329: Macbook Air, iPad Pro, and Mac Mini

Vergecast hosts Nilay and Dieter were able to attend Apple’s event in Brooklyn this week, so you can guess that’s what the crew talked about on this weeks show. 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?

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• 0:45Nilay Patel?

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• 1:27Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the future of computing. Whoa. Whatever shape that might take. Is it a screen? Or is it a screen with a keyboard? Or a screen with a detachable keyboard? Either way, it has USB-C and dongles.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  I think of it as a magical pane of glass.

• 1:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I'm here, I'm Neelai. Yep. Dieter Bohn is in New York with me. I am. I brought all my dongles. You really did. Paul Miller is here, hello, Paul. Hello. So, this show is basically going to be about three things. We're just going to be straight up with listener. Dieter and I went to the Apple event yesterday. We did. We saw the new iPad Pro. Zuh. Yeah, and we saw the new MacBook Air. And the new Mac Mini. Yeah, there you go. So we're gonna talk about those things. And then I want to talk about the big Foxconn story we did this week because it's my hometown.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  That's where I'm from. But let's start with that. Before we begin, I want to remind everybody to go listen to Why'd You Push That Button? The Verge's other podcast that's currently running. This week, Caitlin and Ashley talked about why people leave the group chat. Like, literally push the button to abandon their friends.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  That's deep. That's an existential crisis. That show is among my favorites. It's everywhere podcasts are served. Go get it, listen to it, people love it, you're gonna love it too. Listen to Why'd You Push That Button? Okay, Apple.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  That's what we're talking about.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  So it was a pretty peppy keynote. They did it in Brooklyn.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  The Brooklyn Academy of Music.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Academy of Music.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Opera House, a legendary space.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Legendary space.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  They bought the block. So the space was across the street from an Apple store that they have.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  Then they rented out a taco place.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  That people were getting free tacos out of before the event.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  I ate a taco. I got there early because I do, so.

• 3:08Nilay Patel?

  Look, we've disclosed.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  I donate to charity whenever I eat at a company food. Anyway.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  How much do I have to give to charity for this cup of coffee?

• 3:14Speaker 02

  The value of the cup of coffee.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, if you know how much one cup of coffee costs.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Dollar twenty-five.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Done and done. Okay. And then around the corner, they rented out another space that was where their big hands-on area was. It was cavernous, huge space. They had built a raised platform in the middle.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  And there was a limit to know how many people were allowed to the platform before it would collapse and kill us all? Which is a very, very savvy way to limit the number of people that can go into the hands-on area. It's like, just let me in there. No, it's too crowded. It's not that crowded. Also, everybody will die. Okay, fine, I'll wait.

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  It's smart.

• 3:46Nilay Patel?

  And that was basically like they had built another Apple store.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  And then they had advertising everywhere. So just a huge amount of space in downtown Brooklyn.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  Taken by Apple. The keynote vibe itself, like you're saying, very peppy.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  So it was peppy in part because whatever led them to bring it in New York is, I don't know. But they did invite, I want to say, they ran a contest at New York Apple stores. And the contest was, who can cheer the loudest and clap the most?

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 02

  And then the people that won that contest got to go.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  Is that true?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  And the person, no, this isn't true. But the person who won the, I can make your eardrum vibrate like it's going to shatter like a champagne glass in front of an Aria? Was sitting directly behind me.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  It was definitely Apple Store employees, right?

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  There were some retail store employees there for sure, and they were cheering their faces off. It was like the loudest Apple event I've ever seen.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  And like, everybody on stage loved it. Tim Cook loved it. A bunch of fresh faces on stage, a bunch of new people that hadn't been up there, hadn't been up there much.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was good. It was like, it was a fun event.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  The, sort of the iPhone event every year now has this like, portent of doom. It's like, can we do it again? Will we succeed or fail? The fate of computing rests on this square.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:06Nilay Patel?

