iPhone 13 review / Microsoft’s Surface event biggest announcements

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Tom Warren discuss the reviews of the iPhone 13/iPhone 13 Pro and the many new devices Microsoft announced at their Surface event this week. Further reading: iPhone 13 review: yep, bigger batteries are better iPhone 13 Pro review: a better display, the best camera, and incredible battery life iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 review: foundational fixes iOS 15 is here, but we’re still waiting on a few new features Apple updates macOS Safari with a new look, but you can turn off the big changes EU proposes mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones Apple won’t let Fortnite back on iOS until the Epic v. Apple verdict is final Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo Microsoft’s fall Surface event: the 7 biggest announcements Microsoft announces Surface Pro 8 with bigger 13-inch 120Hz display and Thunderbolt Surface Laptop Studio is Microsoft’s new powerful flagship laptop Microsoft’s new Surface Duo 2 has all the features that were missing the first time around Microsoft’s new Slim Pen 2 uses haptics to mimic the feeling of using a real pen The Surface Pro X gets a Wi-Fi-only version The Surface Go 3 gets new Intel processors Microsoft’s new mouse has a shell that’s 20 percent recycled ocean plastic Surface Adaptive Kit makes Microsoft’s laptops more accessible Microsoft Surface Pro 8 hands-on: the one we’ve waited for Microsoft Surface Duo 2 hands-on: once more, with cameras Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio hands-on: one weird, powerful computer The Surface Laptop Studio isn’t as original as Microsoft would have you believe Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Alex Krantz and Tom Warren join the show. We talk about the iPhone reviews, that's the 13 and the 13 Pro, the iPad Mini review, preview, iOS 15, and all of the things Microsoft announced, including a new Surface Pro 8, the Surface Laptop Studio, and the Surface Duo 2. That's coming up on the Vergecast now.

• 0:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:05Speaker 01

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

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Widgets on the Home Screen, my new prog rock band. Check out our first album, streaming now. Is that a better band name or album name? My instinct is that it's a band name. I think that's an album name for sure. I think it's an album name. Okay, self-titled first album, everyone agrees. I'm your friend Eli, Dieter Bohn is here. I'm too tired to have a good nickname this week, I'm sorry. Dieter's been working hard. That charming British voice you heard is Brexit himself, Tom Warren. Why, hello there. Alex Frantz is here, hi Alex.

• 2:25Alex Cranz?

  I'm an EMR stylist.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  An EMR stylist, is that what you said?

• 2:28Alex Cranz?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's good. I like it. All right. You know, that could also mean like you're an electronic medical records stylist, like it could go another way.

• 2:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god. No, I'm not. I'm not into anybody's records today. I just want the smoothest, nicest stylist writing possible.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  Smooth. All right. It is, it's fall hardware season. It's here in extreme force. It's iPhone review week, which Dieter did both of the reviews this year. iOS 15, there's an iPad Mini, Dieter did that review. Heim did the iOS 15 review. He escaped one. And then there was a Microsoft event, a bunch of new Surface devices. Dieter did a bunch of hands-on videos. You can see where this is going. Dieter's a very sleepy man, but we should talk about it all. We talked about the iPhone kind of at length last week after the event. As always in that conversation, we're like, well, we gotta wait for the review. Dieter, I would say the reviews came. They did. I have the Pro Max and you have all 25 iPhones.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  Four, but yes. Let's start with the babies, the regulars. I would say just in the process of trying to figure out a headline for this review, I learned more about the phone.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  Because we were like iPhone 13 review colon and then we were kind of like another iPhone. The iPhone again.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 3:50Nilay Patel?

  Here's the iPhone. You know it. Now maybe you'll like it better. Like it's, it is the smallest of upgrades, except for the camera, which we can talk about, but it is a very familiar product at this point.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  It's a very familiar product. The hard time I had with it is to just say, oh, it's an incremental upgrade. Oh, they updated the, the camera and they made the battery life better. Like that's the sort of thing you hear it and you move right on. Right? But no, no, the batteries are better and the camera is better. And last year it was very good to begin with. So it's this sort of weird thing where if you have an iPhone 12, you should not buy this, just don't. You're, you're fine. You're good. You're cool. Unless the battery life is a real problem, I do not recommend the upgrade. It is noticeably better, but I don't think it's like year over year, you should spend the extra money better. If you're a year over year kind of upgrader, one, maybe you don't need to be, but two, like come be honest with yourself. Why aren't you getting the Pro? Right?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  But for anybody that's earlier than a 12, maybe an 11, definitely a 10R, 10S, 10, you are going to have just a wonderful time if you upgrade to this phone.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think we should, do you want to start with the batteries or the cameras?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Start with the batteries. It's pretty simple. Apple told us many stories about how the new A15 Bionic processor was more power efficient and how they, you know, they rearranged all the parts and whatever inside the phone. The long and the short of it is they made the batteries bigger. I think Mitchell Clark has the article up that like actually gives you the percentages. So that's been calculated. But Apple's claim is the iPhone, regular iPhone 13 gets, I believe, two and a half hours more of use and the smaller iPhone mini gets one and a half hours more of use. We talked a little bit about this last week, but we're in a weird place with like the way that everybody's talking about batteries. We're like in the slow transition from like, everyone knows that milliamps isn't great and we should be talking about watt hours.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  We're in this little transition from everyone provides some kind of benchmark number to, they'll give you video rundown numbers to now hours better. Because Apple and both Microsoft, which we'll get into, when you ask about battery life, like, well, we just, we collect telemetry on how long our battery lasts from all of our customers. And then we like average it out. We figure out like how long we think the battery lasts. And then when we make a new thing, we make sure that we beat that by a certain amount. And so. The, the claim to test is ours better, but ours better means nothing unless you have the thing that it's ours better than.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  And so it's tough.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  Their claim is it's ours better for you.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:17Nilay Patel?

  Which, like, I don't.

• 6:19Speaker 03

  For, for like a, a, average customer that isn't doing anything too, you know, intense, but doing more than just hanging out and watching movies. Cause like the video rundown spec is, I don't know, it's like 20 hours or something ridiculous.

• 6:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, what I, what I mean by for you is that, I mean, conceptually, this is difficult, right? But what they, what they're saying is we've collected all of this usage data. We've turned it into a model. That model represents some average customer. And now we think the average customer is going to get X, X additional battery life.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  If you run the same usage model.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  And theoretically, you, the individual is somehow captured in that. So even if you're kind of like at the upper or lower bound of the usage model.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  You're still getting the benefit, but it is impossible to test this claim.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  Because we don't have their data. We don't run their models.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, the models, uh, result in, and I, the average iPhone lasts Bezos hours.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know. We, we, we, when we started The Verge, you remember this? We had a battery test.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  We did.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  We like coded up a thing.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  God, I remember that thing.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  This thing did not work. This was Joanna Stern's baby. And it was basically like, you would go to a webpage and click go. And then it would just like load and scroll webpages until a battery died.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  It would load like eBay and CNN and Yahoo for like an hour.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  And eventually it kept on breaking, especially on phones, because the mobile web kept breaking. And so like, it would freeze when a pop-up demanding you install an app would appear. And so you'd have to like, sit there and babysit it for an hour to like, clear all of the pop-ups so that it would continue running.

• 7:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, after a while, the thing is supposed to run for like, you know, 10 hours or something.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  And so the idea was when the webpage was no longer getting click events from the macro, it would stop the clock, right? Like very clever. And then like spit out a, a battery test result. And this never worked. So Joanna ended up watching her like dumb robot for 10 hours.

• 8:22Alex Cranz?

  I had to do battery tests at one of our former jobs and I was like in charge of maintaining those tests and I'd always have to click through for the Friendster website because they just didn't edit it out and it hasn't been used that long. And I was like, can we just get like a GoPro and just like point it and like run a video. And so that like we went to the video because like these websites were just like, at one point I was working with like this developer in Romania who's very nice and told me I was a developer because I was helping her.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Oh, that's nice.

• 8:54Alex Cranz?

  And I was like, oh, I'm not, but like, thank you.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  You participated.

• 8:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm there. I appreciate the participation. But like, these battery tests all make no sense and do nothing. It's like, it really drives you to nihilism sometimes.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  Well, and the way that modern processors work is now that we're slowing down on Moore's Law, we're getting more and more custom bespoke parts of the processor that do custom bespoke things. And so there is a piece of hardware on your motherboard that is there to just make video more efficient. And so a video rundown test is a measure of that piece of the processor, not the thing's overall battery life.

• 9:31Alex Cranz?

  Review, just, yeah, this one tiny piece works really, really well.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  So look, I had four phones to review. The upshot of all this battery stuff is we like to do something that approximates a real world use case. And there's only so many phones you can do. So the biggest, my biggest regret is I didn't at embargo time have something definitive I could say about the iPhone 13 mini, because that's the one that everyone really wants to know. Is it better enough to go from, man, if I actually use this like a normal phone, it'll die at lunch, to if I actually use this like a normal phone, it'll die at TK at something later.

• 10:05Alex Cranz?

  Dinner.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, dinner. It's better, but it doesn't change the fundamental rules of how an iPhone 13 mini should work or an iPhone 12 mini should work. If you use an iPhone mini the way that you use a bigger phone where you're just doom scrolling all day, you're just, you're, you actually use it a bunch, it dies. That's just, that's how it is. If you use the iPhone, if you use a mini iPhone, like not as much and like you have a different relationship with your phone, you could theoretically last all day. Lots of people do. But it's like, it lasts all day if you don't use it, which is like

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  One of the more challenging things reviewing stuff, and Dieter, I'm curious how you went about it this time. Last year, I found it was really hard to do battery testing because I was not leaving home. I was just always in a wifi environment. And so was I really testing the 5G radios? I was not. I had like one day in New York where I was doing it. Did you, did you manage to get out and push them?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the, the thing about living in the, the city instead of the woods is you can go out and take pictures of different things besides more trees. And so.

• 11:07Nilay Patel?

  If you're wondering why Dieter did all the reviews this year and I didn't, it was because I found the lack of places to go last year, like utterly demoralizing.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  You could have taken really cool photos of the bears, though.

• 11:18Alex Cranz?

  I was about to say the bears.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  I just wandered the woods looking for bears. What happened to Neelai? Well, can you review the iPhone?

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Call it out of bear.

• 11:28Nilay Patel?

  So that's the batteries. It, it seems like, you know, Apple is usually doesn't lie about batteries. They say the batteries last a long time. Dieter, it appears the batteries last a long time.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  Batteries last a long time, especially on the 13. It is a notable difference. And it's a notable difference from the 12, but remember the 12 had relatively disappointing battery life. It was a step down from the, the previous, you know, generation, the last round of generation where Apple did the thing that Apple does where they every two to three years are like, oh yeah, we should make the batteries bigger. People would like that. And then they do, and it's great. So this is a, oh yeah, we should make the batteries bigger kind of year.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  No, when they're going to read, when they redesign the case for the iPhone 45 or whatever, they'll make it too thin.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  And then the iPhone 46, they'll make it slightly thicker. Like they, they're off the S cycle, but maybe it's like odd numbers have bigger batteries.

