We reviewed the Mac Studio, the Studio Display, the iPhone SE, and the iPad Air

Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Monica Chin, Allison Johnson, and Dan Seifert discuss The Verge's reviews of the Apple products announced last week: the new iPhone SE, iPad Air, Mac Studio, and Studio Display. Further reading: Apple’s new iPhone SE is a modern phone stuck in yesterday’s design Samsung’s really good midrange phone just got a bigger battery and a price cut Apple Mac Studio review: finally Apple Studio Display review: nothing to see here ‘Pro’ has lost all meaning, and Apple knows it Apple’s chips are on the table Apple’s charts set the M1 Ultra up for an RTX 3090 fight it could never win Apple iPad Air (2022) review: it’s the nice one Universal Control is Apple’s most impressive new feature in years The Mac Studio is myth fulfillment Vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars — or leave the platform Ukrainian influencers ring the frontlines to TikTok How Wordpress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird 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, Dan Seifert, Alison Johnson, and Monica Chin join the show. We talk about all the Apple reviews, the iPhone SE, the Mac Studio, the Studio Display, and the iPad Air. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:13Speaker 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.

• 0:58Speaker 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.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of bad charts. I wanted to start in a high and then I was like, what's in my heart? And it's chart crime, which is my new favorite phrase.

• 2:00Alex Cranz?

  There's a lot of them.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm a friend of Eli. Alex Krantz is here.

• 2:03Alex Cranz?

  I am so excited for this very specific podcast.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  It's this one's it's it's gonna get off.

• 2:08Alex Cranz?

  I'm pumped.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Dan Seifert is here.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  How you doing?

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Allison is here. Allison.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  A little bit later, Monica is going to join us because it's Apple Review Week.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  It is. It's been Apple Review Week.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  It's been it's been Apple Review Week.

• 2:22Alex Cranz?

  For a week.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Allison reviewed the iPhone SE. Monica reviewed the Mac Studio, which I reviewed the studio display. It's we reviewed both things at the same time, but I was focused on the display and she was focused on the studio. And then Dan reviewed the iPad, the iPad Air. So lots of Apple stuff. There's some other stuff we should talk about, but like Alex said, this this podcast is gonna get wild because there's good parts and there's bad parts and there's medium parts. We're gonna laugh, we're gonna cry.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  It's the full spectrum.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  There's gonna be some very oblique references to Dieter jokes. It's gonna be great. Let's start with the iPhone. Allison, you reviewed the iPhone SE. It feels like there's a lot to say and it also nothing to say.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's it's a very nice phone.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  That's the thing. It's like, it's still what the iPhone SE has been. It is a very inexpensive way to get into Apple's ecosystem. You get so it's it starts at $429. You get, you know, the newest processor, the A15, but it's kind of just a lot of the same of what the iPhone SE has offered in the past. There's, I mean, there's 5G now, which, you know, we're semi excited about.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  But yeah, it's still it's still a really solid, like, amazing mid-range phone. But I think at this point, this is just kind of like my whole takeaway in the review is a 4.7 inch screen is just not cutting it. And I say this as a person who loves small phones dearly. They're wonderful.

• 3:56Alex Cranz?

  I'm with you.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's it's like such a joy to put this phone in my coat pocket and have that moment where I'm like, oh, is the phone in my pocket? I'm like, yes, it is. It's just really small. But it just, it feels really cramped and it's those bezels really. It's like the aspect ratio of the screen and there's a lot of real estate taken up by the chunky bezels. It's an iPhone eight design, which was put out to pasture quite a while ago, except for the iPhone SE.

• 4:27Alex Cranz?

  If they had kept the size of the phone, like the external size of the phone, but gotten rid of the bezels and just made it all screen, would you have liked it more?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I definitely would have liked it more, but then it's like, what is the iPhone mini? And then that's a philosophical question.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  When you say it's an iPhone eight design, I just want to come, isn't it more like an iPhone six design? Right. This basic design had been floating around for a very long time.

• 4:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have my original SE.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  That's like the iPhone five.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it goes back. It is a throwback.

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  I don't know. It's not the worst. You have the, the home button still, which some people really want and they don't want Face ID. And the iPhone SE will give you that. You get the latest performance. You get a great phone. You get to keep your touch ID. So it like, if that's you, then this is your phone and it's awesome.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  So I was talking to our friend Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal and she went through the same review week that we did. And she was like, you don't understand for Wall Street Journal readers, the iPhone SE is the Super Bowl. Like this is what they want. This is what they care about the most. She was like, I can't screw up the SE review. This is it. Like they don't, they want, they love the home button. They want a great camera. They don't want to mess with what they know. This is like the phone for them. I think it's fascinating, right? Like our audience is very much like, what is the latest in great? I mean, if you're listening to the show, you're very interested in things like phone specifications. At least I believe you are. And I just think that's like, you know, Apple's product line is so big now.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  It's like basically every $50 price point, or I guess now in the 5G era, at every $70 price point, Apple has a phone for you and this one is just like holding down the low end. But then I, just looking at their pricing, you can get an iPhone 11, which is kind of like a dramatically better phone with a bigger screen. For what 70 bucks more? It's $4.99.

• 6:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, I would just get that.

• 6:36Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  Like you can get 128 gig version of iPhone 11 for $5.49.

• 6:40Alex Cranz?

  But would you have 5G?

• 6:43Speaker 03

  You wouldn't have 5G, but I think that there's something to be said about like how most iPhone SE buyers are actually buying their phone. And they're not rolling up to apple.com and ordering it there. And they're probably not really ordering it or buying it from the Apple Store. They're probably buying it through a carrier and the carrier is like, it's $11 a month for the, and then like in the tiniest print, it's $11 a month. And then it says for the rest of your life, but like in the tiniest print.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then they put you on a 5G plan and that plan is more expensive, even though you don't need it.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Right. But what they're not looking at like, oh, this one is 600 or your $500 versus 430. They're like, this is $11 a month. It's like really cheap. It has all the stuff that I'm familiar with. That's why I'm buying it. But like, I really also feel like the, the reason people buy the SE, the marketing line says they love the home button and it's familiar, but the real line is it's cheap. And that is why it is sell, it sells. It is purely because it's cheap. If Apple made a cheap iPhone mini or iPhone 11 design, that was just $400 or $430, that's the one people would buy i- if it was cheap. It's just because it's cheap. That's the reality of it.

• 7:49Alex Cranz?

  Here's my question. iPhone SE comes out. If they did an iPhone X SE Extra L, a large iPhone SE, same price, giant screen, would that sell more?

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  The most more.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  You could tell by just how poor the iPhone mini sales have been. People always choose the bigger screen. At the same price, they choose the bigger screen.

• 8:11Alex Cranz?

  That's the thing I poke at is what if, this is get a little galaxy brain. What if the reason people don't buy the mini and buy the SE is because the SE is small, but also cheap. And the people who want a small phone also do not care about specs.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  I think all the people that want a small phone write for tech blogs. Like that's the entire market.

• 8:37Alex Cranz?

  Probably true.

• 8:39Speaker 03

  I mean, like, but but Allison, not to put you too much on the spot here, but like, you like small phones, which is fair and cool. But what phone do you own?

• 8:48Alex Cranz?

  It's an iPhone 11.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  So like,

• 8:50Alex Cranz?

  which was the smallest phone you could get. Yeah.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  All right. All right, Dan. Huh?

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  What now, counselor?

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  I'm just excited to have somebody on the Vergecast today who also likes small phones. Yes. I have been bullied so often by large phone tapes. It's unfair.

• 9:10Nilay Patel?

  We have a lot of small phone proponents on our staff, but I will just offer you this counterpoint.

• 9:15Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  My mother was a like devout Steve Jobs fan. Like, this woman read the biography when it came out and called me in tears. And she was like, after he left, all the designs went bad and these phones are ugly. And so she never wanted to give up her like last Steve Jobs iPhone five.

• 9:35Alex Cranz?

  That's I love her.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  So she held on to it for her. She had a tiny phone. And then it was time to finally give up the phone. Could not was not operative anymore. And we went to the store and she was like, I just want a small one. All these phones are too big. They ruined it. Like, this is the conversation I'm having in the middle of a pandemic in an Apple store. She's like, after Steve Jobs died, I'm like, I can't be here with you. And I was like, no, no, you don't understand. The font size on your phone is out of control. The display scaling on your phone is like, it's tiny screen, huge letters. Like, you're reading one word at a time. So I bought her the Pro Max. And it's great. And now she is never going back.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  She's like, this is the best phone I've ever had, right? Because it's gigantic. And if I could buy her that mid range, like Samsung makes a thousand phones like this. The mid range phone with a huge screen. And that's like their sweet spot. And I feel like Apple doesn't have that thing. So we end up in this weird conversation about the iPhone mini. But if they had that thing, it would by far and away be the best selling iPhone.

• 10:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  That's what the the 11, the XR was.

• 10:45Alex Cranz?

  Right, right.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  That weirdo phone that they made.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, you could look at this like the history of the iPhone, that the iPhone sales didn't really skyrocket until the six plus came out. Apple finally came out with that big screen iPhone and sales took off. And then the screen has gotten progressively bigger across the line until they introduced the mini, which no one bought.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  We've gotten, we've gotten so far away from the iPhone SE. See, Alex, you called it. You're like, this is gonna go sideways. The SE itself, Alison, tell us about the phone.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  It's nice. I mean, it really flies. Like, there's nothing, well, there's very little that I feel like I can't do on it that I can do on a $1,000 phone, which has been the case with the SE. Then it's, that's just kind of its trick is like, this is less than $500 and it does an amazing job. And if you look at purely like in the mid-range class, like across Android too, it, you know, it gives you IP 67 rating, got wireless charging. It's not MagSafe, but you get the Qi charging and that processor, it's immediately stands out.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  It's sort of, it would, it would be a no-brainer to me if the screen was a little more modern. But yeah, I just found myself, like, not that the iPhone SE owner is probably gonna be doing a lot of gaming, but I put Genshin Impact on there and you're just, your songs are over so much of the screen. I was like peeking around, like, where's my, oh, okay.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  I thought it was really interesting the way you put it in your review that like just the modern web and modern apps are just not designed for 16 by 9, 4.7 inch screen anymore. And that's where everything starts feeling cramped, the gaming example, but like, think about your email app. Like you see what, two emails on a screen before you have to start scrolling?