  Um, I guess a rectangle. This one is like, yeah, dude, this is the Mac. Like, are you happy? We did it. And everyone's like cheering, like, it was great. Walt Mossberg was there.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:17Nilay Patel?

  As a guest, he was, he's retired. So he.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Didn't stop him from making fun of me in the live blog.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Walt still has credentials to our live blog software, but he came up to me afterward and said, this is a huge security problem, you realize?

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it is.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  It's just, well, anyway. Don't guess Walt's password. So that was fun. It was fun to have him there. He was like floating around. But so the news, uh, Tim Cook announced the new MacBook Air.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  That was the first thing. And he basically did that one, like, super casually. He's like, what do you want? You want a retina display? Here's the retina display.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  I actually have more thoughts about how he introduced it, but we should, let's run through the show and then, yeah.

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  Then he, uh, and he brought on other people to talk about the Air, and then he came back and said, oh, it's time for the iPad Pro. We love it. And it's the two new sizes of iPad Pro.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  Then.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So it was, it was MacBook.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And then it was Mac Mini. No, it was MacBook, then it was the store stuff.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  And the store stuff.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  And then it was Mac Mini. And then they wanted to put as much space as possible between MacBook and iPad. Yeah, so I'm pretty sure it was MacBook, Mac Mini, MacBook, store stuff, Mac Mini.

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  Mac stuff, and then Angela Arons came out.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  And talked about the classes to do with the stores.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  And then it was iPad, iPad Pro.

• 6:24Nilay Patel?

  And the iPad.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  All iPad all the time.

• 6:25Nilay Patel?

  And then the whole point of this whole thing was for me to say, then he announced the line already.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:29Nilay Patel?

  Which was hilarious and weird.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  And it was a strange moment to bring out Lana Del Rey, who was like, I'm not allowed to swear here.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:37Nilay Patel?

  The title of her record is Norman fucking Rockwell.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  So she couldn't even say it.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  And that one of the, it was ridiculous. Uh, she was great. Jack Antonoff was there playing the harpsichord or whatever he was doing.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I think it was just a piano.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  It's a piano.

• 6:49Nilay Patel?

  Anyways, let's talk about these iPads.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's just, let's do the iPads. Yeah, for sure.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so obviously the big changes are the smaller one has a bigger screen.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Same footprint, bigger screen, smaller bezels.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Smaller bezels.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  And curved corners on the screen because it's a liquid retina display.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  Yes. And then the, the bigger one is the same size screen, but a smaller body because they eliminated the bezels.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  I've been trying to figure out why they call them, uh, liquid retina, cause you know, it's liquid crystal. So that's why, cause the iPhone 10R is also liquid retina and I figured it out. Have you ever seen water, except for that one crazy iceberg that sheared off a couple of weeks ago? Water never itself naturally forms into a square with a 90 degree edge. It's always just a little bit, you know, rounded.

• 7:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  And so anytime a screen is a little bit rounded, it's a liquid retina display.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  I have one of those silicon ice cube trays and it makes perfectly square.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's not a naturally occurring event. You have to put it in a thing.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I don't know about that. It's, it's not a heavy lift for me.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so the iPad Pros, screens different, faster, faster processor, and they're pretty squared off. Like they don't have a taper on the back anymore.

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  I think it's a thing that I will get used to, but it definitely felt, I don't know, weird. It, it like holding the thing in your hand, you're like, oh, this is really like square. I don't know, I can't put words to my feeling about it.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  So look, we're gonna have to get them and review them and live with them.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Can I just give you my extremely blunt first impression?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  It's ugly.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  Thing is ugly. And I have specific reasons for this. Two.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Two specific reasons?

• 8:31Nilay Patel?

  One is the antenna lines, particularly on the LTE model, are just crazy.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Present. They're there.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  They're, they're, they're big, they're on the back. You know the iPhone, uh, like six antenna lines? Right?