• 12:20Speaker 04

  So, so is this year they're, they've got bigger batteries and they're thicker? Are all of them thicker?

• 12:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're all thicker and it throughout the body of the phone, the thickness is so minimal. You like have to set them down next to each other on a table and like feel your finger across and you can maybe feel it. Cases are fine there. Where they're definitely thicker is in the camera bumps. They are, they're thicker, they're wider, they're, they're more Mesa-esque than they've ever been.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  So we should, we should talk about the camera bumps. But again, this is one of those things where it's like, did you like the 12? You're going to love the 13, but if you like the 12, you should not buy a 13 like. There's paradox embedded here. The thing that is absolutely remarkable, now that we have the phones, I was talking to like the Heylied folks, like it, yep, the sensor in the 13s is the same sensor that was in the 12 Pro Max, only in the 12 Pro Max last year.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:11Nilay Patel?

  With sensor shift stabilization, the whole thing. It is absolutely remarkable that that sensor is in the 13 Mini.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, the camera bump on the Mini is huge, but it's, yeah, it's remarkable. They had to, they had to move the cameras diagonally to fit it, or just to make them look different. I mean, you know, come on.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  They could have had them diagonally to begin with.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  There are so many memes about the iPhone 12 to 13.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  The designer meme.

• 13:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's just like when they were designing the 12, they knew the 13 was coming.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  So it could have been diagonal from the beginning. Anyhow, it's remarkable that they have that sensor in the 13s, but it also kind of means the 12 to 13 comparison is super straightforward because it's the comparison between the 12 and the 12 Pro Max.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, which we already did last year.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  Which we are super familiar with. Is that kind of what you found?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  That's almost exactly what I found. There are differences in the way that Apple tunes photos, which we're going to get into if you want to talk about photographic profiles. But they're a little bit less yellow and they're just a little bit less noisy. I think that they're a little bit less afraid of shadows, just a, just a tiny bit. But otherwise, like if you had a 12 Pro Max, the photos from the 13 Mini look very, very similar, except at the edges of a little bit of color stuff that I've noticed. They also updated the ultra wide, but in both cases on the regular and the Pro, it's like kind of fuzzy about how it is for low light improvements. It's there, they did stuff, but what precisely

• 14:49Speaker 03

  they did isn't as dead ahead as like bigger sensor, you know, lower f-stop, blah, blah, blah. It's, it's a little bit, I don't know, subtler.

• 14:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, what I recall of last year was there's a big conversation about how the photos are almost indistinguishable. And it was because we were all stuck at home. All the reviewers were stuck at home, which meant we were all taking still lifes.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  And it was not clear that like the true improvement here was you were collecting more light at a faster shutter speed. Like the thing could ramp to a higher ISO.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  And make a cleaner photo at a higher shutter speed.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  And I only figured out like at the end, when I started taking pictures of my kid, who is not a still life.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, oh, I I figured it this occurs to me what figured it out. If that's the same here, that's like a meaningful stepwise improvement over the 13.

• 15:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the same here. I tried to I tried to do the same thing with my cat, but my cat just doesn't move anymore. So.

• 15:49Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's all great. Like, I don't know. It I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that they made the notch smaller, but didn't improve the selfie camera. Like, keep the notch the same size, make the other stuff smaller, make the front camera better.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Why did they reduce the notch size? Why did they put the engineering effort into this particular thing?

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  To fit the bigger camera sensor.

• 16:12Speaker 03

  But like, but why make the notch smaller? What does that give them?

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, space is at a premium in.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  So you think because they made it narrower, then they could move a thing over, which gives them more Z space to put the bigger sensor behind where the notch used to be?

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think we gotta wait for a teardown, but I think every millimeter of space inside this.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  Especially for the mini counts.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  And if you're gonna radically increase the size of the the main sensor, you gotta make it up somewhere.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Right. Which all of which is like they they they made the notch smaller, not because they actually cared what it looks like or care about our experience of the screen. They made the notch smaller because they had to for the cameras, which is amazing.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  I have a theory about the notch that so I think they made the notch smaller. But Dave, the guy who's in charge of doing the percentage in where the notch was, is on vacation this summer. So they just didn't get around to it. So I feel like that's that's gonna come.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna get back from my parental leave or whatever and be like, oh, yeah, hold on, let me let me do this.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Apple does not want to show you a battery percentage. They are philosophically opposed to putting a battery percentage anywhere, even on a Mac. Like, a Mac will fight you.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  But it used to be there. It used to be a toggle. You turned it on.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. And then they started doing the battery health thing and they got in trouble for throttle it like. An iPhone battery indicator is not is no longer a linear experience. Right? It's like full, it's half full, it's still half full, pretty much half full, gonna be at 15% for the rest of the day. Right. And there's like, there's no shades in between those moments.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 17:43Alex Cranz?

  We see the battery percentage now, right?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  You can look at it in Control Center, but yeah, it's like, what is a battery percentage is in the same category as what is a photo and what is a computer at this point? It's a feeling in our hearts.

• 17:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we gotta talk about the file directory story at some point today. Okay, so those are the 13s. I feel like we should talk about photo styles and all that stuff in the context of the pros.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  And also cinematic mode? And also cinematic. Because those are the, that's the, I think of that as the camera review.

• 18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  But the 13s are great. I think the pricing games that Apple and the carriers are playing are quite frankly gross.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  We had a very long discussion about how much of this should go into the reviews and the, the answer was, I wrote 7,000 words in like two days, so maybe not. But we wanted to.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  We are following up on it. We've already heard, you know, we are responsive to our audience. We've already heard from a lot of people listening to the show after we talked about last week. Other readers are telling us buying an iPhone is more complicated and confusing than ever. There are YouTubers out there that are basically making videos of Excel spreadsheets. Like, if you can push the YouTube economy towards like, straight Excel, you know, like versus anything else they'd want to do, like, we're gonna do Excel on, like, you know, you've, you've done something. Like, that's the rawest id of the tech universe is like, tech YouTube.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Some tech YouTuber is gonna be radicalized by this pricing experience and gonna like pivot into giving financial advice full time and it's gonna be amazing.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that is already, we're like, right on the cusp of that happening. Anyway, we love our tech YouTuber friends.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  But if you're doing Excel, it's like, it's bad. Anyway, we've heard, we are doing those stories. We've already written a few about why the subsidies exist. It's really hard to do that story. Like, the only way that I can tell you how much an iPhone costs is if I know what legacy Verizon plan you're already on. And they change them every three months.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  So we're trying to figure out ways to do it in a structured and meaningful way, but rest assured, nothing is free.

• 19:45Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, like, kind of the basic formula here is there's a lot of people on legacy 4G plans. They want to give you a free iPhone and to do that, you end up on a 5G plan, which is more expensive. That's the, and, and at a 36 month contract.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

  That's the basic shape of it. So we, we didn't put it in the review, but it's something I don't mind. All right, let's talk about the Pro phones, Peter. These are the ones with maybe the most new things. Do you want to start with the displays or do you want to go camera again?

• 20:14Speaker 03

  I mean, we can, we can get battery life out of the way. Same story, better battery life. Uh, the battery life on the 13 Pro Max is like two and a half hours more on the thing that was already really good. It's just, it's bonkers. That's all I have to say is.

• 20:26Alex Cranz?

  Have you had to charge it even once?

• 20:28Speaker 03

  The Pro Max, like, no, like, I haven't used it as my full, full time phone because I wanted to do the worst case scenario. So I've been using the small one more. Now I'm on the mini and then I'm going to come back and do the max and we'll have a full battery feelings thing next week, probably. Anyway, so that's, that's battery there. So, I don't know. Yeah. What do you want? Screen or camera? We can do screen quick and then get into cameras.

• 20:48Nilay Patel?

  Let's do the screen. My big question here is when we were after the event and then we were in our various briefings, we're like, you're going to ramp the screen up and down, like you should with any sort of variable refresh. Are all the apps going to support it and how can we tell? And I don't think we ever, I think we still kind of don't know.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  The answer is if your app is coded in Swift or is it Cocoa? Cocoa's the one or Carbon? I always get them confused. I'm terrible.

• 21:12Nilay Patel?

  Cocoa Touch.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, then you should be getting most of these improvements for free. Um, but, uh, you can specifically code your app. There will be an API apparently. And that it also is trying to watch the screen to watch for what frame rate it thinks it should be running at.

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  But there's no way for you, the user, to know that it stepped down to 24.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  Well, unless you can see it. Um, it's harder to see in video, I think, but, um, I got into this in the review, but I am the kind of person who sees high refresh rate screens. I just like, I just do. I'm also the kind of person that sees Jelly Scroll. There's Jelly Scroll on the iPad mini. Some people don't see it and they don't care and whatever. Some people see it and they don't care and whatever. Some people see it and it's like, ah. I have felt minorly ah about iPhones for the last four years, may, call it three years. And the knock, the, the, the claim is like, well, Apple doesn't need to have a high refresh rate screen because iOS is so smooth. And it's like, yes, you are correct. iOS is smooth. It does not have the amount of stutter and jank that you get on Android. And Android solved that problem through brute force of high refresh rate

• 22:13Speaker 03

  screens. Battery be damned. Right? That is what they did. And then they, over time, figured it out. So now they work pretty well. All that said, it just looks better. Like you, I see it on the iPhone. I feel it on the iPhone. And I get it if you don't, if you're like, whatever about it. That is like, good for you. Be whatever about it. I see it. It is better. Apple does not deserve a pass for waiting this long to do it.

• 22:37Alex Cranz?

  Is there any experience that really like, makes you feel it more?

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Scrolling. Just scrolling. That's like scrolling text. Like, that's it. You like, they stopped turning into like, blurs. They, it's just like, it's more like paper. And it's ridiculous. But like, the fundamental thing that you do on a phone is scroll. And so I see it all the time.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  So this is very noticeable to me because I have an iPad Pro, which has a ProMotion display.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  And I switch back and forth between the two all the time. And I notice it between those two. And then I got the 13 Pro Max. And Dieter was like, do you see it? And I was like, no.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  I was very mad.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  I was just like, wait. And then, once you see it again, like, I was so used to looking at a 60 hertz display on my phone.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  That I was like, what? And then you see it. And then it's very difficult to go back.

• 23:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  The animations, like, smooth, because Samsung's obviously had the 120 hertz stuff. And their animations don't always keep up. So I'm just curious if iOS actually keeps up at 120.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  Never, never seen it not keep up. They were, they were, like I said, they, they got the pass on not doing this for, because they had good animations in the first place. And that, that just continues. Plus, don't forget, like Neil, I said, they've had this on the iPad for a while. So this isn't a brand new thing to them.

• 23:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, true. How does it work for games on the iPhone, though?