• 12:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  Or, you know, other, other applications that are very standard and like everyday applications are all taking advantage of the wider aspect ratio, the taller screens, because there's more real estate there to play with. And when you don't have that, especially if you're used to it, when you go back to like, like maybe if, you know, the SE buyer is someone who's never had it, they're not used to it, they don't know what they're missing. But if you're used to it and you try to go back to that, it is like a jarring experience. And I think that's really what came through in your review.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I think if you're, if you're coming from an SE and it's just time to get a new phone and. You want to get this one because you want to hang on to it for the next five or six years, like do it. You will be so happy. But yeah, I can't, I can't envision coming from a bigger screen and going to back to the 4.7 inch because everything is so tiny. I'm like, I'm doing my Duolingo and I'm like, I can't read these little words. I need, I need some kind of new glasses. I don't know. Also getting old.

• 13:42Alex Cranz?

  What was the battery life like on it? Cause I think that was like a big question mark coming into this.

• 13:48Speaker 04

  I thought it was fine. Um, yeah, the previous model battery life was a little iffy. It was a little dodgy, I think, whether you could get through a full day of kind of moderate use. In my experience, on a moderate day, I could get to the end of the day and I still had enough in the tank to get into some of the next day too. So it definitely, it feels like an improvement to me. I think it's a heavy user.

• 14:15Alex Cranz?

  And that was like with 5G on and doing its thing?

• 14:18Speaker 04

  Yes, which 5G is questionable where I live, but.

• 14:23Alex Cranz?

  No millimeter wave.

• 14:25Nilay Patel?

  I want to come back to the thing you said about five or six years. So it has an A15 in it, which is Apple's highest end iPhone chip. It does not have an M1 Ultra in it that has A15 in it. Maybe it should. Yeah, who knows? What this thing needs is 48 GPUs. No, it's got an A15 in it, which, you know, for a $430 phone is pretty remarkable. And that's, I think that's, and Apple's really good at software updates over time, much better than any Android phone vendor. So that's where, okay, five or six years of this phone sounds really reasonable. And that's why you put the really high end chip in there. Because you're expecting people to hold on to it for a long time. But I would just put that right next to what you're saying about the screen,

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  which is, this already feels small for the current state of web and apps. Six years from now, like this trend is not slowing down. Like six years from now, who knows? Like every developer could be assuming that your phone unfolds to become a much larger screen, which is right. And like, I don't know that's gonna happen, but you just see the trend line is, when we make fancy features on the website, right? We like test them out and we, we know that most of our readers are mobile, but we just sort of assume they have big phones. Cause that's what the data tells us. And so you just keep this trend going and it's like, soon you will not be able to read the web on your tiny phone. The processor will be there and maybe the, you know,

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  the mobile network speed will be there. But you're just gonna get completely left behind by the screen size. It's the first time I've thought about that with an iPhone.

• 16:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I felt so I, so I dug out the 2016 iPhone SE. I put iOS 15 on it, which worked. And, but I was going through something on Instagram and I was trying to like something that someone like DM'd to me and I physically couldn't. It was like the, the little like real estate that I needed to be hitting on the screen just like didn't exist. It was sort of like, yeah, this is what this is maybe gonna come to in five years when you're on your 4.7 inch screen and everybody else has the folding whatever. And it just kind of sucks. It's like, that is the, the really cool thing about this phone is you can keep it for so long.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  And it's that this 2016 SE is running iOS 15 flying. But it's, it's like the modern web has moved on, so.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about the camera real quick. It's got the single camera, no night mode, which seems like a real miss to me.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's, it just seems to be a choice on Apple's part because I can't imagine that the processor is holding it back. There are other phones with this processor that have night mode. That kind of stinks. There's, there's a lot of mid-range phones on Android that have perfectly decent night modes and cost about the same amount of money, have less fancy processors. So that, that sticks out a little bit. It is the same camera hardware as the previous generation. Still a single camera, which doesn't bother me a lot. I think people probably aren't buying it for the camera

• 17:47Speaker 04

  or they're not super interested in, in an ultra wide or kind of messing with a lot of settings. Maybe, maybe you are, but what you do get is pretty good. I mean, it's an iPhone camera. It's, it does what it does very well and video recording is very good, especially in the mid-range class.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  Do you think it's on par with the iPhone 11, for example?

• 18:10Speaker 04

  It's pretty close. Yeah. I think that, I think the night mode is-

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  I think you get night mode on the 11.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  I do. I do, in fact.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  The 11 is when I stopped using my RX 100 as much. That's why, that's, and I know that's the one you have. So it's like the comparison making. When the 11 came out, I noticed that I slowly stopped using my RX 100 as much as I had been. I thought the XS looked horrible, so that's probably like embedded in my brain. So this is like, goes back to the, the thing about the Wall Street Journal audience. Like the update you can bring to the audience is like, the camera is way better and you don't have to think about it or you can zoom, right? Cause that, that breaks people's brains that you can zoom in an iPhone, but it makes the image quality worse. Like significantly worse in digital zoom. And that to me is just like adding night mode to this would have effectively been free. It would have blown every other mid-range phone out of the water.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  And everyone could have seen that they got something cool. And it just seems like such an odd feature omission.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't figure it out. And there's sort of like a theory. You know, if you look at the product cycle, it was four years between the first two versions of this phone and then two years. So this is maybe like the S E S is sort of one theory on it, but like maybe in another two years, we're gonna get, you know, that more, a bigger screen, you're gonna get.

• 19:35Alex Cranz?

  Could they do it as a software update? Like, could we, could they just announce it when they announce all the other iPhones and be like, and by the way, this one's getting night mode?

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Or you, when iOS 16 comes out.

• 19:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Be like, we've added, who knows?

• 19:49Speaker 04

  That would be great. I don't know. Right to your senator.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Right to your senator. Okay, I want to end this by complaining about the New York Times, which I've been quietly vibrating in the background, ready to do. So I don't understand what's going on with the Times review. I'm certain the person who writes the review is lovely. The New York Times has fully decided that people should not care about their smartphone cameras. Like, they just don't think that people care about better pictures. So they wrote this review of the S E. And I just want to read this line to you. And you tell me what you think, because I think it is bonkers. So it's all this stuff. You probably want this $130 phone if you meet this any of these criteria. You don't care about features like ultra fast cellular, fine. You correctly recognize that smartphone technology has been around for so long, you should pay less for it, fine. And then there's

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  this line. You don't care about what the number of camera lenses or pixels on a screen tells your friends and colleagues about your wealth. And I'm just like, yeah, I mean, okay, maybe I just want to flex like my Range Rover keys in the club with my iPhone that anybody can buy. Sure, that's just who I've been. But like, the number of lenses is like, that helps you take better pictures. And like, all anybody cares about these phones anymore is like, the cameras. Like, when we do reviews, what are all the questions we get are cameras? And maybe that's our audience, it's not the Wall Street Journal, it's not the Times. I just don't understand this approach to this review.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's kind of news to me if like, multiple cameras on a phone is a status thing?

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  There's a lot of phones that have a lot of cameras. I don't know.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  I'm only carrying that Nokia 9 Pro around, it's got six camera lenses on the back.

• 21:36Alex Cranz?

  When was the last time a phone was considered one, like a status symbol? Right? Like, 2014, 2015, when they're like, we're making these phones for billionaires, and then we stopped.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  I, I think there's something about like, folding phones. Folding phones, when people see that, that it's different, they like, you know?

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  That's just the form factor. Eventually, I mean, like, I'm just telling you, it, and I haven't rolled up to the club in a long time, but if you roll up in the club and you're like, I have an iPhone 13 Pro, like, that shit is not gonna work.

• 22:07Alex Cranz?

  You have a broken iPhone 13 Pro, because the bell will throw it to the ground.

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking about? You're like, I have the fanciest Toyota Camry that has ever been made.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Also, yeah, it's not hard. I mean, the mid-range phones will just like, pack on the camera lenses, like, I have a macro lens on my phone, like, that's not really gonna get you anywhere special.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, for whatever reason, the fact that the Times has decided that good photos is not a thing that phone buyers should care about, it just breaks my brain completely. And then the idea that the number of lenses are signifier of wealth, and that is the only reason you should care about the number of lenses, is just like, no one's rolling up with a light show camera, being like, I've got 96 lenses.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  I'm just, I just looked at the back of my iPhone, and now I'm very confident in my family's hereditary wealth for the next few generations.

• 23:06Nilay Patel?

  What are you talking? I honestly think like Apple should add, my request is like, add night mode to the camera. The people who buy this phone will probably be happier if they take better photos in low light.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  That's like the main thing that is confounding to people.

• 23:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's one I don't get. I don't buy any good explanation from Apple. Just put night mode on it.

• 23:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  I'll start a campaign. I'll start a letter writing campaign.

• 23:32Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I tell you what the Times said about low light photography?

• 23:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  My favorite line. They said, you can always just use the flash.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Wow. Which is technically true. You can make everything into some sort of bizarre 90s Cobra Snake photo shoot.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  That is a choice you have. You can make your children look like they are completely strung out at any moment of the day. By shooting flash photos of them, especially your LED flash on my phone. Anyway, that is confounding. I just want to complain about it because I can't let it go.

• 24:06Speaker 03

  I just want to clarify, you can't always use the flash because like the iPhone has auto or off on the flash. So the iPhone decides whether you can use the flash or not.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Well, you put it in video mode.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  And then you just have the light on the entire time.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  The light on.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  You turn the flashlight on and then you take a picture.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  What you want to do is you want to switch your already behind the curve camera to its 1080p video mode.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  It does 4K.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  It does 4K?

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  It does, yeah.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  That's what's so baffling about it. It records 4K video that's better than like basically any Android phone you can buy, but they didn't put night mode in it.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Utterly baffling. I love, and also because this is like full on 4K 60.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:48Nilay Patel?

  And it, and the base storage is what 32 gigs?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  64.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  So you can record 10 minutes of 4K 60 on this phone.

• 24:57Nilay Patel?

