New chips, new screens, new gadgets

Today on the flagship podcast of the many definitions of electronic paper: 03:12 -The Verge’s David Pierce takes a look at the Boox Palma, a phone-shaped e-reader that runs Android. He also compares notes with Clockwise’s Matt Martin and writer Craig Mod. The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn't even know I wanted New Pop-up Walk, Reading Digitally in 2024 — Roden Newsletter Archive 30:06 - The Verge’s Nathan Edwards and Tom Warren join the show to discuss their experience using Microsoft’s new Surface Copilot PCs. They also answer a question from The Vergecast Hotline. Surface Laptop 7th Edition review: Microsoft’s best MacBook Air competitor yet With Copilot Plus, the new and improved Windows PCs are here Microsoft’s embarrassing Recall Microsoft makes Copilot less useful on new Copilot Plus PCs 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?

  Bienvenidos al The Vergecast, el podcast flagship de las muchas, muchas definiciones del papel electrónico. Soy tu amigo David Pierce y estoy en el parque para investigar y periodismo, como tú. Así que tengo este nuevo dispositivo, se llama Daylight DC1. Y es una tableta, obviamente, pero la idea es que es un tipo diferente de tableta. No usa una pantalla grande, brillante, colorida como el iPad, pero también no es una pantalla de e-inking que tiene un rato de refuerzo lento y no tiene algunas de las cosas que quieres de una tableta fácil de escribir y de rastrear. Trata de ser un medio ambiente. Y encuentro que ese medio ambiente es realmente interesante. He estado usando esta tableta mucho. Realmente quieren que la usen al aire libre. Se llama Daylight.

• 0:43David Pierce?

  Viene en este tipo de casilla de afuera, en lugar de la pegada metallica y tejida que normalmente obtienes con una tableta. Y está diseñado para ser un tipo más simple de tecnología. Y tengo mucho que hacer para probar esta cosa, pero hasta ahora no es tan impresionante como un gadget. Pero todavía lo encuentro fascinante porque creo que esta idea de si en lugar de reinventar totalmente todos los gadgets que existen en el mundo, simplemente ajustamos un poco la fórmula. Tipos diferentes de pantallas, tamaños diferentes, formas diferentes, texturas diferentes. Y tal vez eso cambie la forma en que nos sentiremos sobre estas cosas y la forma en que las usemos de formas más interesantes que simplemente la tiramos y lo probamos de nuevo. En cierta medida, eso es lo que vamos a hablar en este episodio.

• 1:25David Pierce?

  Primero, vamos a hablar de un dispositivo de e-inking llamado Books Palma, que estoy un poco obsesionado con. Hablaremos de por qué en unos minutos. Después de eso, vamos a hablar del nuevo laptop y Surface Pro de Microsoft, que todavía son gadgets muy gadgeticos, pero están haciendo esta gran jugada de que la IA y un nuevo tipo de chip de Qualcomm pueden cambiar la forma en que te sientes sobre algo que todavía parece una tableta y todavía parece un laptop, pero puede significar algo más para ti. Es un episodio muy gadgetico, pero también, creo, va a llegar a ser extraño y filosófico en algunos puntos. Estoy muy emocionado por ello. También tenemos una pregunta nueva de la línea de llamadas. Muchas cosas que hacer. Todo eso está llegando en un segundo, pero nunca he jugado pickleball antes y esas personas están jugando pickleball. Voy a ir a aprender a jugar pickleball. Este es el The Vergecast. Nos vemos en un segundo.

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• 3:09David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So, one of the things that happens when you write about technology is that you tend to accumulate a lot of technology. This is like the world's best problem to have, by the way. I just have a million gadgets around all the time. And the truth is, very few of them have much staying power in my life. I test something out, maybe to write about it, maybe just to understand all this stuff a little better, and then it goes in a drawer, or sits in a desk, or goes back to whoever sent it to me until I have another question about it. I try new stuff for a living, which, again, it's great, cannot recommend it enough, which is what makes the book's Palma kind of remarkable. I've got it right here. I almost always have it with me now, actually. It's a device that, on paper, is pretty much a smartphone.

• 3:51David Pierce?

  6.1-inch screen, 6 gigs of RAM, camera on the back, runs Android, but it's not a smartphone. Because that 6.1-inch display is an e-ink screen. The e-ink Karta 1200, if you're really curious, which makes the Palma kind of the exact middle between a smartphone and a Kindle. And for me, that turns out to be kind of perfect. The Palma launched last fall, and I remember being sort of interested in it back then. Books, the company. Company, it's B O O X, by the way, has been making these interesting e-ink Android devices for a while. And they started kind of clunky, but have steadily gotten better over time. It's a China-based company and it sells like a million different devices. There's the BooksNote Air 3C and the Books Tab Ultra and the Books Page and the Books

• 4:35David Pierce?

  Leaf and the Books Leaf 2 and the BooksNote Air 2 and the Books Go and the Books Go Color. Basically, every size of e-reader you can imagine, you can get. I already have a lot of e-readers, though. I read a lot on my iPad. I have a couple of Kindles of various sizes and generations. I have a remarkable tablet that I really like. I'm honestly good on e-ink devices. The Palma is also $280, which is a lot for an e-reader. But I ended up getting one anyway, because over the months since it launched, I've seen a surprising number of people talk about how much they love this thing. So I got mine a couple of months ago, and I have to say, I understood the appeal pretty much right away. For me, there are two things about the Palma that have actually made it stick in my life. The first is just

• 5:16David Pierce?

  the size. The fact that it fits in my pocket and is really easy to hold in one hand is a total game changer. That sounds sort of ridiculous to say, but it's really been true. It's easier for reading in bed. It's easier to bring with me on a walk or to a coffee shop. I can lug the Palma the same way I lug my phone, and that has just made me have it around more often. The second thing is the fact that it runs Android, which, I mean, obviously, right? That's like the whole books thing. Instead of just having to do everything through Amazon on a Kindle or through Barnes & Noble on a Nook, you get the whole universe of Android stuff. For me as a reader, that means I can have three crucial things on the device at the same time. The place I read books, which happens to be the Kindle app, the place I read articles, which is an app called Readwise Reader, and

• 5:59David Pierce?

  the place that I save webpages and other links to get to later, which is an app called Braindrop. All of my reading, no matter what form it takes, now lives on this one device with an e-ink screen. Any app with pagination, you can scroll with the volume buttons on the side, which I really love. The battery lasts a long time, somewhere between like a few days and a week, depending on how I use it. I'm not distracted by other stuff because I don't have any other stuff, because TikTok and YouTube all really suck on an e-ink screen. It's just perfect. I did also install Pocket Casts and Spotify, which are where I listen to podcasts and music. So now this thing is both my Kindle and my iPod. I go online to download new stuff, then I put the thing in airplane mode and I'm good to go. Anyway, I sound like I'm chilling for the Books Palma and I kind of am. I love this thing.

• 6:41David Pierce?

  But it's not because this is some magnificently perfect, unique gadget. It's kind of flimsy. I wish the screen were higher res. I wish it supported a stylus. It's pretty slow, even when you're just trying to get to the home screen. And most problematically by far, it's running Android 11, which is now four years old. And I am deeply worried it's never going to get updated past that. The upside of Kindle is that my Kindle from whatever six years ago still works great. There are lots of things about the Palma that I wish were better. And very little about it, actually, that someone else couldn't do better. But that's actually what's been so fun about using this thing. It has totally proven to me that there is something in this hardware combination. An e-ink display in the body of a smartphone with all the apps I need. That's it. It's worse than my phone at a lot of things, but massively better than my phone

• 7:26David Pierce?

  in just enough ways that it's worth having around. I've spent a lot of time testing out new kinds of gadgets this year. Smart glasses and AI pins and foldable devices and weird new ideas about tablets. And as it turns out, the thing I like the most is just a new take on the smartphone. Anyway, I wanted to know what other people liked about the Palma and why this thing has been such a hit with people who have tried it. So I called up a couple of them to chat about it. The first person I called was Matt Martin. He runs a company called Clockwise. And I actually caught him a few weeks into parental leave. He said he found the Palma the same way I did because people just wouldn't stop talking about it.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  People on my feed that really love good products, good design, seem like hit the zeitgeist somehow in like the little tech world that we live in. I also am having a kid and I was like, well, I aspire to read. I aspire not to, you know, spend my 30 minutes before bed on, you know, Instagram reels. And so I got it. And I have to tell you, like, the thing that I find really quite compelling about it, even after using it for a month or so, is having a full OS on it. Like the Kindle, you're in Amazon's little world where, you know, it's the Kindle operating system running on top of Android. But you know, you only have access to what Amazon gives you. It is basically a full version of Android. You can go to the Google Play Store. I downloaded the New York Times app.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  I downloaded Instant Paper. I downloaded Libby and I downloaded Kindle app, which by the way makes for just a better reading experience is on a Kindle. And that's actually, it's the combination of the portability and be able to like flip through online articles that are cultivated in the New York Times and actually flip through things. It's actually pretty, um, I wouldn't say it's revolutionary, but it's, it's an evolution that transforms that device for me to make it pretty compelling and something I'll reach for.