• 23:56Speaker 03

  I mean, I've been playing a lot of Fantasia and it just, it just looks beautiful. I don't know what else to say. Like, it looks great. I don't know if it's doing the frame rate thing there or not. So, again, it's a like, I, I'm not doing all of my experience with a high frame rate camera and it's not like you can just like get a little developer mode thing on an iPhone to display what the screen is doing. Imagine that world where Apple let you do that. I mean, they have every other setting.

• 24:19Alex Cranz?

  There used to be an app that would count the frame rate for you years ago. I don't know if it still exists, but you'd have to like put your phone into developer mode and like hook it up and it would be like on your computer. It was the worst experience. You were basically a debugger.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  But that wasn't the frame rate of the display. That was the frame rate of

• 24:36Alex Cranz?

  That was the frame rate of the game. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Also, but Tom, to your point about games, you know, Apple's hedge against this for the past like three years is like an unrelated stat. They're like, oh, we run the, the touch sensor at 120 hertz. And you're like, well, that isn't the screen.

• 24:55Nilay Patel?

  You're like, does your car go 60 miles an hour? And they're like, we make a motorcycle that goes 30. It's like, well, those aren't, what are you talking?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Everyone does that, that touch response rate thing. Everybody does it. It's funny, Apple didn't bring it up this, this year.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, because their screen has the good stat.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  But like, part of games responsiveness is like, yep, how fast is the screen refreshing? But also how, how little lag is there? They're already at the right number for the, the touch response.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  I'm fairly sure that Fortnite, back when it used to be on the iPad, that that used to be 120 hertz, I think. Because it's definitely, it's definitely 120 hertz elsewhere.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember. And now we'll never know. I have a Fortnite icon on my phone.

• 25:36Alex Cranz?

  I'm kind of curious about the games because for years the games all capped at 60 and that, that was just, they're like, yeah, we're going to cap at 60. That's as high as the refresh rate goes. And so I'm wondering how many of these games are going to have to like go in and Unleash the beast, so to speak.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  There's a beast to unleash. The A15 seems great.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  And there's an extra GPU core in the Pro, y'all.

• 25:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's what it's for. They call it the 60 Hz core. Okay, so let's talk about the cameras. The cameras are, all three are different.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:06Nilay Patel?

  Selfie camera, it's still stubbornly the same.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:08Nilay Patel?

  No center stage, but the three in the back are all different. And they all seem much improved as well.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the, like I said, the ultra wide has some vague low light stuff, which I kind of noticed. But it has an autofocus now, and so you can get, once you hit 10 centimeters, the frame shifts to macro mode, but it tries to keep the same framing. So, sorry, you see the frame shift, but it tries to keep it, you know, the same framing. And so it crops in from the ultra wide instead of just showing you what you're getting on the wide. And then you can get up to 2 centimeters and take the photo. And unbeknownst to me, every other reviewer, not every other reviewer, a bunch of reviewers were very mad about this. About this, like, this, like, experience of the thing.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  Shifting.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  This was like, if there was gonna be a controversy.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  This would be the controversy.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  And then it was not a controversy.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  Well, here's the thing. Have you ever taken a good photo with your iPhone 10 centimeters away from the subject?

• 27:03Alex Cranz?

  All the time.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Really?

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  Every day.

• 27:04Alex Cranz?

  My constant state.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  I, I suppose that there are situations where you absolutely want to stay on the wide and you don't want it to switch to macro mode at that distance. But to me, it's like, they should have just had some other clearer indicator. It does feel broken, feels a little buggy to see like the, the framing just like change on the screen.

• 27:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  As you move closer. And it's a little bit worse as you pull away. As you pull away, it's like, are you gonna switch? Oh, there you are. So I knew what was happening, so I understood what was going on. But I suppose if, you know, you're just thinking about the average user, that might feel a little bit broken. So they're gonna, like, like the night before the review, like, we're gonna make a software update so you can, like, turn that off.

• 27:44Alex Cranz?

  Is it more or less, so like, I'm on the 11 Pro, and on the 11 Pro, when you switch between the different lenses, there's usually like a noticeable kind of shift in reframing. Is it more or less, like, pronounced than that?

• 27:56Speaker 03

  It's different. It's like, they, because they're, they're cropping, they're trying to keep the same crop on the ultra wide. And so sometimes it's like, there's like this weird, like, it shifts left or right a little bit.

• 28:05Alex Cranz?

  Sort of like, when you're like, closing one eye or the other and looking at a point in the distance?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, they should lean into it, though. They should just, they should have some like, wow.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're going in, y'all.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  They should have the Mega Man boss animation. Yeah.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is actually, I think we'll end up talking about this with iOS 15 again. Like, Apple is, the thing is getting more and more complicated.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  And Apple is like, not, they're not celebrating how complicated the thing is.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  They're like, avoiding it in ways that makes it even more, like, this is a great example of that.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  The camera is now very complicated, and we can talk about photo styles and everything else too. But just this thing where they've tried to make it automatic and invisible, for a thing that you cannot make invisible, just make it super visible. You will solve the problem. Instead of adding another setting.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  That no one will understand.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  And where will that setting go? Will it go on the camera app or in the settings app? Let's, it's just, let's decide. I don't know. The telephoto goes to 3X, I think it's 2.8 now, so it's, it's a little bit longer, but it also takes in a little bit less light. So the trade-off is you get night mode on it, so that's cool. But if you don't have night mode engaged, it will take dimmer photos in the dark, which I think some people were a little bit unhappy with. On the whole, I'm very happy with it because I think, like, it takes better photos. It takes better portraits of faces. The 3X is just slightly nicer than the 2X. You get a little bit of more, I don't know, grace in your digital zooms there, just that much more. It still looks like digital zoom, but whatever.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  I don't know, maybe I'm just happy because Viren took just the most incredible portrait that anyone has ever taken of me during the course of this review. And so I just think, oh yeah, the camera's great. There's a good picture of me. That's all I care about.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  But no, it's, I like the telephoto camera. I'm willing to do the trade-off for the, you know, the slightly worse performance in low light on that one in particular. We'll see if, we'll see if Apple sticks with it. The other interesting thing they're doing in their camera interface is, I'm not sure if Apple did this first or Samsung did it first, but they're now, as you do the little, you bring up the little scroll dial when you like move your finger up and down and it shows you the full range. They're showing at their 1X, their 0.5X, their 1X and their 3X, the millimeter equivalents. So they're explicitly saying, this is 77 millimeter equivalent. This is, I don't know, 23 or whatever it is. They're, they're showing you those as like a way to feel more like photographic, more like a professional camera.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  I feel like I would love for them to do... What Nokia did back in the Lumia days, which is have just the basic camera mode, which is what they're kind of trying to cram everything into. And then a pro camera mode where you can do the ISO, like every, every setting you want to change.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  Sony does it, Samsung does it. Everyone, everyone's got a pro camera mode.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  So I don't see why they don't do it.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Because you can just buy the app that is that mode. Sure. I, I think their, their feeling is that like the people who want that are just going to spend the 30 bucks on HaLi, or they're just going to be Lightroom users or whoever.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  But what about the people who don't want that? They still have Apple's camera app, which I just, can I just ask, why is the button that shows more options next to the shutter button on the other side of the frame? Why is there a little arrow on the, like if you're holding shutter button under your right thumb, why is the button to show more stuff on the left side of the frame? Why? What is it? Why?

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  Hold on, I'm just like looking at my phone.

• 31:28Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I gotta, I gotta pull my phone out now.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  The little, the little arrow button, the Chiron button that like switches to show you all the different options in the mode that you're in, is on the left side, if you're holding it in your right hand with the shutter button under your, because like it's in photo mode. And if you want to like change it to like four by three, or go into like the timer or whatever, you had like, all those things on the right appear by hitting a button on the left.

• 31:49Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's so you can, so you can do it, do it two handed.

• 31:52Speaker 04

  But you just, you just swipe up though, right? I never pressed.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  You can also swipe up. Yeah. But what if you don't know about the swipe?

• 31:59Alex Cranz?

  I didn't know about the swipe. Oh, wow. That's cool. That was great.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to Vergecast where all of us just use our phones.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  It's like the YouTube app where I only discovered like two weeks ago, you can swipe up and it makes it fullscreen.

• 32:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  We, we literally wrote an article about it.

• 32:17Speaker 04

  I know. I think that's what I read.

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  It exploded through our Slack, like the entire Verge shut down when everyone's like, oh, you can just swipe up on the YouTube video.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  Did you know that on the macOS, when in the menu bar, there are three dots next to a menu item, that is an indicator that it's going to open up another window instead of do some, do an action directly?

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I've known that since I was like 10 years old because I read like David Pogue's first book.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, computer tips and tricks, everybody.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  The regular wide angle, it's so good, but it's, it's so good if you're the kind of person that looks for it. If you have a 12 or maybe even an 11 and you take a picture, look it on your phone and put it on Instagram, you might not see it. And that's fine, totally okay. But if you're the kind of person that wants to see how much noise there is in the shadows and you want to see if like your color temperature is right and the thing, the bright thing in the background is not completely blown out and like you, that is stuff that you see, it's there, you see it, it is better, it's better even than the 12 Pro Max.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  So, one of the things that I, I think Apple has been able to do, this is the first year they've branded Smart HDR.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Really?

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they, they were just like, every previous year they're like, we improved it. This year they're like, it's called Smart HDR 4. And I think it's because they added photo styles to it. And so I think one of the things that they've been able to do is get more aggressive with what they think the photo should look like.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  Because they're giving you these outs of, well, screw it, you can just make it look like Samsung if you want.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think some of their contrast decisions, some of their, like it's harder for, to make it go into night mode.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Yes, it's much harder to make it go into night mode.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  And I, part of that's the sensor, but I think part of it is also Apple saying, no, we, we think that this is, this scene should be dark.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think, I think that the system is more aggressively tuned this year. And I, I think all of that is related to the fact that they, A, have other styles and B, they're, they're more confident in night mode. And I, that just comes through having used the phone for as much as I've used the phone. Like, the cam, the camera on the 12, the 13 Pro Max is, well, I called, last year I called the 12 Pro Max really confident. This camera is, it's not just confident in that it can take a picture, it's confident in what the picture should look like in a way that I think the push and pull between... The Pixel look and the Samsung look and the Apple look kind of made everything look the same. This one is like, no, this is what it's gonna look like. And if you don't like it, here are some, here are some ways to make it look different.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  When I started writing this review, I had to like get up and walk around the room for a minute and then I had to slacken a lot of yell at him for using the word confident last year because that was what I was like, yep, like this thing just knows what it wants to do. Much more so than in like a lot of other cameras. Even like the iPhone 12, like sometimes the camera panics, right? It's like it, it just goes haywire. It's like, I don't know what to do here. Sure. Bright and everything. Ah, this thing almost never panics.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think it's because they, you know, most people take smartphone photos and the look for every smartphone photo has been totally flat for about three years. The highlights are as bright as the shadow. Like, everything is just as bright as it can be. Which makes things look weird. Like I, was it the, I think it was the 10S that I was like, this camera just looks insane to me. Because it was just so aggressive. And I was like, this isn't how photos should look. And they've walked it back. And now they're at this very like, you know, artful look. But the photo styles are really interesting to me because what, I mean, like, we were joking, but it is just super true that one of them is Pixel and the other one is Samsung.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:03Nilay Patel?