  That's great. I love it. All right. That's the iPhone SE. I will complain about the New York Times more at a later date. Rest assured, I can do it at the drop of that. But Allison, thank you so much. It was a great review. You were just saying there's another Samsung phone, like a mid-range Samsung phone that's worth comparing to this, right? That's on the site now?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, Samsung just announced a A53 5G, which the A52 5G last year, it's mid-range phone, about 500 bucks. I, I thought it was really the best bet for that price range on Android. So they announced the newest version. It is $50 cheaper, which puts it just under the iPhone SE at the 128GB storage level. So I wonder if they're doing a little like undercutting there.

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  How big is the screen?

• 25:48Speaker 04

  It's much bigger. It's 6.5 inch, I believe.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  Holy, it could like be an iPhone SE.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  You could fit several iPhone SEs into it. But it's, it's the closest thing, I think, to, and they're, they're getting there on the software updates too. They're promising four years of Android OS updates and then five years of security updates. So this, I feel like Samsung is like slowly chipping away at what was just kind of like a guinea for the iPhone SE was like, you're going to get all these years of software updates. It's super cheap and it is, you know, built really well. So that's one to watch. I'm really interested in trying it out. And word on the street also is that it does not have a millimeter wave, just like the iPhone SE, and will also be sold at Verizon.

• 26:41Nilay Patel?

  The lie is over.

• 26:43Speaker 04

  Because our nightmare is over.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Allison, before you go, do you have a, do you have like an ORAN update for every time you're on? I'm like, I gotta ask. There's one person who cares about ORAN as much as me. It's Allison.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  I have no update. I, yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Do we have a fourth wireless carrier in this country? No.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  Around the clock Dish Network. Four years ago Dish Network promised us.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  We're going to do an emergency Vergecast when O-Ran finally happens.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  We should.

• 27:17Alex Cranz?

  Like absolutely.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  The Project Genesis Genesis Vergecast. It's Gen of Five Sis, by the way. We're going to be on to like the 6G hype cycle by the time 5G network comes. It's going to be very depressing. All right, Allison, thank you so much for joining the show. We'll be right back with Monica Chin, talk about this Mac Studio.

• 27:40Speaker 05

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• 28:49Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Monica Chin is here. Hey, Monica.

• 28:51Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  It's good to see you. I feel like we've been talking every minute of the day for the past week about these reviews. So Monica got the M1 Ultra Mac Studio and the Studio Display with the Nano Texture Coding. And then I had the M1 Max, Max Studio and the regular studio display with the regular coding. And I mostly just did benchmarks and then gave the computer to Monica. So she did all the computer review stuff, along with our amazing video and art teams. And I mostly just see all the webcams. So let's start with the computers. It seems, Monica, like Apple has pulled off a chip design dream with this M1 Ultra and then packaged it in a computer that everyone seems to be very happy with.

• 29:36Speaker 06

  Yep, that's pretty much right. Basically, you know, for years and years and years, people, various companies have been trying to take two GPUs and make them into one GPU. And it, you know, usually you just put two GPUs or two chips on one board and you put it in the system. And then you basically say the software has to figure out how to make those two GPUs work together. And that's really difficult to automate, because they really need to be in sync with each other. Like if they're, if one of them is not rendering things when it's supposed to, it can throw everything off. So usually what programs do is they just have the two GPUs like do separate things. So Apple's taken two M1

• 30:18Speaker 06

  Maxes. They've used this technique called UltraFusion to put them into one GPU. But the difference here, and what we haven't seen done successfully at this scale before, is that they are actually presenting themselves as one chip. So like a software will see them as one chip, and it will just give them a task, and they will do the task and divide it between themselves. So the software doesn't have to do anything. You, the user, do not have to do anything manually. It, they just work as one chip. There's a 2.5 terabytes data like going between them, or that that's the bandwidth that it supports. So these things are able to talk to each other into Mac OS at like a speed that we just have not seen before. And that's like a crazy amount of power that they put in this thing.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say that the clarification I make, I think I'm pretty sure Mac OS is helping a lot here. Like the, you know, the promise of all Apple things, that it is on the hardware and the software. So it seems like, yep, they've done this UltraFusion chip design technique, which Alex, you talked about a bit last week, right? They've assembled the chips in this way that seems to be more prevalent. But they've actually pulled it off. And then between the chip and the operating system.

• 31:28Nilay Patel?

  An application like Adobe Premiere, which is always the one that comes up when we do these reviews, does not need to be, it's just seamless for it.

• 31:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you didn't have to like actually do anything because I know a lot of times when you do these kinds of things, you have to tinker, right? Like to get, sometimes something will see it, one program will be like, oh yeah, I see these is, these two things as one. And sometimes you'll have to spend 40 hours downloading drivers and installing them. And this just like, you turned on Premiere and Premiere was like, oh, hey, cool. You have the new, like, did you have to update Premiere? Did you have to do like?

• 31:59Speaker 06

  We were never asked to do anything that like, I would have, we don't, did not have to do on the M1 Max machine. You did not have to divide anything manually.

• 32:08Alex Cranz?

  So you didn't have to like, reach out to Adobe and be like, send me a special updated version?

• 32:13Speaker 06

  For a dual GPU setup, no, we did not.

• 32:15Alex Cranz?

  That's cool.

• 32:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:16Alex Cranz?

  That is super cool.

• 32:18Speaker 06

  It worked out of the box.

• 32:19Alex Cranz?

  That is really awesome.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's right, that's the dream.

• 32:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Every other time we've done a pro review of a Mac and we've done the game, and Monica, you mentioned this in your review, like we've, we just like give the thing to people and then they're like, complain.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't seem faster or in particular Creative Cloud is like not updated. And it's usually like, Apple has wacky GPU ideas and no one else gives a shit.

• 32:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it was real, it's really interesting, like, I, I honestly think, you know, we have all these benchmarks, whatever. I think the most telling thing is you watch the Mac Pro review where we gave this device to like, all kinds of podcast people and music people and artists and they all use it across the board. They're all like, this is not any faster. And we gave this studio to our art director, our illustrator, our audio engineer, people like that. Every single one of them used it for like five minutes and said, this is so fast. The, the reactions were just opposite ends of the scale.

• 33:19Alex Cranz?

  Was that the M1 Ultra or the Max?

• 33:21Speaker 06

  That was the Ultra.

• 33:22Alex Cranz?

  And that's like the super high end one.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  So that, that Ultra that you had was the 20 core CPU with 64 GPU cores.

• 33:29Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  The fascinating thing about all of this is these cores are the same across the M1 line, right? So when we do benchmarks and we do like, single threaded CPU tasks. You can buy the $8,000 computer, but if you have a single-threaded or a single-core task, it's as fast as like the MacBook Air.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, that we would really need a revolution in architecture to see those increase, which, you know, we might very well get, but that's not what we were expecting here.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the thing about this computer to me, and this came up in the review, is the chip is fast, but it is consistently, the Ultra is 2X as fast as the Max, which is already a very fast chip, on the benchmarks.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  In the multi-core benchmarks, like Cinebench multi-core and Geekbench multi-core, you know, that's, and that's what you'd expect, it has twice the cores, you know, but it, you know, it is impressive that, you know, Apple got that right, and it was delivering the, twice the cores, as it would core, twice the score on the multi-core benchmarks that it was supposed to. In terms of like, real-world tasks that we ran, we were not seeing that. Like, we were not always seeing double the scores on Tomb Raider, we were not seeing double the scores on like, Pugia Bench for Premiere, Pugia Bench for After Effects. So, which I think just underscores that, you know, these are systems and these are software, and, you know, if you're not using a software that doesn't effectively scale to every available core, or, you know, effectively utilize all that GPU power, you're not necessarily

• 34:56Speaker 06

  going to be seeing that benefit. But the Ultra was a little bit faster than the Max, that was the impression that we got from the various professionals who use this for us. It was like noticeably faster for them, but it was not, either they didn't feel it was twice as fast, or the Max is already so fast that like, having that time was not like, super, did not like, change their lives.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  It seemed like a lot of the folks that you were working with were coming from Intel-based machines, right? Like, their everyday, I know Becca's daily drivers, the old Mac Pro.

• 35:25Nilay Patel?

  The old Mac Pro. $14,000 computer that we bought.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  $17,000 Mac Pro. It's that crusty old, crusty two-year-old machine of ours that we spent a salary on. She works on that, which is Intel based. I know Andrew works on the Intel based machine. Alex Castro, the illustrator, he works on an Intel based PC that he was comparing it. So they were seeing these huge advantages coming to this desktop form factor that they had not seen before. But I just wonder how much of that was because they were moving from Intel to Apple Silicon now. And like, there, there might be like diminishing returns between the Macs and the Ultra. You know, because the big leap is going from Intel to Apple Silicon, right?

• 36:11Nilay Patel?

  Dan, I think that point is like, well, taken, although I'm not sure. This is what I mean about Apple's wacky GPU ideas. Part of the jump to Apple Silicon was all these, all these apps, when they moved to Apple Silicon, they started using metal. They started actually taking advantage of the GPUs. And then the GPUs were not wacky old AMD GPUs or wacky Intel integrated GPUs. They're like reasonably good.

• 36:37Speaker 06

  Some of the kooky AMD chips.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like what do you got? And he's like, I know it's some weird shit. Like, so like, I feel like the chips themselves are more powerful. And now what you're seeing is Apple's approach to GPUs beyond just the wacky parts is no longer this like wacky idea that they're just going to throw more like GPU chips at the problem. They're just going to make the GPU itself bigger and addressed as a single device. And then figure out how to distribute it across cores. And I think that, that feels scalable. Like, that's why you see that the 2X in the benchmarks.

• 37:13Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's scalable in a really, a way that's got to be super frustrating for AMD and Nvidia. Because notoriously GPU makers do not like to talk about, they're like, they're not cores. We don't talk about threads. We talk about compute units or they make up some other word.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  The chip industry doing weird graphs?

• 37:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  Never seen that before.

• 37:33Alex Cranz?

  But Nvidia and AMD are like very particular about this. If you try to say, oh, this has got 56 or 64, they're going to be like, no, no, no, that doesn't matter. Nvidia in particular is like, that doesn't matter. And Apple is saying, no, actually these do matter. Here are really measurable differences. When you bolt twice the number of GPU cores on, you're going to see, you know, close to twice the performance. And that's got to be a little scary for the GPU industry, right? Like, Somebody's kind of calling them out?

