, I watched Savage pop the screen off without any problem, for whatever that's worth. Anyway, we plugged in the replacement part, and we turned on the phone to see if it would stay on this time.

• 44:16Speaker 07

  We'll make it a five-minute timer.

• 44:18Speaker 06

  All right, so now we've got five minutes to figure out if that is the culprit. But after exactly three minutes, the phone reset. Oh, little phone. We tried. That meant that the problem might actually be in the motherboard, which for a phone that's worth maybe $100 is probably too much trouble to fix. But we wanted to rule everything else out, so just in case the replacement part also had a bad sensor, we tried a couple more identical parts from Savage's inventory. All of those failed too. We also verified that the battery was fine, since that was Apple's guess. It was fine. At one point, we actually lost track of the timer, and we thought that we had a working phone for a second. Oh, it worked.

• 45:03Speaker 07

  Ah!

• 45:04Speaker 06

  Oh, there you go. But it reset again. Motherboard.

• 45:07David Pierce?

  Motherboard.

• 45:09Speaker 06

  So that was it for the Boot Looper.

• 45:12David Pierce?

  So we gave up on this one. It was the end of the Boot Looper.

• 45:15Speaker 06

  It was the end of the line for the Boot Looper.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 45:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, motherboard problem is bad news.

• 45:20David Pierce?

  Right, and in this case, I suspect it ends up just being a pretty straight financial decision. Like, yes, you could replace the whole thing and sort of like ship a Theseus your phone into a new phone, but at that point, it is probably a lot more expensive than just taking whatever deal Apple would have given you.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Or even if you don't take Apple's deal, there are cheaper phones online, just walk away.

• 45:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, go buy a different broken one on eBay and just try the whole thing again.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  And fix that one, yeah, just go through it all again, have better luck.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  Okay, all right, so we're at 1 to 1. It's tiebreaker time. Can we fix these phones? Uh, we have one that works, one that is broken forever. How are you feeling at this point in the process? I feel like at the very least, you've been given access to a lot more information and process with the independent repair than you were at the Apple Store.

• 46:08Speaker 06

  Totally. That is absolutely true. You know, walking out of the store that day, I was like, well, I found a good stumper on eBay. I was sort of hoping that we would go through this process and triumph at the end, but the utter brokenness of the phone revealed a lot more along the way. So yeah, on the one hand, it was funny that the end result is the same. Both the Apple Store and Jet City were like, this is not a phone that's worth fixing. But as you say, the journey to get there was just totally different. As soon as Apple saw that there was a third-party part in their phone, they were like, case closed, and that was the end of it. Whereas Savashe found the log files, he opened the phone up, he tested like four

• 46:50Speaker 06

  different parts, he really worked the problem, which was what I was looking to see. And it drove home, you know, one big argument for independent repair shops, which is that they'll repair things that manufacturers never intended to be repaired in the first place. There's one really wild case in point while I was there. While Savashe and I were chatting, over his shoulder, I noticed this industrial looking device next to his workbench that was shining a bunch of lights on an iPhone that had a totally shattered back glass. And I asked Savashe, what is up with that?

• 47:24Speaker 07

  That's the laser.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  Oh shit, what is that doing?

• 47:27Speaker 07

  It's lasering off the adhesive from the back glass.

• 47:30Speaker 06

  No kidding?

• 47:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a, you don't want to stare too long into the white. I'll let you wear this.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  He handed me a pair of tinted glasses.

• 47:37Speaker 07

  And then you can stare at it while it's lasering.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  So for most iPhone models, there's no official way to fix that back glass. It's glued to the phone. But that's where indie repair shops are like, okay, challenge accepted. You buy a laser and you zap the phone to loosen the adhesive and then you manually scrape the glass off and install a new plate. And that's just what it takes to repair something in spite of the design of the thing. Did you buy this laser specifically for this kind of repair? Or does it do other things?

• 48:09Speaker 07

  No, just for this.

• 48:10David Pierce?

  First of all, that rules. Everyone should have a laser in their house that just does one job.

• 48:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a single purpose laser. I have one for my cat and I want more now.

