Macs and M3s, shot on iPhones

Today on the flagship podcast of spec bumps: 02:21 - The Verge’s David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Dan Seifert discuss the announcements from Apple’s “Scary Fast” Mac event. Apple’s ‘Scary Fast’ Mac event: all the news from Apple’s online keynote 27:56 - Becca Farsace joins the show to share her thoughts on smartphone photography in 2023, and if the “Pro” branding can live up to its name. iPhone 15 Pro Max camera: 1000 photos later, it’s still missing something 1,000 photos with the Pixel 8 Pro: AI, UI, and Pro stuff 52:06 - Adi Robertson answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline. Xreal’s Air 2 AR glasses ship in November in the US Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of SpecBumps. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am once again in the E. Barrett Pretty Men courthouse in Washington DC. That's right, folks, I am back at USV Google. This time, I'm here for Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. His testimony was on Monday and we learned some fascinating stuff about the Apple deal, about the things that Google wanted to preload onto iOS devices. There's this fascinating alternate universe that Apple and Google could have gone down. We're going to get into all of that, I think, next week. We have a lot of catching up to do on some of the trials with SBF and antitrust and some new antitrust stuff happening, lots to get to. But for today, we're going to talk about two things. First, we're going to talk about the Apple event from Monday night, the big scary fast

• 0:46David Pierce?

  event with all of its new devices and unlabeled y-axes. We're going to get into the new devices, whether they're interesting, why Apple chose to do this at 8:00 PM Eastern on a Monday night, and a bunch more. Then, I'm going to talk to Becca Farsaci from our video team, all about phone cameras. We've spent a lot of time this year talking about and shooting with these new phone cameras and increasingly on things like the Pixel and the Galaxy line and the iPhone. The phones are the thing, like that is the reason you buy a new phone year in and year out. It's either that or like your battery dies. So, we're going to get into, are phones getting better? Are they getting more different, developing their own taste? Or are we getting kind of to a platonic ideal of smartphone photos? It's a super fun conversation, it goes like all over the place, but it's a good time.

• 1:29David Pierce?

  All that is coming up in just a minute, but I just found the cafeteria in this courthouse after like a lot of days of being here and that means I actually get to have lunch during the trial. This is very exciting for me, I'm going to go make that happen. This is The Vergecast, we'll see you in a sec.

• 1:46Speaker 01

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• 2:18David Pierce?

  Welcome back. All right, they let me out of the courtroom. It was very exciting. I don't have a cold anymore. Let's get to it.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Good evening and welcome to Apple Park.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  On Monday night, Apple held an event that it called Scary Fast. For some reason, in my head, this event is called Spooky Scary, but it's not. It was called Scary Fast, and there were signs from the beginning that this event was always going to be a bit unusual. First of all, it was on a Monday at 8:00 PM Eastern, 5:00 PM Pacific, which is up against like Monday night football. Nobody was invited. It was all virtual. And like we talked about last week on the show, this sort of seemed like Apple trying to flex its muscles in prime time. My theory going in was that either this was going to be one of Apple's sneaky big announcements ever. It was gonna like announce it bought Disney or something, or that it was essentially trying to bury an event, which seemed weird because normally when Apple thinks it has news that isn't all that interesting, it just puts out a press release.

• 3:11David Pierce?

  So I was very confused about what this was gonna be. And as you can see, I also had a million theories about how this event was gonna work, whether there would be costumes and what we would see announced. And I was wrong about, I think, just about every single one of them. But we'll get to that. To talk about what did happen, Alex Cranz and Dan Seifert are here. Alex Cranz, hello. Hello. Dan Seifert, hello.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  I have no idea where to start. I confess, I'm so confused now, many hours after this Apple event, that I'm not sure what to do. But let's, let's just start with the vibe of the thing itself. So Dan, we got this invite and it was for 8:00 PM Eastern on a Monday night. And we immediately started trying to decide, what is Apple doing here? We had a lot of theories. Now that we've seen the thing, why did Apple do this at 8:00 PM on a Monday night?

• 3:57Speaker 03

  I think the strongest theory, which we still really don't know the answer to why they did it on Monday night. But the strongest going theory is it's a testing of the waters to see if they can get the audience and the interest. In the prime time time slot for when they do a bigger event, that's either the next iPhone or the next iPad event, or their spring event, whatever it might be. That's my guess. And I think that in Apple's eyes, at least based on what I've seen, based on the interest on our own site, they probably have the interest to do it. And so going forward.

• 4:30Alex Cranz?

  No, Dan.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  They're probably going to be at 8:00 PM on Monday nights.

• 4:34Alex Cranz?

  Dan, this is incorrect because we all watched this one because we were hoping it was going to be something interesting and something a little more because it was, it was at 8:00 PM or 5:00 PM. If you're on Pacific time, there was that little bit of like desire. And then instead it was not just a very traditional Apple event. It was like the most traditional.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:55Alex Cranz?

  And it just, I do not think it was successful at what they wanted to do. Yeah, people watched it, but are people going to tune in every time? Or did they just like waste it?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Honestly, I think that for an iPhone event, they could have it at three in the morning and people will tune in.

• 5:10David Pierce?

  I think that's right. I agree with that.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  The audience probably has heard us say this, but the amount of attention that Apple can pull is so much more than basically any other company. And so Apple can do basically what it wants. I will say that they did lean into the fact that it was at night, like their pre-recorded infomercial was shot at night and they were all wearing dark clothes because it was spooky.

• 5:35Alex Cranz?

  It's the dynamic range on the iPhone that shot it all was incredible.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  We're going to talk about that in the next segment. I don't, it's just, that's for Becca to talk about later. Don't even worry about it.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  There was lots of like cloud or smoke effects and you know, nobody wore a costume. I was hoping that they would be a little bit more fun and wear a costume.

• 5:53David Pierce?

  I was a little disappointed that no one even, there weren't even like little jokey costumes that appeared for a second and then just like, I was, I was hoping for something.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  Nobody even had like a jack-o'-lantern pin or anything.

• 6:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 6:04Alex Cranz?

  I have an additional theory for why they did it at this time.

• 6:07David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 6:07Alex Cranz?

  Because I was sitting there last night after the event, it was about 8:31 because the event ended exactly at 8:30. It was a 30-minute event. And I was like, why was it at this time of day? Because generally speaking, you want to get as maximum, you want to get as many people watching as possible, right? So everybody on the Pacific Coast is watching as they watch right before they leave to work, right? Everybody on the East Coast and everybody in Central Time is watching over like dinner because I guess that's what we all did.

• 6:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, we had people on our staff who were like, I just put my kids to bed in the middle of an Apple event. What is happening here?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  I speed ran bedtime last night. I was like, you guys are all getting to bed, brush your teeth as fast as possible, gotta go.

• 6:46Alex Cranz?

  I would, I would argue that it wasn't the best time to maximize American views. And so then I was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, okay, well, maybe Europe. And I was like, no, Europe, it's even later. So this is actually a much worse time for Europe because they're all in bed to sleep because it's sleeping time for them. So you're cutting out that whole market. So the best I could think was maybe this was for China where it would have been first thing in the morning, would have been seven, eight o'clock, where we're currently having a massive debate with the country about processors and who builds those processors. And this entire event was about processors. So there's, I was like, is there something there? Or was it really just, we want to see if Americans will tune

• 7:28Alex Cranz?

  in as they're putting their kids to bed the day before Halloween? In which case, I feel like that was a weird, weird bet to me.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  I could see the China argument more for an iPhone event, a Mac event.

• 7:42Alex Cranz?

  But this, it wasn't a Mac event as much as it was a processor event that had Macs in it, right?