• 38:02Speaker 06

  I mean, another thing not to overlook here is that Adobe has at this point had like two years to get its shit together when it comes to making its programs run really well on Apple devices. And that like, prior to M1s being released, we had been saying for years, like, all these Apple products are really good, the Cryos3 doesn't run well on them, it's full of bugs, like, on our Mac purview, it was like breaking everyone's plugins. Now we have a bunch of these programs that our professionals were using have been made and optimized to run on the M1 chip. And that allowed, I think, these devices to unlock potential in those programs that like, previous Apple machines just haven't been able to do because the software hasn't

• 38:47Speaker 06

  been focused on that area for a while.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say that Adobe's, the big stuff has moved over, right? So, parts of Premiere, parts of After Effects, parts of Photoshop.

• 38:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  The, like, 90% of that stuff is optimized. There were, you're mentioning Puget Bench. People don't know, Puget Bench is basically like, they're a systems vendor, but they sell a bunch of benchmarking plugins so that then they can sell you a faster machine to make their benchmarks go higher. It's a great business model. Some of the best marketing I've ever seen. But their plugins that run these benchmarks in Adobe programs are basically just like automations, right? You download a bunch of assets, you like, run the plugin, it times how fast.

• 39:28Speaker 06

  It's actually really fun to watch it because it takes control of your mouse for like half an hour, it just plays around in Premiere, and you can just watch and try to figure out what it's doing. It's like making, it's like throwing like, effects on the pictures, like making them all green for no reason, and then it gives you a number at the end. It's really fun.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's like, we're gonna run a GPU-heavy effect, and it's like, what we're gonna do is take this video clip and make it look ridiculous. Right, just like nuts.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  Just invert all the colors. It's like, oh yes, as one does.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Like you do. But it was like Photoshop or it was Photoshop that we couldn't run the benchmark because that part of Photoshop was not available on Apple Silicon yet.

• 40:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  Right. And there's like, there are these weird corner cases where the transition is complete. But to your point, it is mostly complete and it's mostly pretty good. I think the question about, do you get the M1 Max or the M1 Ultra? Like, if you know you need this computer, which I think now our entire video team fully in their heart believes they need this computer. Right. You're probably good enough right now with the Max, right? That's like basically what we saw.

• 40:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. So no one who we talked to thought that the Max was inadequate for their workflows. But, you know, they would have all chosen to be on the Ultra if they could. I think Alex Castro Illustrator said something to me that was like, yeah, like the Max would be great for my work. I think if I really wanted to take it to the next level, I'd want to be on the Ultra.

• 40:44Nilay Patel?

  Alex is like drafting the email to request a new computer right now.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Look at all this art we could have if you just gave me an M1 Ultra.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  Wandering the halls.

• 40:53Speaker 06

  I think like, you know, if you're someone who really needs every last ounce of speed you get, which some people do, and some people do want to pay for that, then, you know, the Ultra will be like a millisecond faster on various things that you're doing, which does add up in your, in your workflow. But no one was using the Max and was like, oh, this is slow. Like, the Max is also like very, very fast.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, so the Ultra is twice as expensive. So I would just connect this to our iPhone SE conversation, which we were just having, Monica, which is like, the thing will last a long time. So I think a good, like a good question is, how long do you expect to keep this computer? If it's a long time, then having the performance headroom of the Ultra might well be worth it as things get more demanding. If, I don't know, you're running some sort of tax scheme and you're just like flipping computers every two years? I've never run a tax scheme.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  I mean, studios, like, like, studios do flip computers every couple of years, right?

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  They're called tax schemes, Stan.

• 41:48Speaker 03

  They run the tax scheme, but like, they're the ones that are gonna buy the Ultra, right? Like, they're, if you're doing a production, maybe our, you know, Vox Media produces Netflix shows, maybe those teams really want these M1 Ultras because they have a lot of production work to do. But if you're a consumer like us, and you're doing, and even if you're doing like, heavy consumer work, like, I mean, Monica, this was the point you made right at the top of your review. I could run thousands of Google Docs on this all day long and never hit the ceiling of it, right?

• 42:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  So like, I, I, I think that the, the Ultra consumer, or the Ultra purchaser, is very distinct and like, knows what they want and what they need out of it. And then like, if you just want like, a killer desktop computer, just buy the Macs and load up on storage and RAM, and save that $2,000 for those other things that you're gonna need to pay for.

• 42:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. The other thing about longevity that is worth, you know, is gonna matter, it's not gonna matter to some people, it's gonna matter a lot to other people, is that it's not modular, like, the, the Mac Pro was. So you aren't gonna be upgrading the RAM or the storage.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Oh, but you could plug a display into it. That makes it modular.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  Any keyboard you want.

• 42:54Speaker 06

  There is that.

• 42:55Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's, that's, like, they've still gotta announce the Mac Pro, they've still gotta show that off. So I guess we're not gonna have to listen to more talk about the M1 Ultra when it comes out, and they're just gonna be like, yeah, it's got that. But also, modularity. Like, is that the plan?

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  And that means they're gonna have to figure out like, PCI expansion for this.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  How does PCI expansion work in the M1 world is gonna be a fascinating thing to see.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. I also, I think that's what's left for the Mac Pro, though. I mean, they were very clear. There's no more chips, but there's a Mac Pro coming.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Well, there's wheels. You can't get wheels for the Studio.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've gotta do internal expansion, they might move that to M2, you know, there's, they were clear there's no more M1 chips coming. Or, and this is my, this is my idea, they could go back to wacky GPU ideas in the Mac Pro.

• 43:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 06

  Just start stacking ultras on top of each other and have like a tower.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  What if they sold M1 ultras on a PCI card that you could click in? So you could just keep running more and more M1 ultras and like more and more GPU cores.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  No, you think I'm crazy, but this is what I'm suggesting. That they're gonna do like wacky afterburner card setups where they sell a physical piece of hardware that effectively accelerates one program, which is what the afterburner card does for Final Cut Pro. There's all kinds, like, all that stuff remains wide open.

• 44:16Alex Cranz?

  What if they let you update the storage in the RAM? What if that's the Mac Pro?

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  So you're never gonna get the RAM because the RAM is unified memory. That is the bet. And then when we talk about the jump to Apple silicon, like some huge undefined acceleration for all these Pro apps is that the video cards have access to just heaps of RAM and the CPUs have access to RAM fast enough to run a video card.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  Which is like an inversion of how things, they're each getting the thing the other kind of system used to have, but it's just one huge pool of memory. And like, I don't know, we, you know, we had our Apple briefing. I was like, okay, like on the MacBook Air with eight gigs of RAM, people run out of memory. What happens when Alex Castro is like, I need to justify this ultra? Like, here's 129 gigabyte file. And I'm like, yeah, that'll be interesting. So it's like, I don't think that we've seen that like play out.

• 45:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  In computing, that Apple's big UMA bet. Obviously, we've seen it play out on iPhones and iPads because they have unified memory, but we haven't seen it play out on these systems and we certainly haven't seen that play out in Pro machines that potentially need to last for a long time. But Monica, this was the con, like when you're listing pros and cons, the cons is you buy it and that's it, like you get what you get.

• 45:33Speaker 06

  Do you get what you get? That doesn't necessarily matter to everyone, but I mean, for some people in this crowd, it certainly is going to matter, especially with, to your point, this thing is so expensive, you, people are gonna buy it wanting to last, wanting it to last for a long time. And I think that is, you know, it's always the story with Apple, like you can't upgrade Apple stuff, but as you're getting into this price range in this market, I do think that is something to consider.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  I would not buy this M1 Max with 32 gigs of RAM.

• 45:57Alex Cranz?

  I immediately bought it if it's here tomorrow.

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  Did you really?

• 46:00Speaker 06

  There are two kinds of people.

• 46:02Alex Cranz?

  I bought it like they hadn't even finished. The keynote, and I was like, refreshing the thing because I'm on a 2016 MacBook Pro that when I do a Zoom call, I can't open a spreadsheet. So like,

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I think 32 GB of RAM is going to be like perfectly adequate for someone who is like, my budget is $2,000 for a desktop that's going to last five plus years. I think it's totally going to be perfectly adequate. If you're going to be running the Premiere Pros and whatnot, then like, maybe you want to upgrade that RAM, but it's not an inexpensive upgrade. It's what, $400, $800 to go to 64 gigs? It's huge.

• 46:38Alex Cranz?

  Apple is so excited because for years, the horrible thing about buying a computer from Apple was the RAM markup. And now you cannot escape it. Like before, you could be like, okay, I'll buy it and then I'll go upgrade my RAM for a reasonable price. And now it's like, nope, I guess I'm going to pay $200 for 24 GB more RAM or whatever. So this is, they're living the dream.

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  I just looked at this and so I, when I bought my 16 inch MacBook Pro, I bought the M1 Pro because that was like, battery life is all I really care about. And we, in our testing, we discovered the Macs had a lower battery life. And I realized that I, I thought I had like bought 64 GB RAM, but I bought 32. So I don't even know what I'm talking about. It was my own computer, I bought my own money.

• 47:20Alex Cranz?

  We're just going to be like, out of, out of capacity in about a year, Deli. We're both going to be crying with our 32 GB of RAM.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just think for consumer use, right? And like, I would say that I'm a professional user of Google Docs. I'm a pro Slack user, but.

• 47:38Alex Cranz?

  If they ever make a Google Docs specific MacBook, I will, I'm going to have a great time with that review.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  They're like, our world-class chip team has added.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  I mean, we're joking, but I have a browser window open right now that has eight Google Docs open in it right now, and that's just for this.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  That's fine. If they make one, if they're like, we've added a dedicated 12 core processor.

• 48:01Alex Cranz?

  Just for Chrome tabs.

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  Accelerates Chrome. I'm buying that computer.

• 48:05Alex Cranz?

  I will be like Alex and I will be ordering it on my phone before the keynote is over, keynote is over.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Is there someone we know that might, you know, work on a certain product line at a certain company that we could pitch a

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  You gotta disclose that.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Google Docs specific hardware to?