• 48:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:20Speaker 06

  So that was really notable. The other notable thing to me about the repairs that I brought in is that as much as I was looking for stumpers, they were actually pretty simple in one regard, which is that the parts that we replaced were not programmed by Apple to resist the doing of the repair.

• 48:39David Pierce?

  Oh, is this the part where we get to talk about parts pairing? I've been wanting to scream parts pairing ever since you said third-party battery like hours ago.

• 48:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:47David Pierce?

  So this is the parts pairing part of our program.

• 48:49Speaker 06

  This is the parts pairing part of the story.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  It's like when we talk about the smart home and we have to get really upset about Matter for 15 minutes. Like, this is the part of the repair story where we have to talk about parts pairing.

• 48:58Speaker 06

  Yes, and I like, I was very naive. I was like, okay, I did a parts pairing story last time. This story isn't going to be about parts pairing. I'm going to talk about other stuff. But I learned very quickly that you just can't talk about iPhones without talking about parts pairing. Any repair of just about any part of an iPhone will eventually lead a repair tech to talk about parts pairing. So, without doing a whole other segment, parts pairing in brief. Your phone can basically sabotage your repair if it figures out that you didn't use Apple parts installed by Apple techs. So if you replace the screen, it might lose the True Tone feature. If you replace the battery, it might not track its health over time anymore. Replaced Touch ID or Face ID components will just fully fail.

• 49:43Speaker 06

  Again, we've talked a lot about this. But being in a repair shop made me appreciate just how much parts pairing has undermined them over the years. These bugs have been popping up in iPhones generation after generation. And it's not like Apple announces them to everybody. They have to get discovered and shared. And it happens when repairs just start going haywire for no reason at all. So just to name one example, a few years back, a YouTuber named Hugh Jeffreys noticed something really weird when he replaced the cameras in an iPhone 12.

• 50:16Speaker 08

  After changing the camera, two functions are now completely unusable. Portrait mode only works for the front camera, with the back one only flashing still images and a black screen. You can see panoramas also don't work when using the .5X zoom.

• 50:30Speaker 06

  There was no warning about non-genuine parts. The new cameras were just flaky, which is a thing Sivash noticed.

• 50:37Speaker 07

  So it mimicked a quality control issue rather than an intentional interference with the functionality on Apple's part. And so your immediate gut instinct, even as a technician, is going to be, man, there's no reliable parts for them. With serialization, you can actually program failures that are intermittent and mess with people's heads.

• 50:58David Pierce?

  Wait, hang on. How did they know in this process that it wasn't some sketchy part causing the problems here?

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Well, he knew because the YouTuber took the parts straight out of another brand-new iPhone 12.

• 51:10David Pierce?

  Oh, that would do it.

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, he actually took two phones right out of the box and swapped their components, and both the phones had these issues. So, Apple eventually fixed that specific bug with a software update, though they added that non-genuine parts warning instead, of course. And actually, just last month, Apple did announce some plans to relax some pairing restrictions on used Apple parts, though it's only on select models of iPhones. And there are just a lot of specifics that they haven't talked about. But it does mean, in the future, you might be able to pull a screen off of one iPhone and drop it in another without any problems. So, we'll have to see about that. But even if that happens, aftermarket parts are probably still going to cause problems.

• 51:55Speaker 06

  And this is the thing, maybe some of those problems will be genuine. Aftermarket parts don't always work perfectly with the original hardware, and you can make a mistake during a repair, and that can cause a problem. But the repair techs just feel so gaslit by Apple after this history of bugs.

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Now, there's like this healthy paranoia.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 07

  Where you don't know if that was something else, or if it was intentional sabotage.

• 52:20Speaker 06

  Over the years, the community has found some pretty clever workarounds. There are ways to restore True Tone if you're comfortable physically moving microchips around. There are aftermarket home buttons that are explicitly built to get around the phone's security checks. Savage can even make a third-party battery play nice with an iPhone, but it is a process.

• 52:40Speaker 07

  You see that tool right there?

• 52:42Speaker 06

  The red thing with the...

• 52:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a welder, spot welder.

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 52:46Speaker 07

  And so, you have to cut the battery electronics from the old battery, and then you have a new battery without the electronics.