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  They did the same, the, they did the aluminum case and they had the big plastic antenna lines.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  And then by the time they got the iPhone 7, they're like, whoa, we should just make those black.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  Just like, not draw attention to them. They're, they're the, they're iPhone six antenna lines. So they're huge. They go across the entire back of the thing. They frame the back.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  So it's like weird. And then on the LTE model, they notch over the sides on different sides of the case.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  So one's like top left and one's like bottom right.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  So that is just like, first of all, what is that?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  Then the extremely square proportion of the thing.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  And then you flip it over and the 10.5 inch iPad Pro used to have like really tiny bezels.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  On the sides. And then it had the forehead and the chin.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Uh-huh.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  This one has pretty thick bezels all the way around.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  It's not as big as an old forehead and chin, but like, it's a uniform bezel. And so Apple's like, it's an edge to edge display. And it's like, the edge of what? Because there's, there's, you can just see it with your eyes that there's a bezel.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  And that, I think that the old iPad, it felt like the screen was like too big for it because of those tiny side bezels. Do you know what I'm saying? It, it felt like you were getting something a little bit more than you should have.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  This one feels like you're holding a reference design.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  I was not, okay, I haven't seen it in person, obviously. I was not expecting these strongly negative first impressions from you guys.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  We gotta like use it.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  We gotta try it.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  The screens look great.

• 10:15Nilay Patel?

  The screen is beautiful.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  The 12 inch in particular, they reduced it, they reduced the volume by 25%.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Whatever. The big 12 inch iPad Pro before made, like it made a 13 inch MacBook Pro feel small. Like it was just like, huge.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Huge.

• 10:31Nilay Patel?

  It was funny in the way that big things are funny.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yes. Um, and the 12 feels much more like, oh yeah, this is like, this is the size this should be. This, if I, if this were my main computer, I would be relatively happy. Um, and I think more people are going to go with the 12 as a result. I think that's a mistake. I think the 11 is better.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  And there's a huge camera bump.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  And there's a gigantic camera bump because it has to sit. Behind the screen and they told me that this was the same camera as in the iPhone XR.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  So saying the same wide angle as the tennis.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  Big sensor sitting on the screen, whereas before it lived in the, in the channel, the forehead.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  And you know how on like iPads before, it was just like a little like, I don't know, little metal ring that was black and whatever. Now the, the metal of the casing like curves out to it. So it just kinda looks like a, like a, like a mole, like a wart, like a.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, it's just like sitting on there. It's, it's something. None of this to say is that it's like a bad, it's just in the pantheon of Apple products. This one is the most utilitarian I've seen in some time. Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  To me, the, just obviously I haven't seen it in person. The aesthetic is, it's, it's the classic Apple move where now I think the old thing is ugly.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Ah.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Like, like this looks right to me now. You know, my brain has been reformatted.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  To the new APFS file system. And now this is beautiful and old iPads are like just wrong looking.

• 11:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, of course, especially when you see it on the website and it's like, they've taken the photos beautifully and the, in particular.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Straight on.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  The move that they're doing, I'm pretty sure, let me double check, is when they photograph, cause they're still selling the 10.5, right? So when you see all three of them, they are doing this. So when you see all three of them together and like the compare iPad models photo, they've picked the black ones for the new ones and the white one for the old one.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  So like the bezels are even more apparent to you.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I mean, these are, these are great tricks. I appreciate them, but I don't think people expect Apple to put out things this kind of, I would think almost like rugged. Like there's like a, it's a tougher product than Apple usually puts out.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  It's like, it's, it's not characterless, but the, yeah, not having, part of it is I think just not having the home button. Like when they added the notch to the iPhone, it added, say what you will about it. And you can say many things, but you're like, you could identify it added some kind of character to the thing. Some kind of sense of like, this is a thing that is, has an identity. And if you don't have a home button, which is the thing that gave Apple devices like a sense of like, this is what you are, that you have a sense of identity. If it's just to the screen, that's I think what makes it feel a little bit characterless. Like there's nothing, when you look at this iPad that tells you this is an Apple device. And I think that that's what you're reacting to.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, but it's also the extremely square corners. It's the antenna lines. It's the camera boom. Like, all the things that make it seem like, you know, Johnny Ive didn't stand there like molding the aluminum with his hands into a perfect organic shape.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Like Johnny Ive, there, but was not in any of the presentation videos, bubble there.