  There's just no way around it. And you can call them rich contrast and was it vibrant?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Uh, it's yeah, rich contrast and yeah, vibrant. Yeah. And then there's warm and cool. And then my favorite mode is if you, you can tweak the sliders. And so you can land on rich, cool, which is what you have to be to buy an iPhone.

• 36:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know what warm and cool are. I think they're just there so that Apple can say there's more modes other than Pixel and Samsung. But it's just like super interesting. Like, when we do the Pixel review, like our ability to say, we prefer the look of the Pixel is now severely undercut by the fact that iPhone can generate something that looks very much like the existing Pixel.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Greg Joswiak's secret plan.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm pretty sure it's a secret plan. Sure, he did it just to irritate me personally, but that is really neat. The thing that is befuddling to me is just based on how we understand how it works. There's no reason that shouldn't be a feature of iOS 15 that hit every other phone.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, part of the explanation is that requires the A15. Okay, why does it require the A15? And then like you end up in like spinning it out, trying to figure it out for your else land. And the best devil's advocate argument I could make is that Apple really cares about making the live view be as close to what the final photo is going to be as possible. They get they they did it with portrait mode. They are now doing it here. And so I think that they must believe, or they say they believe that the extra processing power they've got in the A15 bionic is what allows them to make the viewfinder look like rich cool because they want you to know what your final result is going to be. They don't want the thing after all the little processing happens to look especially different

• 37:53Speaker 03

  from what you see live. I don't know if I buy that argument, but that I think is the argument.

• 37:57Nilay Patel?

  I buy it 20%.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  Just because here's what's happening.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  You buy it, you buy it, oh, you buy it like that. That's like, you know, four out of five GPU cores. You buy it four out of five GPU cores.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm buying one out of five. No, like if you just think about that argument, what's the phone doing? You hold the phone up, it starts, it's already taking photos. You hit the shutter button and takes its burst of how many seven photos in varying exposures. iPhone 12 was already doing that. Then it starts stacking the photos semantically. It's like, this is the sky. We want this sky. It's over, it's underexposed. You want this one, blah, blah.

• 38:30Speaker 03

  I guess it's an open question if you think that they're semantically doing that in the live view in real time. I doubt it.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Then it's just basically applying like an exposure table to that. And that changing the exposure table is what gets you the different look. It's not quite do it like I know it's not literally an exposure table, but that's what it's doing. They have some set of values that are like, make the sky this bright or this vibrant. Do faces this way, do that the other way.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Privacy is a human right is another one of the values they apply.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  Take risks. That's one of Fox Media's values. That's my joke. It's true, by the way. It's printed in giant letters on the wall in our office. I think about it often. But they could just send that set of exposure values to the older phones. And whatever that is would be just as fine in the live view because the older phones are producing a live exposure too.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:23Nilay Patel?

  I think this is gated. I think this is gated to make you want to buy a new phone. Like they had to, they have to gate some feature and they gated this one.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  And the point of a devil's advocate argument is that it's the devil.

• 39:34Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough. Okay. But it's a great camera. The, the styles are neat. They're on both phones, the regulars and this one and the pros. Very cool. We should talk about cinematic mode, which is not, I would say, a success on the level of these cameras and photographic styles.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I believe that Apple was disingenuous with its ads. They are showing ads with this mode that is portrait mode for video with some cool little auto reframing options for you. Working in light that I would never be able to get it to work well in.

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  I have not gotten it to work in anything but the brightest of light. Some people have.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. I can get it working in like medium light. Um, I got it working in a couple of like brightly lit, you know, alleys. But it can fall down pretty fast and it looks really green screeny. Like one of the things I like the, you know, not a Tik Tok I posted. Everyone's like, this is a green screen. This looks, this looks completely superimposed and fake. Uh, it wasn't like obviously. But yeah, I think that it's difficult to get this to look as cinematic as they say it is. If they had presented this as something much more playful or much less like self-serious. We might be having a different conversation about it, but the way it's, the way that they are marketing it is the problem I have with it. The, the feature itself works meh and I don't have a problem with a meh feature the first time around.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  I have a little bit of a problem, but whatever. Um, I have a problem with people buying this thing on the promise that it does more than it actually can do.

• 41:01Alex Cranz?

  Is it worse than like when portrait mode came out? Cause portrait mode, we all thought was going to work in a lot of different lights and distances and stuff. And quickly learned, no, that's not true.

• 41:09Nilay Patel?

  No, but, but that's compared how they rolled out portrait mode to this.

• 41:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  They rolled out portrait mode, not at first with the seven.

• 41:16Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  Right. The seven came out. It wasn't even enabled. Then they rolled it out in beta and they were like, ew, we don't, right? They were just like. You know, this is the future of photography, right? And then it's gotten, and we were like, it's a gimmick. And then last year, we were like, oh, this got really good. And that was a long time.

• 41:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  This one, they're like, here's Katherine Bigelow. And this is the future of cinematography.

• 41:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, no, it isn't like, first of all, it only runs in 1080p 30. So like, no, it's not.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  And then it just, it just doesn't like their little knives out video is like very moodily lit. I'm confident that there were more lights in that room than we can see.

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying Apple faked it. Like the way that Huawei or even I think Nokia has been caught like using a different camera and passing it off as their camera. I don't believe they're doing that. Like they, these are actual cinematic mode videos that have a lot more stuff behind the iPhone than you will have behind yours.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  I think that's fair.

• 42:19Alex Cranz?

  Katherine Bigelow was like a cinematographer before she was like, yeah, it makes sense. Like they, they got real.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  She's got a lighting assistant.

• 42:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they have like Oscar winning cinematographers working on this. They're gonna definitely turn out, I would hope, a better video.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  And then I, so there's that, which is just even when you have the best of light, it's kind of meh.

• 42:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  And then as the light falls off, it just stops working. Like it just puts up a thing that says you need more light.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  And that's the end of that story. Then there's the file format disaster. And like, I'll just point you to Joanna's video. And she's watched it because she was like very frustrated by all this. But when you turn off H, so HDR on the iPhone is already a file format disaster. If you want to get into another app.

• 43:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:09Nilay Patel?

  If you want to edit and premiere, if you want to edit anything but Apple's apps, HDR video on the iPhone is already fighting you. And the button, when you're in cinematic mode and you turn off HDR, the button is broken. So it doesn't turn off HDR. So Joanna made her whole video in cinematic mode. It's in her video, you should just go watch it. And she was like, Apple tells me they'll fix the button.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  But on top of that, you cannot re-edit the video. So it bakes it.

• 43:32Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  So whatever your depth decision is, is baked into your video and export. The way that most people export the video files off their iPhones is to airdrop them to a Mac.

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yep. If your iPhone sees that your Mac is not running Mac OS Monterey, which I would note at the time of this review was not out. It's airdropping a baked video file with no depth map. Yeah. That you can. So that's like problem one. Dieter, I think you did it over USB, right? It doesn't fight you on USB. So I did it just it syncs over to Photos, the Photos app. And so you could just go to the export option in Photos apps and there's two export options. There's export. And that will let you export in 480 or 720 or 1080 or 4K apparently, even though it's a 1080 file. Oh, and then the other one is like export original unmodified, unmodified something, something. If you export original unmodified something, something, you get the file. And then you get a extra sidecar file that has all of the depth map information, maybe the HDR information. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 44:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  If you have an app that knows that there's a sidecar file, then you're fine. If you just try and take the original file and throw it into a video editing app, all of the blur is just gone. Because none of that thing is there in the file. So you either you either bake it into the file on export in one way, shape or form. Or you need an app that knows that there's an extra file that goes along with this thing. And right now, the only apps that can do that are made by Apple.

• 44:59Alex Cranz?

  You know, we talk about how Apple and Microsoft, all of it, everybody is working towards like teaching us less and like kind of having, doing all the hard work for us. I really respect that here. They're like, no. All of this hard work, you're going to have to be very thoughtful of and have read like, listened to every podcast, watched every YouTube video. Read everything to know how the hell to like get this onto your computer. Like I respect that. I love it. Something for the experts.

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, you know, we I read all the reviews and all the reviews had the same sort of you can just tell that people who write iPhone reviews are not Tik Tokers like successful Tik Tokers. Like they all have the same little thing. It's like, oh, this would be great for Tik Tokers. And it's like, well, Tik Tok can't use this feature. Right. And Tik Tok can't read these video files. So unless you are this exact sort of person who shoots and edits a video in the tools Apple provides you, then exports that and then imports that into Tik Tok and uploads it. That's your process for getting to use cinematic mode in Tik Tok. Yeah. And maybe some people do that. I would just expect that most people do not, right?

• 46:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's just a long road to get to what you want. And then Tik Tok will be like, whatever. Here's a software blur and a filter.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't matter.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  This to me is like, you know, again, Apple rolled it out. I agree with Dieter. Apple rolled it out in a way that makes it seem ready.

• 46:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  And if they'd rolled it out in beta or as an early version or like the next step in video, I think we'd be having a much different reaction to it. But I think hiding the ball and how much light it needs, like it created a context for me to look at this thing is like, ah.

• 46:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they kind of like set themselves up to just get this criticism, like just be honest. They could have. They could have done like Panos and like gone back around and be like, and look, here's, here's everything happening behind the screen.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Such a, such a. Anyhow, it's like, you know, Dieter, you had the line that it was gimmick adjacent. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm at with it. Like when we were scoring the review and we were talking about it, you can't knock the phones for bad cinematic mode because if it wasn't there, we wouldn't be like, no cinematic mode. Right.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Do we think they'll fix it though?

• 47:25Nilay Patel?

  They fix portrait.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, it sounds like it should have been a point release, right?

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, or, you know, or they should have done it in beta and let the beta run for a long time and the iPhone 14 will have a slightly better one in the 15. Like that, that's been the run with portrait mode photos. Maybe they'll get their videos, but doing with Catherine, they just, they just set expectations for this thing that even at the level of what if I want to get the file off my phone, or it's just complicated and hard. That said, it's, it's fun to mess with. It's not not fun to mess with. All right, Dieter, anything else on these phones? We've, we've done 15 minutes on these phones. I think we're good. They're iPhones. This, I started by saying the headlines are hard to write and we landed at iPhone 13 review. Yep. Bigger batteries are better.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  And somehow we still did 15 minutes.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  What is a photo? All right. We're going to take a break. We come back. We still got to talk about that iPad mini, iOS 15. And then we do have a lot of Microsoft stuff to talk about. We'll be right back.