• 9:11David Pierce?

  I totally agree. The argument I have heard against this device is basically like just download those apps onto your phone. You do this, like, what is the point of having a whole separate dedicated device just for this? And I think to some extent, the answer is like, Ian, because nicer to look at, right? But it also feels like there's some, there's something about having a thing that feels like a dedicated device.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:35David Pierce?

  Even though it's not a totally dedicated device, that's like, I could put all the stuff I don't want to look at on the Palma. And for some reason I haven't, and I don't feel tempted to. There is a web browser and no part of me is tempted to go look at the web browser. And I like, I have a hard time figuring out why that is.

• 9:51Speaker 04

  So I am addicted to New York Times little games. I play with friends and I, and I was like, oh, I could play connections on here. Even that I find not compelling to do, like, if it's outside of reading, I don't really want to do it on the Palma. And I think that the, the answer is, um, probably not a very exciting one, which is that, you know, as humans, you know, there's the old anecdote that we were probably all taught in psych 101, which is that physical environment matters. Like if you set up an environment for a specific context, your brain actually is kind of part of where to take in the context and get prepared for that. And I think a separate device matters here a bit. Like if I'm in the context of my phone, there's just like that muscle, like, you know, iOS has become so refined at getting between the applications so quickly.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  Like I can have a random thought and this happens all the time. Like sometimes you're reading, you're in a slow section. You have that random thought about like, oh, what was that thing that I wanted to buy on Amazon? And you're there without even thinking about it. And now I'm on like a rabbit hole of attention that I didn't mean to be on.

• 10:53David Pierce?

  This is part of the reason I've been so interested in this gadget ecosystem for so long is I think anybody who says, oh, just use your smartphone differently. It's a matter of willpower. It's just like, no. You're wrong, and that's not how it works. And also, I don't, my phone is very good at a lot of things. I'm happy it's good at those things. So what, give me the full list of the apps you have on there. You mentioned Kindle, New York Times. What else you have?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  That's basically it, man. I mean, so it was kind of wild. Um, I realized when I was logging into everything that I could install one password and like it would just work.

• 11:23David Pierce?

  Oh, that's smart.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  Integrated, which is, you know, it's a full install of Android. So I have, in addition to those, I have OnePassword, Audible, Wikipedia. But I really, the home screen is just four apps. It's just Kindle, Instagram, or New York Times, a little bit. Cause again, it's a dedicated device for me. I don't really even seek out the other applications you said. Like you said, there's a web browser and I don't, I don't really have any impulse to go use that.

• 11:48David Pierce?

  Do you wish there were things this thing could do that it doesn't? What do you dislike about the Palma?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Not yet, honestly, I'm, I'm very happy with it. So I'll answer this all this, which is like, look, let's just acknowledge that we're weirdos. I wouldn't scream for the mountaintops that everybody should go get a book's Palma. Like, my mom would probably love this thing, but also she probably shouldn't get one. Like, it's fine. And I'm also not like, I don't quite nerd out despite my profession being in a company that focuses on focus time and helping get people more time in their day. I actually don't geek out on like all these different apps that try to, you know, give you more time to focus or prune your little garden when you're trying to focus your elements. But I just find the thing compelling because it helps me read. Like, that's it, full stop, full story.

• 12:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 04

  I was at a pediatrics appointment and I stuck in my pocket because I knew it would be waiting around. And I was sitting there and I pulled it out and read an article that I'd saved instead of pulling out my phone and looking at some dumb crap on Instagram. And like, I don't know, small win, but it kind of feels good.

• 12:49David Pierce?

  The way Matt put that was something I've been thinking about a lot ever since. When I have my phone in my pocket, my impulse when I pull it out is to open threads or TikTok or Instagram. I can fight that impulse and be productive and do the thing that I wanted to do, but that's still the impulse. When I have something like the Palma in my pocket, I open it up and my impulse is to open up Readwise or the Crosswords app. It just incentivizes a different kind of behavior in a way that I really like. After I talked to Matt, the next person I called is probably the single person most responsible for all the other people in my threads feed talking about the Palma. It's this guy.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  I'm Craig Maud and I'm a writer and photographer and I make books.

• 13:27David Pierce?

  Craig wrote a blog post in early May about why he loves the Palma, which got a lot of people excited. Craig has been thinking and writing about digital reading for a really long time. So for him to love a reading device is a pretty meaningful thing, actually, especially because, as he told me, he never expected to love a digital reading device ever again.

• 13:45Speaker 05

  Oh, I totally stopped helping with the best a long time ago. That's why I stopped writing about it. That's why I stopped talking to companies that would like, you know, people would email me and be like, "Hey, I'm doing a startup around digital books. It's like instantly into the trash." Like, no.

• 13:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, good luck with that.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  I know how that song ends.

• 13:59David Pierce?

  Earlier this year, though, the folks at Readwise called up Craig to talk to him about some digital reading stuff. He's actually an advisor to the company these days, but he also does just like the app and so do I. It's very good. And they ended up showing him the Palma. He bought one, along with one of the other larger books tablets, and immediately fell in love with it. So we compared notes for a little while.

• 14:19Speaker 05

  I'm excited about this idea that e-ink screens are cheap enough that anyone can kind of produce these devices now. And Android is an operating system and, you know, in general, touch-based tablet operating systems, like, whatever. We've figured them out. We figured them out a long time ago. There's no cancer to be solved in tablets anymore. It all works the same. They're all, they're all fine. And so like Android is totally good enough. So like the fact that you can kind of stick an Android computer into a device that has a great e-ink screen and run the Kindle app, which by the way, Kindle devices are just Android devices.

• 14:53David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, that's true.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  They're just running the Kindle app and that's all they run. And the Books folks runs every Android app in the App Store, runs the Readwise Reader app. So suddenly you have all your long-form reading beautifully synced between all your devices. The Readwise Reader app is actually really thoughtfully done. The scroll design that they released earlier this year.

• 15:14David Pierce?

  Do you do the paginated scroll?

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, and I love it. I think it's so good.

• 15:18David Pierce?

  I turned that on the second they launched it and I, it was, I have switched to and from Instapaper 100,000 times just because it paginates.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:29David Pierce?

  And I don't, especially for very long things, I just don't want to scroll it like a webpage.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  No.

• 15:33David Pierce?

  I told the Readwise folks like a year ago, like, "Please, dear God, just give me pagination." And they were like, "I don't know, I'm not sure anybody except you wants that." And I was like, "All right, fair enough, understood." And then they launched it and it was instantly, everything about my reading life got better.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, and they did a really good job with it. I love how they do the breaks. And with like the Books Palma, you can set the volume buttons as the scroll buttons, and it's just perfect one-handed reading. And there is something, you're absolutely right. Scrolling and reading long text sucks. It sucks. And this is one of the reasons why I think if you looked at engagement on laptop screens, like long text, I can't read something over a thousand words on a laptop. I just can't do it. And so I've given up on it. So everything gets sent to Reader. You know, you just click the little icon, you know, in your Extensions bar and Chrome or whatever, and boom, it's in Reader, Readwise Reader. And, you know, it's on all these devices waiting to be read beautifully paginated. You can do note-taking, highlighting, synced beautifully. It goes into Obsidian,

• 16:29Speaker 05

  the Obsidian synced notes. You can see them. You click on them. It opens in Readwise Reader on the web. All the loops are closed for engagement around long-form reading. And I have found since getting these devices, because I used to send long-form articles to the Kindle, but it was such a clumsy affair, and the notes weren't really synced and saved. And it just felt like I was throwing things away, and I'd never be able to go back to them, and the archive was bad. Now that I can use Readwise Reader, and I have an e-ink device that has essentially a week-long, two-week-long battery life, I never think about charging these things. Even now, it's like 44%. I've been using this for the last week. And now that I can do that, that ecosystem has completely reinvigorated all of my digital reading and long-form reading. I've read more long-form articles in the last three months than I have probably in the last year. It's awesome.

