Apple Macbook Air with M1 review / Apple will reduce App Store cut to 15 percent / end-to-end encryption for RCS in Android

Walt Mossberg joins the show to discuss his experience with Apple's Macbooks with the new M1 chip. Nilay, Dieter, Chris, and Dan discuss The Verge's reviews of the computers. Stories from this week: Trump’s post-election tantrum is holding up federal vaccine planning Virus surges complicate the distribution of scarce COVID-19 treatments CDC says people should not travel for Thanksgiving due to COVID-19 surges The COVID-19 pandemic hits new highs and new lows Apple Macbook Air with M1 review: new chip, no problem Apple Macbook Pro with M1 review: flexing Arm Apple Mac Mini with M1 review: over-performer macOS Big Sur review Here’s how to run any iOS app you own on Apple’s new M1 Macs Apple will reduce App Store cut to 15 percent for most developers starting January 1st Apple’s biggest App Store critics are not impressed with its new fee cut for small developers Google Stadia is coming to iOS officially as a web app Google Pay's massive relaunch makes it an all-encompassing ... Google is rolling out end-to-end encryption for RCS in Android .. Google’s latest Chrome update delivers ‘largest performance gain in years’ 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, Walt Mossberg joins the show for a little bit to talk about Apple's new M1 MacBook Air, then Chris Welch and Dan Seifert join us to go deep into all of Apple's new Macs. We talk about what's going on with the App Store, and there's also a little bit on RCS and the new Google Pay. That's coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:18Speaker 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.

• 1:03Speaker 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.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of performance per watt.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  See, it's topical this time, Dieter. Yeah, there's that noise. I'm Neel, I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here. I am your chum. Good. I'll take it. Dan Seifert is here.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm merely an acquaintance at this point.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Dan's like, don't, let's not get any ideas. Chris Wells is here. Good to be back, as always. So last week, we had, we assembled this group to talk about the launch of Apple's Armax. This week, we've reviewed them a lot to talk about. We reviewed the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini. Big Sur is out, just a ton to talk about, and there's some App Store stuff. It's a, it's a big week. And this is true. Apple sent a MacBook Air to Walt Mossberg, our friend and colleague Walt Mossberg, even though he's retired, they're like, it's so good, we want you to see it. So Dieter and I jumped on the phone with Walt for 15, 20 minutes and talked to him about the Air. So we're going to run that a little later in the episode, too. So just jam-packed M1 Max on this episode. We're going to get into it. As always, I do want

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  to start with the pandemic. It's still happening. It's getting worse in countries around the world, particularly the United States. We have a lot of coverage on it. I just want to call some of it out. One, Trump has refused to concede the election, which is dumb. It's holding up federal vaccine planning. There are two vaccines that have very, very promising preliminary data that could be out very soon. To distribute those vaccines is complicated. They require multiple doses. They need to be transported in something called a cold chain, which means they stay cold a long time. That is a logistics problem, like just getting the thing done, isn't it? And the government needs to be involved in that. So his refusal to concede to Biden is preventing the Biden administration from taking up that work. Got a story about that.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  The surge of the virus around the country is another problem. Like, the treatments are scarce. They're new, they need to be made, and as demand goes up, supply is not existent right now. That's a problem. We got a story about that. We have deep dives into both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. They're very interesting. Our science desk has done a great job pulling that stuff apart. And, you know, we live in an information ecosystem. And so YouTube is starting to add information about vaccines to its fact checked boxes. And then the other platforms are not to do that stuff. So we're into that phase of it. But the pandemic is bad. It's getting worse. Wear a mask, stay home. I'm not going home for Thanksgiving. You shouldn't either. CDC says you shouldn't. Just please stay safe.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  We're, it's still the biggest story in the world. I don't want to distract from it. We have a lot of coverage. Our science team is doing a great job of it. Just please stay safe. Okay, let's start. Here's Dieter and I talking to Walt Mossberg about the new M1 MacBook Air. Walt Mossberg, welcome back to the Vergecast.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  I'm thrilled to be here. I love working for free.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I love making you work for free. It's a real power move. It's one of the last true power moves I had is making you work for free. How are things going?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Fine. If you like my house, it's, it's fine. And I do like my house, so it's fine.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you very famously were a huge fan of the original MacBook Air. Well, the second generation MacBook Air.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, both to be honest, but yeah.

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  And I recall that when you retired, you purchased a cache of MacBook Airs because you said it was the best computer.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a little exaggeration there, but I do have an completely unopened MacBook Air because I was convinced at one point that they were just going to kill it. They're just going to let it die.

• 5:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you have it in a, in a glass case with a, like a metal rod chained to it? That says in case of emergency?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Uh huh, I do.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  And a very, very large lock.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it says.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  And I bought a guard dog just for that.

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  If the butterfly keyboard ever comes back, break glass. Yeah. Well, I lay that little bit of history because we have obviously just reviewed the new MacBook Air with Apple's M1 chip. And you've had one as well. So I'm dying to know what you think of this sort of major internal change to the Mac, even though the outside kind of looks the same.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Okay, so I just want to say one thing first. I actually believe that the MacBook Air, which you know and I know, was the thing that the Windows guys were trying to copy for years and years. I think it doesn't get enough credit for being one of the seminal products of the last 20 years. I mean, it's not as seminal as the iPhone or, you know, the first Android phone or whatever, but it was a seminal product because it, you know, light, thin laptops tended to be cramped before the MacBook Air, and they tended to be, uh... there were a lot of compromises.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  And the MacBook Air also kind of almost tied, I think it maybe was a month before one of the ThinkPads in having an SSD. There were a bunch of things about it that were notable. And then the 2010 one was a huge improvement. And then the 2013 one, ironically, given what's happening now, because of an Intel chip, because of the Haswell chip at the time, which was specifically meant to give a huge leap in battery life. I mean, I got, in my test, I looked it up, I got 12 hours on it, and they were only claiming 10, different battery tests, of course, but... So I think the MacBook Air

• 7:30Speaker 03

  is a really important consumer tech product. And I think this one is... I mean, I agree with Dieter's review. I think it's sort of amazing. I mean, we've all known they were going to do this. I'm no chip expert, processor expert, but from what I can understand, they've pulled off something amazing. In relatively short time. And by that, I mean, you know, it takes a long time to develop a processor. It's not, it's not like doing some other things. So, and, and in my use of this, I think the single thing that has impressed me most, the battery life has impressed

• 8:12Speaker 03

  me. I have not plugged this in in about 36 hours and I have 75% battery life.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  So that's fantastic. It's buttery smooth. It's fast as can be. But the thing that really impresses me is their, their translation layer, this thing called Rosetta 2. They had a Rosetta when they made another processor change some years ago. And what it does is it takes apps that have not been written for this processor that were written for the Intel processor, which is most of the third-party apps so far, and it runs them. And I got to tell you, they run fast. They run normally. I mean, fast. You couldn't, if you were doing a blind test and you didn't know this was originally written for Intel, still written for Intel,

• 9:06Speaker 03

  and it was running through this Rosetta thing, you would never know it. At least that's been my experience. I don't know if it's been yours.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, completely. That's, to me, that's one of the most impressive parts. Maybe if you were staring at how many times it bounced in the dock when it launched for the first time after reboot or something, you might be able to tell the difference. But otherwise, just exactly the same. And it's my understanding that they co-developed this processor hardware with Rosetta 2 in mind and vice versa. So I think part of what's happening here is this whole thing where Apple says, we are able to integrate hardware and software and that makes our stuff really special. And sometimes that seems like a true claim and sometimes it seems like it's more marketing than reality. I think in this particular case with Rosetta 2 is absolutely reality that I don't think their translation software would have worked

• 9:58Speaker 04

  as well if the chip team didn't know it was coming and they didn't know it was on the chip. And those two things are, you know, my, my hunch is there's some sort of Thing inside the M1 chip that especially just, just there, just to make Rosetta Fast.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  There's actually a tiny little Intel chip inside of the M1.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  They don't talk about it a lot, right next to the neural engine, there's a Core i5. So while you were saying the Air is a seminal product, and I actually want to just dive into that little history with you, because Dieter, the first line of your review was, the MacBook Air is a triumph. We came this close to giving the thing a 10. I mean, it's like, it's as close to perfect as a laptop can be. But Apple tried to kill the Air for a while. And like, one of the things that you and I have talked about over the years, is they were unsuccessful, people just kept buying it, even though Apple didn't want them to. And I know you've got some history there. So like, do you think that it's come full circle, that the Air is right back where it should be?