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Sure, but it was the processors that go into Macs. It's not the processors that go into iPhones and most of the iPads. It is like their desktop computing processors.

• 7:57Alex Cranz?

  But those processors are just as important, just like the iPhone is obviously more important than the Mac. But those processors, as it compares to, to the other big folks making processors that go in computers and servers and stuff, just as important.

• 8:10David Pierce?

  It's a good theory. Yeah, I think, and, and Apple is definitely going out of its way to flex itself as a chip manufacturer in all ways.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  But the only difference is they don't sell the chips.

• 8:21David Pierce?

  That's what I was just about to say.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, they sell computers that have the chips.

• 8:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  You cannot go to Apple and be like, I want to run a server farm.

• 8:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Give me your chips so that I can put them in there like they're not competing with Intel and TSMC and the others that are fabricators and also, you know, building server chips and all this stuff. They are building their products, their chips for their products that they sell either directly to businesses or to consumers as a fully fledged product. So like, that's how it is a Mac event. Like, yes, they were flexing about their chips, but the only way to get these chips is in a Mac. And there's no other way to get it.

• 8:53Alex Cranz?

  Dan, I need it to be the chip scenario because otherwise we're going to be like doing 8pm Mac events for the rest of our lives.

• 9:00David Pierce?

  I'm with Dan. I, I think if you made me bet $50 right now on what time will the iPhone event be next year? I'm going to say it's, it's evening East Coast time.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you know what evening East Coast time is? It's not the middle of the workday.

• 9:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Like, like for us, it's our job to watch it. We stopped our whole workday, many workdays to focus on it and to plan for it and stuff like that. But for most people, it's like you are sneaking it in the middle of your workday.

• 9:27Alex Cranz?

  Before I was a journalist, that was one of my favorite things was like middle of the workday. I'd be like, oh, I'm going to take my lunch and watch an Apple event.

• 9:34David Pierce?

  It's so that Apple can make sure its employees work the whole day and then watch the Apple event. It's really, this is about Apple Park getting its full productive use. All right, let's move on. So I think I agree it was odd, but I also suspect this will not be the last time Apple does this. But let's, let's talk about the chips. So we got the, the M3, the M3 Pro and the M3 Max. This is the first time Apple has launched the whole family of chips all at once, which I thought was very interesting. Dan, we were talking just before we started recording and you were saying basically that the story of these chips is slightly more complicated than usual. It's not just kind of the good, better, best it has been in the past.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the typical rollout for M chips, at least for the M1 and the M2 generations, was Apple would come out with the M base model. And then six months, 12 months later, they'd have the M3 Pro, the M3 Max, and then eventually the M3 Ultra. And each one would build upon it. So the unique thing here is that the M3, like you said, David, is all rolling out at the same time. But there is some like real weirdness once you get into the Pro and the Max, because not only are there M3 Pro and M3 Max, but there's also like M3 Pro with a certain number of cores on it, and then M3 Pro with more cores on it, and then M3 Max with a certain number of cores, and M3 Max with more cores on it. And that will determine how many features each one of them has and what capabilities it has. So if you want the absolute best CPU,

• 10:54Speaker 03

  you have to get the M3 Max with the best GPU, which wasn't always the case in the past.

• 10:59Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  The way that Apple split the power cores and the efficiency cores is not linear anymore. The M3 Pro has a 12-core CPU on it, and six of those are efficiency cores and six are performance cores. And then the M3 Max does like 12 performance cores and then four efficiency cores. So in prior models, it was like a linear thing. And you had the same ratio of performance and efficiency cores in the Pro and the Max chips. But that's upended now. We'll have to see how that shakes out in the real world and what that performance means. But it is just more stuff you have to think about and consider when you're when you're buying these.

• 11:38Alex Cranz?

  I like this because ultimately it's not going to be more stuff for most people listening to this. Because ideally, a bunch of people are going to get a hold of these things and benchmark them, and you're going to get a better sense of which is the right one for you. But I like, it feels like the company is thinking more, is being more thoughtful about their processor design by by adjusting the amount of efficiency cores. Because if you've got the Max, that's like the biggest one, right? It's equivalent of the AMD Threadripper or something like that.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:04Alex Cranz?

  You don't necessarily want energy efficiency there. Right, you're buying that for like raw power.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  You're buying it for raw power, sure, but if you're buying a Pro as opposed to the standard M3, because that's the other thing is now the standard M3 is part of the MacBook Pro line. So if you're stepping up to the M3 Pro for reasons, one of those reasons is probably power. And I will tell you from personal experience with a standard M chip versus an M Pro chip, I can max out those performance cores on a standard M chip pretty easily with simple workloads and Lightroom and stuff like that. And the extra performance cores in the M Pro chip allows me to have that headroom where I do not max them out. Or if I do max them out, that's for a shorter amount of time and stuff like that. If I run a Lightroom export on an M series MacBook Air, that computer is, I can't do anything with it until that export is done.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Whereas my M1 Pro, even a two-year-old M1 Pro allows me to run an export and do other things. It allows me to do more quote professional tasks. But if the new chips don't have as many performance cores, then that might change that equation, but it's hard to say without actually testing all of them.

• 13:09Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it's still fairly linear from the regular to the Pro.

• 13:14David Pierce?

  You're right, Alex, that there is still some measure of like good, better, best going on. It's just that the kind of leap from one to the next is maybe less clear to me than before. What I have a hard time with is seeing where I would want the base chip. Like, why would I buy the entry-level 14-inch MacBook Pro? I guess is a question we've been asking for a while because the MacBook Air has gotten so good. But for me, it's like, I see why the top-end computer here, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, you've got 128 gigs of unified memory, like the 40-core GPU this thing costs, what is it, like $7,200? Like, like, hell, yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  Fully loaded, yeah.

• 13:49David Pierce?

  I see why that computer kicks ass. What I don't understand is this sort of middle ground of everything is more powerful, but not necessarily sort of dramatically so in some ways here.

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we should talk about this base model because this base model is really the new thing in the lineup. The others, the M3 Pro and the M3 Max are upgrades of the M2 Pro. But now we have this base model 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M3 standard chip.

• 14:18David Pierce?

  And the 13-inch is dead, dead now, right?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  13-inch is dead and gone.

• 14:20David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Goodbye Touch Bar. Kranz loves the Touch Bar. Sorry, Kranz.

• 14:24Alex Cranz?

  I love the idea of the Touch Bar. Let's be clear.

• 14:27Speaker 03

  The idea, great. Execution, not so much. Now it's gone. So now the Pro line starts at $1,600, which is a $400 price drop from where it started with the M2 generation. But that $1,600 computer comes with a base M3 chip, not a Pro or a Max chip. And it's got other compromise in it. It has eight gigs of RAM for $1,600. It has fewer ports on it. They took away a USB-C port, so there's none on the right-hand side. So it's really basically set up like a MacBook Air, except with an HDMI port and an SD card slot.

• 14:59David Pierce?

  I mean, there's all kinds of little things like that. It doesn't, it's not fully like Thunderbolt 4 certified in its ports. Like, and again, I just, I just want to say this again, one more time for emphasis. It's $1,600 and it has eight gigs of RAM.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:11David Pierce?

  That is ludicrous. Like, that should not be allowed. Apple should be ashamed of itself for trying to sell that to people.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  And like, Apple's line is that unified memory is more efficient and you don't need as much. But my retort to that is you can hit swap very easily on an eight gigabyte.