• 17:14Speaker 05

  And I just love it. I love it. I love that everything that the Kindle had a monopoly on, which was mainly hardware and screens, that's gone. The mode is totally gone. And it feels like we're at this, now at this precipice, high-refresh e-ink screens, low-cost Android devices, let's go. Like, let's do something interesting around this space. Like, it's just really exciting.

• 17:36David Pierce?

  What is there about the Palma in particular that sort of speaks to you?

• 17:40Speaker 05

  Well, it's you can just have it in your pocket. This is one of the things that drove me insane about the Oasis is like, I like the Oasis. The shape of it is shaped so it can't fit in any pocket known to man. It's the craziest shape I've ever seen in my life. It doesn't fit into any pocket. I don't know how they did it. They like, it's like they went around the world and they checked every pocket and they're like, okay, make it one millimeter bigger than every single angle. Well, you know, so this, you know, this Palma I'm holding right now, it's so light, it fits anywhere. You can just have it in your breast pocket. You can have it in your pant pocket, whatever. So it is my like go-to thing to have on trains whenever I'm traveling. I pull this thing out and I'm reading on it. It's also my bedtime computer.

• 18:19Speaker 05

  You know, it's like you can be in bed, all the lights are off. The, all the backlight stuff on these books devices are pretty well done. It's kind of like a, I don't know if it's a warm backlight, but it's like you can have it low enough where it doesn't really feel like it's affecting sleep. It's just perfect, one-handed. It's not heavy. It's not going to fall on your face in a weird way. You can be on your side. You got it in your hand with your thumb on the, the volume controls and you can just easily go through an article until you fall asleep. It's like a gentle lullaby of a reader. It's great. And it makes you wonder, why hasn't someone made an e-ink phone? Because

• 18:51David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 18:51Speaker 05

  It's so, everything that I'm looking for in a device is like these Palma, this, the Palma, the refresh rate is high enough. I mean, have you watched video on these things? It's really wild. Like it disincentivizes you from watching video, but the fact that this e-ink screen can update fast enough to show you video and it looks like video and it doesn't have that much ghosting, that just means that you can do highly interactive interfaces that wouldn't be annoying to type messages on, do the basics. You could run Google Maps on this thing and zoom and do searches and it'd be fine. And I would love to have this as my main driver, so much more than, you know, the dopamine casino iPhone, where it's like vying for your attention every two seconds and all the notifications look so good. And it's just such a juicy device to be spending time with.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  But this Palma, it really has reconfigured like Because I hadn't been paying attention to the state of e Ink. And so, you know, the state of e Ink for me was whatever the latest Kindle was doing. And, you know, you don't really get a sense of how good it is with the Kindles. And these books devices have really blown my mind, just how fast e Ink can be. And how joyful it is to run all these different apps in e Ink.

• 19:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, what do you do on the Palma other than read?

• 20:02Speaker 05

  That's it. So that's, I mean, that's the other great. All I, all I run is Reader and Kindle. But I've, you know, poked around on the, if I need to do a web search, which I very rarely do. But if I need to, I can. And if I need to buy a Kindle book, I can go to the Kindle website and run that. And like, the fact that I can do that and it doesn't feel like a burden or like I'm taxing the machine. You know, whereas like on the Kindle, anytime you had to load up the experimental, the experimental, now like 14 years later, still experimental browser.

• 20:29David Pierce?

  Disaster.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  Doesn't work. Doesn't work well at all. Yeah, no, absolutely terrible. Yeah, it's this baby go, wow, there's a whole world of e Ink exploration that hasn't happened and can happen now. And the, the technology is clearly, like, the IP is, I think there was a lot of IP issues or whatever. It's expensive, it was expensive to license before, maybe that's all changed.

• 20:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  And, yeah, and now you can make things like this, which is incredible. I love it. More, more e Ink, please.

• 20:54David Pierce?

  I agree. And I actually think the, what you said, the like, if you need to, you can. To me is like the perfect description of everything about the Palma. Because like, yes, you can watch video, but it sucks. Like, it's not, you wouldn't want to sit and watch a video. But ultimately, it's like, if I need to watch a video in service of the thing that I'm reading for a minute, it's there. I will get through it. I will get the thing that I need out of it. And then I'll go back to reading, which is what I'm after here.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  And so that to me is like, the fact that it does all of these things, the fact that it does them poorly has actually become a feature, not a bug for me, which is not what I expected when I first got this device.

• 21:26Speaker 05

  It's the absolute perfect amount of friction.

• 21:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 05

  Whereas the Kindle is too much friction for doing most things. The books devices, it's like just a little bit of friction where it's like, as you say, it's like, you wouldn't want to go surf YouTube and be like, all right, let me watch MKBHD. You know, his most recent video on this thing. But if I needed to watch a little interview with Dennis Johnson talking about train dreams or whatever, like, I could pop into that for a second and be like, exactly like you said, get what you need to get out of it and go back into the reading. And that's, that's exciting. And, you know, and I think the perfect amount of friction is exactly what no one is willing to bake into most devices. And this is kind of happening almost like as a byproduct, a natural. A natural byproduct of the technology and that feels organic and really lovely.

• 22:10David Pierce?

  Totally. Is there anything you would change about the Palma, like as a gadget?

• 22:14Speaker 05

  I'd probably get rid of the camera. I'd simplify it even more.

• 22:17David Pierce?

  I forgot it had a camera. Just this moment was the first time I've thought about the Palma's camera since the second I got it.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I've taken a few photos with it. It's kind of funny to then look at them, you know, later and it's like, oh yeah, that's right. I could take photos with this. But like, um, I'd probably put the volume rockers on both sides. So you could do page change on both sides of it. And just really optimize for like, if you're holding it with your right hand or left hand, you have the exact same kind of hardware interaction model. I'd probably move the power button to the top because I think that's the best place for all power buttons. I think the iPhone power button on the side was the worst hardware change they made to the iPhone in the history of the iPhone. I mean, just because how many times do you accidentally, you know, do screenshots and yet, you know, anyway, I love power on the top. Which by the way, this other Books model does power on the top in their tablet and that feels really good.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  Um, and then just, yeah, just have those, have those page trim buttons on both sides. And then I think that's it. Maybe the screen, like I do feel like the screen on this thing is not extremely well protected, you know, I'd.

• 23:18David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  I would love to see a Gorilla Glass version of this. What would that feel like? How much heavier would it make it? I wouldn't want the body to be metal. I think this plastic body, I think the texture on the back of it is fine. I think lightness is, is a huge bonus when it comes to devices like this. And I just worry like, sometimes when I put it in my bag, I'm like, is this screen gonna get messed up? I'm still treating it, I'm not babying it at all. I'm, I'm just throwing it in my bag and I'm like, okay, whatever's gonna happen is gonna happen. But I do feel like a stronger, even just like a couple of generations old Gorilla Glass might be a really interesting modification. I don't know what the IPX rating is, but I'd want to make sure it would be like fully submersible. Those would be, you know.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  I see the Palma more as like a long form reading Renaissance device rather than a digital book Renaissance device.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  I buy it.

• 24:07Speaker 05

  Hopefully it can be that too, though. Hopefully it can create better interfaces for digital books as well, not just for long form articles.

• 24:14David Pierce?

  Totally. Yeah. And honestly, like I have spent so many years wondering why Amazon has not just built a decent way to read web articles on the Kindle. And if, if Books just makes Amazon do that, it will have done the world a great service, but I don't think it's ever gonna happen.