• 10:57Speaker 03

  The people that I know, who I've talked to, not just in the last few days, but over the last, I don't know, five, eight years, seven years, whatever it is, have always told me that the Air was their best selling. I mean, they don't like to talk about this kind of thing, but they've always given me the, either said it outright, or indicated that it was their best selling Mac. And one thing I think people don't realize, just a small side tangent, is that the Mac is a 25 billion to 30 billion dollar annual business. And it's like a footnote. When we talk about Apple, we think about iPhones, you know, we might think about iPads.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Now we're thinking about services and the other things they want to stress. And the Mac is the, you know, the old product, it's the, you know, the 1984 was introduced and all that. And, but a 25 billion to 30 billion dollar product is a Fortune 200 product, if it was a separate company. That's a Fortune 200 company. So it's an enormous business. Now, I don't know how much of that is the MacBook Air, but if the MacBook Air is the best selling one, it's probably in the billions of dollars. And there's lots of companies which never, ever will be in the billions of dollars. So this is a hugely important product for Apple. It's hugely popular with users.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  I do think, and there's some Steve Jobs showmanship in this. But I do think one of the great moments in tech unveilings was when he pulled this thing out of a manila envelope. Because people were, and showed that it had a full keyboard and all the other things. You are right that there was a period when they made no improvements. And you could even argue they degraded it. And I think my own sense, which I can't prove, I don't have the reporting to prove it. And I'm retired anyway now, so I'm too lazy to report. But when I wasn't retired, I tried once to report this

• 13:09Speaker 03

  and I got some distance. But I got far enough for me to believe that there was some kind of argument inside the company about whether the Pro, the base level Pro at least, which you will remember, they suddenly made small and thin. And by, I don't know, the measurement on one end of it, well, I guess on both ends of it because it's not tapered, is, what is it, a millimeter thinner than the thick end of the MacBook Air and only a tiny bit heavier and all that. There was some faction inside Apple that thought this could be both the consumer laptop

• 13:51Speaker 03

  and the kind of low end Pro laptop with upside for people who were Pro, Pro, Pro. And I, you know, I don't think, I think that actually was, that was a failure. That theory was a failure. I don't mean the MacBook Pro is a bad computer in any way. But it didn't make consumers happy because they loved the MacBook Air. And it didn't make Pros happy because by making it so small and thin, it may, you know, it reduced the thermal envelope. It had some other, some other issues for people who considered themselves Pros. So I think there was a faction within Apple, maybe the, maybe the design first faction versus the product management faction inside the company. I don't know.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  That, that said, well, that's just the theory. It's kind of like putting a hurt animal.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Out to just pass away as peacefully as possible. And but the consumers weren't having it. And inside the company, there was an argument about it. And I think the people, the pro air people won. You could see it in 2018 when they didn't make huge changes, but they did bring out a new air with some speed bumps. And what at the time they thought was their cool new keyboard. It was a pretty bad keyboard, which is now gone. But they kind of brought it up to date for what they had at the time. Now, I have to imagine that in 2018, they were already, they already knew they were going to do this M1 machine. But they did that. And that was the signal that the air was not going to be left to die.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  And now, I mean, for Dieter Bohm to write the M1 MacBook Air as a triumph, or whatever that first line was. I think I got it pretty close, Dieter, was amazing. And there were other, other superlatives he used that, I don't know how your fingers typed those words.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  It's hard. It's hard to get that out of Dieter. It's funny, like, you know, I review a bunch of phones. And so whenever I review an Android phone, there's a bunch of iPhone people that say I'm an Android fanboy. Whenever I review an iPhone, there's a bunch of Android people that say I'm an Apple fanboy. There's a little bit less of that in the laptop world. But yeah, I, I don't know. I don't like to be too flowery or over the top when I'm praising something because I just, I'm happier to use florid language when I'm criticizing something because it's just fun. Using really florid language when you're praising something, I worry people think that you are, I don't know, in the bag or something.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  I understand that.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I don't do it very often. But so, but it also, I hope, and my intention here means that when I do use really superlative language, I mean it. And with this laptop in particular, it's not just that the thing itself is good. It's that it should have been by rights, by the way that tech usually works, kind of bad. So not only did they not make the like compromised laptop that you expect for a first gen processor transition, they made an incredible laptop just objectively. And those two things together are why I wrote that sentence.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, I did reviews for 27 years. I understand exactly what you mean. And I can tell you that. In my, whatever it is, week or a little less than a week of using this, I completely agree with you. This is amazing and I'm buying one. You know, I know there will be people who would rather buy a Pro, but I don't really need a Pro and I hate the touch bar in the Pro. I don't even want to look at it. And by the way, there is a slight change in the exterior of this machine and you guys know this. They put, what is it, three new different function keys on here.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  There's a search one, there's a dictation one, and there's a do not disturb one. And those are useful. I can't even remember, I can't even figure out what they replaced.

• 17:48Nilay Patel?

  I would rather have them change those buttons every year than spend one more ounce of time on the touch bar.

• 17:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it was, there was Launch Center, the little app launcher that nobody but me uses.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Nobody uses.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  There was a blank one and I forget what the other one was.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  So, well, this brings up, you know, you've been using it for a week. As a laptop, it's great. It runs iOS apps. And if there's one place where Dieter and I and almost every other reviewer has landed is why, like, this isn't ready, it's not good, why even put this here? Has that, have you had a different experience that has been most of the same?

• 18:22Speaker 03

  I'll be honest with you, I haven't tried and I just take your word for it as everyone should. You know, I think they probably had to say it runs iOS apps only because people figure out and people will write that it's the same processor or it's based around the same processor so it ought to be able to do it. And so why not do it? But, you know, they just, for some reason that I've never entirely been able to figure out, they won't do a touchscreen. It's not that I'm a huge campaigner for them to do a touchscreen, but if now they're going to use an ARM processor that's capable of running touch, a whole ecosystem of hundreds

• 19:07Speaker 03

  of thousands of apps that were developed for touch, and I'm a huge iPad fan, I use my iPad all the time. I'm quite used to that, to touch. They ought to really make it work, right? And I imagine eventually they will somehow. Don't ask me how. I think that obviously the easiest way to do it would be to do a touchscreen. Maybe that's coming, Eli. I don't know.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  You look at the interface and they're saying, oh, we just made it look like this because we think it looks pretty. I'm like, these all look like touch? And we, Apple is very good at telling us they're not going to do something until they do it. And insisting they're not going to do it until they do it.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  I mean, at least since 1991, when I started dealing with them, that's been true. Yeah.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, it's funny, and it's funny that you brought up the Pro. These computers are so good that I've gotten a lot of questions along the lines of, should I buy the Air or I need a little bit more performance? I think I should buy the Pro. And my answer is like, you should actually wait until the, the good Pro comes out. With the four ports and the even faster processor and the, but because everyone is so drawn to the M1 and the battery life, people are willing to compromise in ways that you usually don't see.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  There's never been so little difference between an Air and a Pro as this M1 generation we're seeing this week. What is it? That the Pro has a fan. They both can go kind of all out when they need to, but the Air's not going to be able to go all out for nearly as long as the Pro, because it's going to get too hot and it's going to have to throttle down. And the Pro can keep going longer because it can just turn on a fan, which doesn't exist in the Air. That's my understanding of the difference, the major difference.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  That's more or less what, and a touch.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  No, no, but the touch bar is a minus. I'm talking about plus differences.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  So my advice to people who are asking me if they should buy a Pro is like, I would actually just, maybe in another year, they'll get rid of the touch bar, they'll add a touchscreen, and you'll get a faster processor and like, off to the races we go. But it's amazing to me that it's so compelling already that people are willing to compromise.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  I'm not even thinking about a Pro for the reason you state. I mean, I can't, I can't see, first of all, I, I am not a Pro in that I don't edit video and edit audio and do advanced photo editing or anything like that. So I don't need it, but I actually think some of that you can do on an Air, this Air. And I love the MacBook Air and even just the key, like I didn't buy the last Air when they went back to the Scissor keyboard. So if I buy this, I get the Scissor keyboard. Right now I have a, I still have a Butterfly keyboard, which has not broken, but you know, will. So I'm going to spend it and I'm going to, and I'm going to bling it out. So it's

• 21:58Speaker 03

  going to, it's going to cost money.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  And then the one in the display case will stay there forever.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Will stay there. Yeah, of course it has to. Yeah.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  And the rest of the Mossberg Museum.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the, my 2018, I'll give to somebody in my family, you know?

• 22:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's been great talking to you. We got to have you back. I mean, if you're just hanging around, working for free, I mean, anytime you want.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Well, the working for free, we may have to discuss if you want me on more often. I don't know.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  I'll see what I can do. We'll, we'll, we'll start a GoFundMe. It'll be great.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:36Speaker 05

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• 23:06Nilay Patel?

  Dieter. Yeah. So you reviewed the Air, I reviewed the MacBook Pro, Chris reviewed the Mini. They all have the same M1 chip, except for the base model Air, which has a seven-core GPU. Right. That's exactly right. So really the differences here are how far you can push the M1, depending on cooling, and to some extent. Like how much RAM these machines have to like do stuff.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  But we all had 16 gig machines. So and we all had eight core machines. So really difference is like how how much cooling made a difference here. But I want to start with the air because the first line of your review was the MacBook Air is a triumph.

• 23:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  And I would just like you to unpack that because it's a lot. We don't say this. We're not out here being like the Pixel 5 is a triumph. Like, we don't say this a lot. And you were like, you struggled with it and then you landed on it.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wasn't. I was gonna do it, then I wasn't gonna do it and back and forth. And finally, yeah, it's like, what Apple pulled off with these things is if there were no processor transition here and they just like sent us these laptops and said they're really fast and they have better battery life, we would have been like, sure, okay. Oh, holy crap. You're right. These are really fast and they have better battery life. But then on top of that, they did it in the with a processor transition where the software could have gone wrong in a thousand ways. I expected it to go wrong in a thousand ways. We've seen other companies try to do this transition and have software go wrong in all sorts of terrible ways. But none of that happened because they figured out a system for getting software to run and run

• 24:42Speaker 04

  fast. So they made the laptops radically better and they also executed a platform transition that should have been rough. It turns out to not really be that rough. And so you put those two things together. It's a triumph.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  You know what I've been thinking about a lot is our Mac Pro review, which is like, it was the same processor architecture. It's Intel chips, AMD GPUs. They just made it nicer enclosure with more cooling. And like the software didn't even come along for that ride.

• 25:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  Right. What was our review of the Mac Pro like fundamentally about? It was like, oh, man, this computer would be really fast if any of this software supported this idea. And that was fun. That was the heart of our review. Here, the software definitely doesn't support the processor architecture, like absolutely does not. Didn't even try. There's no like Adobe has known about this for six years. And we're in there waiting. And the update hasn't. It's, we're just running Intel code and the apps are fast and they work well and they're seamless. And in some cases, like surprisingly faster.

• 25:44Nilay Patel?

  That is just remarkable to me.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  So we did two benchmarks on games. I did, started with Rise of the Tomb Raider, because it's the one that I own from the Mac App Store. And I was able to get that thing running at lowest settings, locked at 60 frames per second. And we maybe could have even gotten more if we had put it on an external monitor and support more. I had V-think off, whatever. That is nuts. So I tell Dan and Monica this, I'm really excited. And they're like, that's cool. What about the new one?