• 13:34Nilay Patel?

  So that's what it looks like, and that was just my extremely blunt first impression. We have to review the thing. We have to actually use it and hold it. Maybe I'll decide it's beautiful later and the way that sometimes ugly things reveal themselves to be truly beautiful.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Sure. Man, real hard not to make a joke about your family right now, but I'm not gonna do it.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  My daughter is adorable.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Your daughter is adorable.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what the hell you're talking about, sir.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Wow. I was gonna make a your mother joke or something, I don't know.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  My mother is a lovely woman too, Mr. Bo.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  This iPad is bringing the worst out of both of you, I think.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  So much for Minnesota nice, man. Alright, anyhow, so that's what it looks like, fine. The stuff inside it is way more interesting.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  So Face ID True Depth Sensor on the front. The camera's, again, identical to basically the XR. Seven megapixel True Depth Camera System on the front that does Face ID. And then the 12 megapixel same wide angle lens as the XS and the XR on the back. The, the front Face ID stuff works in any orientation. So it can even be on the bottom and it'll work. It can be on the top. You can put it in the keyboard case. It'll be over there on the side. It'll work. They've done a bunch of work to, when you like do an emoji, to like offset the angle that you'll be at. So you know, when you do like an emoji on your phone, it's looking at you and it sees you kind of dead on, but if you like turn the phone, it's coming at an angle. So they've done all this like, you know, neat Apple recalibration work to make sure all the angles line up.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  They just turned it?

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, they just know it's over to the side.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then when you have it in the keyboard case, you can just like double tap on the spacebar and it'll just like light up and see you and unlock, which I think is very cool.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's almost, almost like, I don't know, like it's saying hello and then Windows.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  It's kind of like Windows, hello. The pencil is probably the single biggest improvement.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  That people will notice. They've gotten rid of the dumb lightning port thing. It's a much nicer pencil. It's smaller. It has like a matte finish. It has a flat edge.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  Thank God.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  It clips to the side. magnetically and then also wireless, wirelessly charges, which is super cool.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  The magnet's pretty strong. Not strong enough to lift the iPad, uh, holding the pen, pencil, but pretty strong.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  I think you want it, it's, it's, it's strong enough to stand there, but not so strong you have to fight it to get it off.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  If you can hold up the iPad, you try to take it off and like scoot the iPad.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  No, but you could just like push it. He's like, like a cat on a thing on a table. Just give it a little nudge and it twists off.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  My first thought is if, if I'm gonna put the iPad into the laptop slot of my backpack, am I just gonna be fine? I just snap the pencil to it and then drop it into that slot and I don't have to worry it's gonna bop, bop off.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  I think, yes.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Probably fine.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  I think you're probably fine. I think you probably want to put it in so it's like sideways, not so it's like on the top. So like sticking out.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  And then the pencil is touch, is like passive touch around the barrel. So you can like just double tap it while you're holding it to switch tools. Um, so the notes app, it'll switch you from the pen to the eraser. There's a couple of options there. That's an open API, so developers can do stuff with that double tap. In Photoshop, for example, it will zoom you in and out of the canvas and other apps can, you know, dozens of options available to developers there. And then on the bottom, there's a USB C port.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  And I will tell you, I drove these people crazy.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Of the iPad.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Well, the side.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Not of the pencil. The pencil.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, the pencil.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Has no connector anymore, right? It's just wireless.

• 16:45Nilay Patel?

  No connector on the pencil whatsoever.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  And also, old Apple pencils will not work with the new iPad. Not in theory, because it uses radically different technology, although it's a little bit fuzzy because the Logitech won't work with it, the Logitech Crayon won't. But you can't use it simply because in order to pair an Apple pencil with anything, you have to stick it in the lightning port? And there's no lightning port? And they told us like, we're like, what about, what if you get like some dongles? And they're like, no, it's just, this just doesn't work. Leave it alone. Just let it go.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  I had a whole buildup to on the bottom of the iPad, there's a USB C port. And we got totally derailed back onto the pencil.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  I tried to bring it back to you by bringing up dongles. I veered us back. I did a little loop.