• 48:21Speaker 06

  It'll be like the Mac interview and I'll just have all you guys lined up to interview one by one about your Google Docs experience and how much faster it was in your Google Docs.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  A 20 minute video of just me being like, so here's my Google Docs experience.

• 48:37Speaker 06

  Tabbing through. I really like to open file and recent and you know, that's a lot slower on this machine.

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  That would be just 20 minutes of me bitching about every time I started a new Google Doc, it goes to my personal Gmail account and not my, not my work one. All I'm saying is this UMA architecture, like we still don't know it's going to play out in desktop computing and I would just always buy the most RAM. I think that's been the rule for 20 years that buying more memory for your computer is almost a more useful upgrade than the processor itself.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Sure, but to Alex's point, that could have been done at any point that you owned the computer. And now it's like, okay, well, I'm shelling out two grand for the base model of this computer. 512 gigabyte is actually a bigger concern I have than 32 gigs of RAM. Like I would fill that up with media.

• 49:21Speaker 06

  That is not enough. Yeah.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  So I, you need, you probably want to upgrade the storage.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  But you can buy more storage. This thing has ports galore, man. Just stick an SD card in the front.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  I, I get it, but like, who wants to do that?

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  Right now, every Mac accessory maker in the world is like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a little wedge of a hard drive and we're going to put it right under the top and instead of more ports on it.

• 49:41Speaker 06

  But that takes up a port that you could be using for more.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  Another display.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  Right, but I will add more ports.

• 49:47Speaker 06

  If I want to connect five displays to this thing and just have them on the wall, I can't, I got, every port counts.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  Monica, one thing that just did not pan out is Apple compared the Ultra to the 3090 on a, a series of charts. I don't know why.

• 50:03Speaker 06

  They had like relative performance on the Y axis. You know, that very useful word that we all know what that means.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we definitely, and they would definitely tell us which benchmarks they were running, which they refuse to do. But you didn't find that to be the case at all, that it could run with the 3090.

• 50:16Speaker 06

  No, I could not, did not replicate that in the GP benchmarks we ran. Our editor TC has a 3090 at home. He ran Geekbench compute for us. It just absolutely demolished the M1 Ultra. Like M1 Ultra didn't even get like half of its score. There have been some, like back in like October, there were some issues with Geekbench and Apple, but Geekbench has had like a lot of time to fix that issue. And also these were not like kooky scores that I would not expect to get. Like this is like, I think it's just a lot worse.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Heim and I looked, now that we have our results from benchmarks, the 3090 is like twice as powerful in various benchmarks as the Ultra, depending on the benchmark, depending on the test. And so Heim and I went back and looked at those weird Apple graphs. Okay, so the Y axis is relative performance.

• 51:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  And the X axis is power and watts. So the Y axis already is like just confusing. And maybe they're just, you know, they're, they're just moving other numbers. Like they're just turning Geekbench scores into 0 to 100. Like, I don't know what they're doing.

• 51:24Speaker 06

  Which makes total sense to do in charts, you know, just move, move numbers around.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just convert them into a different set of units for no reason. But here's the thing. The 3090 line on that chart stops at 320 watts. And the 3090 has a standard TDP of 350 watts and can spike to 400. So they just stopped the line at 320 watts. And we're like, oh, that's why. Like, there's just more line. That's the graph. Like, the relative performance, Y axis goes up to 200, but the 3090 line can go to 400 if you just keep letting it go.

• 52:11Speaker 06

  How utterly useful.

• 52:13Nilay Patel?

  I have complained about these charts so much. They, I mean, Apple's deeply aware about the charts.

• 52:20Speaker 06

  This is not going to shock anyone also, but the gaming, the frame rates we were seeing in games were not at all close to what we saw for the 3090 either.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  Actually, can you talk about this? A lot of our comments were about Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which is not optimized for Apple silicon, but it's like the only benchmark that we have across multiple systems.

• 52:39Speaker 06

  It is a standard benchmark that everyone runs. It is a very GPU-heavy game. It has been out for, you know, quite a few years now. Like, it's not like it's this brand new game that, you know, Apple hasn't figured out how to run. I mean, it is a game that, like, a graphically powerful computer, we would expect it would be able to run. Well, it was one of the first games with

• 52:58Alex Cranz?

  Ray tracing, like it was one of the first things we used for for benchmarking for ray tracing. Like Shadow Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a very good benchmark process product. And it's it's like it's like that and civilization. That's what if you're going to benchmark across Apple and and Windows, that's kind of it. Because Apple does not care about gaming, will never care about gaming. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but they they just don't care. And and they're never going to care about, you know, excuse me, PC gaming. They're never going to care about transferring PC gaming. They're never going to and and those companies are never going to modify their software to make it run better on an M1. I mean, they might.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  If Apple was smart, they would go and they would pay the developer Shadow of the Tomb Raider to optimize it for Apple Silicon just to end this.

• 53:45Alex Cranz?

  Just, yeah, just just to end end this like. And it's also funny that they compared it to a 3090 when Mac OS can't even really use Nvidia GPUs anymore. Like they got rid of CUDA support years ago.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, sure. But like, that's what their comparison is, that's the best one on the PC side. I understand. Here's a here's the thing. I understand why they compare it to 3090. All they're saying is for 200 watts less power, we can like run with the big dogs. Right? That's what they're trying to say.

• 54:15Speaker 06

  And that's what they said last year when they compared to the 3080. And that also turned out to be not really necessarily true.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  I just like, why walk into that fight? Like, the thing is historic. And the thing is a massive victory in ship design. The performance is out of control. People love it. And you're like, here's this graph that's going to make you mad at us and then not be true. Like, what are you doing?

• 54:39Speaker 06

  And just to be to clarify on what was bad, the frame rates we were getting from the the M1 Ultra were still like, you know, well above 60. So it's not like, like, this couldn't run the game. Like, the the frame rates are clearly good. The issue is that there's still stutter going on in the game. Like, it was still like, even when it was running like over 100 frames per second, like there was, it was still hiccuping all the time. Which I think just goes to show, like, you know, this is not a gaming PC. No one's going to buy it for games. We understand that like games are optimized for it. We understand that. But, you know, in terms of comparing graphics power to the graphics power that other machines have, like, that's a number we get that we're going to use.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  If you can find us a game that runs an Apple Silicon and Windows that is graphically intensive, that has a built in benchmark.

• 55:25Speaker 06

  And don't say like World of Warcraft, because I'm not going to. Catch all the forecraft. Sorry, I'm not doing that.

• 55:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you can find us that test, we'll run it. But this is what we got, I think is basically the answer. So I just want to start, I want to start the high before we go to the low. That's what I was trying to do there is like, we're going to build up his historic computer. Deeply disappointing display.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what's going on with this display. So Apple announced the Mac Studio, they announced the Studio Display, they canceled the 27-inch iMac. Everyone is like, okay, here's what they're doing. They're reselling the display for the 27-inch iMac, which is the only 5K display apart from the, I would say, much hated LG Ultra Fine 5K. People do not like that display. So here it is, it's in a case, you can plug it into this thing, it replaces sort of the iMac Pro. There is, I would say, just an inordinate amount of chatter about whether Apple will do another iMac Pro or another 20, I don't know what's going to happen. These are the computers that sell now. So we get the display. Apple's like, the display is the 5K display, it's beautiful. They don't make a lot of claims about the display itself for reasons I will get into in

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  a moment, but they make a huge claim about its video conferencing capability. Right, it's got a three mic array, it's got six speakers, it's got a 12-megapixel camera that is the same camera as the iPad.

• 56:45Speaker 06

  How was that camera, Neelai?

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  And it's got an A13 chip, which is the same chip as the iPhone 11 we were just talking about, that I was like, this is the, this is the phone that made me stop using my RX100. So I'm expecting to be blown away. And I will say, this is probably not fair to Apple, it's not fair to the Opal team, but what I was expecting was we, there's that startup Opal that Cam has reviewed their camera, it's a $400 standalone camera, it's called the Opal C1. It is the same camera module as the original Pixel and a little Intel chip that does computational photography and the webcam is great, which is great. I bought one for our CEO, because I was like, you gotta stop doing all hands on this whole company on your MacBook Air. Right, so like, the thing's great.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  So I'm expecting that Apple's going to do computational photography at smartphone level.

• 57:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  On this display.

• 57:37Speaker 06

  Did you get that?

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  The thing is garbage, like.

• 57:40Speaker 06

  It's so, so bad.

• 57:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's so bad.

• 57:43Speaker 06

  It's really ridiculous to look at.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  It's, I don't know what's wrong with it. I honestly can't tell you. It's a 12 megapixel sensor and an A series processor. Five years, a half a decade of experience will tell you that Apple is good at those two components, making good photos. An A series processor and like, that's Apple's stuff. They know how to do anything. It's like, put those together and make photos that are better than any Android phone like, and the thing is garbage.

• 58:12Alex Cranz?

  I have a theory.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Alex Cranz?

  I've got a theory. It's a really bad theory. So I was looking, I was looking at, you know, you, the lovely video, everybody, please go watch it. There's a really great comparison shot and it's Nilay and like four different cameras at once. There are no shadows, right? Like contrast does not exist on this thing. I think they used cardboard cutouts of people for all of their testing. So they never had to actually like mimic real world, like contrast in what people actually see.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I, I don't know, man. We took briefings, you know, and they were saying they were on these cameras and the briefings, it did not look this bad. I got home, I plugged the thing in, I plugged it into the Mac Studio that I had, I plugged it into my MacBook Pro. Monica had one. She plugged into a bunch like, it just looks bad. Like Joanna Stern compared it to her BlackBerry. Ten years ago.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  It, it does some weird stuff too, right? So like part of the pitch is that it supports center stage, which is the auto framing type of feature that they debuted on the iPads already. And it's kind of whack when it does that, which is, it's kind of a weird thing to put on a monitor where you're sitting still anyways. But it has that feature. It's got portrait mode with an M1 computer. So if you've got a Mac Studio or you got an M1 MacBook, you can do portrait mode on there. But like, it's a 12 megapixel camera, which has a very wide field of view from 12 megapixels. You can pull a 4K video feed out of, because that's enough resolution for 4K. But this camera never gives you the full 4K. If you turn off center stage,

• 59:45Speaker 03

  it like, is a very cropped in view of that field of view and it's still 1080p. It's, it's very low quality. It's very strange.