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Okay, so put Shadow on. It did not hit 60, but at the lowest setting, it hit 38, which is kind of what you expect from like, an overperforming, not-quite-gaming laptop, or maybe a low-end gaming laptop. This is on a fanless UltraBook. This is on a machine that its predecessor would have just like, cried if I tried to run Shadow of the Tomb Raider on it.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  That kind of result is what we expect from like, a Dell XPS 15. Technically, not a gaming laptop, but it has a discrete GPU, it's got a really beefy processor, it's, you know, should be able to run a game. If you're hitting like, 40, 35 to 40 frames per second on low settings in Tomb, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, like you're, that's pretty good for a Dell XPS 15, which is not designed for play games, but designed to do other work. We're talking about a computer that starts at half the price of an XPS 15, has no fan, like you mentioned, no discrete GPU, has like, what we assume is a 10-watt processor running inside of it. And it's, and it's hitting these levels. And it's, it was frankly, quite stunning. I would never recommend this, any of these machines

• 27:25Speaker 02

  as gaming devices. If you are really into gaming, these are not going to do it. But just the fact that they can run a heavy, like, hard-to-run game at a pace that you could play the game if you wanted to, is like, something that we just have never seen before in this kind of form factor.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Through Rosetta, not coded natively to the M1 chip. Which might be higher than 10 watts, like, Antech's been doing a bunch of really good analysis. They're, they're like, trying to estimate TDP based on power draw on the Mac Mini, which is a really fascinating way to do it.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  You mean instead of information provided by the vendor?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Super interesting way to do it.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I mean, but we have other benchmarks. There are some benchmarks that are numbers that are just bonkers. Like you run it three times because you don't believe it, right? And that's across like web browser benchmarks to Geekbench to Cinebench. Like all of them are just like, what? But it also, all of those numbers actually do translate into what these things feel like to use day to day. Like Neil, like Chris, like what was, what was using your versions of these Macs like? Like it just felt like great, right? Like it felt like a Mac that wasn't bogged down and it was like hard to bog it down, is how I felt.

• 28:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, my daily machine is like a maxed out 16 inch MacBook Pro and like the Mac Mini just felt just like using that essentially. And so like that was the most impressive thing about it. Like every app I opened, sometimes I felt like some apps took a while to open, but then once they were open, it just flew. And so, yeah, that was the most surprising thing about the whole review.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  I have one meeting a week that's in Google Meet. Google Meet in Chrome destroys a 16 inch MacBook Pro. Like Google, the combination of Google Chrome and Google Meet is just devastating to a computer. I don't know, like, they have to know this at Google, right? Like, it's just noisy in all of their meetings. It's bad. Anyway, this thing just like did it. And that was like the moment to me, I was like, I haven't not listened to my fan this much. Because, you know, I had the Pro, which has a fan, and I just never heard it. I had to actively push the machine. And like, I don't, I'm not, I don't do a lot of 3D rendering. Most days I type for a living, you know? So we had to run Cinebench

• 29:42Nilay Patel?

  on like a 30 minute loop. And at 10 minutes, the fan would spin up. And that was, that's like your first inkling. You know, I didn't run a lot of M1 native apps. Like I don't, and you know, we obviously tested so far, all of Apple's apps are done. So we test those.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I did use a bunch of Apple's apps for this review period, but as soon as it was over, I was like, duh, done with that.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my game was to like, try to just use it. Because one of the other problems I had was killing the battery. It was, the MacBook-

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Problems, in huge air quotes. What are the other problems?

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a great problem to have. But the Pro has a bigger battery than the Air. And I just, at one point, I was slacking both of you. Like, I'm just running 4K YouTube videos in Chrome in the background. Just to see if I can get some battery drain going on.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  And it wasn't, it was doing it, but it was like every 10, 15 minutes I'd lose 1%. And I was like, well, this battery test is gonna, like, we're just not gonna run the bat- like, those things are not normal. The last time I think we saw laptops with this kind of battery life was that Haswell generation of laptops.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like the last time, you know, I know there's a lot of like discussion about the last time, uh, Apple made a chip transition and things like that, but a more recent time of like when people were really excited about a new laptop because of what processor was in it that I can think back to is that Haswell transition, which I looked it up, it was 2013 and the MacBook Air went from what Apple was claiming at the time, seven hours of battery life to 12 hours of battery life on the 13 inch model. So it was like a 40% increase. Now they're going up to, I believe, 16 hours of battery life on the same metric. But in real world use, if you had a Haswell laptop at the time, it was twice as long it lasted. It went from like four hours to eight hours. And, you know, in the years since then, we've seen laptops get a little bit more powerful.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  They're doing more things. They're getting higher res screens. We've seen that battery life come down. Average laptop that we test now, I think, nets out around six or seven hours. And then these come out and Apple's making these huge claims. I think they're claiming 20 hours of video battery life rundown on the Pro. And we're like, yeah, whatever. Well, we'll see what it is. And then, you know, we can't kill the battery in a workday and like not being able to kill the battery in a workday with our standard workflow of using Chrome, lots of browser tabs, Slack, all these like, what we know are power inefficient apps is like, you know, that is like a changing of the, the, the game for us and to use such a trite overused

• 32:18Speaker 02

  expression, but like, that is a huge quality of life deal. It's awesome that the performance is great. That's obviously what we were anticipating running into issues with. The fact that the performance is great and the battery life is like, also great is just like, like, that's why we're so excited about these. And then I think that's why you might've seen that come through in the reviews on social media, things like that. Every reviewer we've talked to, uh, after reviews, if you look at other competitors, everyone's just like, We can't believe this is actually real.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  There was definitely a moment before I published where I texted Joanna, just like, yo, are you, do we screw this up? Like, did you, did you find anything? Uh, cause it's rare, right? Like, we're very comfortable with the limits of other products we review. Like, we review phones and I'm like, okay, I figured out the camera. We review other laptops from like, okay, this, this thermal design and this GPU CPU combination is doing about what we expect. Here you have a massive architecture transition. We're like, huh, nothing is bad. Except for one thing.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  A couple. There's a handful of things. Uh, just one last piece on the battery thing. I didn't put this in the review, but I wanted to, but I didn't feel like I had done enough, like really careful one-to-one testing to say this definitively, but I will just tell you, the Vergecast listener, between us, I'm getting better battery life on the MacBook Air than I am on an 11-inch iPad Pro.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 33:43Speaker 04

  When you actually use an iPad Pro as your work computer, instead of using it like an iPad and watch a movie, you set it down, turn it back on an hour later, browse the web for a while, blah, blah, like the way you normally would use an iPad. If you use an iPad as your work computer, it act, the battery life is actually like normal, right? It, it follows the same rules of physics that a laptop does.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  I personally get, I have a, I have a 12.9-inch iPad Pro and I, I get like five hours of use out of that, using it as a laptop. And it's got a bigger screen than the 11-inch and such, but like, if I don't use it as a laptop, it's 10 to 12 hours, right? Of like, you know, intermittent tablet stuff. But I totally believe that, that you're getting better battery life out of that Air than, than a Pro, iPad Pro. Yeah.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, it has a bigger battery. I think it's like part of the game.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. But like, to, to everybody that's aware, um, these two, the, the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro do not have bigger batteries than their predecessors. And in fact, one of the things that Apple chose to do here was keep these enclosures exactly the same. In my heart, what I wanted them to do is to bring back the original MacBook design, the little itty bitty one, that, um, not enough people loved, and so they killed it. And that's everybody's fault for not having big enough hearts. So way to go cynics. Anyway.

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  So by the way, I have two of them, including your old one here.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  And send it back to me.

• 35:02Nilay Patel?

  Happily. They're just like, we just use them as coasters now. They are so slow compared to this computer. I opened one up, just like run the Geekbench and it's like 700. This computer is at 1700. It's amazing how, right, that's the usual trade off. To make something small, thin, battery last, you just trade that performance off. And here, that's not happening.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  The big question that I have is, will the next MacBooks get a redesign where the enclosures and the the heat system and everything is more, more customized to this chip and therefore we'll see even bigger claims? Or were these laptops sort of like designed with the knowledge that they were going to do this M1 in mind anyway? And so they were thermally throttled on Intel and that, but all along, they meant to have M1 in these. It just took a little bit longer than they expected.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  I'm convinced that the 2018 MacBook Air refresh was designed knowing M1 was coming. And so when they put the cooling system in that for the Intel processor, they were just like, we're slapping a fan in and we're not bothering to put heat pipes to connect it to the actual processor here. And it's just going to be what it is. And then when the M1 comes out, we just take the fan out and we're done.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  Cause the, the 2018 Air had heat pipes, so we're not.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Well, it, the, the thing was like, it had a fan that was on like the other side of the, of the chassis as the processor. And normally when we see that, if you open up the bottom of a laptop, you see what are called heat pipes that are copper tubes that run from the top of the processor to the fan. So they transfer the heat coming off the processor, the fan blows it out the back. So you get that hot air out the back. The 2018 to early 2020 MacBook Air doesn't have those. It's just a fan sitting all by itself. That is, I mean, I assume it's doing something. It's exhausting hot air out of the case, but it's logical laptop design. You, we know what the Intel chips are doing. You put heat pipes in there and it's much more efficient.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  The fact that Apple didn't even bother to do that just kind of reads to me like, oh, they know it's coming. So, you know what? We'll just throw the fan in there.

• 37:10Nilay Patel?

  Have we seen teardowns of these yet? We, I don't think we have.