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Flat circle.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  And now we're in dongle town.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Dingle town, USA.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  So I will say that I, I think Dieter did this too, but we asked so many questions about this USB C port at this event yesterday.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  Waves of Apple product. They're all wonderful. They're all super nice and very helpful.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  But like just more and more of them had to come by to answer our increasingly granular questions. So here's what I know, and I apologize for our cast listeners, I did not bring a tiny printer to the event. I'm very sad.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  I feel personally betrayed.

• 17:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, I couldn't find one that was USB C. So I thought, I figured it might be cheating to be, to bring a USB C to USB A dongle and then a USB A printer. So that was like part of my reasoning. My other part of the reasoning was I assumed that at some point I'll actually get one and I can do all kinds of dumb stuff. But I did ask, what happens if you plug a printer into it? And an Apple person said to me, this is a quote, "I don't know, we'll just have to find out together." We'll just see what happens.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  What happens when you plug a hard drive into it, Eli?

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Nothing happens when you plug a hard drive into it. The USB C port on the bottom of the iPad is there for charging. Charging other things, which is cool, so you can plug your iPhone into it, it'll charge. It is there for file transfer from camera file systems into the camera roll and the camera roll only.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  So if you plug an SD card adapter into it, click an SD card into there, it will pop up in the camera roll. If you plug, I did this with a Sony A7 camera, you light up a Sony A7 camera, you plug the cable in, you, Sony's like, "I'm in mass storage mode," it opens the camera roll. That's the only place photos can go.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  We gotta come back to this camera roll file thing, because I'm very angry about it and Paul's very depressed, but let's just run through a couple more things.

• 19:06Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  What happens if...

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Wait, wait, let me just...

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  I just want to say the other thing. So it's optimized for file transfer

• 19:11Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:12Nilay Patel?

  from camera file systems into the camera roll and DisplayPort.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:16Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  And so, when you plug in DisplayPort, it will just mirror the iPad, unless the app has been custom coded to be aware that there is another screen that it could do something to, and then it could put something on that screen.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  So this was very confusing...

• 19:31Speaker 02

  You can't like extend the desktop.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  This was very confusing at the event, because this is one of the questions we're sort of escalating answers to. This is exactly the same as the previous iPad.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  So, previous iPads had Lightning port, you go Lightning HDMI, you plug in an external display, they would just sort of mirror the iPad display onto that display. You open something like... Keynote or DJ, like one of these apps that has like a visualizer. They are aware of the external display. They can send content to that display. Now with USB-C, it's a higher bandwidth port, so they can drive a 5K display from the iPad. Whereas previously you were limited to some lesser resolution. That's it. That's what it can do. I, we're gonna try to plug in a bunch of stuff. It will also support docks. Um, so if you have a USB-C dock-

• 20:15Speaker 02

  It'll do Ethernet, it'll plug in-

• 20:17Nilay Patel?

  Ethernet, HDMI, USB-A, headphone jack-

• 20:20Speaker 02

  It'll work, it'll work with or without an audio DAC, apparently. We'll do both digital and analog audio. Cause there is no headphone jack on this thing, which I can't believe we haven't talked about yet. Here's the thing that is actually a little bit crazy-making to me. One of the things I would, in a perfect world, use an iPad Pro for is tethered shooting from a camera. So plug the camera in, and you would like to think that maybe an app, so if an app is allowed to like do custom stuff with the monitor, maybe it could turn on, like Canon could make a tethered shooting thing and then, you know, it would just be able to do that directly via USB. Apparently not. Apparently the only thing that an app can do with the USB-C port is put display stuff out there. It's not able to like read, you can't like, if someone was like, "Well, screw this. Uh, I'm gonna make a, an app that can read a hard drive."