• 15:27David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  Mac. I've done it. We've done it in testing. I hit swap on my 16 gig Mac all the time. And you do notice when that happens. And then if eight gig was all anyone needed, why are you selling 16 gig and 24 gig upgrades for $200 and $400? Anyways, so now you have this computer at $1,600 that is right next to the price of the 15-inch MacBook Air that has a larger screen, a lighter chassis, thinner design, all that stuff. It's a little bit cheaper. But the question is like, now you have even more of a confusion of like, what do you go for? Like, if you wanted, prior to this, if you wanted the good Pro computers, you started at $2,000. You got a faster processor, more capable, more ports, all the whole nine yards. And you got the great display and all that kind of stuff. Now the main difference is the screen and an HDMI port.

• 16:12Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's often been the big difference between the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. Like, historically, that was the primary difference, was not the processors, but the display. And, and people were like, yeah, I want to play more for a prettier display because, so I like, I think that makes a lot of sense. Honestly, I think this positioning makes sense because it's saying, look, if you, if you care just about lightness and good battery life, go get one of the two Airs. Or maybe wait until they release the M3 version of those Airs. But go get those Airs. And then if you actually want like a better display, if you want the good display, then you can get better battery life and similar speeds for similar price and get the, the MacBook Pro, the base model.

• 16:54David Pierce?

  I think that theory made a lot more sense to me like six years ago when the Airs screen was pretty crappy.

• 17:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:03David Pierce?

  It's now you're going from like very good screen to even better screen. Which is again, like I think Apple would be happy with the outcome of this conversation being most people should still buy MacBook Airs. Like I think most people still do buy MacBook Airs and that's all fine and good. To me, it's just like the MacBook Pro is sort of inexorably moving towards being the Mac Pro. I think that it's just going to get higher and higher and higher end. But Apple cannot let go of this idea that they're like, we have to have one that is under $2,000. And it's like, just don't, just get rid of it. It's the Air. It's fine.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  The theory for the longest time was that they kept around that stupid 13 inch MacBook Pro. Because this is quote, a theory that businesses will only buy a computer if it has Pro in its name. And they don't actually care about the specs or whatever. And so they want the cheapest one that has Pro in the name. And so now the cheapest one with Pro in the name is $1,600. It's up from $1,300 on the 13 inch model. I would argue that like that makes sense. It's a much better computer. And that is who's buying this. So it's like almost not even a consumer pitch. And you can see that in ways where like you don't get the new color option, which is not really a color. But you don't get that option on the base model. And you like, if you buy the 16 inch model and then you do upgrade the RAM, you're at 1,800 or $2,000.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  At that point, you might as well just buy the better processor and all that stuff.

• 18:17Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, we're ignoring one thing. The Airs all come base 256 gigabytes of storage. The Pro comes base 512.

• 18:26David Pierce?

  That's a fair point.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Sure, but the Airs start at $1,100.

• 18:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but so to get, they basically spend the same amount to boost the storage.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  Not quite. You don't get there. You, you get close to it, but it's still cheaper.

• 18:38Alex Cranz?

  You get close enough that you're like, ooh, if I spend a hundred dollars more, I get a prettier display too, kind of deal.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  You get a smaller display and I would argue that that customer that really cares that much. Uh, or is looking at a 15 inch MacBook Air is looking at that because it has the bigger display. Uh, and that actually matters more to them.

• 18:54Alex Cranz?

  Then why would we compare it to the 14 inch at all?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Because they're in the lineup there. This is modern Apple where it'll always be where you're at one point and you're like, well, if I just spend a little bit more.

• 19:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  I get more. Oh, now that I'm here, I'm at 1600. Well, shoot, I really should get that 16 gigs of RAM because I'm spending almost $2,000 for this computer already. I want it to last a few years, stuff like that. Oh, now I'm at $1,800. This is how you step your, you rationalize every single step and every single step, the profit margins are bigger. So like this is modern Apple and this is, this is how it goes with everything.

• 19:29Alex Cranz?

  Okay, we talked about the eight gigabytes of RAM and that's very offensive. I do want to talk like, I'm still just thinking about that 256 gigabytes of storage minimum on the air. That's just, that feels as bad as eight gigabytes.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  I don't think that's as big of a problem as some of these other constraints on the pros. For one, the air, if you think about how people use computers these days, they are living in a browser. Most of their life lives in the clouds.

• 19:53Alex Cranz?

  This is spoken like a man who doesn't hoard his data.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  I, I, I hoard data. My computer has a terabyte drive. I've got seven terabytes of drive plugged into it. Do not talk to me about hoarding data. I pay, I pay an ordered amount of fees for cloud storage in the terabytes of range. But if I think about like a typical consumer buying the MacBook Air, a student or someone who's just looking for a home computer or whatever, most of their life is living in the cloud. They are living in a browser and things like that. There aren't, they aren't storing a lot of stuff directly on their drive. They don't even know what files are. Exactly. So I, I, I don't think that's a problem on the airs. When the airs first launched, there was a lot of controversy about the speed of that storage. I don't think that's a problem at that level either.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  But once you add a pro to the name and once you step up to these price brackets, that is where all of these considerations do matter and, and make differences depending on the workload. If you're buying the pro computer and you're saying, I'm going to be editing images and video. I want to be a creator. I want to pursue this and stuff like that. You will quickly run into these walls if you stay with the base model and that's just the reality of it.

• 20:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, my guess would be that the kind of consistent choice for a lot of people here is going to be the 14-inch, either Pro or Max, depending on the person. But like, the 16 just feels like it's so much bigger and more expensive that you're gonna lose some people. It's also just a big machine. Like, it's a big computer.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're pushing almost five pounds with that.

• 21:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I think as the like, you know, creator tool for people with expendable income, the 14-inch with the Pro and the Max, if it benchmarks the way we probably expect it to, based on all of Apple's unlabeled graphs that say it's faster. Do you see the one where it was just like, "Image Processing 2X"? And you're just like, "What is that? That's nothing." You just said "Image Processing 2X", like, that's with a swoopy line.

• 21:41Alex Cranz?

  They did have labels for the graphs, but it's very, very small and like, just a shade lighter than the background.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  The Y-axis is relative performance.

• 21:51David Pierce?

  It said "Relative Performance"? That's nothing. Just don't even put words there.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  Just draw lines floating out in space.

• 21:58Alex Cranz?

  Look, I used to do this too. I would make charts and it would just be, I'd just be like, "People don't care about the actual speed. They just wanna see a big number." And I got yelled at a lot for it.

• 22:09David Pierce?

  But I just think the M3 Pro, I just specced this out while we were talking here, and you can get the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro, 18 gigs of unified memory, 512 gigs of storage, blah, blah, blah, $2,000 on the dot. It's $19.99. I suspect that one is going to be the one that most people do. Because you're gonna start with the base one, and like you're talking about, Dan, just slowly step your way up to that anyway. That's the one I think Apple wants to sell you.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  If history follows what happened with the M1 Pro and the M2 Pro, that's the one that's like, gonna be in stores at Best Buy and B&A and all this stuff. And they are gonna discount it by $200 when they put it on sale. And then at $1,800, you have a hell of a computer for $1,800, and I think a lot of people can be really happy with it. And they should not get the $1,600 base model.

• 22:51David Pierce?

  Have you seen the Space Black one? Alex and I were both very excited about this Space Black one.

• 22:55Alex Cranz?

  It's so pretty.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's Space Dark Gray. I'm not going to quote him exactly, but Jason Snell over at Six Colors had a really great line about it in his piece. You should go check it out. But him and I were kind of talking about it yesterday. It is just a darker version of space gray. It is not really black. So if you have in your mind that this is the return of the Black Book, which was that black plastic MacBook from the mid 2000s, this is not it. It's it's still gray.

• 23:19Alex Cranz?