• 59:53Alex Cranz?

  Do you think they sheaped out on the RAM and?

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  In the studio display.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  They didn't get the upgrade when they were buying and then they're like, oh, should have gotten the 64.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, let me just finish this and then we can, we can, I don't know what's wrong with this thing. So all week I am sending basically selfies of myself in various lighting conditions to Apple, which is a weird thing to do. I'm like, here I am in my basement again, like, hooray, like, here I'm in the office, like, comparing it, you know, we, we got, there's some friends of the verge out there who review products. So like some little back channel opens up. Then we're also like, this is crazy. Again, more selfies of myself sent to more people this past week than I've ever been comfortable with. You know, and Apple's like, we're looking into it. Yeah, it's all very sincere. I ran a full cyst diagnose. Actually, Monica ran it for me. We sent that over because I didn't have the machine anymore because I was back home and it was in the office.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  We sent that to Apple. We checked all the firmwares. We updated the soft. It's all the same. So finally last night, Apple says, and Dan and I were joking, like, I could have written this line the first day.

• 1:00:59Speaker 06

  And just pre-recorded in the video.

• 1:01:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like I didn't need to wait until the last minute. Like, we've seen the thing. It's not behaving as we expected. A future software update will fix it. Okay. Sure. I, I don't know. Like, maybe it will. The rule, and this has been our rule from the beginning of the verge, dating back to our Engadget days, like whatever, is we've been burned too many times. So people promise us software updates and you review what's in the box. Cause you can never count on the software update coming and you never know what it's actually going to fix. So I asked, when is it coming? What will it fix? No answers. So I don't know if they can fix it. I don't think they should fix it. Now that the reviews are out, there's like noise in the world. This is a last minute bug and it actually isn't. Who knows? I don't know. But the thing looks like a potato. Like, that's, that's what I got for you.

• 1:01:45Speaker 06

  My biggest impression was that I would take a lot of, I was like hanging out with the person who made our video, Becca, this entire week. And we would often be taking these meetings together. We'd be talking about this review. It's would be like me and Becca trying to get in the frame and Center Stage would just lose its mind. Like it could not figure out who to focus on. It was like swooping back and forth like, like, like one of those like VR amusement park rides. Like it just like, it could not figure out where, like, everyone was just telling us to turn it off because it was so distracting. Like it kept going in and out.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  It keeps moving around. I was trying to record my little update last night with Center Stage on and I was like, I can't. Like this is just not working. Like it's just like flying around.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so we were not the only people who ran into problems with the camera. Joanna ran into these problems, got the same statement. Sean Gruber ran into these problems, got the same statement. He actually called out the center stage stuff. I was so distracted by how bad the camera was. I was like, I can't even think about anything else. Like, I'm not looking at your center stage right now. I will say the microphone is great. It is like really good. The speakers, I don't know if two speakers in a stereo pair that are like 18 inches apart can produce spatial audio. I don't even know if spatial audio is like a real thing that is worth it.

• 1:02:59Alex Cranz?

  That is a lot of air quotes happening right now on this podcast.

• 1:03:04Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, did I try to have the experience of Jimmy Page sneaking up behind me with a guitar solo with this computer? Like, yes. Did it have like, was I surprised? I was, but the speakers do sound good. I just, you know how I feel about audio processing. And then the display itself is just like, this panel is from 2014, man.

• 1:03:24Alex Cranz?

  It was impeccably calibrated.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  It is impeccably calibrated, is very bright. Dan's theory about 600 nits versus 500 nits is it's in a different case and it has fans so they can run the backlight LEDs brighter.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Right. It doesn't have a whole computer in there soaking up, making heat so that could, that's, that's my theory at least, yeah.

• 1:03:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. But in your day to day use, are you running this thing at the full 600 nits? Like, maybe, like, are you gonna see it? Like, I don't know. But then it's just a single LED backlight. And I went and I was like, just like, look around, it's like, there are $379 TVs with full array local dimming now.

• 1:03:59Alex Cranz?

  You guys all took offense at this, but I actually kind of like it. And that's because I watch all of, it's a dumb reason, it's a dumb reason, I know.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  So, so Alex is coming out as a, a dark, dark grays enthusiast.

• 1:04:10Alex Cranz?

  I love my dark grays.

• 1:04:15Alex Cranz?

  I love my OLED. I adore my OLED. The thing I cannot stand about 99% of backlight TVs is they cannot mimic, like even really good tons of.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  The bloom.

• 1:04:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the bloom. The bloom just distracts me, irritates me. And so I would rather have screen wide bloom where I don't have to think about it. The blooming little spot.

• 1:04:37Speaker 06

  Just everything's blooming, so you just get used to it?

• 1:04:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like that for me, I was like, you know what? I don't hate that. But also I watch, like, I'd be using it in a big room anyway with a lot of tea, with a lot of light. So it's not going to hit me as hard as somebody who's like sitting in the darkness trying to use this thing. It will suck.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  Like, I will say, I've never seen two displays look more different than seeing the XDR next to this one, the Pro Display XDR next to this one in like a dark, our dark office. Like, it was just, it was like, basically, like, literally night and day. Like, there was one, like, very bright, dark gray, and one that is actually black. It was wild.

• 1:05:14Alex Cranz?

  I do think the thing that provided the most irritation from when I, because I went and looked at it with Monica. I brought in all my really stupid, little nerdy patterns. And I was like, let's test the patterns. And Monica was like,

• 1:05:25Speaker 06

  It was fascinating.

• 1:05:26Alex Cranz?

  I said it just like that. Monica was like, very, very polite, was like, sure.

• 1:05:30Speaker 06

  No, it was awesome. It was awesome.

• 1:05:33Alex Cranz?

  But, but before that, Monica had to like wipe the entire thing down repeatedly because you had the nano texture, right?

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  Oh, every two seconds, we had to wipe it down because you, your hand comes within like 10 feet of this thing, and it gets a fingerprint on it.

• 1:05:50Alex Cranz?

  Magnet for hand oils.

• 1:05:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, which we sort of, you know, that obviously was a problem for us because we were carrying this thing around everywhere. I don't know how much of a problem that is for like, the average person just to like have it on a desk. Like, I don't know how often they're going to be touching their display, but.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're gonna move. They're gonna adjust the.

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  If you adjust the angle, you will have to, probably have to wipe it.

• 1:06:08Alex Cranz?

  You will need to wear gloves.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  Alex, your weird ideas went backwards.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  And I kind of buy the argument, like blooming an LCD TV is bad. Like, this is what a great IPS LCD has looked like since 2014.

• 1:06:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Right. I mean, they started ship. I'm looking at a 2015 iMac right now with the same panel in it. It's it is exactly the same. Right. You can get the QD OLED that Cam has on his desk.

• 1:06:36Alex Cranz?

  It's in the it was in the office and I went and looked at it stunning gorgeous. I cannot wait to read the review.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  $1300.

• 1:06:43Nilay Patel?

  13 but cheaper than this thing.

• 1:06:45Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's my point.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  You can save the money and you can buy a webcam that doesn't insult your friends and colleagues.

• 1:06:52Alex Cranz?

  Or you can buy spend for like, okay, it's $1300, $1600. So for $100 more.

• 1:07:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, here we go.

• 1:07:01Alex Cranz?

  You get a better display. Yeah, for $100 more, you get the QD OLED and you get the Opal. And then you've got a good webcam and a really, really good display that you can presumably touch without needing gloves.

• 1:07:16Speaker 03

  I I'm gonna be the the reason to buy the Apple display argument is because of its stupid 5K resolution though. But to like Mila's point, like you've had that since 2014. Like the like the like the person who wants the 5K display is not interested in the QD OLED because it is a 1440p panel that doesn't scale macOS nicely. It doesn't have pixel perfect icons and all this other stuff, which is like a thing that a lot of, you know, creatives and developers care deeply about. They want that sharp resolution. If you're coding all day long, you're looking at little text. Sharp resolution matters a lot more than refresh rates.

• 1:07:48Alex Cranz?

  So theoretically, everyone in this room should want the 5K because all we do is look at text all day.

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, but but unless you play games in the evening, like then it then, you know, you want the refresh rates, right? And you want the contrast, or if you're using your monitor to watch movies or whatever it is, then then the QD OLED will be fantastic. But like, you could have gotten that experience for seven years now, or however long it's been. I don't know how to count. Is it eight years? Maybe it's eight years since 2014 now. And and we're not seeing any advancement on this. And like, it's a $1600 display. Like, I feel like we could excuse the fact that the the panel was old if it was $800. Like, we'd be like, all right, whatever. That's the Apple tax that you're paying and you get the speakers and the microphone and a terrible webcam. But this is like $1600. When I look at like $1600 displays, I'm looking at 5K, 2K panels from LG that are ultra wide

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  with, you know, DCIP3 gamuts and everything like that that are like 40 inches. That's a $1600 display, like. They kind of blow this away when it comes to like an actual monitor experience.

• 1:08:50Alex Cranz?

  This could end up being like the HomePod, the original HomePod. So if we wait a year, it'll probably like half in price.

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  They'll put out a tiny one.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  They will cancel this one and they will put out a 15 inch USB C display.

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  You like hold it in your palm and like, yeah.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's to me, it's you can't have HDR without local dimming. Like if you just like, play that in your head to do HDR, you need some parts of the screen that are way brighter than others.

• 1:09:20Alex Cranz?

  Got it.

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  So you can't just ramp the whole backlight. You need to selectively light up parts of the display. So you can't have HDR without local dimming. There's no lighting, so you have no HDR. Now this thing is just like out of the running. Like I do keep coming back to the fact that the cheapest TVs now have full array backlights, full array local dimming backlights with HDR. And maybe you could still use the panel, but why not innovate on the backlight, which is like a totally possible thing to do. And they did not do that.

• 1:09:50Alex Cranz?

  For the same price, you could go get for around the same price, a 48 inch LG OLED with 120 hertz refresh rate, the absolute best color and.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  But you would only get that 4K resolution.