• 52:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 52:55Speaker 07

  And you spot weld those two points back on, and then roll them like a cigar, and then tape it up again, and then put it together.

• 53:05Speaker 06

  The upshot is that shops constantly have this really tough choice to make. Either they have to jump through all of these absurd hoops to outsmart the devices that they're fixing, or they have to ask their customers to live with bugs. And that choice, more than anything else, infuriates Savage.

• 53:25Speaker 07

  We do better work than Apple. Jet City Device Repair does better work than Apple. We've done better work than Apple for a very long time. But because of these limitations, sometimes it appears as if we do worse work.

• 53:43David Pierce?

  All right, I feel Savas' pain, I really do. But Will, you have led me up to what I hope is now the grand finale here, which is our good friend Rusty, the iPhone 14 that has spent, what was it, some amount of time in salt water?

• 53:57Speaker 06

  I actually reached out to the eBay seller after I bought it, and it turns out they just found it in a bay in Florida. So some time is really putting it lightly, I think.

• 54:08David Pierce?

  Somewhere between 10 minutes and two years in salt water.

• 54:11Speaker 06

  Between 10 minutes and the release of the phone.

• 54:14David Pierce?

  Love it. So Rusty, what happened with Rusty?

• 54:17Speaker 06

  So I, you know, I told you I had really high hopes for Rusty. And Savas, again, to his credit, was totally happy to open it up and see, but...

• 54:25Speaker 07

  It's like leaking corrosion.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  The guts of the phone were just totally coated in this toxic-looking white and brown gunk. It was disgusting.

• 54:36Speaker 07

  Oh my...

• 54:37Speaker 06

  I can hear, I mean, I can hear the sound that it's making.

• 54:40Speaker 07

  Guys, you wanna see a record breaking? That's like a core reaping there, yeah. Corrosion phone? There's nothing we can do with it, but I can share it with the company. They're gonna have fun with it.

• 54:52Speaker 06

  It was so bad that he posted a photo of it to the company Slack.

• 54:55Speaker 07

  I was gonna say, can we fix this 14 Pro mat?

• 54:59Speaker 06

  So that was Rusty.

• 55:01David Pierce?

  Moment of silence for Rusty. I will say, though, huge success on your part, in a certain sense, that you managed to bring this person a phone that they then shared with the rest of the company. It was so broken so spectacularly.

• 55:16Speaker 06

  Like, yeah.

• 55:17David Pierce?

  If the goal was to find interestingly broken phones, like, oh, boy, did you do it.

• 55:20Speaker 06

  I knew on some, you know, that's making me feel better for spending the amount of money that I spent on a phone that was never gonna be fixed. Because I just, I knew that it was destined for something great.

• 55:30David Pierce?

  It will live on. Rusty lives on at the repair shop. It's probably, he's probably in a frame on a wall somewhere. Just oozing corrosion.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  So foul.

• 55:40David Pierce?

  So what do you feel like you learned from this experiment? You went in trying to get kind of a real sort of tangible sense of what the right to repair fight is like. What do you feel like you learned?

• 55:49Speaker 06

  So I, I feel like I learned a couple of things. The first thing is, is maybe obvious for people who have spent any time in this world, but as a consumer and an Apple device owner, it was new to me. And it's just that Apple is not the authority on its own phones in this context. It's people like Savas who are. I've talked to a lot of independent repair techs over the course of this reporting, and they have all just put in the time to get to know these devices inside and out. And they literally have to, to understand them better than the Apple geniuses if they want to do all these repairs that either Apple doesn't care about doing, or actively doesn't want them to do.

• 56:32Speaker 06

  That's the thing that, that sets them apart from the Apple repair internal ecosystem. And that's what right to repair advocates are trying so hard through these laws and all these other things to protect. So that kind of turned my thinking around on the sort of internal, external repair ecosystem.

• 56:50David Pierce?

  The thing that keeps jumping out to me as you talk is there's such a different incentive here, right? Like Apple, even if you believe Apple would like to fix the things that it sells you, also would like to sell you new things. And so what you get, I think, my sense of your Apple store trip is very much that you sort of ran into a script. And when you said third-party battery, or they discovered third-party battery, or it became obvious that it was water damage, it just immediately is like jump to end, which means we can't repair it. Whereas if you go to a repair shop, the one and only thing they are there to do is repair it. And so you just have set yourself up in a very different sort of adventure from the very beginning, just by the virtue of like who these folks are.