  It's a shame. Never mind.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  I don't know what to say. It's another shade of gray. They are claiming that this anatization is like supposed to be more resistant to fingerprints. And I did slap my palm on it and smear my fingers around on it to try and see, but it was hard to tell if they actually remained or not. I think once we have it in use and see if it's any better than the midnight, because the midnight grossed up almost immediately. This might be slightly better.

• 23:43David Pierce?

  Let's talk about the iMac for two minutes, which I think is as long as the iMac deserves. I started out when Apple announced the iMac, which is literally just the same damn computer, but they took out the old chip and they put in the new chip. The end. No new accessories, no nothing.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Nothing.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  Still lightning keyboard. I was outraged by this. I'm still kind of outraged by this, but I also now understand this. And what I think it is, is Apple believes that there are people who buy iMacs, and that's a very specific set of person. And what they are going to do is they're going to take their 11 year old iMac that they bought that runs an Intel thing and no longer gets software updates and is basically falling apart. They're going to replace it with this one and they're going to be very happy. And I think they're right. And I think that is like a sad way to think about the iMac line at this point in time, but I think that's where we are.

• 24:28Alex Cranz?

  The iMac was always there, though. There was like the bit of time where the iMac was used by kids and teens. But for the most part, it's always been like your parents' computer that they keep in their computer room because they're the ones that still have computer rooms.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  Yes, it served the role as the shared family computer or the home computer. And I would argue that at this point, that is an increasingly shrinking audience and does not exist for the reality of most modern families or modern homes. People have moved on to personal devices, whether they're Chromebooks or laptops or iPhones or tablets or whatever. So it makes sense to me that they are not throwing lots of investment at the iMac. David said, like, we don't have an iMac Pro because the Mac Studio exists and the Mac Pro exists and that serves those customers better because they can swap out that computer without having to like deal with the whole thing. And the audience for IMAX, which we all know is you

• 25:23Speaker 03

  go into a spa or a fancy doctor's office or whatever, and they are sitting there on the desk as you're checking computers at the reception.

• 25:31David Pierce?

  Or your kitchen, according to Apple. While you cook, you just like hang out on your iMac.

• 25:35Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't wait to read divorce notes of like, the husband insisted on putting the iMac in the kitchen. So they got to, the wife was like, this is invading my space. But yeah, that's the reality of it. So what we got is, you know, I'm glad that they didn't completely ignore the iMac like they have for two and a half years, that they did put a faster chip in it, but everything else is exactly the same. It would have been great to have USB C accessories because I would have happily replaced some of my older accessories.

• 26:00Alex Cranz?

  These prices are goofy. If I'm reading this correctly, the base model iMac doesn't have USB ports?

• 26:07Speaker 03

  It has two instead of four. So the base model, this is the same as the M1 generation, has two USB C ports in the back. If you upgrade the processor to the higher bind version or whatever, it jumps up to four.

• 26:19Alex Cranz?

  That's goofy.

• 26:20David Pierce?

  It's goofy. All right. We have spent now exactly as long talking about the event as the event was itself. So we're, we're done here. This event deserves so more. Thank you, guys. Dan, I'm assuming we will have reviews of these at some point in the hopefully not too distant future. So stay tuned for that.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Stay tuned. Yep.

• 26:35David Pierce?

  Thank you both. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about cameras, like iPhones, which shoot events sometimes at night. We'll be right back.

• 26:47Speaker 01

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• 27:19David Pierce?

  We're back. Right at the end of the Apple thing the other night, there was this little notice on the stream that said the event had been shot on an iPhone, an iPhone 15 Pro Max, I think, and edited on a Mac, which is impressive, given all the dark shots and swoopy drone stuff and the huge empty rooms and the tricky camera moves. It was a pretty good flex from Apple. But how big a flex, really? That's the question for me. The event was shot on an iPhone, but as we saw in some of the behind the scenes footage, it was an iPhone plus like a room full of giant lights and a bunch of drones and gimbals and much more. They didn't just like put the phone in video mode and pointed at Tim Cook, you know what I mean? And I don't mean that as a dig. That's not how anyone ever shoots anything professional. And this is still really cool.

• 28:04David Pierce?

  And actually, one of the things I thought was interesting was one of the folks who produced the event said that it was remarkable how not different it was to use the iPhone. Here's a clip from the behind the scenes shot.

• 28:15Speaker 05

  We're able to get the same complex shots on such a small device, similar to how we would do any traditional camera. We're on cranes, dollies, drone shots.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Drones rolling up.

• 28:27David Pierce?

  This all raises a question we've been kind of asking all year. How good are smartphone cameras, really? Have they gotten so good over the last 15 years that we've stopped noticing the ways they keep getting better, but they continue to be mind blowing? Are they going to be as good as or better than big pro level cameras anytime soon? We've been made these grand promises about the evolution of smartphone cameras. Where are we on that road? To figure that out, I grabbed Becca Farsaci, who has been running around all summer and fall taking photos and video with all of these new high end smartphones. And we're going to get to the bottom of this. Becca, welcome back to the Vergecast.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 29:04David Pierce?

  Let's talk cameras because you've been doing tests of really the iPhone and the Pixel are the two I'm most curious about. And I think the biggest question that I've had over the course of this year is where are we in smartphone cameras? I feel like we've been on this trend of like smartphone cameras are getting really good, really fast, better every year. They're eventually going to be as good as pro cameras. Just you wait. And I feel like that idea has really aggressively plateaued for me the last couple of years. But then Apple comes out and they're like, it's the most pro one ever. You can, you know, use video out through USB-C. This is a pro camera. Where are we in smartphone cameras?

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Okay, a question for you. When was the last time you were impressed with the smartphone camera?

• 29:43David Pierce?

  Like, truly, like, blown away impressed? I think the cinematic mode on the iPhone was the first one in a long time. It had been a while before that, but the cinematic mode on the iPhone was a moment that I was like, "Holy crap, this takes a thing I couldn't do before and works." I can now, all of my, like, awful video walking down the street now looks passable. But just in terms of, like, the photos I get out of a phone, it's been years.

• 30:08Speaker 06

  Okay, talk to me about cinematic mode. Do you still use it?

• 30:11David Pierce?

  Occasionally. It's one of those things that I use when I remember to turn it on.

• 30:14Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 30:15David Pierce?

  Which I think is the problem with a lot of phone cameras, is they have a lot of cool features that are six swipes away, and thus I don't use them.

• 30:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's something about the Pixel 8 Pro and the Pixel 8's camera system that I will talk about in a bit. Interesting, cinematic mode, okay. And that basically, cinematic mode applies a blur effect to the background of your videos. It makes them look a bit more what some would call professional. It came in the iPhone 13, I believe, maybe just the Pro?

• 30:40David Pierce?

  I think it started in the Pro and has since worked its way down. Yeah, and it, like, stabilizes things as you're walking. It just feels...

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Adds a little bit of a color look?

• 30:47David Pierce?

  Better, yeah. And so all the things where you're like, "I wanna, I wanna walk through something as I'm taking video," and it used to just feel jumpy and bad, it smoothes it out in a way that, like, I will actually watch those videos later.

• 30:58Speaker 06

  Cool, and that's a software?

• 30:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 06

  That's software?

• 31:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Okay, so really, you weren't impressed with the camera, you were just impressed with software that this company added?

• 31:05David Pierce?

  That's fair, yeah, that's fair.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  Hardware side of things, it is very slow, but the way I look at it, like, I think, you know, you entered this question kind of comparing them to, you know, standalone cameras, cameras that have interchangeable lenses, or that we only use to take photos, and there's just really no comparison to me, because the experience is so different.