• 21:05Speaker 02

  No, nope, not allowed.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  That was gonna be my first question.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Well, there's your answer.

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  It is unclear. The answer appears to be no, but the answer, it's, uh, it's unclear. So if you plug a storage device into this thing, it is not clear if another app developer can address the storage device. There are, there are some iPad hard drive things out there, and they work over Wi-Fi, they work, like there, there are products out there that do this. So it's not out of the question, but you have to, every piece of support happens in a third-party app, not at the OS level. Unless it's a camera file system or display port. Or MIDI devices into GarageBand.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, just think about that, Paul.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  It just seems like they have to work to make it this limited, you know?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  No, they don't. They just have to continue to have iOS be what iOS is.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Let me just say one thing about the camera file system.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  There's a files app. What if you, what if when you plugged in a hard drive, the files app had a little new- Tab on the side and it was the hard drive. The hard drive. That's something that was, oh my gosh, it was, it's so long ago. It seemed so easy.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  How are you gonna get your, your three gigabyte PSD file?

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  So if you listened to me on the Vergecast last week, I said, the most annoying thing about the iPad, the reason I can't use it for Lightroom the way I want to, is I have to round trip raw files through iCloud to get them into Lightroom, right?

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Paul, you're gonna love this so much. I cannot wait.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  This is, in this, to be clear, this is a huge sticking point with all Lightroom CC users. So I go to the event, I'm like, what are you gonna think? I'm like, why do I have to use, and they had Lightroom CC preloaded on every demo iPad. They're like, very proud of it, because the iPads are so fast, which is a thing we should talk about. So I'm like, why do I have to do this? Why can't I, why can't I just plug in my camera or a card reader and have Lightroom address this storage device? And they're like, no, we have a great solution. We're so excited. Bringing over this dude, he's, he's waiting to talk to you. Comes over, he's like, you're gonna love this. This is a true thing that happened.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Paul, don't hold your breath right now, because you're gonna hyp, you're gonna hyperventilate.

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  Adobe has built a Siri shortcut for Lightroom. So you plug in your camera, you import everything into the camera roll, then you close that app, you open Siri Shortcuts, and then you've got a Siri shortcut you've programmed called Import to Lightroom. You push that, it'll shoot it all into Lightroom, it'll apply a preset, you know, like if you have a filter preset that you want to do, which is actually pretty cool.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Oh, how nice.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  It'll do that, because that's a thing Lightroom people do. And then it'll go ahead and delete everything from the camera roll.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  And they looked at me expectantly, and I was like, I don't.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  They were so excited.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  I heard about this Siri shortcut four times yesterday. It was demoed to me twice.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  And every time, I didn't want to, you know, it's like their event, it's like, you don't go to someone's party and be like, your appetizers suck.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I do.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Two mom jokes and my app sucked.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, so.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  So I just was like, that's great. It's kind of cool. The presets thing is cool, but like, just let Adobe do it.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so here I figured it out. Okay, so you know, the files app can show like cloud providers in it, right?

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  So you make a fake cloud provider.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  It's called Neelai's Cool Files. And then there's a Siri shortcut that pretends like when you plug in a hard drive that it's reading a camera file system, but really it's actual files. And then it copies all of those to your fake cloud provider.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  And now you can see them in the files app.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  None of that is easier than just giving up and using Dropbox or whatever.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  What if, what if I want to do something with, I don't know, something that isn't an image or a PDF on an external drive?