• 24:27Speaker 05

  It's never gonna happen. No, no, no. Like, you just have to accept that there's a certain size of company that internally just doesn't, doesn't have the willpower Yeah. to do these things that where that you look at the spreadsheet and you go, what's the market cap of this? What's, you know, and it's essentially a rounding error, you know, it's zero. And it's just not going to happen unless you have a C-level person who owns it. And I think with Jeff out of Amazon, I don't know anyone there who is an avid old GQ, you know, Esquire reader or whatever. Right. It's like, we've got to make this amazing to read old gay Taliesse articles or whatever. You know, it's like. Yep. So thankfully, we don't have to because the e-ink technology is now trickled down to everyone else.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  And companies like Books, which we should say, and I think it's important to say, Books is a bad open source citizen. I don't know if you know about this, but like, they are using, I think, Android models or Android software in a way that breaks the, the terms of the open source license. Oh, interesting. Like if Hacker News ever, like if a Books, like, device article comes up on Hacker News, you know, people go nuts about this and bring it up. And I think it is, I think it is important to bring up. Yeah. Because they are effectively violating the license. And I, and I think it would be very easy for them to not violate it. And I think we should talk about this in podcasts like this and say, hey, Books, can you just be a good citizen? It's like such a dumb, easy thing to do. Why aren't you doing it? And we'd love to, you know, it would help me even

• 25:55Speaker 05

  more enthusiastically recommend these devices, you know? I, I know anecdotally, I have probably sold at least a couple hundred of these things in the last couple of months, at least. These are people just messaging me directly. So I may, it's probably in the thousands of folks who've bought Palmas and are using them. And in fact, anyone listening to this who has bought a Palmer and has, you know, had an interesting experience with it, I'd love, sent, please write into us. Tell us what changes you would like to see. I would love to, I'd love to hear what people, how people are using these things or thinking about it. But it does seem like we're in this moment where maybe, maybe, just maybe, digital reading of long form stuff could, the interfaces for it could change. The way we interact with these libraries could change. And it's, it's an exciting moment.

• 26:38David Pierce?

  I really agree with what Craig said there. I do think this is an exciting moment. I think there are a lot of companies out there being like, "We will replace your smartphone." And I think that's mostly ridiculous. But I also think that there are a lot of things that can be done better than the way our phones do them. And it's fun to watch gadgets explore that. Sometimes they get it wrong, like the humane AI pin, but there's still something to the idea that not everything should be inside of your smartphone. I've been using the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses as a way to take photos without sticking my phone in my kid's face. I've been using the Apple Watch as a faster way to set reminders or take notes. And I've been using the Palma as a way to read and listen to stuff without the rest of my digital life getting in the way. None of these things replace my phone all the time, but they do some of the time.

• 27:22David Pierce?

  And I think that might be enough. All right, enough about E-ink for now. We gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back and talk about some Windows computers. We'll be right back.

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• 29:06David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. We've talked a lot on this show over the last several weeks about this new generation of Windows PCs. Thanks to a new set of chips from Qualcomm and this new Copilot AI stuff from Microsoft, the whole Copilot Plus PC idea, which is a name I really hate, but a concept I think is very cool, feels like it might be a moment in the history of PCs. If these computers are as good and as versatile and as long lasting and as powerful as Microsoft and Qualcomm would like you to believe, this could be really exciting for the whole laptop and desktop industry. It's been kind of a weird rollout, though. There was the whole issue with Recall, which was Microsoft's big new AI feature that would let you search through and organize basically everything you ever did on your computer.

• 29:49David Pierce?

  Turns out, giant security disaster, at least in the way that Microsoft initially implemented it. So that's been slowed way down. I don't think a lot of people are going to be excited about it at first, so suddenly Recall feels less cool and exciting and like the future of Windows that it once did. But we're still getting some of these devices. I still have lots of questions. Companies basically across the PC industry are all in on this Copilot Plus PC idea. We're starting to see tons of new models. We're going to have lots of new reviews. But personally, the ones I'm most excited about are the ones that come from Microsoft. Microsoft has been at, I think, the forefront of Windows hardware for a pretty long time. And with the new Surface Pro and the new Surface Laptop, is really trying to, I would say, show the rest of the industry how this Copilot Plus PC thing can work.

• 30:33David Pierce?

  So Tom Warren and Nathan Edwards on our team have been reviewing those devices. They haven't told me anything about how it's going, and I am desperate to find out. So I am going to use the fact that we are here on The Vergecast to make them tell me things about these new devices. Let's get into it. Tom Warren, hello. Hello. Nathan Edwards, hello.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Hi, David.

• 30:52David Pierce?

  First, let's just level set a little. I want to know the Microsoft gear you both currently have right now. Tom, what do you have in your possession that you've been playing with?

• 31:02Speaker 07

  So I have the 13 inch Surface Laptop Seventh Edition. Not seven, Seventh Edition.

• 31:08David Pierce?

  It's very important.

• 31:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, the 15 inch model as well.

• 31:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 31:13Speaker 07

  The laptop. And I've also got the Surface Pro Eleventh Edition?

• 31:19Speaker 08

  It's the Eleventh Edition, yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 07

  Eleventh Edition, yeah.

• 31:22David Pierce?

  For our purposes, we're just gonna call them the new ones because God help anyone who tries to keep all these numbers in their, in their brains.

• 31:28Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 31:28David Pierce?

  And that's both of you. So God help both of you. Nathan, you're on the Pro. Which Pro are you on?

• 31:33Speaker 08

  I have the top of the line new Pro. It's also 13 inches. It's got, they of course sent the tricked out version, 32 gigs of RAM, 1 terabyte of storage and the Elite 80100 processor.

• 31:48David Pierce?

  So this is like, if, if there is going to be one that kicks ass, it's gonna be this one?

• 31:52Speaker 08

  Yes, this is their $2,100 without the keyboard model.

• 31:57David Pierce?

  Okay, that's serious business. So I have a lot of questions for both of you about both of these devices, but I feel like the place we have to start is with the chips. Right? Like that is, there, there are lots of stories of this thing, but I feel like the question most people want to know is like, did, did Qualcomm do the thing here? Are these things actually good? So Nathan, let's start very top of the line. And then Tom, I want to hear your more like mainstreamy experience. But what have you, what have you seen so far, Nathan? How do these things hold up?

• 32:23Speaker 08

  It does not disappoint me.

• 32:25David Pierce?

  Really?

• 32:26Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 32:27David Pierce?

  That's so exciting.

• 32:28Speaker 08

  I don't have to think, most of the time I don't have to think about the fact that it's not x86. It's not perfect. And there are like places in which it's like not the top runner, but it's a good laptop. It's a good laptop, a good Windows laptop with an ARM processor.

• 32:43David Pierce?

  Which you like, really cannot overstate how big a thing that is to be able to say at this moment in time.

• 32:49Speaker 08

  Yeah. And Tom has the Pro X and I, he's done a little bit of like digging it out and brushing the dust off. And I want to hear more on that. But like this, I'm not fundamentally fighting the thing, except in the sense that I would be fundamentally fighting Windows anyway. Like generally with a few edge exceptions, it like just works.

• 33:08David Pierce?

  Tom, has that been your experience too?

• 33:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, pretty much. And I'm I'm obviously using the nine hundred ninety nine ninety nine cent Surface Laptop, and that's the base model. So I've been using that one primarily for the past week, because mainly because we obviously didn't get these beforehand for review embargo and all that sort of stuff. So I was like, I don't want the tricked out one. I want to test what the base model one is because it's got sixteen gig RAM, two hundred fifty six gig of storage, and then the X plus processor, which is, I think for me now, testing the the Elite is around about twenty percent better performing, roughly. So that that's kind of the gap. But in real terms, if you're just using it day to day, you're probably not going to notice that unless you're really

• 33:49Speaker 07

  pushing it. But yeah, in terms of app compatibility, I'd say, like, you know, like, the ninety percent of the apps you're going to use aren't going to be emulated. And the key one being the browser, right, which obviously everyone kind of lives in these days. But then outside of that, yeah, there's going to be some app compatibility things, some weird things like Google Drive Desktop still doesn't work, but that isn't necessarily because it can't emulate. It's probably because Google's just flagged it not to. So it's like these weird things of like the past ten, twelve years of Windows and ARM being a bit crappy, coming back to sort of haunt me at this time. But Microsoft and Qualcomm have done a quite good job at like getting these software vendors to sort of play ball. And it's definitely a lot better than than I've ever used in the past.