• 31:23David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 31:23Speaker 06

  Like, when I pick up a smartphone to take a photo, like, it feels like I'm picking up a brick, and I'm pointing it at someone, and they know the etiquette, they know what to do, but when I pick up, like, a camera that's made to take photos, it feels different. I feel like my purpose is to only take photos, and the person who's standing in front of me, all of a sudden, is a lot more nervous. And so they're two, like, very different things. So now, if we talk about just phones and their cameras, do we think that they are progressing meaningfully? Maybe like every three years.

• 31:53David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 31:54Speaker 06

  Every three years, I feel like if you look at, like, the iPhone 12, and you compare it to the 15, there is a big difference in quality.

• 32:02David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 32:02Speaker 06

  I would know, because I use an iPhone 12.

• 32:04David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  But if I look at the 14 to the 15...

• 32:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 06

  No, you're not gonna notice a difference.

• 32:10David Pierce?

  Right. And I guess that's fair. I mean, that's like the upgrade cycle of a phone now, right?

• 32:13Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 32:13David Pierce?

  People are keeping them for three, four, or five years. So if you're feeling that upgrade every time you actually upgrade your phone, maybe that still counts. But I just can't let go of this idea that for, I don't know, the last, say, eight years, we have been told it's sort of right around the corner where your phone's photos are going to be passably the same as what you'd get from a DSLR or a Fuji Street Camera that people run around with for thousands of dollars, or whatever.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  I love the Fuji Street Camera.

• 32:39David Pierce?

  This is what I call that. That I don't like, there's a million of them and they're all X1, whatever. They're just the Fuji Street Camera. But I just don't feel like we're getting closer to that at this point. I feel like we're teaching these cameras to do new things on smartphones, which are cool. But just in terms of like, how my photos and videos look, I don't necessarily feel like I've gotten much closer to, I truly won't miss my camera in a while.

• 33:03Speaker 06

  Okay. Back to your point about like, forgetting to turn on cinematic mode. There are settings, if, let's talk about the iPhone for a moment.

• 33:11David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 33:11Speaker 06

  Because I think it actually, I do think the iPhone 15 Pro's camera comes close in some ways.

• 33:16David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 33:16Speaker 06

  To some standalone cameras. But you have to be willing to click some buttons.

• 33:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  And I don't think you're gonna be that person. And I don't think phones are like, I don't think they're trying to have you pick it up and like, take the photo that maybe you imagine that a standalone camera takes.

• 33:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 33:34Speaker 06

  You have to like, go in and tune some things, right?

• 33:37David Pierce?

  Which again, goes back to your point about like, the object itself. Like, you just have all that stuff one thumb movement away when you pick up a big camera in a way that on your phone, it's actually like buried in settings menus.

• 33:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, buried in settings and also not one thumb.

• 33:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 06

  My god. I mean, these things are huge. Like, I had tiny hands and reaching across the screen sucks and I'm less likely to push buttons that are across the screen. So, let's make them small.

• 34:00David Pierce?

  Okay, so like, what would, what do you do on the 15 Pro to get there?

• 34:05Speaker 06

  Oh, I'm so excited. Let me tell you about it.

• 34:06David Pierce?

  Please.

• 34:07Speaker 06

  So, there is like, a 48 megapixel mode, right? And you can turn that on and you can take a photo, like, I find faces, it's gonna find faces. It's like, it loves faces.

• 34:16David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 34:16Speaker 06

  And if you are Say like five feet away from somebody and then the the background is like far beyond them. You'll actually start to get some depth, like some some like natural depth because the sensors are actually getting bigger. And the lenses are bigger and you know, like real camera things are starting to happen.

• 34:34David Pierce?

  And so much of that is physics, like you need space for those things.

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Real physics. Yeah. Can I explain it? Well, some days.

• 34:42David Pierce?

  I know big sensors, good.

• 34:44Speaker 06

  Big sensor, good. Bigger lenses, good.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  Got that.

• 34:47Speaker 06

  Sometimes more megapixels, fine.

• 34:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 06

  Um, but yeah, you're starting to get like some real depth. I especially notice it if I if I turn on like, you know, uh, raw photos, 48 megapixels, blah, blah, blah. And I flip the camera around and I take a photo of myself with the main camera. Like that distance from like, I don't know, maybe that's two feet on me. That like, I'm going to actually see depth and you can compare that to like, you know, some of the the lower end Sony cameras.

• 35:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  And it's like not terribly far off, you know, something that has like a smaller sensor, like an APS-C sensor, like. It's looking pretty good and the colors are really nice. I mean, Apple has always kind of had a really great color science. And and so it's just like, for me, I love like a little bit more blue. And so like denim, oh my God, the way it reproduces denim. I'm just like, wow, I'm going to wear this denim jacket every day.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  So, all right, well, what else? I feel like to me, the thing on the 15 that has actually been the biggest improvement is the fact that you can now do portrait after. Which goes back to your point of like, I don't have to remember the thing anymore. I can just take the picture and figure out what to do with it later. Which is a weird, like, we like to talk about what is a photo? There's like a weird philosophical question behind all that. But just like leaving that aside, it's nice that I don't have to sit there and go, oh, I have two seconds to get this like cute photo of my dog doing a funny thing. I don't have to swipe it to portrait and then try to, it says like back up, you're too close and then I have to, and I've just missed it. Now you just take the picture and it does the thing.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  Sometimes, but yeah.

• 36:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. But I wonder how much we can put that in software. Cause like you, you spend a lot of time, one of my favorite things is to be in the Verge office and just watch you or someone else on the video team set up a camera. Because it's such a good reminder. Of like, there's so much time of just, you hit a button and then you look at the screen and you look at the histogram, you're like, hmm, that's not it. And then you hit it more buttons. And it's just like, there's work that goes into doing this stuff that all these companies are trying to abstract out on your phone. I wonder how possible that is ever going to be. And if the answer is just, give people more knobs, now we're back to like, the user interface for that on a phone is just never quite gonna work.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  I think it can get really good. It can get really good. And I see a world where, you know, the iPhone starts suggesting more like, try portrait mode on this. So it's like, even more like, you're not thinking about it. I mean, Google has proven time and time again with their camera systems that like, software can do a lot.

• 37:09David Pierce?

  True. And there is an amazing amount you can do in post.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, an amazing amount, if you feel like digging and then also manipulating images. But I do wanna, I mean, flat out, software can do a lot. I don't know where we're headed. I don't have an answer for like, oh, yeah, in 10 years, like, all of our photos are gonna have this great blur and it's gonna look more natural and the cutout's gonna be better. I don't know. That's what I love about my job, is that like, I get a new product and I get to be like, oh, did this happen this year? But back to like, the what is a photo? Like, I love this question. I love thinking about it. I think about it a lot. I don't think phones like, really take photos anymore. I mean, they take photos, but like, they're manipulating so much of the color. They're like, I mean, and then now you can like, change anything you want. Like, you can take a photo on iPhone and put it in Google Photos and change everything. So like, these to me aren't like, let's stop

• 37:56Speaker 06

  like, asking ourselves like, what is a photo? Like, I mean, like-

• 37:59David Pierce?

  First of all, I will never stop asking that question.

• 38:01Speaker 06

  Go ahead, keep asking.

• 38:03David Pierce?

  Neil will fire me if I stop asking that question. No, somebody described it to me relatively recently, which I thought was really interesting.

• 38:08Speaker 06

  Ooh, let me hear.

• 38:09David Pierce?

  What we're doing with our phone cameras now is to photography what like, the cameras spinning around on top of the Google Maps mapping things are, where they are like, they are fundamentally data collection devices.

• 38:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:23David Pierce?

  And then you can do all kinds of interesting things with the data. Google uses it to map roads. It uses it to get street view. It uses it to find places. It uses it for AR and Google Maps, like, all this stuff. Technically, what it is capturing is video.