• 37:13Speaker 06

  There was one of the Mac Mini and it just, there's a ton of space in there just not being used by anything at this point. It's just like a largely empty enclosure. I think Linus did a teardown of it and it's just like a ton of space in there that's just not being used. So they could have clearly like gone for a new design, but they didn't. And I think they chose these three Macs pretty carefully as far as like, people wouldn't really be that disappointed to not see like a big redesign. But like for the 16 inch MacBook Pro or like there's some new iMac next year that's just the same design. That's going to bump people out a little bit, I think.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. And again, Dieter, you made this point in your review, the Air is their best selling machine.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Coming off of the best selling quarter ever for Macs.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Which sucks for you if you bought a Mac on this quarter. Cause you probably bought an Air, like most people buy it. We know it's their highest selling product. Huge bet. And they were so confident in it, no caveats. And that was a, right? We caught it. We, we noted that they were not telling us to avoid anything and they, and they pulled it off. I think what's interesting about these three machines, to Chris's point, is that they're largely the same computer in slightly different expressions, slightly different literally cases. So that Pro does have a fan in the benchmarks. Yep, it just sustains performance. It is very hard to even get the fan to come on.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  We knew this about the Pro design from the beginning. Ages ago, when Apple like revved to this version of the MacBook Pro, they wanted the, this base model weird two point, two port entry level to replace the Air because it had better cooling. That wedge shape of the Air is not great for a lot of the things Apple wants to do with cooling. They don't want to put fans in there, but they made this one. And now you can just see like inherently it's a better thermal design. Plus there's a fan, so it sustains performance. And then the mini is even slightly higher. I mean, just slightly.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  And Chris, I don't think you ever heard your fan at all.

• 39:12Speaker 06

  Not once. And I haven't seen on a review or anybody has heard it. It's just totally silent at all times. So I think that also speaks to like just how hollow it is inside and how much air just flows freely through there. But yeah, I haven't heard it once. And it's just, yeah, it's a fast, fast computer. I haven't found one app that doesn't work. I've gotten some questions about stuff like Pro Tools, and I feel like Pro Tools isn't one of those things where you race out to buy a first gen machine. So I think

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  Those kind of folks should probably hold off for a while. But as far as like day to day apps that I use every day, it all runs and it all feels very native. So.

• 39:39Nilay Patel?

  There are a handful of Adobe apps that they, so Creative Cloud is like this interesting middle zone. So if you go to launch Photoshop or Premiere, you'll get a warning that says you're going to install the Intel version. Just you know it until we release the, the Apple Silicon version. And then you click yes, and you install it anyway. But that is officially unsupported.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  So you can run Photoshop and Premiere and Lightroom under Rosetta 2. They work fine. It's very fast. Unofficial, right? Not officially supported. But then Adobe Aero, Adobe Dimension, Adobe Substance, I don't even know what Adobe Substance is. Adobe made some stuff and it's not currently compatible with M1 devices. And that was the first time anyone told us there's some stuff that's incompatible. So from Adobe, it's that list. I am sure as these things go out into the world, we're going to find more of that stuff. But the big apps all seem to work just fine.

• 40:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. The big apps work so well that I'm worried that everyone's going to like, be like, eh, you know, we can hold off on optimizing. We can hold off on making a universal app because it's fine. People will wait. It's, everything's fine now. We don't need to rush to that. And I, I kind of like, I don't actually wish that things were slow, but there's like tiny part of me that's like, if the, if there were just like a little bit more broken with the experience, then there would be a lot more pressure on these companies to fix it and optimize it for the M1. And then we would see some bigger gains.

• 41:01Nilay Patel?

  No, I, I, I don't know. The, the, it's like a, you have like a nightmare incentive scenario there. I'm happy everything works well. Right, like us waiting around for Adobe to do the right thing is like not a historically good idea. You know, like the opposite incentives are true, though, like, what if like this is the time for us to really rethink Photoshop? And it's like, don't do that. Just ship it so it works better. Chris, did you find, I mean, you were running it in a much more desktop kind of environment. Did you find there were any places where you would, because you were at the sort of the top end of the performance curve? Did you find there are places where you hit the limits of what you thought it could do?

• 41:40Speaker 06

  Not really. I mean, we've all talked about the ceiling of 16 gigs of RAM, and I feel like you've just got to think about that differently as far as like how the system uses that. But I mean, it does page for more from the system. Like, if you open up the stats, you'll see that it does ask the disk for RAM. And so it does share that memory, but I never felt it slow down. I never felt it bogged down for anything. I mean, I was running Plex, I was running Photoshop and Lightroom and all these apps all at once in some cases, and it just never really, never gave up, so.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  One of the things that surprised me with the Mini was that there wasn't a bigger delta of performance between it and the Pro. You know, you mentioned, Chris, that like you open the case up, it's kind of half empty. We know it's a thicker case. We know that the fan sits basically right on top of the processor. It's the same design as the 2018 Mini. And so I kind of like, just was like, oh, it's, you know, it's going to perform a little better because it's got a higher thermal ceiling than the Pro. And we really didn't see that. We saw a little bit, like maybe 1% or smaller performance differences. And to your point, Chris, about thinking differently about how this RAM works, I think we also kind of have to probably reset expectations around how thermals work with these chips as well, because you can't just like, put more cooling on these to make them sustain

• 42:52Speaker 02

  their boost mode, because there's just no boost mode with these chips. It's just running at its top speed all the time. And so it was very interesting to see that develop. I've got a 2018 Mini here. Fan does like to come on, especially while we're doing Zoom calls. I can touch the top of it. I can, you know, keep my coffee warm if I put it on top of the Mini. But like, the M1, completely different computer, just in a very similar looking shell.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you've had a lot of thoughts about the unified memory architecture here. I mean, It doesn't seem like it is a big deal on the consumer laptops or in some of these use cases, but as you get to the other kinds of machines where people have workloads that are tax the memory system harder, it does feel like a change is coming.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  So it's gonna be really interesting to see how Apple navigates it. So like the very, very high level explanation of what's going on here. And if you ask me to get to the low level, I will fail really quickly, but I feel confident talking at the high level. Is there sharing RAM between the GPU and like the main CPU stuff? And that's kind of new. It's an integrated GPU. And that means that in theory, thinking about RAM on a Mac is now the equivalent of thinking about RAM on an iPhone. So if you look at the amount of RAM on an iPhone, it's compared to an Android phone, pretty paltry. But the iPhone does stuff differently. Android does garbage collection, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  So some of those like efficiency gains are now available on the Mac, which is great. I think it's one of the reasons it feels faster. There's less swapping and copying and extra stuff happening there. But if you're sharing that RAM with the integrated GPU, eventually, when you get on Pro machines, you are hitting workloads and applications of professionals that have their entire system built around the idea that they have big ass, beefy, powerful GPUs with a shit ton of RAM. And will Apple address that market by like creating discrete GPUs that have their own RAM? Or will it address that market by saying, no, we like,

• 45:04Speaker 04

  this is the way that RAM should work from now on. You don't notice the swaps as much. Everything is great. And so we're just going to ship the thing. We're going to make the whole thing ourselves and we're going to make the GPU ourselves. And you need to change the way that your systems work to work with this new kind of RAM, which by the way, it's better. You don't have, it's like easier to code to blah, blah, blah, blah. Or will they ship a more traditional discrete GPU with its own RAM system? And I kind of think the answer is we are never going to see a discrete or external GPU again on a Mac. I kind of think that's what's going to happen. I don't know. Don't freak out. But like, there's a part of me that thinks that they believe this in this unified memory

• 45:44Speaker 04

  architecture so much. They just are confident that the whatever worries I have or you might have about a discrete GPU, you know, being better are actually wrong. In the same way, they were so confident in this M1 chip that it was going to exceed our expectations. I kind of think that they think that like, they've got it and they don't need to go back.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  So they they've earned it with this one, right? They've earned a little trust because they were right about this one. But it is true that we are aware of this chip's limits. It's we're not saying that the MacBook Air is a 9.5 because it has no limits. We're saying at its spot and price in the market, it is easily the best laptop you can buy, minus the webcam, which we still have.

• 46:32Speaker 04

  We gotta talk about that.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  We'll get there.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  Well, but this is why the MacBook Air is a 9.5 and the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro are not.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  Right, because at their spots in the market, you can see the limits of the machine. I think for the Pro in particular, what's been really interesting to me is the number of people who are like, should I get the Air or the Pro? I have a more demanding workload. I should get the Pro. I'm like, you should wait a year for the real MacBook Pro to come out, not this version of the MacBook Air that has a fan.

• 47:04Speaker 04

  And a touch bar.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  If you are

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  because I just think like I every day on my MacBook Pro have four things plugged into it all the time. And so two Thunderbolt ports, you can't get a Thunderbolt dock with more Thunderbolt like it's just like you're into dongle hell instantly if you have multiple things plugged into a Mac. And you only have two ports. And I think that's fair on the air. Like, I think a lot of people be fine and might never plug anything but power into a MacBook Air. That's what Apple tells us all the time. But the second you're like, I run a lot of stuff. I plug in cameras and faster card readers and things like, you're like, I need ports. And the second you need ports, you might as well have

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  four of them. So we know there's Thunderbolt controllers on the M1s. We actually know it can support four ports, which makes it mystifying that there's not four ports on the Mac Mini. But we also know that it doesn't seem to be able to support more than two displays. So on the laptops, it supports the built-in display and one external. On the Mini, you can support two displays. But that's a step down from where the Mini was, which could support three displays previously. So there are just some inherent 16 gigs of RAM. Seems like a limit for this machine, for this architecture. We don't know. And so like, the next turn is how much farther can you push it?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  I gotta say, the GPU concern, Macs don't have great GPUs to begin with. So it's not like they've been having the best of the market for the past half decade plus. They've had, kind of had, you know, AMD cards that were not even the current generation AMD cards for a long time. I would like to see what Apple does with integrated GPUs and see how far it can push it. And like, to your point, Eli, the limits that we're seeing here, these are entry-level machines. The Mac Mini starts $700. The MacBook Air is $1,000. The Pro is, I think, $1,299 to start. These are, you know, entry-level machines. They have entry-level machine limits. But I would be very interested to see what a Pro machine with Apple's architecture and Apple's ideas

• 49:11Speaker 02

  around where how a GPU should work and how a processor should work and everything will really, you know, pan out and what we'll see there.