• 34:34David Pierce?

  That is super exciting. Nathan, have you run into anything that just like flatly didn't work?

• 34:38Speaker 08

  I mean, yeah, so Premiere Pro does not work, but they told us it wasn't going to work. You're gonna hate this. Arc refuses to run.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  That's disappointing.

• 34:46Speaker 08

  It's my browser of choice on both Mac and Windows these days, although it's much better on Mac still. And they were just like, sorry, we don't support it, ARM sixty four. Let us know if you want us to, to put my name in a little form. Please let me know.

• 35:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, please, please let it be known that we want it to. If you're listening, we would like that. But I would say that alone, those are things that presumably will get updated over time. And Tom, your point about the history of this maybe being a problem, that there are a lot of folks who are like, actually turned it off because the experience was so bad, who are now going to have to be convinced to turn emulation stuff back on. My hope would be if the performance is as good as you guys are describing, that that'll start to happen fairly quickly. So even the stuff that exists, hopefully won't exist for too much longer.

• 35:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, and with the Adobe stuff, like, so with Premiere Pro is quite a funny one because they disabled it or like blocked it on the X Elite, but they forgot to do it on the X Plus, so I got it installed. And then I think they realized like a day later and then it like dropped out of my Creative Cloud, but I still have it installed. And I can understand why they blocked it because so I tried to process like a 4K, a 20, 20 second 4K video, right? On this thing. And it was like stuttering, like you couldn't just play it without it skipping and dropping frames and all that sort of stuff. I tried to export and they said it was going to take five minutes to export. And I was like, for a 20 second 4K video, that's like obviously way too long. And for comparison, this is really unfair comparison, but I'm going to make this comparison anyway.

• 36:16Speaker 07

  I tried it on my desktop PC, which is a 4900K and a 4090, and it exported in seven seconds. So I can see why they have Premiere Pro blocked on there because it's not a good, good experience. I feel like if you were trying to edit in that, you would come like, I feel like you'd make editing mistakes just from the basic like trying to crop a video or in the timeline and all that sort of stuff. It's just very laggy because it's obviously, yeah, it's not been optimized and that is a heavyweight app. That will hopefully be better later this year once they release the actual ARM 64 version, which they've promised to.

• 36:49David Pierce?

  Got it, okay. So it, it seems like the, the performance promises that we've gotten, some of it is like you won't notice the difference. And Nathan, it seems like that's kind of been your experience, that most of the time you don't have to think about the fact that this is an ARM processor instead of an X86 processor, which on its own, giant terrific win. Microsoft in particular has also made a lot of noise about how it like beats the crap out of Apple silicon and everybody is making large, grandiose performance claims here. Like in terms of actual raw performance, like good enough is, is a huge deal. And that's frankly, I would say like that's the benchmark and it sounds like we've mostly cleared it and that's very exciting. How good are these actually that you've seen so far?

• 37:29Speaker 08

  Well, I want to preface by saying Joanne and Emelius has our big benchmark article coming in a few days. That'll be the big word on it, the official word, but they are single core. They're not as good as the M3 at all.

• 37:42David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 37:43Speaker 08

  They do pretty well on most things compared to the Core Ultra stuff and compared to Ryzen 8000. But it's like, it's not like, it's not crushing anybody. They do, they, on the reviewer's guide, did this very funny 58% faster than the M3. It is on, very specifically on Cinebench Multi Core.

• 38:05David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 38:05Speaker 08

  Notably, it has about 50% more cores. Each of those cores is slower than the M3 single core. There's just more of them, which is, you know what? Yes, sure, fair, you did it, like, good job. But it's competitive, they're competitive, which is more than I could say for any Snapdragon-based Windows laptop before.

• 38:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, just to be in range feels like a victory. Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 08

  Battery life is decent.

• 38:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was the next thing I was gonna ask about because this is hopefully the other big bright product of switching to ARM. Uh, what, what have you seen on the Pro battery life wise?

• 38:40Speaker 08

  So I haven't gotten a full day of battery out of it, but I've been doing a lot of benchmarking.

• 38:46David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 38:46Speaker 08

  I haven't had like a full day of what I would consider my normal workday, just like doing spreadsheets and Word docs and Slack. Slack is still a battery killer. Every time I look at the battery usage thing, Slack is right up there. Maybe not as bad as it used to be on ARM.

• 39:01David Pierce?

  Slack is pretty bad on everything, to be fair. We should just do an episode at some point where we just sit and yell about all the apps that are grossly inefficient and messy on computers. And we would spend a lot of time talking about Slack, I suspect.

• 39:14Speaker 08

  It's funny, it does to the computer what it does to our attention span.

• 39:18David Pierce?

  Just slowly destroys it. Uh, Tom, what are you seeing on the laptop?

• 39:22Speaker 07

  Um, yeah, really, really good battery life, to be honest. On the first day, I was like working outside and it was like, I had the screen at 100% brightness. I was downloading like multiple Steam games, I did video calls, working in Photoshop, all that sort of stuff. So I'd say that was probably more than my sort of average workday of, of using. Your laptop, but I still got around about seven hours battery life on that day. And then in the evening, I charged it up to like a hundred percent. I was using indoors at like, you know, fifty percent brightness. You didn't need the hundred percent brightness. Um, and I think in around four hours, it only drained twenty five percent. So.

• 39:56David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 39:57Speaker 07

  I was like, okay, that's good. And then I closed the lid and it had like seventy whatever percent remaining at like eleven P M. And I woke up the next day, did some stuff and then I ended up grabbing the laptop about midday and it still had that seventy percent. It was like, I think I went to, went to sleep at like seventy two and it had seventy percent. I was like, okay, that's, that's good as well.

• 40:17David Pierce?

  That's pretty exciting.

• 40:17Speaker 07

  Half the time, yeah, half the time you close the lid on Windows laptop, you're kind of like, is it gonna wake like, am I, should I just keep this thing plugged in? Cause it's not actually gonna, it's gonna just drain the battery um overnight. Um, so I've never seen it do that. Um, it's usually like one or two percent it drains overnight.

• 40:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 07

  And to be honest, I haven't left it long enough for like, you know, five, six nights to see whether that is one or two percent per day or if that's just a. You know, every time you sort of um sleep it. But yeah, the battery life is phenomenal as long as you're in the native apps.

• 40:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 07

  As long as you're doing sort of the lightweight stuff. So if I, if I had a day, I think I had a day where I was working predominantly in like Slack and Discord and Chrome and, and WhatsApp. You know, not, not too heavy lifting apps. And I think I charged it and I think I got sort of, sort of like something like six hours. And it, and it's about down, down thirty percent in those six hours.

• 41:13David Pierce?

  Wow, okay.

• 41:13Speaker 07

  Which is pretty, yeah, which is quite surprising. So yeah, but, but then if you start downloading stuff in on Steam, like which is an emulator app.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 41:21Speaker 07

  Like I, I could notice it drop by like five to ten percent just from downloading a big game on Steam.

• 41:27David Pierce?

  Not even playing, just downloading.

• 41:29Speaker 07

  Just downloading.

• 41:30David Pierce?

  Just as soon as it needs to do an emulated app, you can feel it working harder.

• 41:34Speaker 07

  And, and Steam's quite vigorous when it's downloading and unpacking games. On the CPU. Yeah, so it's understandable what it's done there, but yeah, it's emulated. So I'd, I'd be very curious to see if there's ever gonna be a ARM sixty four Steam client and whether that would improve that. I'm sure there will be.

• 41:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, it feels like it's coming. But it seems like to me the the the two levels of battery test are like, the first is sort of the the cross-country flight test where it's like I can I can use it in the airport and then like watch two movies on it and then get to wherever I'm going without it dying. That's like that's test number one. It feels like any laptop that can't pass that test sucks. And then there's the like, use it all day and, you know, use it and don't charge till the next morning. And this doesn't seem like it's quite gotten there, but it does seem like it probably passes the cross-country flight test, which again, for a pretty powerful Windows laptop is a big victory. And at least it's like, it's not as good as Apple, which is pretty easily in the like, I can use it all day

• 42:34David Pierce?

  and then charge it at lunch the next day with a lot of things. This doesn't feel like it's quite there, but it's almost there. And that's something.