• 38:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  But the point of it is not the video. The point of it is the data inside of the video. And they're like, that's just what our phones are now. They're

• 38:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:40David Pierce?

  collecting a bunch of data about their surroundings that you then manipulate to be whatever you want.

• 38:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  I was like, that's a cool way of thinking about it. That is fundamentally not photography.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:49David Pierce?

  But it is a really interesting way of thinking about like, what happens when I hit the button on my camera.

• 38:53Speaker 06

  Well, let's also think about like, what you're taking photos of. I mean, I'll tell you what I take photos of, like receipts.

• 38:58David Pierce?

  You in denim jackets.

• 38:59Speaker 06

  Me in denim. Yeah, the top, number one is me in denim. Number two is receipts.

• 39:04David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 39:05Speaker 06

  Uh, number three is like, I, I'll just like, oh, I want to remember this restaurant. Let me just take a photo of it, cause that's quicker. Like, I'm not really taking like, photos. I mean, I, like, I'm collecting data, as you're saying. And so like, I don't have this big problem around like, oh, our phones don't take photos. It's like, I just need it to like, collect information. You know, and like, and then I'm gonna send that information to my friends and they can see that I, I don't know, went swimming and it was really fun. And that's just data to them too, on me.

• 39:35David Pierce?

  Yeah. Andrew, our producer, was saying to me before we started that we're still in this phase where if you shoot something on a smartphone, you always say you shot it on a smartphone, that like, every magazine cover, nobody talks about the camera that they use, but they'll always tell you that they shot it on an iPhone.

• 39:48Speaker 06

  I love this.

• 39:49David Pierce?

  I do too, and it's, and it's so true. And it's like, I, I could name you the movies that Steven Soderbergh shot with an iPhone. I could not for one second tell you what camera he uses when it's not an iPhone, right? And that to me goes to, either we're just doing different things with different goals, or phones are not getting anywhere near the realm of the other stuff, because the camera shouldn't matter.

• 40:08Speaker 06

  I disagree. I think if everyone actually knew cameras, like, I would love to know what every magazine cover is shot on. Because I know cameras. Everyone knows phones. So of course, if you tell them, oh, it was shot on an iPhone, it's like, they know what that is. If you just told them it was shot on like, a Nikon Z9.

• 40:23David Pierce?

  That's true, but I also think part of it is like, it's still such a novelty that you can take a cool photo on a phone. And what they don't show you is that you have to do twice as much lighting and work way harder to get that photo to look good on a phone.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 40:35David Pierce?

  Such that it will exist on a magazine cover.

• 40:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:38David Pierce?

  But I just think it's still like, oh my God, you can take a good photo with a phone. And to me, it's like, until we're way past that, where...

• 40:45Speaker 06

  Wait, but you don't believe that? Are you still at that point where you're shocked that you can take a good photo on a phone?

• 40:50David Pierce?

  No, but everybody is.

• 40:52Speaker 06

  They are.

• 40:52David Pierce?

  It's still such a novelty that you can do something cool on a phone.

• 40:55Speaker 06

  Can we pull the audience?

• 40:56David Pierce?

  Marquez Brownlee started a whole new YouTube channel where he shoots stuff on his phone. And part of the shtick is I'm shooting it on my phone to prove that you can.

• 41:02Speaker 06

  And it's genius because then he's also just like testing the phone at the same time.

• 41:06David Pierce?

  Oh, it's great. And the channel's great.

• 41:07Speaker 06

  So smart.

• 41:07David Pierce?

  He played, he did it all extremely well and very smart. And he just like sits next to cars and films himself doing selfie videos.

• 41:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:13David Pierce?

  Great job. But it is, we're still at the point where like, I can do this on my phone is like, mind blowing to lots of people.

• 41:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, interesting. I would love to hear from folks if you agree or disagree with that. Because, I don't know, like, I remember Casey Neistat was shooting videos and like, I don't know, on his like Samsung Galaxy S7 or something. And like, that, I was like, whoa, that's crazy. But that was like, six, no, that had to be more than six years ago. That had to be like eight years ago now. So I guess that novelty's like gone to me. Like, it's, there's no doubt you can take a good photo on a phone.

• 41:43David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 41:43Speaker 06

  And so then your point of like, are we gonna get any better? It's like, yeah, marginally, but like, we can already do all the things that we want to do on them.

• 41:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 06

  Um, so then the bigger question for me that I get a lot is like, why would I buy a standalone camera? Like, I really believe that people think that their phone cameras aren't good enough. And so then I ask them, like, well, what do you want to do? Like, what do you think a camera can give you that your phone isn't?

• 42:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 42:07Speaker 06

  And it's always experience. And that's like where I base all of my like, reviews around. It's like, what is the experience of holding this thing? What is the experience of using this thing? Like, that's what it is for me. Because we can all take a good photo. I even have, oh, I should have brought that. I have the first iPhone, right?

• 42:23David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 42:23Speaker 06

  And like, the camera on it, I love. It takes good photos. Like, and what does good mean? Okay, they're exposed well enough.

• 42:31David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  You can see things well enough. Like, the color's fine. It's kind of in focus. But the experience is so fun. And like, I, there's just, yeah, so like, yeah, phones will get better, but like, I think everyone believes that what they have in their pocket is actually pretty good.

• 42:47David Pierce?

  This is my point, you're grading on a curve. We're still grading phones on a curve. Like, it's because they're phones. Like, you're, you're not replacing your professional gear. You still carry 11 Pelican cases every time you want to shoot something.

• 42:59Speaker 06

  No, I carry one Pelican case and it's got a lot of stickers and it's very cute and we love her. Why do you talk about 11? I don't even, I don't even, I don't even have hands for that.

• 43:06David Pierce?

  There's like a van that follows Becca around every time you go to shoot something.

• 43:09Speaker 06

  Boy, I wish. If anyone wants to drive that van, has that van, hit me up.

• 43:15David Pierce?

  Okay, let's switch gears a little bit just before we have to go. I'm curious about the differences between the iPhone 15, and I guess specifically the iPhone 15 Pro, which is like the camera-iest camera, and the Pixel 8 Pro. And we were talking about this on the show a couple of weeks ago, that like, we've sort of settled into a place where those two companies, and Samsung to some extent too, have different ideas about photos.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 43:37David Pierce?

  But everybody had kind of settled into their lane. And it's like, we'd gotten to a point where I think you could fairly reliably look at a photo and guess which company made the phone that it captured. You've spent a bunch of time with the Pixel and the iPhone over the last couple of months. Is that still the case? Are they kind of in their own lane about what their photos should look like?

• 43:56Speaker 06

  I think we are all coming together to the most collective, we think this photo looks good.

• 44:03David Pierce?

  Interesting, okay.

• 44:04Speaker 06

  I really do. We do this fun thing, I do this fun thing, and then I see who will take the bait. When I'm doing these photo comparisons, I basically start the edit. Here's some like video jargon for you, or some background on my process. I start the edit before I even start the script, because like, I just take so many photos. Like, I really take over a thousand photos. And then I put them all next to each other in the timeline, and I sit there and I watch a blank timeline. Sometimes I put music in just for fun. And I just like, watch the slideshow happen. And then I screenshot it and I send it to people. And I'm like, okay, these are three different phones. Tell me which one's which. And like, I would say, one person always takes the bait, and that's Virin, my boss and coworker. He's like a photo person. He can't even, he can't even tell anymore. Sometimes I can't even tell. Sometimes I'm like, oh wait, I forgot.

• 44:49Speaker 06

  Let me go look at the file names.