• 49:19Nilay Patel?

  And they've given themselves two years for the transition. It is a sign of how well These first ones came off and you know, people are getting them now. I haven't seen any giant red flags, all the reviewers got it wrong. Like, people are impressed with the machines in their hands. It's a sign of how well Apple has done. They were already like, what about the iMac? Like, we're excited for the next generation, the next versions of these chips. Now we have to talk about the webcam. Which, I think Joanna went on CNBC yesterday and said the webcam was bad. And that is like, just lit off a firestorm of controversy. The webcam is bad.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  The webcam is terrible.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna support our friend and former colleague Joanna Stern. The webcam is bad.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, we immediately were like, well, what the hell? Apple tried to do some stuff. They have done some stuff with the image signal processor to improve the picture on it. Sure. Here's what I'm gonna say about the webcam. It is hard to fit a good webcam in a chassis that's this thin. You know, because they like having this thin screen at the top of the clamshell. If you let yourself have a little bit thicker z-axis there in the screen, part of the clamshell, you could theoretically fit a better camera. You could theoretically fit, I don't know, a Face ID camera? And hell, if that thing is thicker and you've put better cameras in there, you've still got that extra space. Your screen could maybe, I don't know, have a touch controller in it.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  If they hold off like two years and they're like, yep, we just glued an iPad to the top of it. That'd be great.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  So they are doing some stuff. We should give them credit. They are, they have the image signal processing pipeline from the iPhone chips. And there's a clear family relation, they're able to use it. They're, you know, they're doing something that looks a little bit like Smart HDR. They're pulling up the shadows, they're dropping the highlights, like, yep, that's the Apple image processing pipeline. We know what it looks like. And it very much looks like this camera is going through that. It's still bad. And what makes it even weirder... And I have no idea how to show this to you. You just have to go find one of these machines and see it for yourself. Open FaceTime or the Photo Booth app and just move your head around and you will see your face just gently smear.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Like because it's processing your face. And so all motion, what we were on the call with Walt today and he was using his MacBook Air and he was moving and I was like, that is just looks crazy.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can see it through Zoom.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  You can see it through Zoom.

• 51:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  And then you move the, you move the laptop around to get the background to move and the background moves around crisply. And like, yes, I am a giant camera snob. I apologize, but we just came off the phone reviews. Where Apple will talk to me on a micron level about how impressive their camera. Last year, remember they were like, the pixel wells are deeper. They're in it to tell me how good their cameras were. And this year they're like, yeah, it's, it's, it's the same. Software fixed it. It's just a, it's, it would have been a 10. Like we put it in the video. It would have been a 10. But you, we cannot look at this webcam in the context of the full product review and say, you got everything right. Cause they've just been so stubborn about this.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Could have been a 10. Could have been 10. It's ridiculous. Um, and there are other things where like, when I was like, oh man, am I really going to do 9.5? Let me make the list of NOX. So webcams at the top, the next on the list of NOX is definitely iOS apps. And that was a huge whiff. Uh, then there's no touchscreen. Uh, and then after that, you're just like, you start to feel like you're nitpicking. And I don't know that touchscreen is a fair knock yet. I think it's, we're very close to like, all Macs get knocked off a point for not having touchscreen.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Actually, Peter, let's take a quick break and come back and talk about iOS apps and what is happening with the App Store. Cause it's a whole, a whole situation.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:11Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

• 53:15Speaker 07

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• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. So we gotta talk about iOS apps on these Macs. We gotta talk about the fact that Dieter and Welch hacked their way into running illegal software. The cops came to Chris's house last night. Then there's some App Store stuff to talk about. Let's start at the beginning. iOS apps on these devices are very much just like a whiff.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's huge whiff. So it's because it's got the iPhone's chip and iPhone architecture. They built an iOS system into macOS. And in some ways, it's actually really, really clever. So one of the things Chris noticed is if you right-click on a dock icon, it pops up like a right-click menu. That is the same right-click menu that you get when you long press an icon on an iPhone home screen. Right? Like, they thought about that. But what they've done is they know that like a bunch of apps aren't going to work well on the Mac. They tried to like prime the pump with Catalyst and get people thinking about how do you take an iPad app and tweak it to make it work on a Mac? And then nobody used Catalyst, except, you know, whatever. So it's still there.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  So some apps have opted out of being available in the Mac App Store. And in fact, most of the ones you care about have opted out because they all know, either because they have like some business reason to not want to have their app be available on the Mac because they'd rather be in the browser or you can be tracked or something. I don't know. Or they just know that it's a weird experience and they actually need to do real work to make it work well on the Mac. So when you go to the Mac App Store and click on your little name and then click on the iOS app thing to go look at what's available to you, it is a gallery of abandonedware. It is just clearly a bunch of developers who haven't touched their app in two years, right? Because if they had, they would have opted out of this thing.

• 55:34Speaker 04

  And so, whatever. You install a bunch. Some of them are good. People that pay attention and think about it, like Overcast, of course, Mark Arman's app, really good. Some other apps work pretty well. You can resize them and so on. But then there's a bunch of apps that just don't, that should have opted out and didn't. And the one that everybody hit on, and I'm on the list, is HBO Max.

• 55:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, they advertised HBO Max.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. What are you doing? It's stuck in a little window, which is, that is some Gen 1 Android apps on Chrome shit right there. Okay? Like, I'm not kidding. It is, that, the level of implementation here is maybe like 20% better than Google's first cut at this, which was real bad. And so, you know, like, you're like, oh, okay, well, maybe I'll find a couple that I like. The idea is great. It's like, oh, I want to have like, this one little utility that I love in my iPhone available on the Mac, right? Or like, Spotify, maybe, and you want the iOS app instead of the Mac app because it's lighter or something. You just can't do it because they're either not around or they're kind of not great. And then on top of all of that, Apple knows that there's just gonna end up being some apps that get made available on the Mac because they decided to have it be

• 56:38Speaker 04

  opt-out instead of opt-in, which is a choice that I disagree with. And so they knew a bunch of these things would be optimized. So Apple knew it had to create another system to make sure that users would be able to use iOS apps that didn't, hadn't been fully customized for the Mac, and yet were still available in the Mac App Store. And I'm walking myself up to Touch Alternatives. Somebody else has to talk about it because I'm too angry about it.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  It's, it, there's a menu. And if you run an iOS app on your M1 Mac, you go to the application menu and you can open Touch Alternatives. And you get a little screen that is just one of the most poorly designed dialog boxes in Apple history. It's all like center-aligned. Things are like randomly capitalized or not capitalized. And it's just a list of ways you can like use your keyboard to fake a touchscreen. Like, you press Option Left and it will, that's a swipe from the right edge of it. No one will ever remember any of it. Also, this is true, Touch Alternatives is something you turn on and off. So that menu isn't a way to bring up the instructions. It just shows up the first time you turn Touch Alternatives on in an app.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  And then if you go to do it again, it just you've turned on this system of keyboard commands with no reference to how to do anything ever again.

• 57:56Speaker 04

  If you didn't take a screenshot to dunk on it like we did, you're out of luck.

• 58:00Nilay Patel?

  You'll never know. And then on top of it, there's on the, you know, on the laptops, you've got the big trackpad. And so it's like, you can just map, there's a, you can just map the trackpad to a touchscreen, which you think is a great idea. All of us have, all of us have stared at a Mac and been like, look at the size of this trackpad. It's the size of an iPhone. Right? That makes sense. And then you realize the key to the iPhone touchscreen is that it is a screen. And you can see what you are touching. And your brain, when you look at a window of arbitrary size, mapped to a trackpad of a different size, it doesn't matter how smart you are. Your brain is

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  like, fuck it, I'm out. Like, I don't know what I'm touching anymore. I'm done with this. Turn it off. Quit this app. It's very bad. And it's very much the menu that Apple had to build before putting a touchscreen on the Mac. Like, you can just see, the joke that I've lifted from Neil Dash is imagine the meeting. Like, they had a meeting. Like, some intern and a project manager sat in a room and were like, we gotta build touch alternatives today. Like, I'll check out the ticket. And they fought through it and they got to this. And someone said, yep, ship it. That's good enough. And all of that is bad. Yeah. All of that is a mistake. And the second a touchscreen's on the Mac, it will all go away.

• 59:25Speaker 04

  All which aside, say you want to experience this madness. It's kind of neat sometimes to have an app that you had on your phone, on your computer, but you can't get the ones you want unless you go through a very interesting process and you can run apps that were designed for the iPhone that are not in the Mac App Store. Chris, can you like, tell us how we figured this out and like, what exactly is happening to get these apps running?

• 59:51Speaker 06

  So I think there was a port for Mac rumors, where they found out that if you just sideload the IPA file, which is what the apps Format is to your Mac, you can just load it on to your Mac and it'll just install and open. And so they found out that you can do this for Spotify and Netflix and all sorts of other apps. And they just kind of open up. It is tied to your Apple ID, so you can't send other people apps. So that's kind of important for them. So you can't just steal games or everything else. So, but yeah, it works as you'd expect. And some of these apps work. Okay. I mean, Netflix does support offline downloads and so you can use them for that.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  It's Yeah. Does it support resizing the window or going?

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  It's not fullscreen, but you can zoom in.

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  Can zoom in with the accessibility settings and it works fine. So that's kind of a hack. While we're in this weird phase of these apps not being supported and who knows what? Who knows when they will be? I mean, I hope Netflix is gonna make an app for these ships. But yeah, I mean, you can just kind of run wild and open up any apps that are on your phone.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  For now.