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that's the USB C port.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  All of this is in the context of.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  I will say one good thing about the USB C port. There is a world where Apple could have layered on the same MFI restrictions that apply to the Lightning port to the USB C port. They could have been like, it's USB C, but you gotta, it only work if you do a special handshake deal and then the software has to be pre-approved by Apple and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They could have done that. And I kind of thought they might, but they chose not to. Basically, the only thing that's, that will stop a USB C thing from working in the iPad Pro is whether or not iOS like supports it. So there's no, like any, any USB C compatible dock that conforms to the standards should work with this thing.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  One, one thing I'm excited about is, so I have the last gen iPad Pro and I got it specifically for doing music stuff.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh huh.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  But the, there's a, I've got a whole dongle situation for that, which is like the, the camera connector dongle to a USB hub. Then, then I plug in like a made for iPhone mic that I could just plug straight into my iPad, but I need to use the USB hub. So I can also get a keyboard, but the keyboard draws more power. And I forget how exactly it works. I think I power the hub with a battery or, or no, I need to have something plugged in so that there's power delivery. So hopefully some of that is, is simplified by, I could just plug in a USB hub that's powered by USB C.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Plug my keyboard and mic into that and I should be hopefully a little simplified.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that USB C port on the iPad has enough bandwidth to drive a 5K display and like pull files off a camera. Right. So you can plug, you can plug one thing and they're, they were like, we tested a bunch of hubs. So if you have a hub that has, you know, some more USB C ports, some USB A ports, a headphone jack, HDMI, an ethernet, that thing should just work.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  Assuming it's like built on standards, not some crazy thing. So the USB C conversation to me leads right into the performance conversation.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so here the cover, the tenor of our conversation is, I believe, going to radically switch.

• 26:50Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's exciting?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  This thing, they slide after slide after slide was the iPad is better than a computer. And I just, the MacBook Air is a computer too. But just over and over, it's like 95% this and 3X that and 15X that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They showed us some stuff. But this thing is, I believe, genuinely radically powerful and way more powerful than nine, some huge percentage of the Intel processors that people get in their laptops.

• 27:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So A12 X processor, which is eight cores, it's four performance cores and four high efficiency cores, which they are.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  And that's what the X is that there's more of the cores?

• 27:33Nilay Patel?

  It's a bigger chip. Yeah. So it's, it's more A12.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  The, and they're, you know, the Apple's like, look, our high efficiency cores are actually really fast.

• 27:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like we can, and they can light up all eight at the same time. I mean, they're just like very proud of this chip. And they hammered again and again and again and again. This thing is faster than laptops. They actually did not say the word Intel. They did not say the word Intel once during this entire event.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 27:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I think it might've been on screen just one time.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they downplayed Intel completely.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  And they downplayed sort of what the MacBook Air's performance was completely. And then, and then they were like, look at how fast your iPad is. So there's a lot to be discussed there between how they're presenting these things. But the iPad has the A12 X, their best processor, their fastest processor. It can do a lot of things and they showed, you know, a 3.5 gigabyte Photoshop file in the early version of Photoshop, just like doing just fine. They showed us a bunch of neat AR stuff. They showed us some rendering and the thing that gets me is I would love to have a computer in this form factor, regardless of whether I think it's beautiful or not, but like in this form factor that's small, ultra-high performance, has great battery life and a beautiful display, but I can't do any computer shit on it, right?

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  It's like it's an I, it's iOS on an iPad. And so you can show me mail running in Split View all you like, but I don't want to use iOS mail. And so I'm always like living this life of dancing around the limitations of the operating system, even though this chip by all accounts is a technological masterpiece.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you could hackintosh the iPad Pro, it would be the best Mac portable.

• 29:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like without question. So that I don't want to give short shrift to this chip. Like the graphics are like 900 times faster than the first iPad ever shipped, right? Like it's insane. It can do all of these things. Apple's A-series processors are so out of control that they just like sliced off a chunk of them to be in Macs as the T-series chips. And so the MacBook Air has a T-series chip that is, you know, some variant of an A-series processor and it has so much additional performance overhead. It's there to just run the secure enclave and Touch ID, but it has so much additional performance overhead that they just made it more of a computer. It runs the cameras, it runs the image processing for the cameras.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  It runs the audio processing for the speakers.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  It runs like real-time encryption for the disk.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 29:59Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's just better at doing that than the Intel processor.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  This is something I was unclear about during the keynote because they, they mentioned T2 and then they said 30 times faster HEVC encoding.