• 1:10:05Alex Cranz?

  But yeah.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  And you'd run.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  And also it's a 48 inch screen on your desk. And I can tell you that's not a fun time.

• 1:10:11Alex Cranz?

  Don't do it. It's so much TV.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  I personally cannot really see refresh rates beyond 60 hertz. This is actually like, Dieter and I used to talk about this all the time. Like he was really, he could see the refresh rates.

• 1:10:22Speaker 06

  I absolutely can.

• 1:10:23Nilay Patel?

  And I see HDR in color and like, I don't know, maybe that's just a thing. Like you're one or the other, you're left-handed or right-handed. But to me, it's way more important to have the HDR in the, in the backlight than refresh rates. I know, we have tons of people in our audience, Monica, who can see it.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a constant argument in, in our Slack as to like, how could you buy a 60 hertz monitor? I will say that like for a monitor where your inputs are detached, you've got your mouse, your keyboard, or your trackpad or whatever. I do not see as big of a difference. I'm looking at 120 hertz monitor right now and I really only use it ever for work. And if I turn it to 60 hertz, I really don't notice much of a difference. You do notice a difference in gaming because everything's a little bit smoother there. And I definitely notice it on a lot of touchscreen devices. And we'll probably talk about this with the iPad. But if I'm directly manipulating things and I'm actually reading text as I'm scrolling it with my finger, I notice that 120 hertz because I can still read the text as I do it. Whereas a 60 hertz screen will blur it out or get choppy. So it really depends on your use cases, whether faster refresh rates make sense for your needs.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  But I think anybody could probably tell, to your point, Eli, the difference between an HDR and a non HDR screen, most likely regardless of what you're doing.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know what's going on with this display. I don't know why $1,600. I don't know why buying a stand that allows you to adjust the height is another $400.

• 1:11:42Alex Cranz?

  That's the real offense.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  And the best part is if you make the wrong choice when you buy it, you're stuck.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  You're screwed.

• 1:11:48Speaker 06

  If you have the Max Duo, you can plug five of them in.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  You can plug five of them in, which is obviously important. And then in a dark room, you would have just a source of blinding light.

• 1:11:58Speaker 06

  Five gray pills.

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  People have been talking about like Perfect Blacks on displays since at least 2007. Like that's when I went to CS and Pioneer would have us in for their Curro Plasma demos, where they'd show you that all the other ones had gray backlights and the Curros. I still, well, we still have a Curro Plasma, man. You light that thing up, the lights in our house dim. It is an experience.

• 1:12:22Speaker 03

  Weighs 75 pounds.

• 1:12:23Nilay Patel?

  It's, yeah, it's just, it's in another room. And every now and again, I go and like lovingly gaze at it. We haven't turned it on in forever, but I'm never throwing it away. It was like the first expensive TV I ever bought and we are keeping it until we're dead.

• 1:12:36Speaker 06

  Just brownouts for the whole neighborhood.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  But Perfect Blacks.

• 1:12:44Nilay Patel?

  But that's like, since 2007, we've been chasing after this. And a $1,600 display from Apple, which in every other category where it makes the displays, makes the best one.

• 1:12:54Alex Cranz?

  It's like offensive.

• 1:12:55Nilay Patel?

  Utterly bonkers to me. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see if they can fix this webcam and maybe that will change things dramatically.

• 1:13:01Alex Cranz?

  That'll also fix the black lights. Who knows?

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  Software update to full every local tuning. That'd be incredible.

• 1:13:08Alex Cranz?

  Surprise.

• 1:13:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we still have to talk about this iPad. Monica, thank you so much.

• 1:13:13Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:13:13Nilay Patel?

  We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

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• 1:14:05Speaker 07

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• 1:14:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Actually, Monica is going to hang with us, talk about this iPad. But Dan, you reviewed the iPad Air.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  I did.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  I will tell the audience that I specifically deleted the line in your conclusion where you're like, I have nothing to say about this computer. And I was like, no, that's your job, homie.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  I had this crisis of confidence.

• 1:14:53Speaker 06

  If I could put that in 99% of my reviews, I would have deleted that.

• 1:14:57Speaker 03

  I will say that the fact that I had nothing really to complain about with the iPad is a testament to how good the iPad Air is. The iPad Air is an excellent product, and it is more excellent this year than it was two years ago when they last refreshed it. It is closer to the iPad Pro experience than it's ever been before, and it's remarkable that it does it for $600. Like, when you think about, the original iPad came out in 2010 for $499. If you do the inflation calculation or whatever, it's going to be way more than $499 in today's dollars. This is giving you for $600, it's giving you basically Apple's fastest iPad processor, the same amount of RAM as you get in a comparable storage iPad Pro. It runs all the same software and everything like that.

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  So it really obviates the need for the iPad Pro for a lot of people. There's some reasons you might want the iPad Pro, but fewer and far between. And it's just like a really great iPad. And I think the other question that you had when we were editing this draft, Eli, is like, well, why don't you just buy the $329 iPad if like they all run the same software and they all do the same thing? And yes, that's true. The air is like, if you just want a nicer experience, you want those nicer speakers, you want the nicer build quality, you want the flexibility to work with the newer pencil, to work with the magic keyboard if you really want to. It's compatible with all the same accessories as the last model. And you just like, you know, want to be able to have that iPad that's going to last for five or six years. It's got all the headroom and all the power you could want.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  You're not going to hit the head limit of the power of this thing right now. But it'll last for a really long time, just like the iPhone SE, except that you're not really making those same compromises you do on the iPhone SE. You're not getting the old weird design. You're not getting a compromised screen experience.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  That's with a $329 iPad.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  That's yeah, the $329, but the $329 iPad does use an older processor and things like that. So you're, you're like, you know, giving, getting older technology.

• 1:16:51Alex Cranz?

  Well, this has got smaller bezels too, right? Like.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is like the modern Apple design ethos, right? It's got that uniform bezels across the, across the screen. So it feels exactly the same whether you're using portrait or landscape, which is really nice. That's like a kind of like an iPad hallmark. I've tested a lot of review, reviewed a lot of tablets. I've got the stack of Samsung tablets here that I'm going to spend time with next. Finally, promise you readers, we are working on them. We're not ignoring them. They do not have that flexibility to work as comfortably in portrait and landscape mode as the iPad does. And the iPad does it really well. And part of that is because of its aspect ratio and part of it is because the bezels around the screen are just all uniform. And it doesn't really matter how you hold it. So it gives you like all the best experiences that the iPad offers

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  for a price that is not $1,000 or $1,500 when you add in accessories and things like that. So it's like a really compelling type of tablet. If you're in the market for this midsize 10 inch, 11 inch tablet, which is a really great tablet experience.

• 1:17:50Alex Cranz?

  Is the display better or worse than the Mac Studio display?

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  It's better because it's, it's, you know, it's, it's different. I mean, like, I don't know, like it's, if we go and qualify it on all the things that the Mac that we just qualified the Mac Studio display on.

• 1:18:07Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  It doesn't have HDR. It maxes out at 500 nits. So it doesn't have that HDR mini LED experience that you get on the 12.9 inch iPad. Right.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  Or the 11 inch Pro.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  So the 11 inch iPad Pro does not have mini LED. So that's kind of why the 11 inch iPad Pro and the iPad Air are so similar because the screens are effectively the same except for refresh rate.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  So you don't get the HDR. You don't get full array local dimming or whatever. It's a, it's a, an LCD panel, but it is, you know, a great colors. It's plenty of brightness for use in any situation that I really could encounter in my time with it. And it's, you know, super responsive for touch and everything like that, like a typical iOS device is. So there's really very little to complain about with the screen. It is only 60 hertz and it doesn't have pro motion. And so for some folks who are, we talked about this earlier, if you're sensitive to.

• 1:18:57Alex Cranz?

  So Neel I would be fine. You would not.

• 1:19:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, like, if you're sensitive to refresh rates, you might see a smoother experience on the iPad Pro because that does have the 120 hertz screen. I think a big misconception is that you need that 120 hertz screen for great stylus experience. And that's not really the case at all. You can have just as good a stylus experience on the iPad Air. So if you're drawing or writing notes, I take a lot of handwritten notes on an iPad. I really didn't miss having 120 hertz there.

• 1:19:24Alex Cranz?

  Well, like the Remarkable 2 has the best stylus experience out there right now and it's, has a refresh rate of like one.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a wildly different technology there that you're stuck. But if you're comparing the Air and the Pro and you're like, I want to buy the Pro because I use the stylus all the time. It's like, well, maybe you don't really need the Pro for your stylus work. There's a, a digital artist on YouTube that I like a lot because I can't draw for anything and he's actually pretty good at it. He tests all the tablets and he does the comparisons of like the stylus response in slow motion and like his ultimate conclusion, um, his name is Brad Colbell, you can find him on YouTube, but like his ultimate conclusion is usually that the, there really isn't that much of a noticeable difference at the slower refresh rate. So the reason that you would get the iPad Pro are you get smoother scrolling when you're interacting with it. Now for me, what I use an iPad for is a lot of reading,

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  static text, and I don't need smooth refresh rates for that. Like it's, it's just there. So like.

• 1:20:21Alex Cranz?

  You don't want your pages to be really smooth when they're turning?

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, like I turn on the little page turn animation in the Kindle app so I can see the page curl over, which I do every single time. Like I turn it on every single time. I need that at 120 hertz. But like, I really don't. So like, when I was using the Air, it like, I have, I own an 11 inch Pro. That's my personal iPad. And like, I didn't miss the Pro's screen at all. Like, I really didn't miss anything about the Pro. That was the weird part about it was.

• 1:20:47Alex Cranz?

  Well, you didn't miss Face ID?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry. That is, yeah, you got me, Alex. That is like the one experience difference that I think a lot of people will experience between the Pro and the Air. The Air has the same Touch ID system in its power button that they had on the 2020 model. So you got to rest your finger on the power button to unlock it. It works very well. It recognizes your fingerprints very quickly. It's just not nearly as intuitive and seamless as the Pro, where you just tap the screen, it sees your face and you're in, right? Like, it's, it's, it's like, you have to stop, put your finger on the button, wait for it to do its thing. If you're like, you know, unlocking your password manager, or buying an app, or paying for something with Apple Pay, you got to stop, put your finger on the button, like, and I'm never holding it where my finger is near the button. So I always have to like-

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, do you always have it in the keyboard case?