• 42:40Speaker 07

  I think it probably is.

• 42:41David Pierce?

  Okay, if you're not doing the emulated stuff.

• 42:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, as long as you're not doing emulator stuff, I think so. Like, I don't do the battery tests that other sort of reviews do where they just have a bunch of tabs or a bunch of videos going because that stuff is it's not real world. You know, that's the stuff that Microsoft always says, you know, 15, 20 hours of video.

• 42:59David Pierce?

  Offline video playback, like, who is that for?

• 43:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I do the real world stuff. And I think I charged it on Friday and I used it a bunch over the weekend. And then I haven't charged it since Friday and it's 27%.

• 43:13David Pierce?

  Oh, all right. Then yeah, we're on to something there. Nathan, it sounds like the Pro is not quite as good, though. It doesn't it doesn't quite hang as well.

• 43:20Speaker 08

  I would say I haven't had the time, I haven't had the like extended amounts of time to test it. So it was, yeah. Let me tell you, Cinebench murders murders the battery life, as does, actually, what killed it was Blender. So if you use Blender, don't get a Snapdragon thing yet. Like, if that's part of your workflow, it is emulated and it's not hitting the GPU cores at all. It's just pure CPU compute. It's brute forcing it. It takes a long time.

• 43:46Speaker 08

  And it's not pretty. That will like, we're at now like if there's an app that you need that's not native yet. That's not to say this won't be a good choice, but I wouldn't go for it yet.

• 43:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. And also if ever a setup was going to set your computer on fire, Blender running on the CPU would be, would be the answer.

• 44:04Speaker 08

  Yes. It got toasty.

• 44:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, I would imagine.

• 44:08Speaker 08

  But not on the keyboard, because that's detachable.

• 44:11David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. Okay. Wait, I want to get into all the AI stuff. We have to talk about that for a minute. I totally forgot about that. This is very exciting. Tell me about this new keyboard setup and how you've been using it.

• 44:20Speaker 08

  So the Surface Pro has a detachable keyboard. It connects by pogo pins. That is the way it's always been. Pull it off. It's like a little folio thing. This year they finally put a battery in it. Not all of them, but there's the, the Pro Flex keyboard. It's Bluetooth. It's got a battery. You want to take it off, you pull it off and it still works. And that feels like, obviously this is the way detachable keyboards ought to be.

• 44:44David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 44:44Speaker 08

  Like often they're just like, here is a Bluetooth keyboard or here is a pogo pin keyboard and you sort of have to pick. Pogo pin is great because it doesn't run out of battery. But also if you're in a situation where you want to detach the keyboard, then all of a sudden it's dead. But I love this thing.

• 45:00David Pierce?

  So how have you actually used it in practice? Like what, give me the, the detached use case.

• 45:05Speaker 08

  Well, for example, for ergonomics, if you want to put the screen on like a big pile of books to get it higher up and keep your keyboard down below, you can do that. That's kind of the use case.

• 45:15David Pierce?

  As someone, I spent years with like the, I would have the screen in the middle and I would put my laptop up on a stand next to it as kind of a second display. Having, being able to use the Surface keyboard as the keyboard down on my desk for that. Incredible.

• 45:29Speaker 08

  I will say that it is $350. And if you're, if your use case is like, you're mostly at home with the thing running this as like your desktop, basically. And then you shove it in a bag once in a while and take it with you. You can buy a lot of really nice keyboards for $350 and then still have room in the budget for like the regular Flex keyboard to take with you.

• 45:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, you can buy several really nice keyboards for $350.

• 45:54Speaker 08

  You can buy one really nice key.

• 45:55David Pierce?

  You can also buy one. Yeah. It's like a third, a third of the price of the Surface. I know. It's nuts.

• 46:00Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 46:00David Pierce?

  It's truly nuts.

• 46:01Speaker 08

  It's $350 or 500 bucks, basically with the slim pen. And like, many people consider a keyboard to be an important part of a laptop.

• 46:10David Pierce?

  Many people are saying, yeah.

• 46:13Speaker 08

  But Microsoft, their big thing is like, listen, we give you options. You can have the regular Pogo Pen one. You can have the Bluetooth one. If you already have a Flex keyboard from a previous Surface Pro, you can just use that. It's backwards compatible. It's fine. So like, I used to be like, oh, why, why? This isn't really a $999 laptop. It's 1,200 bucks when you have the keyboard. But like, I do actually appreciate the optionality.

• 46:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I totally buy it. Is there any other hardware stuff we should talk about? I feel like for the most part, the hardware is as it has been and it's still pretty good. I guess the OLED screen is new.

• 46:42Speaker 08

  The OLED screen is nice.

• 46:42David Pierce?

  Is that exciting? Has that changed your life in any meaningful way?

• 46:46Speaker 08

  It doesn't change my life. I mean, so it is 120 Hz variable. It goes up to 600 nits and then I think 900 nits of peak brightness for HDR. It's a nice screen. I will say 50% brightness or whatever, not quite enough. I keep having to crank it up a little bit. And it does have a little faint grain to it at peak brightness where you can see the, the touch sensors in the panel. Several viewers have noticed this. We were talking back channel, like Microsoft was like, hmm, we haven't noticed. And several viewers like, yeah.

• 47:15David Pierce?

  They're like, don't worry about it. You're not seeing what you think you're seeing.

• 47:17Speaker 08

  It's fine. Doesn't bother me. Uh, Welch noticed it. But no, it's a nice thing. I will say you're still in dongle life. Two USB-C ports. Um, they do still have the Surface connector on the other side, which is like a magnetic proprietary connector. Which again, Microsoft is like, listen, want to charge with that? It's fine. You can charge via USB-C. That's fine. I have it connected to my, usually I have it connected to my like 32 inch 4K monitor with a USB-C and it powers the laptop at full speed. It runs all those stuff. But right now, when you're not hooked in, two USB ports, C ports is still pretty limiting.

• 47:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 08

  Especially because there's no headphone jack.

• 47:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's not enough. I agree. I've gotten used to it as a MacBook Air user for years, but then every, every time I am forced to encounter a computer with more, it's like, oh, this is delightful. Like, I have a, I have a Surface Laptop Studio from a couple of years ago and that thing just feels like it has infinite ports compared to this one.

• 48:12Speaker 08

  It's just nice. Like right now, we're, so we're recording, um, and I have my headphones plugged into you, a USB-C dongle. And that takes up one port. And I have our microphone plugged into USB-C and that takes up the other port. And that's all the ports. I'm charging from the Surface Connector, so I'm glad that that's there. That's it. Yes, I have dongles and gizmos and gadgets still over, but like, it'd be nice.

• 48:35Speaker 07

  What do you think of the trackpad?

• 48:37Speaker 08

  It's fine. It's a trackpad. I don't hate it. I don't love it.

• 48:41Speaker 07

  So I started using it today after using the bigger Surface Laptop trackpad for the last week. And I keep hitting the bottom of the key like that because it's, they've made it vertically smaller.

• 48:51Speaker 08

  Yes, it is a little compressed. It's small. You're right.

• 48:54Speaker 07

  I don't like that because, because the, the Slim Pen is always on display now as well, up top.

• 48:59David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 49:00Speaker 07

  Yeah. So you've lost a little bit of, they, they just sort of shifted the keyboard down accordingly. So.

• 49:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't love that.

• 49:06Speaker 08

  The little cradle for the Slim Pen does charge the pen, which I do like.

• 49:10David Pierce?

  That's nice.

• 49:10Speaker 08

  Because I have an Air with the new Pencil Pro. That thing just goes flying all over the place. Like it magnets to the top to charge, but it just, it's just every time I pick it up, the pen flies off into the distance. I'm amazed I haven't lost it yet.

• 49:23David Pierce?

  You might have a magnet problem, but that's, that's for another day. So wait, let's just talk about the AI stuff here for a few minutes before we switch gears. The promise of all of this stuff is that it will do on-device AI things that will make everything wonderful. Recall, obviously its own story, not here. We'll worry about that another time. What stuff have you guys noticed in the course of testing these things that feels like it is part of the sort of AI PC future? I just want to say, as soon as I said that, Nathan's webcam started moving around, which I suspect is an answer to my question.