• 44:50David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 44:51Speaker 06

  Like, we are really coming to like, the point of like, this is what the most people think is a good photo, and that's what all of the north star for all of these companies is.

• 45:01David Pierce?

  So what are the characteristics of that? I'm assuming it's a little extra saturation everywhere. We love dynamic range. Oh my god, we love dynamic range. Like, the number one most. We love dynamic range.

• 45:11Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 45:12David Pierce?

  Let me see the sky and the ground. Let's do this.

• 45:15Speaker 06

  Yes, and the shadows. Like, the man lurking in the back. I want him too.

• 45:20David Pierce?

  And I would think that everything, you wouldn't want it to be too colorful, but you'd want it to be like, 3% extra colorful? I don't know. You tell me, what are you seeing?

• 45:29Speaker 06

  You know, I think that the dynamic range is actually interesting because I think there's like a pendulum, right? I think companies really swung out on the dynamic range and it was like all of a sudden, everything was not believable, which is funny that like

• 45:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, like sometimes things are dark.

• 45:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:42David Pierce?

  Which phones forgot for a while.

• 45:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, like I see shadows and that's okay. And so I think we're now we're like coming back to like more of a middle ground there. I think, you know, white balance is really important, you know, more so there's some like focus things happening, like people do like a little depth of field, you know, people do want things to be a little out of focus. Properly exposed, but that's been good for a long time. But the big thing is the white balance. That used to be the differentiator between like Google and Apple, you know, it was like the iPhone was always warmer and the Pixel was always cooler. And now we're seeing the Pixel kind of like realize that it was a little too cool.

• 46:18David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 46:19Speaker 06

  And come towards Apple in that way. But it does feel like the competition has always kind of been chasing Apple and continues to. And I find that where their photos have been consistent throughout cameras, the, you know, Pixel has changed more and has adapted more to that style.

• 46:34David Pierce?

  Okay. So you think we're headed towards a much more like coherent version of what a smartphone photo looks like?

• 46:40Speaker 06

  Yes, because, you know, much like we don't label magazines with like what camera took them like on Instagram, like you don't know what everyone's phone, who's everyone, you know, what phone they have. And I think people want to like fit in on Instagram, right? So you want the photo that looks good, but also doesn't look too different from everyone else's. And, you know, maybe if you're an iPhone user, you want to like call out your Android friends and your Android friends just want to live in peace. All right?

• 47:03David Pierce?

  They're doing fine. Just leave them alone.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  Fine, y'all, shut up. We don't care that we're green. That only affects you.

• 47:09David Pierce?

  Wow, that's kind of deep, actually. We're going to come back to that another time. It's fine. So what about the like pro experience of doing this? Obviously, Apple made a bunch of noise about this is a pro camera.

• 47:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 47:20David Pierce?

  Having used these things kind of within an inch of their life, like is it, does it feel more pro? There's more stuff to do, but I would not say that's the same thing as being a pro camera.

• 47:28Speaker 06

  No, I think, you know, obviously pro is like marketing. It's like a way to say this is the best phone, but they can't call it like the iPhone 15 best max.

• 47:37David Pierce?

  Parenthesis, the good one.

• 47:39Speaker 06

  I wish they would. The better iPhone 15 Pro. The bigger, better. Yeah, that would be incredible. The smaller, not so good. I mean, it's good. Never mind. So, I mean, all of that's marketing, right? And I was talking to some folks at Google at the event, and I was kind of picking their brain on like Pro Tools and Pro This and Pro That. And, you know, Google with the Pixel 8 Pro didn't say, "This is for pros." Whereas in the iPhone 15 Pro Max, they were like, "This is for pros." And Google's kind of stance on it was like, you know, if folks who are professional photographers come to the system, they will have tools that they recognize in their professional workflow. And that's cool, and that's great. And they're like, and they honestly said to me, "But we find that most pros don't." Like, you know, they pick up a phone

• 48:23Speaker 06

  because they know that it's like the easy thing, and they're not trying to work with it. And I haven't spoken to Apple about this, so I don't know where they stand on it. The thing is, they label everything Pro, but then they don't give the Pro Tools, which it's like, okay, like, that's fine because we've established that like pros aren't maybe using the system for their professional work.

• 48:41David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 48:42Speaker 06

  But it does just kind of like baffle me, and I think it's just because they want people to buy apps and pay for things, you know?

• 48:47David Pierce?

  I think that's right. And I do think there's potentially more interesting stuff to come on the third-party side. Like, what we've seen from the third-party camera apps in the last few months has been really interesting.

• 48:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:56David Pierce?

  And there's potentially a lot more to do there.

• 48:58Speaker 06

  And I want to shout out all the developers there. Like, I did feel bad when, you know, I made this whole like 1,000 photos with the iPhone 15 Pro, and I went to the desert, and it was sick, and I drove in sand for the first time, and I'm addicted. I just want to like, ooh, whip through the sand. Anyway. And in that, I was like, you know, Apple, if you want to be a pro camera, you have to have like Pro Controls. And I didn't really mention and shout out all the folks who like have built Pro Controls for the iPhone. And there's many good ones that I wish I could list off for you right now, and I can't just pull them out of my brain like that. But there's lots of folks that are building really good tools, if you're interested in that. And I think it is cool that there is like a marketplace for those people to make what they love and do what they love.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, totally. All right, we have to go. But before we do, you have to tell me only one answer.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 49:45David Pierce?

  What is the best smartphone for taking pictures and video right now?

• 49:48Speaker 06

  Oh, my god. God. Okay. Can I tell you what it's not?

• 49:52David Pierce?

  No.

• 49:53Speaker 06

  Oh. Okay. Well, it's the first gen iPhone. It's gorgeous. It has like a film it quality. It makes the cutest noise. It's really slow. And she's just so cute to hold in your hands. And everybody's like, oh, my God, what is that? And then you get to open the camera and take a photo. And everyone is just like amazed. And it warms my whole heart. It's a great bar trick. I've been doing it a lot.

• 50:16David Pierce?

  It's actually a really good answer. I'll allow that. I was not going to allow that when you started talking. And now I will allow that.

• 50:22Speaker 06

  I'll go get it out of my desk.

• 50:23David Pierce?

  What if the future of Polaroids is just like first gen iPhones? That they just like make a comeback as the new retro camera that everybody's obsessed with?

• 50:29Speaker 06

  And they're going to sell them on Urban Outfitters where they're selling the iPod. And Urban Outfitters is going to make a killing.

• 50:36David Pierce?

  Becca, this is going to happen now. You just did this and I'm going to be so upset with you when this happens.

• 50:40Speaker 06

  No, you're gonna love it.

• 50:40David Pierce?

  But also I will.

• 50:41Speaker 06

  It's the greatest experience. Get them on eBay while you can, everybody.

• 50:44David Pierce?

  All right, we gotta take a break. Becca, thank you so much.

• 50:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

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• 51:28David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. And the email is [email protected]. We love all your questions. Call us, email us, bring us the weirdest thing you can think of. And we always try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about VR and AR and XR and mixed reality and all these new things about glasses on your face. So I grabbed Addie Robertson, who knows this space better than anybody. Addie, thanks for being here. Hi. This is about a product that of the people at The Verge only you and I have used so far. So I'm just going to play you the question and we're going to go from there. Sound good? Sounds good. All right, let's do it. It's from Peter.

• 52:04Speaker 07

  Hi guys, this is Peter, long time listener, first time caller. I love what you do, but I am at a little bit of an impasse. I'm a big proponent of the future and of potential for spatial computing. I love this idea of the Apple Vision Pro headset and I'm excited to try it out. But I recently saw a really good review of the XREAL glasses, formerly called NREAL glasses. And I think you guys were talking about them recently too. And I can't help but wonder if this really is something that captures 90% of the use cases that I'm, particularly that I'm going to use the Apple Vision Pro for, at one tenth the price and much more convenient form factor. No battery, much lighter, you can pop it in your pocket.