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  So I, for, you know, testing, I put it in the keyboard case. I think the keyboard case is great, but I don't think that this is the right iPad to buy if you want to replace your laptop, because it's got a small screen. And like, I mean, most of the time for, you know, I think what this is really great at is that tablet experience. You are holding it in your hands, you're sitting on your couch, you're lying in bed or whatever, you're watching a movie, you're reading a book, you're reading Apple News, or an article, or something like that, and it gives you that nice large screen that is still comfortable to hold. As soon as you try to go into like, a laptop work environment, you really run into the walls of this really quickly in terms of like, the size of the screen, and the limitations that iPadOS puts on you, for multitasking, file management, all the things that we've beaten to death for a couple

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  of years now. And if you are intending on like, replacing your laptop, I strongly recommend you consider just going whole hog out to the 13 inch model. But then you give up the tablet experience, because a 12.9 inch iPad, it's kind of a crummy tablet when you take it out of its case. So, that's kind of where I sit with it. It's a really great tablet experience, and I don't really knock iOS, iPadOS all that hard for its like, lack of laptop experience in the review, because I think a lot of people are going to experience this mostly as a tablet.

• 1:22:45Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I mean, I have an 11 inch Pro. Which I clearly don't use enough because I didn't even remember what kind of display it had. The most used iPad in our house is my kid's $329 iPad, which runs exactly two apps, Disney Plus and YouTube Kids. And one is the one I wanted to use and the other one is full of garbage. It's poisoning her mind and that's the one that she wants to use the most.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  We'll, we'll let the audience try and figure out which one's which.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  It's Disney Plus, right? But it's like, that's what that thing is for. And it, the thing is trash and it's fine. And then I think most people, like if you've got the money to spend, you're going to want the nicer one. This is just how companies price products and create tiers. But then it's like, well, if I'm, they're so close in price, especially once you start factoring in the storage.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So my big complaint about the iPad era was that it still comes with only 64 gigs of storage, uh, which I think we talked about this last week, but like my perception did not change throughout the process of the review. So my review unit was a 256 gig model. I just kind of like cloned my iCloud account onto it and, and loaded all my iPad apps that I use and I'm at 87 gigs. So 64 gig right off the bat is like no good for me. Someone who's had an iPad for a couple of years, doesn't rely on it for like work stuff. I just kind of like use it as an iPad. Uh, I think if Apple had gone to 128 with this, uh, as a base, it would have been great because the upgrade is a hundred and $50 more and you goes all the way to 256 right away. Uh, and then you are like $50 away from the 128 gig iPad Pro, which now you're like,

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  oh, should I just spend 50 bucks and give up that half that storage?

• 1:24:16Nilay Patel?

  This is, they did this on purpose. This is like Phil Schiller and his pricing matrix is like, I'm going to torture them. I'm going to torture them into spending a little bit more money. Right? Like, I think that all makes sense. I, the one place I disagree with you, and I don't travel nearly as much as I used to. The reason I bought the 11 inch iPad Pro and the keyboard case, which is a very expensive, tiny little laptop, was it is great for traveling and is especially great for airplanes because, because iPadOS is like this endless, single tasking cannot be broken. It doesn't try to use GoGo data the way that like your laptop does.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  I think, uh, in that scenario, and I agree with you because back when I commuted, uh, when that was like a regular thing for me, I used an iPad on the train every single day, had built in cellular connection and that was like my train computer or it's a great plane computer and it's a great travel computer because the- I think the boundaries of iPad OS really mesh nicely with the boundaries of that environment that you're in.

• 1:25:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 03

  You're not going to be the most productive on a train. You're not going to be the most productive on a plane. You're going to bang out emails, write documents, you know, one at a time, things like that. You're not bouncing between tasks and things like that. You're not shuffling files around a lot in those scenarios. And I think the limitations of iPad OS and frankly, for me, the limitations of Chrome OS work really well in those environments and I can be as productive as I possibly can be with that device. But it is not replacing my laptop because as soon as I get to wherever I'm going, I'm not using the iPad anymore. I'm using my laptop or I'm using a proper computer because it does give me that flexibility where I'm in an environment that I can be more productive. So like the keyboard case is excellent for that type of purpose. And I actually really like typing on the magic keyboard, even though it's small, like I weirdly

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  get very comfortable on it very quickly and, and I can type very well on that. But like, once I get to the office, the iPad's staying in my bag because I'm just using my laptop, which is even bigger and more comfortable and I have more space and I'm more flexible there. So I, I don't think it replaces my laptop. When you start to add all these things together though, like 600 bucks for the air, $300 for the keyboard, if you want to get the pencil, now you're at a thousand dollars. That's a MacBook Air with the same processor, twice the stor-, uh, four times the storage.

• 1:26:29Nilay Patel?

  Right, but it's not as much fun to use. I'm, I've, I've, the reason I had a 12 inch MacBook with the single port for the longest time was because it was just like the right size for an airplane.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  Sure. But, but, but as soon as you got off that airplane, you weren't using that anymore, right?

• 1:26:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, presumably I'd, I'd arrived at a destination where I was going to talk to other people and now like immediately start using my laptop. Like that's like the saddest plane ride in the world.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  We're different people then clearly.

• 1:26:57Nilay Patel?

  It's like, you know, here's what I'm gonna do. I've, I've arrived. I'm gonna go to my hotel room and set up my three displays and just rock out like.

• 1:27:04Speaker 06

  Whip out your Mac Studio, set up your five displays and your TV.

• 1:27:08Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. I brought my iMac with me. Um, I don't know. I don't remember what traveling was like. It was a different life. I was a different person back then. So iPad Air seems great. It feels like if you need to buy an iPad right now, that one's fine, but we would probably expect new iPad Pros the end of the year.

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's weird. If you're, if you've been paying attention to the rumor mill, it's like they go back and forth every other week. New iPad Pros are coming this year. They're not coming this year. They will bring the mini LED screen down to the L of an inch. Oh, they're not going to do that this year. So it's like really hard to suss out whether we're going to see new iPad Pros this year. I will say that they released new iPad Pros last year, less springish, and the iPad Pro is typically on an 18 to 24 month upgrade cycle per history. So my money would be on early 2023 for an iPad Pro, but the supply chain kind of mucks everything up. So you can't really predict all that easily anymore. So I don't know. It's hard to say.

• 1:28:08Speaker 03

  If you're buying today, I would say the Air should probably be your first choice. If you're looking for a great iPad experience, make sure you can deal with that 64 gigs of storage. If not, then you're looking at upgrading the storage and then you're in this world, weird world of should I buy the Pro or not? And frankly, I don't know if I can help you too much there. You just got to look into your heart and decide which one is the better one for you.

• 1:28:29Nilay Patel?

  If you want Face ID, it's, is it Face ID, right?

• 1:28:32Speaker 03

  It could be Face ID. It could be the 120 hertz. I don't think it's the four speakers. Like I couldn't hear a difference between the two speakers on the Air and the four speakers on the Pro. Not significant difference there. It's definitely not the point one inch larger screen because it's a 10.9 plus 11. Yeah, that's not it. And, and, and maybe it's, you know, the, the 120 hertz screen. I didn't, we even talked about this at all. The Air now has an optional 5G, but it's only six sub six. It works. If you get 5G on the Pro, it's millimeter wave, which great if you can find it. But that 5G upgrade on the Pro costs $200 and the 5G upgrade on this iPad Air costs 150. So you have to pay more for that millimeter wave that you probably won't get.

• 1:29:14Nilay Patel?

  You're standing under a street corner with an 11 inch iPad Pro.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Cause you get two extra, you get an extra camera on the back. So you're taking pictures with your iPad on millimeter wave of, of the millimeter wave tower.

• 1:29:24Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's like, look at that rich guy. The staggering display of wealth.

• 1:29:28Alex Cranz?

  Got so many cameras.

• 1:29:30Nilay Patel?

  This extra camera and millimeter wave? Who is that?

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  And a keyboard case attached.

• 1:29:37Nilay Patel?

  Is that Warren Buffett?

• 1:29:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, a couple of, we're way over. Couple of notes, universal control also hit, macOS, iOS, iPadOS, uh, well, macOS and iPadOS. So now you can just like scoot a mouse, like magic. Very clever. It is very cool. It works really well. Um, if you got an iPad and Mac, although you have to upgrade your Mac to Monterey, which Yes, you do. That's how they get you. Also, the studio display requires Monterey, which is like, it's a monitor. But it's got a whole computer in there. Yeah, that's why it definitely doesn't need Monterey.

• 1:30:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, very confusing, whatever. Two things I want to call out, Mia Sato, our, uh, platforms and communities reporter on the creators desk, big Vimeo story. So Vimeo pivoted away from being a YouTube competitor to being like this B2B video provider, but now the creators on the platforms are being asked to pay thousands of dollars for hosting fees. They're not happy. That's a great story. You should, uh, read it. She also had an incredible story about Ukrainian influencers who were on TikTok doing TikTok stuff, like hustle, like business hustle advice and like workout tips. And now they're all like war correspondents. It is remarkable. It's like a great Verge story. It's about how people dramatically change the way they use the tools they have when circumstances change. There's, the layout's

• 1:30:56Nilay Patel?

  great. You gotta go read it. And then lastly, this is just a fun one. Jason Snell, who used to be editor of Macworld Magazine, when the Mac Studio was announced, I was like, this thing reminds me of this idea for computer people have had for 20 years. So he wrote about it with like all these pictures of old Mac magazines and like why people wanted Mac, something like the Mac Studio. It's just a great story. It's called the Mac Studios Myth Fulfillment. If you're into computer history, it's really good. Decoder this week, Matt Mullenweg, who's the CEO of Automattic. That's a company that owns WordPress and Tumblr and Day1 and Pocket Cast. Super interesting conversation. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Alex is Alex H. Krans. Dan is DC Seifert. Monica is MC squared 96. Allison is Allison Joe 1. That's it. That's for our cast. Later.

• 1:32:01Speaker 08

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• 1:32:47Speaker 09

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