• 1:00:53Speaker 06

  For now.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  For now. Well, so there's a lot to unpack there. Yeah. So what's interesting to me is the apps come as dot IPA files, which is interesting. Like you don't ever see an iPhone app as its app. Right. It's like Mac apps like look like an app. They're like dot app, like it's a, you're aware of it. You can like move it around. An iPhone app is like, I guess I'll manage my home screen now. And then like 20 minutes later, you've accomplished nothing. But these are dot IPA files. They don't show up as apps. They're files. You can see the file extension, but when you double click them, they install like a window, like a little dialog box pops up and says installing Spotify or whatever. Which is fascinating to me because it means Finder knows what to do with these files. Like, you're supposed to get them out of the App Store. Yeah.

• 1:01:37Nilay Patel?

  But you double click them and like the Finder knows what to do with them. Yeah. So they've built that facility because it wouldn't be there otherwise. And then what's further interesting to me is this notion that like, Apple would turn this off or developers would get mad. Like, we don't ever think about apps as something that we can't just like try to run wherever we want. Unless they're on the phone. So here we've brought over iOS apps and we've brought over all of these expectations about control. Yeah. Can the developer prevent us from running apps on this machine? Can Apple prevent us from running apps on this machine? And I, I think what's gonna happen, I don't like it. I think what's gonna happen is they will find a way to shut this down.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  And I don't like that. That's not how I want my Mac to be. I should be able to do whatever crazy-ish I want to do on my Mac whenever I want. And then we can continue to have the conversation on how locked down the phones are. But I really don't like the idea that I have bought bits from someone somewhere. And I'm now prevented, I'm trying to run them on whatever computer I have.

• 1:02:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I've got a few thoughts on this. One. If anyone is going to like lock it down, I would prefer it be the developer and not Apple. There are plenty of software licenses that like make you pay per machine that you use it on, right? And that's not the way it works with iOS licenses. You can use as many iPhones as you want, whatever. But if a developer for some reason wanted to prevent this from working and that was their call. I don't love it, but okay. I don't like Apple shutting it down. And to be clear, the way that this works is as Chris mentioned, it has to be tied to your Apple ID. But you used to be able to just like go to your iTunes backups if they're unencrypted and find these IPA files. And Apple turned that off in like, I don't know, iTunes 12.6 or something, seven, whatever. But you can still get them. So we found an app that's called iAmazing.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  And it just, it does, it's a really great utility for like backing up stuff off of your iPhone, right? It's just, it's not doing anything nefarious. It's just a much more, I don't know, intensive backup utility for your phone. And so what you could do is you could download the IPA file from the App Store and then just save it locally. And then you've got it. So that's all great, but Apple could like, I don't know, shut that down. They could yell at iAmazing and the next person who tries to make utility that makes it easy to get an app off of the phone or get an app off of the thing. Like they could lock it down via the App Store or via the phone in some way without locking down the Mac. What gives me a sliver of hope is every time Apple has walked up to the line of locking down the Mac too much.

• 1:04:06Speaker 04

  The backlash has been big enough and loud enough that they've pulled back from the brink. The most recent example is this server that is, you know, checking to see if apps have. Been signed or whatever it was. There was a huge hue and cry and Apple just like, oh yeah, quietly published a white paper saying, oh, this is exactly how it works and we don't keep the data. And oh yeah, by the way, we're also gonna do a better job encrypting it next year. No relation to the drama that just happened. We're just, we just have released a white paper explaining how this, this feature works. And so my hope is if they do try to lock this down, I don't know, that they'll, they won't be quick on the jump and then there'll be enough people who like using this stuff that there'll be a hue and cry and stop them. Or they'll just be a big enough hue and cry from people who want the Mac to be the Mac and

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  not be locked down to stop them.

• 1:04:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, it seems like one of those things that they just didn't see coming. I mean, these files are all, it's like remnants from those days back when you would like have your app library in iTunes and you would sync apps over to iPhone, which was a special kind of hell.

• 1:05:06Speaker 06

  We're out of those days. But I think like this kind of goes back to that and they just didn't see people trying this. I mean, it seems like one of those things maybe Apple should have tried, would have tried. Maybe it's just one of those things they didn't care about, but we'll see.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  I don't know. Mac users are gonna try it. So like that's to Eli's point, the difference between a Mac and an iPhone, right? It's like, one of them is presented as a computer and the other is presented as not a computer. And like dragging and dropping files and installers and, and seeing the extensions and, you know, transferring files and so on is like things you do with a computer. So.

• 1:05:41Speaker 04

  It's also possible that Apple is not a monolith on this issue and that the people inside the Mac team were like, yeah, we're the Mac team. We're open. We let you do stuff. We let you run scripts and stuff. We are gonna like in the Finder on the Mac, make something happen when you double click it so that it installs the IPA file. And if you don't like it, iPhone team, you know, tough, tough cookies. We're the Mac team. We do what we want.

• 1:06:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I just like, at some point you have to imagine that Netflix and Spotify, I was gonna say Instagram, but Instagram has never even made an iPad apps. Like, who knows? But like, they're gonna want these apps on these machines for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is they will probably have better battery life if they are running natively as apps versus running potentially in a browser, especially with browsers Chrome. So. Hopefully, we see that happen. There has not been a rush to it.

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  So I think that you're super wrong that these developers are gonna want, they might want these things to be apps on these machines. But if you want to be a developer in good standing with Apple, you are not allowed to distribute iOS apps for the Mac, except through the App Store, full stop. So they could low-key, sneaky, make it good on the Mac and not distribute on the Mac Store, and then it would work. But if these developers want to get their apps on the Mac, they have to go through the Mac App Store. And I don't know if you've heard, but Netflix isn't super fond of the terms and conditions of Apple's app stores.

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the idea that you would have a Netflix app on your Mac that wasn't allowed to tell you how to sign up for Netflix is insane.

• 1:07:15Speaker 04

  Right. I mean, it's insane. It's insane on your phone, too, and whatever. But yeah.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think that's like, one of the great unknowns here is, will they cave and put the touchscreen on and make it so it's a first-class experience for this huge universe of apps that people obviously want to run? Right? You can hack Instagram to run on it, and it's itty-bitty, and it's still like, oh, this is better than looking at Instagram on the web on a Mac, right? Like, it's already better. You can just see the demand is gonna build for it. That said, the demand has been there on the iPad for like, how long? And they haven't done it? So we'll see. But you can just see how the next turn of this is definitely to put the touchscreen on.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  It might be the turn after that. We've got a bet.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  We do have a bet going, but like, we haven't talked about Big Sur at all.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  In like, Monica reviewed Big Sur. It's great. You should go read it. I am just not gonna use it. I'm skipping this one.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  I think it's a mess. It's a visual mess, and I don't like using it. And in particular, everything they've done in sort of the top right of the screen is too iOSified. It all looks like you should touch it, which makes it harder to use with a mouse. And then in particular, that notifications view, what is the messiest part of an iPhone? It's notifications. And they're like, what if notifications on the Mac worked like that? And it, I would prefer not, actually. And I, I just, I, there needs to be a year of Craig Federighi being like, this is messier than I want, and then fixing it, and then I'll use it. I honestly, I'm gonna skip Big Sur.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  I'm gonna change your mind right now.

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  How's that?

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  You know how every single iOS app is making widgets for iOS because like, they're pretty good now on the iPhone?

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 04

  If you use this backwards method to install iOS apps on your Mac, those widgets become available for you to put in the sidebar.

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  I don't want widgets in my Mac sidebar. I just want a notification and a giant button that says do not disturb, and another giant button that says clear all. And I want the notifications to have the actual actions in them. Big Sur notifications, you have to hover and click to get the close button. Like, what is, all of this was made for touching.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Nilay Patel?

  And you're not letting me touch the computer. So I'm gonna stay back here in Catalina with my OS designed for a mouse.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  So you can touch the computer.

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  It's, ah, it's maddening. I've skipped so many years of macOS updates. First of all, I just stayed on Snow Leopard for like, three years. I just refused to leave.

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Which was the best one.

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  It was the best one. And then I've, I've basically skipped every other one. And I've never had any ill effects. The only reason I upgraded Catalina, this is so in the weeds, the only reason I upgraded Catalina, this is 100% true. When you take a screenshot in Catalina, you can just click on the screenshot and drag it into a Slack window, which I do 5,000 times a day, and you couldn't do that before. And once I got like, the review unit of Catalina machine, I was like, shit, I have to upgrade to Catalina. Anyway, let's talk about the App Store. There is a bunch of App Store news and outcry. They have reduced, the math here is, you have to follow it along. So if you are a developer, you make less than a million dollars a year in revenue, on January 1st, your App Store fee goes from 30%

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  To 15%. There are a lot of developers who make less than a million dollars a year, and they are very, very happy about this. There are some very loud developers who make more than a million dollars a year, and they think this is the most evil trick that anyone has ever pulled on them. I think that's about, that sums it up.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  That's the long and the short of it. There's like, things in the middle, like, I think you need to apply. You need to tell Apple, here's my revenue, please cut my fee, Apple, you know, start keeping track of it. And at first I was like, what the hell? Why don't they just make it 15%? And then it's like, oh, well, say you're a developer, you start getting close to a million dollars, you just create a new company, like, there's like, things, sketchy things could happen, I don't know. So that's fine. The other thing to me, and I tweeted this, a million dollars ain't what it used to be. Like, if you're actually trying to like, pay employees and like, you know, pay the upkeep on your server and maybe you have an office, like, for a small business, that gets eaten up

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  pretty quick. So there's that. I wish I could cap her a little bit higher. And then the third thing is, I think Sensor Tower estimates that 98% developers make less than a million dollars a year, so this is a huge win, but that, the other 2% is the one that makes all of the money.

• 1:11:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm getting the percentages wrong, but like, TLDR, the vast majority of like, developers will fall under this thing and be eligible for 15%, but the vast majority of money will not.

• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  And that, that split is the heart of the matter, right? Steven Sinofsky tweeted this, usually, you give the discount to your highest value customer, right? The one who's transacting the most, who's making you the most money, you're like, we'd like to give you a discount, thank you for shopping here, your next sub sandwich is free. It's, I mean, like, you experience this in your life all of the time. Here, Apple's like, we're gonna keep screwing you, you're all very mad, you stay mad. Friends, army of small developers, all of you will be slightly happier. We're not making any money from you anyway. And that is just a wild.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there, there's like PhD theses to be written about this kind of market and Apple's ability to do that. As opposed to the thing that you usually do.