• 57:32David Pierce?

  Regardless of their talent and resources and ability, just having this other thing where the only thing they are there to do is try and fix your gadget, totally changes the way that they're going to work with you.

• 57:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's just their whole deal. The, the more people keep more older gadgets going for longer, the more that they need to be repaired, and the more of those repair shops are in business. So it's like, it's absolutely a difference in incentive more than anything else.

• 57:56David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 57:56Speaker 06

  The other thing that I just found funny and weird is just how adversarial a relationship Apple has with these independent repair shops, given what they're actually doing. Like you would think that Apple was battling these super intense hackers who are trying to take the company down, based on the way that they're acting and all of these these bugs that they're putting into the phones. And these repair techs are not not hackers. I mean, you can look at what they're doing with these batteries and their Touch ID buttons to get around everything that Apple is doing. Like, they're they're really scrappy people. But they're not trying to destroy the company. They're just trying to fix the company's products. They're literally just like, we're going to fix your phones. Try to stop us.

• 58:40Speaker 06

  And I think that is a very strange group of people to pick such an intense fight with. And it sounds like not a group of people you want to mess with. No, very resourceful, very committed. And they have lasers. And they have lasers, and they know how to use them. Will, thank you, as always. Thank you.

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• 1:00:33David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is [email protected]. We love getting all of your questions and we try to answer at least one of them on the show every week. Again, especially in this gadgety season we're about to have, we're going to be reviewing tons of stuff, we're going to be testing tons of stuff. I want to know everything you want to know about all of this stuff. That is one of the most fun ways for us to talk about products, is to talk about the stuff that people actually care about. So keep all those questions coming, we love to hear them. This week, we have a question from a listener whose name is Lovavlova. I'm really sorry, I'm pronouncing your name wrong. But, we got an email and it says, "Why do people think the iPad should be a MacBook replacement? A lot of people have been waiting this for some years,

• 1:01:14David Pierce?

  and so far, the only argument that I've seen for this is that the processor is overpowered and the software is not. Apple has added some features like Stage Manager and Pro apps like Final Cut over the years, but this move only blurred the line between the MacBook and the iPad even more, which is weird, since they used to be different product categories for specific purposes. MacBook for productivity and iPad for entertainment and maybe some easy tasks. Sure, the new M4 processor inside the iPad Pro is way too powerful for the current iteration of iPadOS, but I feel like the same argument could be made about the A17 Pro processor from the iPhone 15 Pro. Would love to hear your thoughts, since this has confused me for a while." Unbelievable question. Love it very much. And this is actually, as I've been reviewing the new iPads, kind of the main question I've been thinking about. The short version of both iPad reviews is that they're excellent iPads, right?

• 1:01:57David Pierce?

  The iPad Pro is thin and light and just lovely to hold in a way that it's been a long time since an iPad has felt like that to me. The Air is everything you would want it to be. It's last year's Pro in last year's Air's body. The screen's very good, the battery's very good, the processor's very good, it gets the new pencil. It doesn't have a function row on the keyboard like the new Pro does, but it's a very good iPad. All of the iPads are very good iPads, right? And so I think the question is, really, what is the iPad for? And I think, when you ask the question, "Why do some people think the iPad should be a MacBook replacement?" I think it comes down to, making a device that is good for everything is really hard. It might be impossible, but it's really, really, really hard.

• 1:02:40David Pierce?

  And if you're Apple, I think one way to think about it is that Apple has had a bunch of very versatile, but also sort of focused devices over time. Like, the the story of the Mac is easy, right? You can do lots of things on the Mac, but it is fundamentally a device for doing work. And you can define work as broadly as you want, but it is it is a productive, creative device. It's a device for doing things. The Apple Watch is a device that can do lots of things, but it has increasingly over time become a device about fitness and health. AirPods, headphones, that one's easy, right? The iPhone is the exception. It is a device that is fundamentally all things to all people. And as a result, this is, I mean, this is why smartphones have become so dominant, right?