• 48:31Speaker 05

  Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. AMEX Corporate connects cards, expenses and payments all in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash MX corporate. Terms apply.

• 48:59Speaker 05

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 49:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Before the show started, I said, "Dieter, there's not much to say about the iPad Mini." And then Dieter said, "I can talk about the iPad Mini for as long as you'd like."

• 49:54Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  How's the iPad Mini, Dieter?

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Um, it...

• 50:01Speaker 03

  It's an iPad Mini, and what that means is, take a big iPad and then shrink it down a little bit. And it has all the same software interfaces, all like, there's like tiny subtle differences, like command tab shows fewer icons, or whatever. And like, the widgets are like scaled differently. And you'd think that'd be the end, but it turns out that when you take a big iPad and shrink it down, you end up using it differently. So for example, the keyboard is still like, human-sized. So if you're in landscape mode and you bring up the keyboard, it covers the screen. Just like, the whole thing. So it's different, and so don't assume that, "Oh, I just, I would like to have a smaller iPad." That sounds cool, that like, you're gonna have the same experience you have with the big iPads. It's interesting, I think they missed a trick that Microsoft actually does very well,

• 50:45Speaker 03

  which is when you go from landscape to portrait, you should have the option to have the split screen be top to bottom, instead of left to right. And they just can't. And I wish it did that. Battery life is, it's weird. It's fine. And that's a weird thing for me to say about iPad battery life. Because normally with an iPad battery, especially when you use primarily for consumption, you're like, "Yeah, the thing will, the thing will last like, a week if you don't pay attention to it." Like, it's great, it's wonderful. And this one, you'll see the battery tick down. Like, I'm at 28% on this thing right now, and I've been using it off and on, you know, all day. And it's 2 o'clock as of this speaking time, so... You know, like, it will, you can run it down, just like you can run down an iPad Pro if you use it, like, all day, like a computer. But it's just, it's not quite as good as the bigger iPads.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  You know, my, you're, listen to this before my full review will go up next week. But, that's kinda where I'm landing on it. To me, it's interesting, and it's good for, like, a certain, I'm not type of person, but it's good for a certain kind of way of using a device that is not the same as an iPhone, and not the same as an iPad. So for the pilots? For the pilots, exactly.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  I think the iPad mini is the one where you like, you basically run one app. Like you're buying this thing to run one app. Whether that app is Kindle.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  I am a nerd and I use two apps, but yeah, if you think of this as a big ass iPhone and you run one app, you'll, you'll love it. Here's, here's what I mean by it. It's like different than a phone. Think of like, you're looking at your phone right now, or you're looking at somebody who's looking at their phone. And there's a certain hunch, there's a certain closeness to them in the screen. And they're closed off in a certain way, like it's them and their phone and you need, you need to break that, you know, bubble that they're in. This thing you can, you are just like, you're holding it a little bit further away. And it's just a little bit more open. It's just a little bit bigger. And so the reason I like this thing is when I go home, I've got this thing where I'm like still open to the world around me to talk to,

• 52:40Speaker 03

  you know, my spouse, and it's like not quite big enough for me to like really want to do work. I like, I have to struggle through it on this thing or go to another computer. So for a thing to like do iPhone stuff or iPad stuff when I'm not working, when I'm hanging out at home, it's great because I feel more available to the world around me and I'm less likely to work, but I still get the benefits of a big ass screen, you know, relative to a phone.

• 53:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. Well, I will talk about your review when it comes out next week, I'm sure.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Okay. I'll, I'll just say the same things again.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, and then I just want to touch on iOS 15.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Which, which parts? The parts that shipped or the parts that didn't?

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, there's that. Let's talk about the parts that shipped. This is an operating system that is now reaching like fractal levels of complication. Just I'll, I'll make another TikTok reference. It is hilarious to me how many TikTok people have successful TikTok careers, just telling people about features of, of iOS.

• 53:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like there's like lots of them. They're like, here's some shit you didn't know you could do. And they're like, successful TikTokers. iOS 15 is going to revolutionize their lives. Like the richest people in America are going to be iOS power user TikTok guys. Because it is so complicated. I think, Dieter, probably the place to start is Focus Mode, which, you know, it's like one of the highlight features and is impenetrable.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say it's impenetrable. The whole situation of when you first set it up, when you go through the flow, it's like, well, which people do you want to be able to contact? It's like, well, how like, is this just iMessage? I guess. Well, am I locked into iMessage? Well, I don't know about that. Let me make some choices here. Okay, let's go to the next screen. And then there's yet more choices about what apps are allowed to get in and not get in. And it's just, it's a wizard of steps, of setup steps. And each successive step, you're still wondering if you made the right choices on the previous step. And by the end of it, you maybe get to a place where like, you've got this Wonderland where you can like, hit a button and you're in work mode and like, it works exactly the way you want. It like, rearranges your home screen. And like, the apps can pop in the way you want to. The apps that

• 54:46Speaker 03

  you don't want to have notifications get all bundled, which is like, bundles is a really interesting idea. I actually think they could go further with that idea. But I gotta be honest, it's like, the setup process is such that it's, it asks a lot of the user in a way that I don't, it doesn't make clear that the payoff is worth what it's asking. And that's, that's the problem I have with it is, it's asking a lot. It's not providing the entire full context of what the value is of all these choices that you're making and how easy it is to undo those choices. And it's just like, ah, that's how I feel about it. Ah.

• 55:21Alex Cranz?

  You know what it kind of reminds me of? Did you guys ever play Mass Effect? The first Mass Effect?

• 55:26Speaker 03

  I tried.

• 55:27Alex Cranz?

  So you know, you have to, you have to make your character and you're in this like, room and you're making your character. And then like, the first time you really get to see your character and know how all those choices will affect it. It's like, after that, and it's a big dramatic pan and your character looks like a potato. That's kind of what I think this mode is like.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  I got to the part where, I mean, it's just like, I don't even know if Apple thought, anyone look at the screen, be like, do the, you do the setup wizard and then you like, go to Settings.

• 55:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  Because like, I made a mistake.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:00Nilay Patel?

  And then you see that the profiles you have.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  And the first one that's listed there is Personal.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  You click on it. And literally, the first setting on that screen is a toggle switch labeled Personal that you can turn on or off, under the word Personal. And I'm like, I don't know what this means. Like, I'm reasonably good at computers. And this, this is just utterly befuddling. What am I turning on?

• 56:28Alex Cranz?

  Yourself, you just blink out of existence.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  And so you like back off and you like open the next one. And the next one's able to work and you click into it and it says work at the top of the screen. And then there's an on off toggle labeled work. Yeah. And it's like, am I, can I turn them all on? Have I turned this one off? Do I turn personal off? Yeah. I don't know. Like, at the end of this, can I just turn off my iPhone? Like, well, just stop working.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  It's called a work-life balance.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, I'm just not, whatever, like, give me the do not disturb mode. And my choices are everything or nothing. And these gradations in between are not useful to me. And that is the opposite of what Apple wants you to do. They want you to create all these fine gradations. And I'm like, well, you know what I usually do in meetings? I just turn my phone over. Like, I just put it screen down. I'm like, do not disturb. And that's the answer.

• 57:22Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of a dick move on Apple's part because think of how long Apple has gone around removing customization. And I think especially of like Mac, like macOS, back when I'm still thinking like upset about 10.3, when they got rid of like text customization. And like, they've gone out of their way to be like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, there's a general use case and that's the use case. And like, anything outside of that is like, kind of weird. And then here they're like, now get customized. And I'm like, that's, I want like rain meter on my computer. I don't want like 40,000 personal versus workplace notification modes.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  I mean, again, I think part of this is Apple is, they're focused on a vision of some, Dieter has talked about this a million times. They are focused on a vision of simplicity that is not realistic.

• 58:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  Sometimes a way to make things simple is to actually make them, let them be complicated. Yeah. So that you know what's happening as opposed to trying to, I mean, this is like, I feel like they're doing that. They definitely let this be complicated.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  And there's a good end goal, like there's a way states, a way messages, there's like, there's a bunch of good ideas that I want to work and maybe they won't work. Maybe, maybe this is like tiny computers or like the web is a app platform. It's a thing that I want to exist that is fundamentally never going to get there because the execution is impossible, but they definitely, I definitely feel like they didn't nail the execution on this one.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  No, what I mean specifically, like, I mean, we're about to talk about Microsoft. This is like a great, this is great. Like they made Clippy for notifications.

• 58:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, it looks like you don't want to be disturbed and then it's in the background, it's going to mess with 50 settings.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:03Nilay Patel?

  And you don't know how you got from one thing to another one. And then you go and you're not onboarded again, like that wizard isn't there again for you. So you're like, what do all these settings do? And that's what I mean, like the, the interface is not teaching you what it does in that kind of complication.

• 59:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Nilay Patel?

  It's not making you smarter.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  It's just presenting endless options.

• 59:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it should learn, that's what it should do. Like it should learn your calendar entry for meetings and then not disturb you apart from a certain amount of context that you want to break through. It should learn that you dismiss that notification all the time. So just dismiss it and put it somewhere else. You know, all these things, it needs to just do automatically.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, try and place an icon on the lower right-hand portion of your iPhone screen.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Not allowed.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  See if that could work.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  Computer says no.

• 59:51Nilay Patel?

  But to Dieter's earlier point, most of the good stuff in iOS 15 is not shift. So share play isn't there yet. Find my support for AirPods isn't there yet. This like universal control feature where you can just like slide your mouse back and forth between your iPad, like not there yet.

• 1:00:07Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited, like all the stuff we're excited for.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny because we have this whole article and we have all that stuff. And at the end, it's like, also the app store's in-app events feature is not there. And it's like, yeah, I don't.

• 1:00:18Alex Cranz?

  Devastated.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  Leave it.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, maybe focus on the other stuff, guys. Uh, last few Apple things. Dieter, I know you have feelings about this, but Tom, I want you as, as somebody who's personally left the European Union.

• 1:00:33Speaker 04

  Sorry, what?

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  I was the 50% that didn't want to.

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but now you live in that reality. The EU USB C mandate. So the EU has not passed this yet, but they are well on their way to saying every device needs to be powered over USB C, no exceptions. Apple came out and said this will harm innovation, which is hilarious because it's not like Apple's innovating on Lightning and also they are the reason for USB C, which is it's like their fault, you know?

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  They have some pretty innovative licensing.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  It's just like very funny to me that they're like this. It's like, well, those connectors are the same. Also, you invented USB C. They made it for that MacBook and anyway, you anyway.

• 1:01:22Nilay Patel?

  They use the same connector for USB C and Thunderbolt. Like that's your innovation is two different standards that required literally different cables that all use the same connector.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  It's your fault, but they seem very unhappy about it.

• 1:01:34Speaker 04

  We could see one of like three things. We could see an iPhone with a Lightning port and a USB C port.