• 49:55Speaker 08

  A lot of gimmicks and a couple slightly useful features.

• 49:58David Pierce?

  Okay, hit me with the useful ones first.

• 50:00Speaker 08

  So the Windows Studio Effects on the webcam, some of them are kind of nice. Like, so they, they use this absurd, like, ultra-wide webcam on the Surface Pro that, like, makes you look like you're being looked at by a four-year-old. You're looming over them. And so they, they use the Studio Effects to crop that down to like, center you. And it follows you around the frame like you've got your dedicated camera person, like the Nest Hub Max does. It's also got fake eye contact thing like Nvidia uses.

• 50:27David Pierce?

  Oh no, that stuff creeps me out.

• 50:29Speaker 08

  I mean, yeah, it's creepy.

• 50:31David Pierce?

  It feels like a good idea. It's one of those things that like, once that's not creepy, it'll be great. But at least everything I've seen so far, it, it veers toward creepy.

• 50:41Speaker 08

  Is it creeping you out right now?

• 50:43David Pierce?

  Now you pointed, it wasn't until you pointed it out and now I feel like I'm looking too deep into your eyes through a webcam.

• 50:48Speaker 08

  There's that. It does have live captioning, uh, which is on device and it can caption any video, um, that's playing on your computer.

• 50:56David Pierce?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 50:56Speaker 08

  I tried it a couple of times. I tried it in a video call, uh, with Antonio and with Joanna and it translated Italian like spoken on the fly pretty well, but it was like, you know, where's the library level Italian?

• 51:10David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 51:11Speaker 08

  I tried playing it on Netflix. I was watching Delicious in Dungeon. You will be shocked that it could not keep up, nor did it match the quality of the, um, actual human translated subtitles.

• 51:22David Pierce?

  But it's serviceable in a pinch, I guess.

• 51:24Speaker 08

  It seems to be.

• 51:25David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 51:26Speaker 08

  Little slow, but like it's cool that it can do that on device. That's a cool use of the NPU. Um, I've not been that impressed with any of the image creation or co-creation stuff, uh, although I'm curious if Tom has a different experience.

• 51:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. Tom, have you, have you seen any features that have jumped out to you?

• 51:40Speaker 07

  I mean, there's not a lot, let's be honest. Um, that, that stuff feels like a bit of a sideshow to the, the Windows and ARM stuff, really. I don't know why they need to make such a big deal out of it because, um, it is, it's like they're laying the foundations for this stuff, but it's not quite there yet.

• 51:54David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 51:55Speaker 07

  So, so you've got like paint, in Paint, they've got Image Co-Creator, which is, which is interesting on the, on the surface laptop, because one thing I should say is that it doesn't support pen input anymore. Like whereas you could use a slim pen before on the previous models, you can't now. The Image Co-Creator feature here pretty much relies on you drawing what you want to see, uh, which obviously you can do on a trackpad, but it's kind of a little bit, not the best way to, to draw. You just want to do on the screen, um, where you'd have to touch. Um, so yeah, that feature seems a little bit less useful than on the Pro, um, if I'm honest, because it's just way more easy just to draw. But even still, it just uses like a, a local AI model, which I think it's using, is it stable diffusion it's using, I think?

• 52:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, they told us it was stable diffusion.

• 52:37Speaker 07

  And the results are pretty bad.

• 52:39Speaker 08

  Good, terrible.

• 52:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 52:41David Pierce?

  I mean, what would you expect from Paint? I don't, I like, I don't know how high my, my bar for quality would really be there.

• 52:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I tried to draw like a dog on a beach with a ball. And it drew the dog fine, but it just refused to pick up the fact that I'd drawn a ball. And in the prompt, I'd said I wanted a ball. It was just like this lonely dog looking all sad on the beach. And it just, yeah, it just looked junk anyway. Um, but even though it's using a local AI model, you still need to be connected to the internet. And I know this because when I first did hands on May twentieth, you could turn off the wifi and do the image creation in in a photos app. And it had no filter, so you could pop Bill Gates, you know, whatever. You could do the typical Mario stuff and it would generate it. And it was really bad because stable diffusion, it wasn't very good. But you could do it, but they've changed that now. So you have to sign in, you have to be online,

• 53:32Speaker 07

  even though it's using AI local model to do that.

• 53:36Speaker 08

  The same is true for Co-Creator.

• 53:38Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 08

  Like it generates it on device with the limited model that it has. And then it runs it by the safety filters just in case.

• 53:44Speaker 07

  That's right. Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 08

  But it could just, why not just send it off to a more powerful model somewhere else?

• 53:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's an odd way of doing that. You're actually doing all the hard stuff in the place where you wouldn't want to do the hard stuff. It's a very weird system. In general, though, it feels like the read on these so far, at least to me, seems like the basics are good, right? That like Tom, what you're saying is that the Windows on ARM thing is a much bigger deal. That it's like, okay, we've now done the thing. That Windows now works pretty well on ARM. We'll, we'll solve some of these last remaining apps and use cases. But uh, the question of like, so what do we do with that? Doesn't really seem like it's been answered yet. That like the, and, and I guess maybe that's supposed to be recall, right? That like this is what we get with all this new stuff. But the, the like, what is now possible and cool and new and exciting?

• 54:34David Pierce?

  Because we've made Windows on ARM work and because these Qualcomm chips are good. Doesn't really feel like either of you have found a super exciting, compelling answer to that. Yet. Is that fair?

• 54:44Speaker 07

  No, I think it's because they're pretty much laying the groundwork for this stuff. So it's kind of like build it and they'll come. That's their approach, right? And obviously, Recall is supposed to be the flagship feature here. But obviously, we can't try it yet. So I mean, I have been using it for like two weeks on the Surface Pro X when it was, you know, you could hack it to get it working. So I've got some thoughts on it, but yeah, I feel like even with that, it's not like a massive selling point. Like, that's not really, I don't think, the reason you're going to buy this laptop. It's mainly because you want a good performing laptop that's thin and light and that actually has good battery life, you know? And as a base model at nine hundred and ninety-nine bucks is like pretty compelling.

• 55:28Speaker 07

  Like a hundred dollars less than the MacBook Air M3 model. That in itself is compelling enough, I think, to get people to buy it. So I don't know why Microsoft had to kind of like put these AI tricks in there that aren't, they're not really that impressive. Maybe Recall, yeah, sure. That might be impressive, but controversial.

• 55:45David Pierce?

  Nathan, is that where you've landed too? Kind of very good device, nice job, but this is not like a brand new day for the PC era yet?

• 55:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I think that all of the AI stuff is they have this processor and they're trying to figure out reasons to use it. It's free real estate. They're looking for something to do with AI because AI is buzzy. It's on the chips anyway. They've got the NPUs. You've got to find something to do. But the reason to buy this thing, yeah, like Tom said, it's got good battery life. It's a, it's nice.

• 56:16Speaker 08

  It's a third option. It's a good option, not for gaming, but for like normal productivity stuff. Like, seems like a good value.

• 56:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Speaker 08

  And yeah, I just kind of ignore the AI stuff for now. Somebody will find something useful to do with it, maybe, probably. Like, they've got the compute there, even just as it is. If that module wasn't there at all, I don't think I'd notice. And it wouldn't change my opinion that much.

• 56:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. I'm sitting here looking at my new iPad Pro and I feel precisely, exactly the same way about it.

• 56:47Speaker 08

  I tried to work on an iPad a couple of weeks ago on vacation and I hated every second of it. And I was like, why can't they just, you know the refrain?

• 56:56David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 08

  Just put macOS on it, whatever. Just put a real operating system on it. I will say, I got the Surface Pro and I opened it up and I was like, a real operating system. I can have two Windows side by side. I can run something in the background. I can do stuff. I can download utilities. I have a clipboard manager. You know what? And I can still watch Netflix if I really want to.

• 57:16David Pierce?

  It's not a bad setup. Alex Cranz has been running around for two months saying everybody who thinks they want an iPad Pro actually wants a Surface. And I think she's not crazy about that.