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  So are you suggesting that the best customers are people that make Apple the most money? Apple doesn't have to give them a discount because they have nowhere else to go? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. If you're Fortnite, you're like, well, we're just going to screw our business on principle. Or Google Stadia, how is it going to come? It's going to come as a web app. X cloud is going to be a web app. This Amazon Luna thing is going to be a web app. GeForce, because Apple won't let their businesses exist on the store. And, you know, to wrap this all back into the, the Mac conversation, like the Bill Gates line about platforms is you're a true platform and other people are making more money than you. And the Mac has been that platform for a long time. You can build a huge business. Adobe is a gigantic business built on selling products on other people's platforms.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  And we, we've just never had like platform warfare with them in the way that Epic or X cloud or Stadia seems like it's crashing into platform warfare on the iPhone and now potentially on the Mac. And that it's, it's a good move. I'm happy that Apple felt the pressure, like the, even just the thought of regulation has made the companies move and change. There's a rumor that Apple's going to start suggesting other apps as defaults in the setup flow of the iPhone. That is wild. That is the result of pressure, making the product better for consumers. I'm there. I still don't know what the answer is for this 30%. And like, yeah, Spotify sent us a, a statement after this was announced. It was basically like, no, not this.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  This isn't what we wanted. Like, it was just like the words like anti-competitive, mad, criminal, like just all the keywords of anger, like in a row. David Hanameyer Hansen, you can look at his Twitter feed. He's like, Apple's scamming you. They're just making you feel good, but they're still screwing everyone. And then like other indie developers like argue with him, like, no, this is good for us. Don't use, you're like. They have thrown this like chum into the water to muck up the the fundamental concern, which is they control the platform and they make the decisions unilaterally in a way that if you don't like it, your choice is to destroy your business. And like, it's not to go to Android. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you can't just walk away from this huge market of iOS users if that's where your business is. And I, I still think

• 1:15:14Nilay Patel?

  there's a lot to be unpacked there. But it's good that they, it's good that the pressure's working, right?

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's good that the pressure's working. The, I don't know if the answer is either, honestly, like, reduce the percentages across the board. That's clearly what I think a bunch of people just want. I was thinking, the storefront analogy, the more I think about it, the angrier it makes me. Like, back in the day, Babbel just charged 50%, you know, when you had to buy physical software. The whole point of the internet is we don't have to pay those costs. That's why we have a website and not a magazine.

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  It'd be cool if we had a magazine.

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, we should get a magazine. That's good.

• 1:15:51Nilay Patel?

  The cover this week would have been like you holding the MacBook Air loft and the words triumph underneath it. We're gonna take a break. There's a little bit of stuff to pick up. We'll be right back.

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• 1:17:26Speaker 04

  We're back. Dieter, there's just a bunch of Google stuff. There's like four hours of RCS conversation. Let's, let's do it. Oh, do we want to do four hours of RCS conversation? We could do, no, we do not. I will say that I tried to shut down the thread conversation last week with Dan and then like people are tweeting us like, give us the two hours of thread. So I'm like, signed up for a Chris Welch HDMI special and now I gotta do a Dan thread special. RCS, so what's going on? So the thing that affects everybody is Google has completed a worldwide rollout of providing RCS directly itself in Android Messages. So you don't have to wait for your carrier to support it. So if you have an Android phone, you can download Android Messages and you can use RCS with anybody else that is part of the global interconnect of the

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  universal profile. That's very specific language there. You can't just say part of the universal profile because like AT&T, for example, supports the universal profile, but they don't support interconnect. It's a whole mess. But that mess is no longer a problem for you as long as you don't live in China, Russia, or Iran, because Google doesn't distribute Android Messages there apparently with RCS. Sure. So that's great. So they've, they've basically, the problem of like, when is this actually going to be available to consumers? Why do we have to wait for the carriers to implement it? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's been going on for two years is done. Like you could just have, you could just have RCS chat now. Great. The second thing, the thing that I personally think is more important. Because, you know, eventually that stuff was going to be available anyway.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  But the thing that's more important is they are enabling end-to-end encryption by default for one-on-one conversations in Android Messages. It's rolling out to people that sign up for the Android Messages beta this month. They won't give me a timeline for when it will actually launch, but I have to assume it'll be sometime next year. But everything with RCS moves slower than I expected to, so I don't know. But that is a huge win. Who knows if it'll come to group chats, who knows, blah, blah, blah, blah. But end-to-end encryption on the texting medium that is designed to replace SMS is like, it's the default way that your phone has to send a text message to another phone for 90% of the phones on the planet.

• 1:19:41Speaker 04

  That is a huge deal. It's a huge privacy win. Because I don't know if you've heard, but when the government asks Verizon or AT&T for information, historically, maybe not necessarily recently, but historically, the government isn't even able to finish its sentence before they're given access to all kinds of data.

• 1:19:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Speaker 04

  Right? But if this stuff is end-to-end encrypted, neither Google nor your phone carrier will be able to do anything with the contents of those conversations. That is, that's, that's just like the baseline. There's like other benefits to encryption, of course. So I'm like pretty excited about that.

• 1:20:16Nilay Patel?

  When does it roll out?

• 1:20:17Speaker 04

  Well, it's rolling out to beta users now. We don't, they won't give me a timeline for when it will roll into the main thing. So best guess, it's going to be a full year before we're like, okay, everyone can do it now. And there might be fights in between now and then. Because right now, Google's policy is if you're a carrier and you don't, you don't provide RCS services to your customers, we're going to do it. But if you do, then we'll let you and we'll get out of your way, which could like cause some faldorol with whether or not this will actually truly be a universal encryption thing or not.

• 1:20:49Nilay Patel?

  You mean carriers are lying about what they're going to do and they're not doing it?

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like, I'm excited, but there's, there's still plenty of opportunity for shenanigans over the next couple of years. Not least of which is if we really do want RCS to supplant SMS and become the thing that is, that we use to text each other, you should be able to text any phone. Because the nice thing about SMS is it's basically universal. iPhones don't support RCS and Apple's never said peep about whether or not they will.

• 1:21:17Nilay Patel?

  You have to imagine that if Verizon and AT&T can convince Apple to...

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Put random icons at the top of the screen. Which they're able to do, or like accelerate 5G marketing before they need to.

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  They might.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  But there is real money that Apple will be leaving on the table by switching on RCS. Because a lot of businesses want to use RCS for their customer service chats. It's like the most convenient thing for them, that they really want to do it. Apple has a business in providing iMessage business chat. And so that's like one of many different ways that Apple could be leaving money on the table. The iMessage App Store exists. I don't know.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  I mean, but they would just keep running iMessage and it would still be better than RCS, right? Like, that's the...

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Nilay Patel?

  They could just do that, and they would do that.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  To that point, what are some of the, I guess, limitations of encrypted chats in RCS? You already mentioned it's just one-on-one communication, it's not group messages. Are there other things?

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can't, you can, you can have the web browser client, because it's basically just running through your phone. But you're not going to have your messages synced across lots of different phones. You know, which I think for Android users is a foreign idea anyway, because like only their third-party messaging apps are really good at that. The SMS apps are really not. You can't do group chats. And, you know, there's other potential gotchas there. I'm trying to think of one. One that you won't run into is you will be able to use all the features in Android Messages. They made everything client-side instead of talking to Google servers for their, you know, smart chip suggestions for smart replies and emoji stickers and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So like, they're not going to break any features within Android Messages by turning this on.

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  The other caveat is, the only way this works is if you're an Android Message user talking to another Android Message user, and you both support descended encryption protocol. Because it's all happening, they're just doing it in the app, right? The app calls the other app and says, "Hey, are you, are you chat? Are you Android Messages? Cool, do you, do you support encryption? Cool," and then you're encrypted, right? But like, any no in that chain means you're just sending regular SMS or even SMS or RCS.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Is there a, like a visual indicator to let you know that the chat is encrypted?

• 1:23:30Speaker 04

  There's a lock at the top of the chat, there's a lock on the bubbles that get sent that say that they're encrypted, and there's a lock on the send button to tell you that you're sending an encrypted message.

• 1:23:38Nilay Patel?

  Amazing.

• 1:23:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40Nilay Patel?

  What you want is your phone to make you feel like a spy. And it's just like an under... It's an underutilized marketing technique to make your phone make you feel like a secret agent.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  They published a white paper that goes into, I would say not deep detail, but a little bit of detail about how this implementation works. They're happy to have other people build it or work with them on it, but this is not part of the GSMA universal profile. This is not being built into the spec. This is just a thing that Google is doing.

• 1:24:05Nilay Patel?

  Is Samsung going to do it? Because that's an important piece of the puzzle.

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  I think Samsung will do it. Yeah. And I, I, I trust that. And they're not fully going rogue. They're still talking to everybody. Nobody's surprised, nobody within the RCS world is surprised by this. But it is still Google just doing the thing.

• 1:24:21Nilay Patel?

  I like that you know that, one, there is an RCS world. You know how big it is and you know the state of surprise in that world.

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  I, I spend, I spend my weekends watching GSMA RCS business seminars. That's what I do.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  You gotta relax somehow. There's one more piece of Google news we should talk about, which is, which is briefly, Google launched a new messaging app this week.

• 1:24:39Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:24:40Nilay Patel?

  It's called Google Pay. It is, right? It's a, it's a messaging app. It just sends money instead of chats. But then they also like tried to make it everything else. They basically are turning into a bank.