• 1:03:21David Pierce?

  They are all things to all people, and thus, they are the most important device that almost everyone owns at this point. That's a very hard thing to replicate. If you're Apple or if you're anyone, the smartphone won, like, it just did. And so trying to do something that does all the same things a smartphone does, that is as varied and broad and able to accomplish so many different goals all in one package, just puts you in competition with the smartphone. It's a bad idea. Most people don't do it. What we're seeing, actually, is that even things like AI devices that try to do lots of things fail because they're worse than your smartphone. And instead, what's cool and what's working is devices that take one feature of the iPhone and do it better. There's a bit of a resurgence happening in dedicated cameras, for instance,

• 1:04:06David Pierce?

  because you get more control and you get better images. But if your camera was like also trying to order you Ubers, that wouldn't make any sense. So what you're seeing, I think, in the best case here is companies that say, "Okay, we're going to cleave off part of what the iPhone does, or a smartphone does in general, and try to do it better." Right? So they're taking, in many cases, smartphone chips. They can run smartphone apps. They can do things that you do on a smartphone, well, on a touchscreen, in similar ways that you do them on a smartphone. But you can just do more, and you can do them dedicated. The iPad has always been the opposite. It's trying to be incredibly versatile. It's trying to be a jack of all trades. It's trying to be all things to all people. And I've come to think of it-

• 1:04:50David Pierce?

  Like this over time. Apple basically sees a core set of what you might call iPad things, right? And that's playing games, that's watching TV and movies, that's checking your email and browsing the web. This sort of basic, simple use case stuff that people have always done on their iPads. The same kinds of things that even like Steve Jobs is talking about in the very first iPad introduction. It's a device for sitting on the couch casually using a computer. That's cool. That has been very good on an iPad for a very long time. It's also true that most of those things are almost as good, and in some cases, better, on your phone, which is a device you already own. It's a device you have to buy before you buy an iPad. And it's a device that is almost

• 1:05:35David Pierce?

  in every case more likely to be close to you than your iPad. So what you have essentially is an iPad is now more work for slightly more benefit because you have to go get it, you have to keep it charged, it has to be updated, all this stuff. Whereas I think a lot of people just say, why would I do any of that? I have my phone and I already do all that stuff to have my phone work. So what Apple has been doing over the last several years is basically adding bits and pieces of functionality that you can't do on the iPhone in the hopes that not all of them will appeal to you specifically, but maybe one of them will, right? So this year you have things like the pencil pro, which has a new gesture called the barrel roll, which basically lets you preview the way that your brush tip is going to look on the screen as you move it around. And it lets

• 1:06:18David Pierce?

  you turn the brush as you're painting. This is the kind of thing that if you're hearing that and it doesn't mean anything to you, that's fine, it's not for you. But there are a lot of people for whom that gives them a level of control doing artistic work that is really powerful and really important. That's not how you get giant swaths of new people to use the iPad. It's not a mainstream new use case, but it is a thing, right? And Apple, I think, believes that over time with enough power and enough work and maybe enough AI stuff, which is what's coming at WWDC, and I think we're going to see Apple make some big swings at new features that only work on these super powerful touch-enabled ultra-portable devices that make it more compelling. And so rather than have One giant mainstream use case that appeals to everyone on earth.

• 1:07:03David Pierce?

  It wants to have a million different little ones covering sort of every niche at a time. And hope that that adds up to everybody. So how does this come back to the MacBook question? I think the reason people talk about it as a laptop is because it is one obvious place for the iPad to go. Right? You look at it, it's a 13 inch screen. I can drop it into my keyboard. It has a trackpad. It runs a lot of the same apps that are on my MacBook. So it's natural to say, well, okay, one thing this could do that it doesn't is be more like my MacBook. I actually have come to believe that that's the wrong answer. Or at least it's the least interesting answer. I think Apple's strategy of trying to find a million small things that add up to one big thing.

• 1:07:46David Pierce?