• 57:26Speaker 08

  No, she's not wrong. I mean, you very much still are using Windows 11 and therefore you're on, you're like, especially on a Surface, you're like, fully locked into Microsoft's vision of the future of Windows, which involves a lot of opting out of things. In my experience, they're just really trying to push certain things like, would you like to use Edge? How about binging it? I had a very funny moment where I logged into my Edge account. So I use Edge on my normal Windows laptop. And it's like, fantastic. Thanks for, thanks for using Edge, the default browser. Now you're binging stuff again. That's not the search engine I asked for. Thank you.

• 58:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I'm good on that. I'm good on that front. All right. This is actually a good segue into a question we got on the hotline. We need to take a break really fast. Can you guys stick around and help me answer this question?

• 58:13Speaker 08

  Yes, sure.

• 58:14David Pierce?

  All right, cool. We'll be right back.

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• 59:54David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. Send all of your questions. You can also email [email protected]. Send us all of your questions. The weirder, the better. We've gotten some weird ones, and I enjoy it very much. This week, we have a question about precisely what we've been talking about. And it comes from Dean.

• 1:00:14Speaker 09

  Hey, my name is Dean. I'm from Northern Virginia. The question that I have is regarding Windows 11 computers and what's going to happen in the market. Now that the new Windows-on-arm units are being released, will the market be some new-style Windows 11 and some of the old ones still on the market? Or do you think soon the x86 architecture will be completely gone? And people will only be able to purchase the so-called AI PCs? And I was wondering if there'll be a massive, you think there'll be a massive fire sale as the x86 inventory gets cleared out? Do you think it'll be a high-end, low-end situation where the new architecture will be at the high-end?

• 1:00:58Speaker 09

  And the x86 will be at the low-end? Just wondering how you see the PC market shaking out once... The AI PCs, Windows on ARM PCs come on the market. Thank you.

• 1:01:10David Pierce?

  All right, Nathan, you were making several faces during that. Tell me what you think.

• 1:01:13Speaker 08

  I do not think that Snapdragon, I don't think ARM is going to wholesale replace x86 for Windows computers. Certainly not on the low end because at least for now, Microsoft has mandated 16 gigs of RAM and I think it's 256 gigs of storage. And the cheapest Copilot Plus PC we've seen so far is about a grand. I don't think we've seen anything under the 999 mark at the moment. They don't really have anything that can compete with like a $400 Windows laptop on price, nor do they have anything for gaming. They don't work right now with dedicated GPUs. The internal GPUs are not for gaming at all.

• 1:01:50David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:01:51Speaker 08

  I mean, you can do some casual stuff, but they're not going to wholesale replace. I don't think it's going to be a high-low either because I think there's still going to be your high-end x86 stuff, not just for gaming, but for anything that requires serious graphical processing. Also compatibility issues. Like I think this is going to end up, at best, it'll be a third option at the Soda Fountain. And I think a good option for a lot of people, especially for the productivity thin and light space. But yeah, we have a lot of unknowns about how Intel's next processor architecture is going to go. Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Tom, I think, can speak much better to that.

• 1:02:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, Tom, I'm curious your read on this because you've been reporting a lot on how bullish Microsoft is on all of this and how much kind of muscle and marketing weight it's putting behind this. And I feel like if I were to squint at it a little, I could imagine a world in which Microsoft is really excited about, you know, ARM being the future of everything on Windows. What is your sense of where we're headed there?

• 1:02:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it's, they obviously tried to start doing this since 2012 and it's been a long time coming. And I think this is the beginning of a transition. I don't know if it will fully, you know, displace Intel and AMD. But I do wonder if AMD really has much of a market in the laptop side of things going forward because they're always the second choice anyway. And now this kind of, does this make them a third choice? I don't know. Like it's, it's going to be interesting to see, to see how that shakes out. But then Qualcomm About to rev their chips next year as well. So which will probably be coming around about the same time as we see M four MacBooks. Um. So that's going to be interesting. So I think this is, this is a train that's not going to slow down now. It's kicked off the way it should have done um originally, or at least a few years ago anyway.

• 1:03:29Speaker 07

  And I think it's, it's definitely not going to slow down. I would, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more um sort of PCs and, and cheaper ones in like sort of like the twenty twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six era. So.

• 1:03:41David Pierce?

  So it, it seems like best case scenario is not that ARM wins, but that this just makes everything more exciting and more competitive, right? That Intel has to get its act together because there's real competition. And so it starts doing better and AMD starts doing better. And all of a sudden we have a bunch of really good options instead of a bunch of, I would say increasingly non-competitive options, which is where we've been for a while now, thanks to Intel. I also wonder about that because then it's like, okay, how do you make a Windows that works with everything all of these ways? So I guess Nathan, is the best outcome here that we get one winner or the other in some meaningful way? Because it'll like make the software better and make everything make more sense.

• 1:04:25David Pierce?

  Or should we, you know, let a thousand chip flowers bloom and everything will be fine?

• 1:04:28Speaker 08

  I mean, that's Windows, isn't it? Let a chip a thousand flowers bloom like their whole thing. Backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, sideways compatibility, like.

• 1:04:38David Pierce?

  But that's been part of the challenge, right? Like, I think that if you want to describe whatever mess exists inside of Windows, I think you can ascribe a lot of it to that exact thing.

• 1:04:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, you can. I mean, I don't think, if there's going to be a winner, an overall winner, I don't know, I just don't see it. There's so much on X eighty six. I don't think it would be ARM. Like they don't have the pull. They're, they're beholden to huge enterprise deployments in a way that Mac frankly is not. They can be like, hey, heads up, we're switching silicon entirely. And you're gonna have to deal with it. And I don't think Microsoft can or wants to do that. But yeah, maybe this makes things more complicated for developers. They're like, okay, great. Now I gotta make an ARM 64 version two.

• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  So it does seem like the the idea that these Copilot Plus PCs are going to like immediately sweep the market and be so much better that they're going to like take over. At least from y'all's experience so far, it doesn't seem like we're there yet. That this is what we have is like a meaningful new competitor, not an entire new paradigm that is so much drastically better than anything we've had before. Maybe we'll get there. Maybe buying an ARM thing right now is a smart future-proofing decision as this stuff gets better. But it doesn't sound like either of you would sort of going away, say, this is the obvious new future and everything else is going to be relegated to the side quickly. Right? Is that fair?

• 1:06:03Speaker 07

  It's definitely important to point out that the Copilot Plus stuff isn't just ARM. So there is gonna be Intel and AMD ones coming. And even like that listener who asked the question, like, is this gonna be like a transition? There's gonna be a fire sale? No, that's not really gonna happen because essentially the premium end of the market is gonna be all Copilot Plus PCs from now on. Like, that's just the the standard thing. Apart from like maybe the gaming laptops are slightly different. But even some of those are gonna be Copilot PCs. We've seen those from Nvidia and AMD. But yeah, no, I don't think it's like a sweeping transition to ARM instantly, but I think it's like a slow burn. Like AMD and Nvidia are both rumored to be doing ARM chips for 2025 for PCs.

• 1:06:46Speaker 07

  So if they do that, then that puts a lot of additional pressure on Intel. So it's gonna come interesting.

• 1:06:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, we it does seem like 2025 is shaping up to be a pretty fascinating year in this space that like we're gonna see everybody's chips on the table in a pretty new way with all of this coming out. And we're gonna have some real answers to like, where is all of this headed? Whereas right now, even with the ARM stuff in front of us, what this whole market looks like is is still just like this much theoretical. We don't have quite the features. We don't have Intel's new stuff. We don't have AMD's new stuff. Like, we're almost to knowing everything, but we haven't quite seen all of it yet. And I think next year it might be that time. Tom and Nathan, thank you so much.

• 1:07:29Speaker 08

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:07:32David Pierce?

  All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything that we talked about, from those Surface laptops to my story on the books Palma and lots of other stuff at theverge.com. I'm gonna have a story about the Daylight DC1 probably sometime this week, so keep an eye out for that. We'll put some links in the show notes, but as always, read theverge.com. It's a cool website. And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or you live in the DC area and want to teach me how to play pickleball, you can always email us at [email protected], call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing all of your questions and thoughts and ideas and feedback on everything. We have lots of fun stuff planned for the rest of this year and we're trying to do some weird new stuff on the show, so if you have ideas of stuff you want us to do, we'd love to hear it.

• 1:08:16David Pierce?

  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 more about some Copilot Plus PCs, lots of other gadget stuff, more AI news, and everything else going on in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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