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  That's not going to happen. We could see an iPhone with a USB C port or just an iPhone with no ports.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  This is true. And there was a statement from the EU, one of the commissioners who said, this does not affect wireless. There's still plenty of room for innovation in wireless.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it goes deeper than that. Like, so if you have a device that that can only be charged or like just exclusively charges wireless, let's say like the Apple Watch, which also has a radio. So I think it is actually covered by this technically. Then you don't, they're not going to force manufacturers to then add, you know, USB C to it. It's only, it's only for devices that will be charged over a wired connection. So there's a massive loophole there. And I know everyone's going to say, yeah, but wireless charging sucks and all this sort of stuff, but it's, it does, but it's also progressing just the way that every technology does. So like Xiaomi's got like a phone that charges in 20 minutes, like

• 1:02:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 04

  A full charge, which I think is 80 watts. So we're getting close and I'm sure that Apple, after air power and everything else, I'm sure that they will have something a little bit later than the Android competition as always. But it wouldn't surprise me if they do go portless in the next sort of couple of years, two, three years. So, because this has to, this is a proposal, it has to go through and then they have two years until they have to, you know, implement it.

• 1:03:02Alex Cranz?

  Is this the EU saying that USB C is end game? Like, is this the end of other charging ports?

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, they do say that if there's innovation in other ports, then we'll obviously, you know, look at that and stuff. But obviously, that innovation has happened to USB C, even though USB C is like a can of worms, isn't it? Like, there's so many. There's no, there's not some single USB C. So, but they, yeah, they, they have caveats where-

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  That sound you're hearing is Heim Gartenberg wailing in despair. What is that noise?

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  But yeah, the portless iPhone just seems, especially after, there was a story about the Apple Watch, uh, operating in some sort of dev mode over 60 hertz or something, which sounds super interesting for like data transfers and stuff. So like, there's, there's stuff going on. I feel like a portless iPhone, the rumors have been there for like, what? Well, the rumors have been there since they basically got rid of the headphone track, right? So-

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but then they also got rid of Johnny Ive. Like, the products became much more, like, we are expecting a MacBook Pro with ports. Yeah. Like, there's a real push and pull here. Dieter, I know you, you, I mean, you tweeted, I have any thoughts about this?

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  So, the, this process, I believe, began in 2009 with them starting to look at it, when micro USB was, was the hot shit. So, there is a little bit of, do I actually think this is gonna happen? Or is it gonna take another five years of delay tactics from Apple?

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, they did mandate-

• 1:04:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, they, they forced everybody, there's a reason that we don't have 40,000, we just have 20,000 dongles in our, our drawer.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Right, but Apple got away with shipping an adapter, right? There was a loophole. Well, there'll be, if, once we're all through this, another loophole. Uh, the other mixed feeling I have is like, honestly, the particular shape of USB C, uh, might not hold up over time, right? Like, it, it might be better to go to the way that the lightning port works, where it's just like a hunk of metal with some, you know, contacts on the outside. And it's like, it's much sturdier, stronger and thinner. So-

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  I like the idea of enforcing a standard, honestly. I just like the idea of Apple putting USB-C on an iPhone. I don't like the idea of... I'm a little bit sympathetic to Apple's argument about hampering innovation, just a little. I'm not sympathetic to their environmental argument, because, look, like, people buy new phones and then eventually the port changes. So, that's gonna happen at one point or another, so, whatever. So, that's my two minds, is, I do think that at some point, we're gonna wanna change the shape of the USB-C port. And will we be able to do that if there's this big mandate in the EU, question mark? I would prefer if Apple had just, like, done the right thing on the iPhone, but they didn't, and so here we are.

• 1:05:50Speaker 03

  This proposal does not have the adapter carve-out.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  Correct. That's, like, one of the reasons this is a big deal.

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  Yet.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Apple hasn't begun lobbying.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, that comes later this year. So, this proposal is strictly the port-on device. And then the charger section is later this year. That's the second proposal.

• 1:06:08Nilay Patel?

  I do appreciate the EU for doing stuff.

• 1:06:11Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they're, like, they saved all of us the first time they did this, with the original, like, the stuff they did. Because I think they announced it, like, MWC in, like, 2009. They're like, "Yeah, we're gonna kill all of these stupid, like, extra port things."

• 1:06:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Alex Cranz?

  And, "It's good. Like, thank you. We appreciate it."

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  But it's just very funny that, like, right on the... They did the right thing right before it became...

• 1:06:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. For Tom.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  Apple's just gonna take the ports off the iPhone. Lastly, last two little things. One, I need to commend Zoe Schiffer for the best headline we published this week at The Verge. Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to LeakMemo.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  A classic in the genre.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Just like, yep, it's... There are some greatest hits. Like, sometimes you just, you just play "Don't Stop Believing," you know? And this is like, that's what... This headline is like, if you write the memo about not leaking, the memo always gets leaked.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  I promise you. Zoe's doing an amazing job, not covering up right now. And then, lastly, despite, I'm just gonna take my little victory lap, Apple won't let Fortnite back on iOS. And there's, you know, Tim Sweeney's out there tweeting all the emails and whatever. But he's like, we'll put Fortnite back in iOS when you comply with the judge's orders to allow buttons and external links to alternative painted processors. There it is. It's, I'm telling you, this is the fight. Everyone yelled at me, I get it. But they're gonna end up back in front of that judge.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  And they're gonna say, what do you mean by buttons and links?

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  And Apple's gonna have to make some argument that buttons and links are the same thing.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Buttons and links are a thing on a computer. What's a computer, Apple? And then the whole case gets blown wide open.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  Then the commercials come out. She's done enough. What's a video game? She's not. But that is, that is the heart of this fight right now. The judge said, Apple's well within their rights to kick out Fortnite. They broke the contract. Apple has always said, we're willing to let you back if you play by the rules. Epic is saying, we're happy to comply by the rules, but here's this thing that you're not allowed to do anymore. And neither side is gonna bend until this case gets all the way appealed, or they get back in front of the judge. What I love most on the Rich Cast is when we talk about the minutia of legal orders. All right, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We gotta get into all this surface stuff.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/af.

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Tom, big Surface event. Panos pumped.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Mega pumped.

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  Screens folding, cameras improved. Walk us through it.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there was eight devices in total. An update to the Surface. Basically, the context for this is Microsoft has a bunch of new Surface devices for Windows 11. So they will drop in on October 5th. And they also have an Android successor, you know, for the Surface Duo, the Surface Duo 2. So you've got the Surface Pro 8, which I think, I mean, I wrote before they sort of announced it, but this is the kind of one we've been waiting for for a few years. A kind of minor sort of redesign, but some really important screen changes and internal changes, Thunderbolt, all that sort of stuff. So that was kind of expected. And then a really minor change to the Surface Pro X as a Wi-Fi model. So that was kind of like, okay, cool.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  That's happening. Then the Surface Go 3, again, minor changes, processor upgrades, all that sort of stuff. So yeah, okay, cool. We kind of expecting that as well. And then I guess the surprise, or not so surprise, we were expecting a new Surface Book, but it's the Surface Laptop Studio. So I don't think we were quite expecting that sort of name and like the way they did it. But basically, it's a complete redesign of the Surface Book. So gone is the detachable display, which I guess I didn't like personally. And I think everyone always sort of questioned, who is it for? I don't think the Surface Laptop Studio necessarily has a good answer to who is it for either.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  But the the actual design is essentially, if you remember the old Acer laptops where like the the screen folds forwards almost, or like pulls forward. Or the HP Folio, they've both done it. It's kind of that design. So it's not really like the unique sort of design that you would expect from a Surface device. So I think that's kind of like where Microsoft's really, you know, focused and previously, it's always been very unique hinges and stuff. It is like a kind of unique hinge in that sense, but the actual overall design is, you know, it's like one of those crazy Windows 8 laptops that we saw many years ago. Just looks a lot better and a bit more refined, but the actual device is very similar. And then obviously the Surface Duo 2, successor to the original, bigger displays, obviously triple camera system.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  That like, that's all good. The hardware's been upgraded, the processor 5G support, all the sort of stuff that really should have been there perhaps, or at least a more modern processor as well. All that sort of stuff's good, but I don't think it really matters. Like, this is the software, right? It's the experience of using that device and the software that matters. And from what I can tell, it hasn't been majorly upgraded or fixed. It might be obviously a lot smoother. But Dieter can probably talk more of that, but I still feel like that device is a little... It feels like you wouldn't buy it until it's the third version, so.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, let's just do it out of the way real quick. I mean, there's a lot of little things, like the camera bump is like angled so that the thing can close over it, which is clever. The only software update that I think, I mean, smoothest or whatever, but they now default to assuming the right screen is the primary screen. So when you close it up, it like just shows the right screen. And that way, because before the accelerometer could never guess which screen you were supposed to look at, and it was always wrong. So they're just like, it's the right screen, problem solved.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  You'd like flip, wouldn't you?

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think a lot of the stuff is just gonna have to be answered by the review. You know, are the cameras any good? Is it actually as fast as you say? Is the bigger screen nicer? There is a peek display. I forget what they call it. You like see the notifications in the hinge. Clever.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  Oh, the glance, right?

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's a very small amount of things you can fit in there. It shows like volume changing and whatever. But you can't really read it. You can like see two. There's two notifications and the icon is yellow, so it's whatever app. But they didn't make it tap to wake. You have to like hit the power button to see it or wait for the notification to come in. What are you doing?

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  And by that point, you're basically, you've got your phone, you're just gonna look at the displays. Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think the question for me, because we've seen, you know, Microsoft and Google have taken some shots at each other recently around Chrome and Windows and preloading and all this stuff, defaults. How much does Microsoft care about making an Android phone? Right? And the fact that they made another one indicates they care somewhat, but the first one is still only an Android 10.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, they just, they made an announcement today about that, didn't they?

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Oh, did they? They finally announced it?

• 1:13:53Alex Cranz?

  They announced that Android 11 was coming?

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  I mean, that's like, but you have to. Like, Android 12 is gonna come tomorrow.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, they announced Android 11 is coming, but they didn't say anything about Android 12. They're just like, you know, we're doing three years of updates.

• 1:14:11Nilay Patel?

  I think they care a lot about having one pinky toe in the mobile device world. Yep. They need to care. They need to have a point of view. You know, Sacha Nadella will tell you all day long, he loves the Surface Duo. Great. Maybe they're just making this because the CEO likes it.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  What does he use? Is that his daily driver?

• 1:14:33Nilay Patel?

  I've literally been in events where he's like in the corner, like, and you're like, oh, what's Sacha using? And it's like, the Surface Duo. Like, I guess he doesn't care about taking photos of his children.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  But like, he's at events, like, he might, you know, there's like a theatrical element to it.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  He gets in his car and pulls out his iPhone.

• 1:14:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Nilay Patel?

  By the way, you would be surprised.

• 1:14:57Nilay Patel?