  Is actually more exciting and means ultimately that the iPad can be a device that isn't just a touchscreen MacBook. I also think they should put a touchscreen on the MacBook. But that's what the touchscreen MacBook should be. It should be a MacBook with a touchscreen, not an iPad that runs Mac OS. I just don't think that's the right strategy. It's at least not the most interesting strategy. But we're in this position now where if you're looking at the iPad and you're saying, okay, this does a lot of stuff. But what it, what would push it over the edge? What would make it an essential, important, game changing, bring it with me everywhere, no matter what kind of device? Work is one obvious answer to that. That's why you see for creative people, it very much is that kind of tool. If you need to draw on a screen, the iPad is the best thing that exists. You can't replicate that on your phone. You can't replicate that on your MacBook. You need an iPad for that.

• 1:08:32David Pierce?

  And we're starting to see that for some filmmaking stuff that's happening. People are doing interesting monitoring and editing work on their iPads. It's a cool tool for photography, for editing photos, bits and pieces, like I'm saying. But if you then throw in, you know, this capital W work thing, whatever that means to people. Whether it's, I want to have a desktop browser so that I can use all my browser extensions. And Google Docs will be better. Or I want full bore, full power Excel running on this thing. So that I don't have to go back to my computer. Or it means I want to use the accounting software that I haven't updated in 10 years. But desperately need in order to do my If you pull all of that stuff down to the iPad, I think it changes the iPad,

• 1:09:14David Pierce?

  but it also makes it more essential to some people in a certain way. And so I think that is why people have been pushing Apple to turn it into like a laptop, is that it would make it something everybody needs, which I actually don't think is right, again, because laptops exist and MacBooks in particular are very good laptops. And so that is just a tricky thing for Apple to get right. Again, if it wants to be this one all things to all people device, it's going to have to do a lot of that eventually. And I think Apple is sort of hoping that work apps will get better before the iPad has to worry about all of that old compatibility stuff. But I'm not convinced that's going to be true. So if I'm Apple, I'm saying right now that the versatility of the iPad is the point.

• 1:09:59David Pierce?

  And this is the thing that you hear from people at Apple. It's a thing that I've heard from people at Apple. The versatility is the point. They don't want this thing to be a device for anything. They want it to be a device for everything, that everyone has a different subset of use cases for, and that that is what makes it special. That is an incredibly hard thing to do. I think the Apple Watch is probably the most interesting comparison there, by the way, because for a time, that was the pitch for the Apple Watch too, that it was it was going to do all the things your iPhone did, but in a better, more accessible way. The iPad is a pretty similar case. And what we discovered with the watch is that actually my phone's very good, but the watch does this subset of other things very well that complement that. It does health and fitness stuff really well. And it's a very simple controller and I can use Siri.

• 1:10:44David Pierce?

  And so you're seeing Apple bet on those things more and more on the watch over time. Whereas on the iPad, it's kind of still stuck trying to be all things to all people. You can focus on the pencil, and that's great. But the pencil market, I think, is much smaller than the health and fitness market. Same goes for some of the like ultra performant apps that you're starting to see, whether it's like architects or 3D games or augmented reality. I think all of that stuff on tablets is fairly niche. So what Apple needs is either one big giant use case, and maybe it is laptop replacement, or just countless more of these little tiny niches that all eventually Give everybody a reason to need an iPad, even though it's not the same one. That's a hard, hard, hard game to play,

• 1:11:27David Pierce?

  and it's a hard list of tasks to finish. But I kind of hope that's what Apple keeps doing, because that, to me, is the most interesting possible future of the iPad. That said, I do wish Google Docs worked better. So just give me that, and then I'll probably need an iPad, too.

• 1:11:42David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who's on the show. Thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about today, including my iPad reviews, all of Chris's, Sono's scoops, and a whole bunch more on theverge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes. If you don't know, we've been doing much better show notes posts on the site recently. They tend to go up about 9 o'clock in the morning on the days that we publish the show. Go check it out there. Leave us a comment. Tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, if you have thoughts, or feelings, or questions, or just want to yell at me about iPads, you can always email us at [email protected] or keep calling the hotline, 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas. Google I/O is coming up. Microsoft Build is coming up. WWDC is coming up.

• 1:12:27David Pierce?

  I want to know everything that you're thinking about and interested in and want us to find out and want us to talk about. Keep it all coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about whatever is about to happen at Google I/O and a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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