• 1:24:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. So Google Pay Send, which on the iPhone was called Google Pay, was already this. It was already the Venmo competitor. So they just like integrated everything in and this had already launched in India as well, pretty much. But what they've done is they've taken peer to peer. They've also had the tap to pay stuff. They also let you plug your bank and credit card information into it so they can track all your finances for you. And if you want, you can have them send you personalized deals based on what they see in your transaction history to get you cash back into your Google Pay account. Plus, wait, Neelai, there's more. Would you like, would you like to also give Google Pay complete and full access to every single email and every single photo that you have stored in Gmail and Google Photos?

• 1:25:30Speaker 04

  Because then they can scan it automatically to ingress even more information into this system for even more exciting things. Like if you take a picture of a receipt and the receipt has the word taco on it, and then you search for tacos later, they will know that you spent $5 on tacos on, you know, January 3rd or whatever.

• 1:25:46Nilay Patel?

  So there's, okay, I will, let me start with.

• 1:25:48Speaker 04

  Like there's more features.

• 1:25:49Nilay Patel?

  Oh, there's more. Oh, good.

• 1:25:50Speaker 04

  It has stories.

• 1:25:54Nilay Patel?

  Just kill me. Like, why, like, why does Twitter have fleets? And why does Google Pay have stories? Like, all the scenes saying, I know why Twitter has it, because it's a nice advertising.

• 1:26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Nilay Patel?

  Canvas for them. They can just, like, put more ads in Twitter. It's great. There's whatever. Google paid. First of all, okay, here's the pro case. I think everybody in their life wants someone to follow them around who's good at money. Right? Like, you want to be like, let me talk to my accountant. Like, that's a thing. Like, that's what, that's like what Jay-Z says.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:26:23Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:26:24Nilay Patel?

  Right? There's like Jay-Z just has like a lawyer and accountant and a publicist and agent. And those are his people. And he's like, I want to buy a boat. And then they like, go do something. And then like, there's a boat. That's how I think Jay-Z lives. I don't.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay. I haven't done any reporting on this, but that is my theory of Jay-Z's life.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:40Nilay Patel?

  I would like that, right? Where you're just like, can I buy this? And the thing like calculates a deal and does your credit card points for you. And like, that sounds nice. Like a little money butler. Okay. To enable the little money butler, you need to also allow an all seeing panopticon into your life. That seems problem like that trade off. I don't want to do.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  We, we have this problem in the smart home world as well. Like, in order to make your smart home really work well, it needs loads and loads and loads of data. And in order to make a financial assistant money butler work really, really well, it needs loads and loads and loads of data.

• 1:27:19Nilay Patel?

  If we can rebrand CPAs as money butlers, first of all, amazing cultural moment.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Are they wearing shoes? And are they dogs? Do you want Bixby money? Because that's what's coming next.

• 1:27:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  But the question is like, at which point does the value of a money butler justify giving Google or whatever it is, all of this data? And like, I don't know. Personally, I'm, I'm kind of skeptical about it. Uh, I, I, I would not want to give that much data to one entity and that entity also be Google, which also has loads of other data about me already and also makes its money by selling ads.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, there's like a, what's the best argument to break these companies up? To make them smaller so they have to grow in reasonable and like. Acceptable ways again, like Google's so big, they're like, now we're a bank. Facebook is so big, they're like, now we're a currency. Apple's like, we have a credit card. They're like, the joke about Sony for years was it was a very successful insurance company with a failing TV division because it makes all of its money in financial services in Japan. And it would be like, do you want 3D TVs this year? No. And then the insurance company like, what are you doing? Like, make a good TV. And then like the next year, they would do it. That's where you get when you're these kinds of conglomerates, right?

• 1:28:36Nilay Patel?

  You're, you're just out of things to do. So you're like, now we're going to do bank stuff because banks make free money. And it's just break them up, like make YouTube try to make a search engine. That would be a better way for Google to grow than for it to just become this like crazy, I'm not signing up for this. It's like one of the first Google products, Google Photos, right? It's like, it's a scary kind of product. You're going to give Google all of your photos. It returns enormous value to you.

• 1:29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:06Nilay Patel?

  This is like some coupons.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  So it's some coupons. I don't know. I plugged in the, how'd you spend your money? I plugged, I plugged all my stuff in for science. I might do a review or just write about it later. It's like made a little chart that shows me how much money I spent this month at Apple, Amazon, Eurozone, REI, and Sony. Just like, this is where your money went to these giant corporations and a little interface. Eurozone's not a giant corporation. It's a sweet thing where you can get custom parts for your Volkswagen Golf. Highly recommended.

• 1:29:34Nilay Patel?

  I love it.

• 1:29:37Nilay Patel?

  So that's like neat, but I don't know. The coupons, they're cash back offers. And the way that they work is you say, yes, I will do this cash back offer. And anytime you use that your associated credit card at the store, you get the money. So you don't have to like remember a coupon code, but the money comes back to you as Google Pay money in your Google Pay account. So all of a sudden, like, just like Apple Pay, you've got an Apple Pay account with money in it, or a PayPal account, or a Venmo account. You like lose track of like, we've got $10 here, $50 there, or whatever. Google's got this money in a bank account that it controls and maybe it could earn interest on it. I don't know. So there's like, there's money there. There's money in their deals with the different retailers for these cash back deals. There's money in the banks that they're

• 1:30:19Nilay Patel?

  going to partner with to order straight up online banking directly inside the app.

• 1:30:24Speaker 04

  No, see, yeah.

• 1:30:27Nilay Patel?

  Again, until you get to the point where you're like, hey, Google, I like this mansion. Figure out how to buy it. And then you go away and you come back one day and they're like, the papers are here. And then Google itself spits out like a leather bound sheet of contracts.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:30:42Nilay Patel?

  And you've got to, right? That's the dream. This is just like skimming. So you gotta go from skimming to what I imagine is like Rihanna's experience buying a new Bentley.

• 1:30:53Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:53Nilay Patel?

  Just get to there, Google. I don't, I, I understand why it's valuable for them to do. And certainly everybody can be better at managing their money, but this is like right on the edge of Google being scary.

• 1:31:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Maybe it's over, maybe it's over the edge.

• 1:31:05Nilay Patel?

  Again, this is one of the few Google products where I'm like, oh, I'll just try it out. Cause the first thing you have to do is give it your checking account. I'm like, I'm not doing that.

• 1:31:13Speaker 04

  This is the other thing is that they promised not to share or sell your information with third parties. Of course, like if you buy something, the third party will know. But they also promised not to share it with the Google ad division for ad targeting. But like, it's a promise. If you don't pay attention to the next time they update their terms of service, who knows? Right? It's just, it's, it's a matter of policy, not of law, that they're not sharing it for ad targeting services. They could change their mind. And so you're going to have to keep an eye on it if you sign up for this thing.

• 1:31:43Nilay Patel?

  We'll just see how it goes.

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:31:44Nilay Patel?

  I know they're promising it now, but Google's an advertising company. If they can link their advertising to you, to you making an actual purchase. Like they have closed the loop. They are, they're it.

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:31:57Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's the win. It's the ultimate win.

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  But wait, there's more. You can scan barcodes when you're out at the store and then you can make that purchase through Google Shopping instead of at the store that you happen to be at.

• 1:32:08Nilay Patel?

  It's also a messaging app, which me, look, it's going to be fine in like six months. They're going to kill it.

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  They're going to make this the home screen of Android. Come on.

• 1:32:15Nilay Patel?

  The end.

• 1:32:16Speaker 06

  One more piece of Google news and it's Chrome, of course.

• 1:32:19Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:20Speaker 06

  Uh, this week, Google put out a new Chrome update that they say has the largest performance gain in years. And this post really blew up on our site because people are always psyched. So they claim that Chrome will now use up to five times less CPU and it'll give you back 1.25 hours of battery life. Uh, which kind of goes to show you just how, just how much battery this thing uses. Uh, but yeah, people are pretty psyched about it. But I mean, most of the comments on our site were saying too little, too late. I've already switched to Edge and like Edge is great and this and that. I mean,

• 1:32:48Speaker 04

  A lot of, a lot of Edge fans at the

• 1:32:50Nilay Patel?

  Most of the comments on our site were like a coordinated, "phenomenal, fantastic, Microsoft."

• 1:32:55Speaker 06

  Could have been.

• 1:32:56Speaker 04

  They're getting a lot of these gains through like shutting down background tabs the way that everybody else does, right?

• 1:33:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:33:00Speaker 04

  Like, you can have rogue tabs just go nuts on Chrome.

• 1:33:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, and there's some new features like tab search, which is awesome. So you can finally search your tabs without having to like squint at all the fabicons to see what is what. Uh, so that's pretty useful, but it seems like Chrome has some kind of image problem with a certain subset of people. I'm not sure how Google can set that right, but, uh...

• 1:33:19Nilay Patel?

  There is also, just briefly, they put out an M1 build of Chrome and we all got excited about it and then there was some problem with it and they took it away.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  And now it's back.

• 1:33:27Nilay Patel?

  It's back?

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, I gotta go. I gotta try this out. We gotta end the show. We've gone way too, like, you don't know how long the show is supposed to be, but I guarantee you this is longer.

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, but we're, we're, we're taking next week off, so it's good that this one's long because you can listen to it again on Thanksgiving.

• 1:33:38Nilay Patel?

  That's true. We're off next week for Thanksgiving. Uh, we appreciate all of you. Please don't visit anyone, just stay home and stay safe. Please do it for me. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backlon, Chris is at Chris Welch, Dan is at DCCFert. Love your notes. Decoder this week was with Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. If you are living the remote learning life, he just had a lot to say about what it's good for, which I thought was really interesting. So check that out. That's in the feed. It's also in the Decoder feed. Next week, Decoder, Phil Spencer from Xbox. We get into it on the Xbox launch. He was spicy. He was a good one. So that's coming up next Tuesday on Decoder. And like I said, we're off, uh, for Thanksgiving next week. So thank you to everyone for listening. We appreciate you. We'll see you in a couple of weeks. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:34:22Speaker 04

  Wear a mask and stay home.

• 1:34:43Speaker 08

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