  But they need to keep trying at this.

• 1:15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, to your point about like Android and like how much do they care about having an Android phone? I think that speaks to a broader point about Microsoft's relationship with Android at the moment. Like, they obviously said that Android apps are going to ship for Windows 11. We haven't even really seen that in preview. And I don't think it even really makes sense. Like, they've tried this thing of like bringing Android apps to their devices. And obviously, the Surface Duo is like a, you know, is Android, full, full, full, fat Android. But like, they had this weird relationship with it, where they obviously want the apps because Windows is lacking in apps. But like, nobody wants Android apps, right? Like, is there, do you really need that on your PC? Like, I think there's a place for Android games on your PC, but like, not Android apps.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  So they definitely have a weird relationship there. And I do question whether there will be a long-term commitment to this particular device. Or whether they're just sort of like testing the waters somewhere, but. I mean, there's a lot of serious hardware work that's gone into this device. So I don't know like.

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  You can see it. You can feel it. It's like the glass is rounded. The edges are nicer. The magnets have little clacky things. You can still use the Surface Pen.

• 1:16:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, I believe that Panos Panay and his team care a lot about making great hardware.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  I've never like, there's no room for doubt with that dude about whether he thinks making cool hardware is cool.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Nilay Patel?

  It's the core of his personality in many ways. But do they care about making an Android phone?

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, like is the end goal, like if they do get this Android and Android apps on Windows stuff working well, which I mean, who knows, like the BlueStacks, you've been doing it for like 10 years now, right? And they they've basically pivoted towards games because people just don't use apps. And like, is Microsoft's plan to then use that as a way to then, you know, get their apps on Windows and then transform this thing back into a Windows device? That sounds a bit wild, but like, I'm just, I don't, I don't get where it all like ties in together, you know?

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  I have the answer to all these questions. It says it costs $1,500.

• 1:17:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my my theory, like I'm saying, they need to keep trying. So they've made an improvement. They're keeping up. They're learning where they need to improve. We've spent too much time talking about this thing that no one's gonna buy. We should talk about the thing that a lot of people are gonna buy, which is the Surface Pro 8. Which it seems like a long awaited refinement. Dieter, you played with this one too.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is. It is exactly what you hope it is. It's a Surface with slightly rounded edges and a bigger screen, a better screen and Thunderbolt and an amazing keyboard.

• 1:17:40Speaker 04

  It's basically the Pro X, right? With a better keyboard, a better display and a better processor, really.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  Better camera. Buy a little bit.

• 1:17:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Alex Cranz?

  Qualcomm's just like kicking dirt as they watch this thing.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  Well, Qualcomm just doesn't have the chips ready, does it? For like whatever the successor would be.

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  Which is kind of something we were discussing the other day is like, everything in this event was Intel, right? With the, obviously with the obvious exception of the Surface Duo. But there was no AMD, there was no Qualcomm. Like, I mean, there was the Wi-Fi only Surface Pro X, but like, when Microsoft were sort of like, diversifying their, their products to AMD and Qualcomm a couple of years ago, that was like a big deal for them. Cause they, you know, they were upset with what happened with the Surface Pro 4 and the Surface Book with Intel and Skylake. Like that, that, that hurt them. So, um, so they wanted to diversify, but like, I don't understand where that's gone now. Like, I thought they had some special relationship with AMD, um, because they certainly do on the export side.

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  So I don't know, why is there no AMD? Like, that's, that seems strange.

• 1:18:47Nilay Patel?

  They gotta play both sides. Intel's got a new CEO. They want it new Intel to be successful.

• 1:18:54Alex Cranz?

  Which is very supportive of Pat.

• 1:18:56Nilay Patel?

  Everyone likes Pat. Pat, come on Decoder. If you're listening, Pat.

• 1:19:00Speaker 04

  But when you put it side by side, like new Surface devices just with Intel. And then there's a Windows 11 upgrade that kind of, it, it could easily work on older devices, but only seems to work on eighth gen and newer. For some security reason that they haven't really properly explained. It's like, Intel's back, baby.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  You know, like, it's what it feels like, um, even though that, that sounds a bit, you know, conspiracy theory, but like, it does, yeah, I don't know. With the whole Windows 11 launch is strange.

• 1:19:33Alex Cranz?

  Does AMD really operating that well and that much in like, the space that you, like the wattage and stuff? That Intel is operating in it for something like the Surface Pro? Like, is AMD even in that space to that degree?

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess, I guess for the Pro, perhaps not, but for the Studio, yeah.

• 1:19:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. The Studio is like, it feels a lot more glaring to be like that wimpy, wimpy. What is it? The, the 3050 Ti?

• 1:20:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but this is like, if you, Microsoft makes a product word Studio in the name, you're like, ah, they biffed it on the GPU.

• 1:20:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Alex Cranz?

  You just prepare yourself as soon as you see Studio, you're like, oh, it's gonna be a bad GPU.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  Actually, I have an open question about GPU stuff, well, the screen. So it's 120 Hz display, parentheses, 60 Hz default. Someone explain that to me.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  It's basically like ProMotion, essentially. It's their equivalent. So they're using something called, I think it's called Dynamic Refresh Rate is the official name of the, which isn't the same as like what would happen on your PC, because obviously that's fully powered, like you'd have a 120 Hz display and that would just run 120 Hz all the time. You'd have the option to change it manually. So what it will do is it'll run at 60 Hz for most stuff. You start scrolling, like touch scrolling particularly, 120 Hz, it ramps it up to, inking, same 120 Hz. So I don't think, I don't, I haven't tested it because obviously we don't have the devices, but I don't think you can just be like, I'm gonna go run games at 120 Hz. Because then I think that means you'd have to actually run the display at 120 Hz. And I'm not sure whether you can do that.

• 1:21:08Alex Cranz?

  And this isn't like variable refresh rate either, right? Like, this is a totally different thing.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  It's totally, it's slightly different because obviously variable refresh rate, your, your display is running at 120 and then you're matching the frame rate to hit that. So it's like, this is slightly different because it's actually ramping up the, the actual refresh rate of the display.

• 1:21:28Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  So rather than trying to match the frames. So, so it is slightly different. But I don't know whether you can do the same thing where you're like, you tell the display, I want you to run at 120 Hz, you know?

• 1:21:41Alex Cranz?

  I was honestly getting a little like excited, thinking of like conspiracies of like, oh, is this Intel like kind of doing their version of VRR on,

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 1:21:50Alex Cranz?

  Like with an integrated graphics card. Like, that's neat. That's fun. But it sounds like no.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  No, I don't think so. But we have to test it once you can actually, we can actually review them and stuff. But yeah, I don't think you're gonna be able to stick it straight in like 120 Hz mode and play games at like 120 Hz. I don't think so. But we'll see.

• 1:22:11Alex Cranz?

  Fingers crossed. With a little poor integrated GPU would just be crying, though. You're trying to do 120 Hz.

• 1:22:18Speaker 04

  It's more interesting on the, the Studio.

• 1:22:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's time with the Studio. Alex, one thing that occurs to me with all this is like, Microsoft also knows that AMD can't make enough chips.

• 1:22:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, like their Xbox team is like, don't, they don't, they can't do it.

• 1:22:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, they just called him like, don't do it, don't, get it out, get it out.

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  Kind of, we need the chips, dude. Like, don't talk to Pat.

• 1:22:39Alex Cranz?

  AMD is probably fine with that.

• 1:22:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, hopefully they've got like some AMD APUs hanging around for like some Xbox handheld or something to like compute the Steam Deck or something. I don't know.

• 1:22:50Alex Cranz?

  I like this optimism, Tom.

• 1:22:52Nilay Patel?

  That's where you gotta be in this time. All right, Dieter, I want to hear about the laptop studio which you got to play with, which is one of the most oddly, as Tom was saying, the basics of the design are familiar, but then you look at this execution.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, oh, man, this is literally a laptop with levels.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  Behold the plinth.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  It has a base underneath. It looks like a Mac. I'm sorry. It looks like a Mac. Like, I know that, like, everything that is going to be made out of aluminum with black keys and a screen is going to end up looking like a MacBook. And so it's a little bit unfair. But yeah, it looks a lot like a MacBook. And then underneath the MacBook part, there's another part, which is the bottom part, which is the, you know, the 360 fan rectangle.

• 1:23:38Nilay Patel?

  It looks like a MacBook until it absolutely does not look like a MacBook.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  And I've just been, I've taken to calling it the plinth, which is another word for pedestal. And I love it. I love it. I don't know if this is going to be one of those things that turns out to be iconic. Like, oh, yeah, this looks weird now, but in two years, it'll be like, oh, yeah, no, that's actually cool. It's like part of the ethos of the thing and we've accepted it. I'm not, I'm not there yet. I'm still in the denial and a little bit of the anger stage. We'll get to acceptance later.

• 1:24:09Speaker 04

  You know what it looks like? It looks like, you know, you know, those air conditioning units that like integrate into the ceilings of restaurants? It looks like they'd slap one of those on the bottom.

• 1:24:18Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Alex, to your questions about like Intel, like thermal envelopes, this thing looks like what you need when you don't have an arm strategy for your computers.

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  There's an honesty to it's it's like honest and dishonest at the same time. It's honest like screw it. We made it thick and we put big fans on the bottom. And then it's dishonest because they didn't, they didn't, they don't let you see that it's thick when you look at it, that there's it's like floating.

• 1:24:42Nilay Patel?

  So to be fair, Intel laptops, Apple's included, have fans in them. Apple's M1 lap, like the MacBook Pro M1 is faster than the air only by dint of having a fan.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:24:56Nilay Patel?

  They can just run the processor hotter and then turn on a fan and blow air over it and keep running it hot. Fine. What is super interesting to me about this is like part of the design of this thing prevents it from hiding the fan, right? So you say it looks like a MacBook Pro, like I have a 16 inch MacBook Pro with an Intel processor that I'm in at least one Google Meet meeting a week.

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Nilay Patel?

  The fan comes on and the fans are oriented at the screen. So right where the hinge is, is the exhaust for the fan.

• 1:25:28Alex Cranz?

  And the mic.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true. This, you can't quite do that with this.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  I mean, the air blows out the sides and they specifically designed the internals of it so that the heat stays away from the palm rests.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  And beyond that, we need to review it to tell you more about how it performs under load.

• 1:25:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just saying that the, because they picked a, a very familiar design, but changed the hinge, they can't vent the fans the way that the MacBook Pro vents the fans. So they ended up with this plinth.

• 1:26:01Alex Cranz?

  Or even can the Surface, because the Surface laptop also vents out the back, doesn't it?

• 1:26:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but the easiest way to vent the Surface laptop is just take the screen off.

• 1:26:10Alex Cranz?

  The new one, yeah.

• 1:26:13Nilay Patel?

  I think this thing is utterly fascinating. I, is the Surface, the, the Surface Book is gone, right?