• 52:48Speaker 07

  I really feel like we need to think about this. And this might be closer to where we're heading than the big, heavy Apple Vision Pro. Thoughts? Thank you.

• 52:58David Pierce?

  I love this question, but I want to know, like, right off the top, what you think.

• 53:02Speaker 08

  Okay, so I just have to caveat, A, I'm assuming we're talking about the NREAL, or sorry, the XREAL airs, not the XREAL lights.

• 53:11David Pierce?

  That's correct.

• 53:12Speaker 08

  The XREAL airs are the new headset. And I am also going to only be able to talk about this from really a theoretical perspective. Haven't used the Vision Pro, have just played a bit with the new XREAL glasses. I think it depends on what you see 90% of the use cases as being. But Apple has all of this sort of, you'll be able to do situational things kind of promise going on, that the idea is that it can sense your surroundings to some extent, that it can pin things to your desk or your wall, or it can give the illusion that it has actual virtual objects in your real space. And that is a thing you will not get at all with the new XREAL headset. That is purely, it's like, imagine you stuck a tablet up in front of your face and the tablet was always there.

• 53:57Speaker 08

  And the tablet was also like slightly transparent, especially in light. Those are the downsides of XREAL. The upsides is that, in a lot of ways, I agree with you. A, you have a thing that is not tied to Apple's ecosystem or to a bunch of XR developers making things, that it's Really just you plug it in, you see a screen in front of your face. It's incredibly convenient. B, that you can see everything else. Actually, you're not passing through a video feed, which is just kind of almost inherently going to be lower resolution and an inferior experience to the real world. And C, yeah, they're kind of surprisingly comfortable even compared to the older XREAL glasses. And I haven't tried the Vision Pro, but it's a big thing.

• 54:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's less comfortable. I can say with great confidence.

• 54:43Speaker 08

  So yeah, I really think people should be giving this a look. I'm not necessarily clear that it's a super viable product yet, and I haven't had a chance to seriously review it. But I am similarly optimistic about it. I think XREAL is a really interesting company.

• 54:54David Pierce?

  I agree, and I think your point about it depends on what 90% of your use cases are is really right. Because the thing that XREAL has done for me is make it very clear that the Vision Pro's idea of a $3,500 device that essentially puts a bunch of virtual computer monitors in the air, and you'll sit there with your mouse and keyboard and use a headset to be a bunch of monitors. That is going to be, if not like totally commoditized very soon, then like not worth $3,500. Because that's fundamentally what the XREAL glasses are, right? Like you said, they are just computer monitors. Imagine plugging any device you have into a monitor that just floats in front of your face. So if that's your use case, XREAL is pretty good. I don't think it'll be as good as a lot of the stuff

• 55:37David Pierce?

  the Vision Pro is doing, but it does the job fairly well. To me, the biggest downside of these glasses so far, and really a lot of these sort of plug and play products, is just the interface. Like, holding up my phone while watching something through the XREAL glasses is cool, because I can just like lean back and watch on a big screen. But I'm still navigating on my phone, which means I'm constantly looking down at my phone and kind of losing the thing. Whereas, you know, the Vision Pro and the Meta stuff has native interactions, and it feels like you're in a space as opposed to this much hackier feeling thing that is the glasses. So again, it's a much less elegant system. But if the goal is like, I need more screens in front of my face while I sit at my computer, like, XREAL is pretty close.

• 56:20Speaker 08

  I think it also, a phone is kind of the worst way to interact with it.

• 56:23David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 56:24Speaker 08

  I was using it with the Steam Deck and the Steam Deck is basically just I'm holding a controller and I can see the screen in front of my face now and so it's just-

• 56:31David Pierce?

  I did it with the Switch for a while for the same reason, yeah.

• 56:33Speaker 08

  Pretty much just like using a console.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, and in that case it's very good. So, I think in general, like, we're both pretty bullish on this kind of glasses, right? I think, is Exreal even like doing anything sort of unusual? Or are they just sort of first in this space? You've been paying attention to these like wacky manufacturers of AR glasses longer than I have. Like, is Exreal doing something special?

• 56:55Speaker 08

  My sense is that they are just ruthlessly conceptually efficient.

• 56:59David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 57:00Speaker 08

  That their first glasses were a bit more in the, they have cameras and you can play sort of AR games and you can pin things sort of to the floor. And they completely cut that. There's no cameras in the new glasses. It's just a thing that sits there. It doesn't give any illusion of interacting with space. But that also means that they can be really light. They can be, I'm not gonna say normal looking, but more normal looking. And they can be comparatively really cheap. And I think that they really have actually just figured out, there's a thing maybe we can make people want to do with this and we're gonna deliver the best experience of that we can.

• 57:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, I said, I said on the show last week that I'm super intrigued by this race between companies like Meta, which are basically saying, "We're gonna take very stylish glasses, start with essentially audio and then try to figure out how to add more screen stuff to it." And companies like Exreal who are like, "We have a screen. It looks kind of silly in comparison to like the Ray-Bans Meta is selling, but it has a screen and we'll figure out how to do the rest of it later." And those two companies are sort of running at each other from opposite directions and it's gonna be interesting to see what happens. And then I think like, the Quest and Vision Pro stuff are just like all the way off in a different dimension. And I think it's not impossible that the simpler stuff is gonna end up being way more appealing to way more people. I would not bet on that yet, but I don't think that's out of the question.

• 58:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think pass-through has just really inherent limitations. I know that there are cases that it's very good for. There are specific things it's very good for. But as a really casual consumer device, it is not the thing I'm the most bullish on.

• 58:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. So $400 for X-Real glasses. Again, we've only used them a very little bit. Like, strikes me as a lot to spend. They're a little bit of a novelty, but compared to, you know, whatever, $3,500 for the Vision Pro next year, which isn't even shipping yet, I guess it's a good deal. It's more than 10% as fun for 10% of the price, I guess. I don't know.

• 58:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that if you think what you need is a really versatile, albeit imperfect, screen that goes pretty much anywhere with you and that has a level of privacy, if you're, I don't know, somewhere you don't want people to see what you're doing, and that you can just really, as far as I can tell, plug into most things you own pretty easily, it seems like a good early adopter thing.

• 59:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, my main use case so far has been sitting here in this chair at my desk, like, feet up on my desk, leaning back, head sort of slightly upwards with the glasses on, playing video games with the controller in my hand. And like you said, it's an excellent setup. The screen's not amazing, neither is the switches. It does the job.

• 59:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, my biggest problem so far is really just that you have to angle them precisely to not get some really heavy blur at the bottom of the screen.

• 59:36David Pierce?

  I've spent a lot of time moving the nose pads around to get them just so. And I eventually can get them there, but it is a fair amount of work. You're right.

• 59:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's way better than the original, like, the lights, but it's still, I think, the biggest drawback to them.

• 59:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. All right, Addie, thank you as always. Appreciate it.

• 59:53Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 59:56David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who's on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about, from Becca's 1,000 Photos series to all of the Apple coverage on theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but read theverge.com. It's a good website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other costumes you wish Tim Cook had worn, you can always email us at [email protected]. Or keep calling the hotline, 866-VERGE11. All your thoughts, questions, ideas, everything, we love it all. And we do, like I said, one hotline question every week, so keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, now we'll be back on Friday to talk inevitably more about Apple, plus Sam Bankman-Fried, Google, and all the other stuff happening in tech. See you then. Rock and roll.

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