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, they called it the successor. So yeah, it's, it's gone. So the interesting thing though is the Surface Book had all the components in the screen.

• 1:26:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  And now that's been flipped to the bottom. So it's like a, that was one of the things of the Surface Book. It was always a bit top heavy and a bit wobbly. On the screen, because it obviously had a lot of the components up there. So it's interesting that they've put that down the bottom, like, you know, where it should be.

• 1:26:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Alex, I just got this wrong. You were talking about the Surface Laptop and I was thinking of the Surface Book.

• 1:26:47Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, okay.

• 1:26:48Nilay Patel?

  I apologize. All right, we'll see. Dieter, like, did you walk away in love? I mean, you are the person that I trust to impulse buy Microsoft Surface products faster than anyone else. Like, who do I know who bought a Surface Pro X? Dieter Bone?

• 1:27:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I did. Yep.

• 1:27:04Nilay Patel?

  Which one of these are you going to impulse buy?

• 1:27:06Speaker 03

  Man, I mean, look, it's gonna be the Pro 8 because it's like, it's the thing. It's the thing that I know will do the things that I want, and it's very good, I hope. Like, we'll review it, but it doesn't look like they screwed anything up, and I really like the keyboard. My big question with the Laptop Studio is the same question as this. This is why it's a Surface Book competitor, because the question of who did they make this for is like, creators and coders and YouTubers, right, I guess, and people who draw.

• 1:27:37Alex Cranz?

  Well, this is like, part of Microsoft just has an obsession with the two-in-one, right? Like, every single thing they do is about kind of the two-in-one. And, you know, they say, they say they like, okay, we aspire to like Apple's customers on this thing. But they've always just really seemed to be like, we want to see how we could make like a perfect two-in-one. And we're going to try it in all these different ways. And we're going to make a really, really skinny one that's underpowered. And we're going to make this really, really wobbly one that's like, top-heavy but has a cool hinge. And we're going to make this like, and we're gonna, we're gonna make the Surface Pro, which is effectively like the best thing they've done so far. And this like addresses a lot of the concerns people have about the Surface Pro. Mainly like, you've got to pay extra for a keyboard.

• 1:28:19Alex Cranz?

  You've got to then like worry about the keyboard falling off or something, although I haven't had that happen in years. Like, this kind of addresses all of that and gives you more ports and more power, which you're never going to get from a Surface Pro. Like, so I, like, it just feels like them like taking a big hit and being like, let's like just go max out what a two-in-one can do. And also, we're really good at hinges, so like, let's hinge it up.

• 1:28:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like the way that I always saw like the Surface Book going and differentiation differentiation between that and the Surface Pro is the Surface Pro is thin and light and you know, it's powerful enough to do what you need to do. But the Surface Book was always supposed to be this monster powerful MacBook Pro compared to sort of thing, but it never really quite was. It was and then, you know, it got leapfrogged and then it's now the Surface Labs Studio. And that's in the same sort of like territory essentially because it shipped with this 3050 Ti GPU. They just made it 3060 or 3070 or 3080, like then it would be like a gaming laptop. Then it has like another more useful, you know, thing for people to

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  buy it for. But it's just like they skimped on the GPU and it's just strange. Like, why don't they just go all in and make like a super powerful laptop? Why does it have to have the flipping display and?

• 1:29:41Nilay Patel?

  Because then they'd have to update it every six months to a year. Like, they would have to keep up. You can't, you can't have the thing be out of date. And so if they, if they commit to making a gaming laptop, they can't stop. They can't like take a break.

• 1:29:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:29:54Alex Cranz?

  They just wanted a little nap, a little rest.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  I just feel like they did the Surface Laptop and that was like the most sort of normal Surface they've done, right? So, but they've never done like a fully powerful Surface Laptop.

• 1:30:09Alex Cranz?

  Well, they only did the Surface Laptop because everybody kept saying, we want a Surface product, but not all of these weird like gimmicks. We just want a laptop from Microsoft. So they did it. And, and this is them saying, okay, no, but we got to do the gimmick, guys. Cause like, that's the whole thing of the Surface brand is like, it's a cool, like the cool gimmick.

• 1:30:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, the, the reason they made it and Panos has been on this show to tell us about it before, is they want to make sure that there are premium Windows products in all the categories.

• 1:30:42Alex Cranz?

  Nobody else has two in ones.

• 1:30:45Nilay Patel?

  Right. Like, there are endless, infinite $300, 15 inch Windows laptops to buy, but they, they want to make sure Windows is still premium. And the second you go towards ultra powered gaming laptop. There's lot, there's lots of premium stuff like Razer is happy to tell you that it makes premium laptops, but in this like middle zone, there's not a lot of innovation from the other makers. It is all just copies of stuff. Microsoft has already done, which they're happy to distribute. They, they hand off their engineering or it's bad executions of ideas that Microsoft is like, well, actually here's how to do flippy, flippy screens. We're very sorry. You didn't do a good job.

• 1:31:29Alex Cranz?

  I get kind of excited looking at this thing, thinking about like, we keep talking about how Apple may one day merge IO or you know, iPad OS and Mac OS or give us those touch features. And like, if they're going to do that, something maybe absent the plinth, something like this is probably more likely what we're going to see from them in like a touch based MacBook Pro. And it's like, like I look at the thing, I'm like, okay, Microsoft like managed to make it not janky like Acer and HP did. They, it looks really cool. I'm, I'm honestly like stoked about this thing. It just looks neat. Looks fun.

• 1:32:07Nilay Patel?

  Alex, I just, I don't know why you're praising this thing so much. You don't need to put it on a pedestal. It does it on its own.

• 1:32:13Alex Cranz?

  It's got its own. It brought it.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  I'm still just a bit confused by it. I don't know.

• 1:32:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's baffling, but like delightful baffling.

• 1:32:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes. More tech companies should make utterly baffling products.

• 1:32:25Alex Cranz?

  Please.

• 1:32:26Nilay Patel?

  Right? Apple's like, we're the dominant player. Like it's, it's got a

• 1:32:29Alex Cranz?

  Slightly better iPhone.

• 1:32:31Nilay Patel?

  We added more 5G bands. Like whatever. No, baffle and confuse your customers.

• 1:32:36Alex Cranz?

  Put a plinth on it.

• 1:32:38Speaker 04

  It's like, it's, it's designed for like this handful of people who are like, I don't know, they're, they're, they're drawing, they're maybe gaming, they're just using a laptop normally, they're an architect. Like they do all these crazy things.

• 1:32:51Alex Cranz?

  These are, these are the principles that PR invents. When like, when two in ones first became a big thing, anytime you talk to PR, they'd be like, oh, you know how you're always like drawing and wishing you could draw better on your laptop? No, that is, they're like, yeah, you're an artist. I'm like, I am not.

• 1:33:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Speaker 04

  Microsoft spent like two years circling things in commercials.

• 1:33:10Nilay Patel?

  Yes. You know what I'm saying? Alex was not here during the most important Verge story of all, which is Microsoft can't stop circling things.

• 1:33:19Nilay Patel?

  They're obsessed.

• 1:33:20Speaker 04

  That was a classic.

• 1:33:21Nilay Patel?

  No, look, this is a computer for architects who are YouTubers. Large and growing market. That honestly, I don't know how Apple's going to survive unless it directly makes a product for that. Please, Apple, get on it. All right, we've, we've done this thing enough. We're gonna get it. We're gonna review all this stuff soon. And then Dieter is gonna buy a service. Go three. That's just my prediction.

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

  An approach, right?

• 1:33:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, there's other little stuff going on. But the, actually, the story I do want to call out, which I mentioned at the top of the show. Monica Chen wrote a story this week about kids these days, college students who are in classes like astrophysics, even some programming classes, who, because they grew up without file systems, are like, not ready to encounter file systems in their college classes. And it's like, it's not their fault. They grew up with file systems. They were just hidden from them. Right. And they grew up with Chromebooks and iPhones, two platforms that absolutely abstract the file system away from you. And it is just a wild story. I will tell you, this story passes no moral judgment at all. Like,

• 1:34:33Nilay Patel?

  we, we absolutely tried to just be like, here's what it's like in college right now. Here's what the professors are telling us. Here's what the students are telling us. And the reaction to the story is an enormous tidal wave of moral judgment.

• 1:34:49Nilay Patel?

  But I highly recommend reading it. It's super fascinating. It is like the vergiest verg story we've ever done. Because it is literally about what mental model you have for how things on computers are stored. And I, like, mine is still files and folders. That's just how I came up. And that is not the mental model that a lot of people share. And like, you gotta meet people where they are. I will say the one tweet, because everyone's tweeting like, oh, this made me feel old. And I was like, I don't feel old. Like, whatever. I search for everything too. The one that made me feel old was somebody quote tweeted me and was like, this made me feel old. I didn't even get a smartphone until high school. And I was like, oof. I, I didn't get Wi-Fi until I was 23.

• 1:35:38Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I'm ancient.

• 1:35:41Alex Cranz?

  You just took your Metamucil after reading it.

• 1:35:44Nilay Patel?

  I was like, oh, man. Like, I was like laughing at all the people who are like, feel it all. And I saw that one. I was like, yeah. Yeah, I came out and I was almost thirty.

• 1:35:54Nilay Patel?

  Whoops. Anyhow, go read that story Monica did. She's done actually a number of incredible stories about the intersection of technology in education, and this is just one of my favorites. Okay, that's it. You can tweet at us. We'd love to hear from you. Tom is Tom Warren. Alex is Alex H. Krans. Dieter is Bakaloon. I'm at Reckless. Decoder exists. It's the other podcast we make. This week, we had the CEO of an app called Fuck You Pay Me, which is just

• 1:36:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Nilay Patel?

  great name for an app, which, by the way, is a Goodfellas reference. I understand there's a very famous talk by Mike Montiere, which is great. And you should go watch it. It's like 10 years old. It is very famous. But that actual phrase is from Goodfellas, and you can go watch Goodfellas, too, which is also good. It's funny, because, you know, the last episode of Decoder is all about owning the building blocks of ideas in music. Right. And now there's like, anyway, Lindsay's great. Go listen to it. It's an app that's Glassdoor for influencers. It's like very interesting. Next week on Decoder, we're gonna run, I'm on the Code Conference this next week. I'm interviewing the CEO of Waymo, the co-CEO of Waymo at Code Conference, Takedra Mawakana. So that's gonna run in Decoder next week. We've actually got a pretty good Decoder lineup coming up.

• 1:37:03Nilay Patel?

  We're also running Ashley's AI series in the Vergecast feed. Last week was AI in video. Next week is, it's here. It's the GPT-3 episode. Yay. It's gonna be nuts. And then Dieter's got some fun Vergecast stuff coming up, too. That's true. Rock and roll. Get the shot.

• 1:37:20Speaker 04

  E U S B C.

• 1:37:41Speaker 07

  Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in, an all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.

• 1:38:18Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and on the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the Am Law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey AI, tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.ai.