• 30:11Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's so.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Is that run by the T2?

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Imagine this, the little chunk of the A-series they carved off to run Touch ID is so high-performance that it is faster to run video encoding through it on the, on the MacBook Air than it is through the Intel chip or the integrated GPU of the Intel chip.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  I think this puts Apple in a very strong position because you could imagine that like the Apple. Likes to put its customers through painful transitions, you know, hey, we changed the connector again. You know, we, we got rid of 32 bit apps. We got rid of Carbon and all the OS nine remnants. You could have imagined Apple putting us through a difficult transition to ARM laptops like three years ago.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  But now they're in this position where we're basically, I mean, that's, I'm exactly where you're at. I'm basically begging them, please transition macOS to ARM.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  Yep. Yeah. And they're doing this Mars Japan thing. There is, I don't know if this is real or not, if this is a rumor or just some wishful thinking or prognosticating. But there was definitely a bunch of like Mac web people on Twitter over the past week being like, the real trick is that the forthcoming Mac Pro will actually be the first ARM Macintosh, right?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 31:30Nilay Patel?

  And they won't, they won't like do a Xeon thing. They're going to take the next series of A processors. They're going to take the next line of A series processors, just run them at full tilt with fans and heat sinks and say like, come at us. Which I would be awesome.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I, no.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  They, okay, there are reasons that it's still important to have. Pro users are the people.

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  Wow, I broke Paul. I broke him.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Pro users need the software compatibility. You're still going to have a bit of a problem with software compatibility. These people want to run Pro Tools, you know, like they want to run Linux. They want to run like probably like Nvidia's CUDA stuff. Like, is that like all cross compiled already for x86 or for ARM, you know, like?

• 32:24Nilay Patel?

  They are, what they should do, you remember when they, we switched to OS 10? And they ran OS nine apps in like a weird Rosetta emulated window thing? They should ship a Mac with both and it should be really expensive. It should be, and you just work everything in the ARM processor. But then.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  When something opens and doesn't work on the ARM processor, you just like boot up a virtualized OS 10.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  Over there.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Over there on, and then the Intel, then the Intel chip spins up and then your battery life, you know, gets cut in half. But until you need it, you have a computer that is stupid fast, compatible with most of the stuff that you do day to day, and lasts for 15 hours.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  So that is, that's bad. That's a bad idea.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:10Nilay Patel?

  Don't have it anymore.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:11Nilay Patel?

  Take that idea in part.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I think it's hilarious and great.

• 33:15Nilay Patel?

  Paul, so to Paul's point, I hear what you're saying. Pros need their workflow software. They need Pro Tools and Adobe Premiere and whatever Photoshop. But hey, it turns out they just did Photoshop for the iPad.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Pop, pop.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  Using the same codebase. It turns out they just cut down Premiere and put out Premiere Rush CC for the iPad. So Adobe, you know, one of their big partners is already moving its stuff to the A series. Look, I think what they're gonna do is build a Xeon Mac Pro. It's like the obvious thing that they would do.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  But I think it'd be an amazing flex if they're like, we don't have to worry about battery or heat. Like, we lit up the A series all the way. That would be awesome.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  And it would be a great excuse for it taking this long if they just had it as like a co-processor. Like, look, all the Apple apps are, run so absurdly fast because we offload mo-most of the work to an A12 X X Bionic.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  A12 XS Bionic Pro. Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  I mean, here's where I'm at with the iPad Pro. It starts at eight, nine, $7.99.

• 34:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  Really cheap. The one I want would be 11 inch, 256 cellular. That's $1,100. And then the keyboard is different this year, and I don't know if I like it better, honestly, which is funny because I've always complained about the origami one.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, it doesn't have a weird bump. It like covers it nicer.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it gives you two angles.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  Kind of utilitarian.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Kind of boring. Yeah, and like, when you, when you flip it, the keyboard around, you have to feel the keys, which is very un-Apple-like. Like, very, very, very un-Apple-like. That's like, actually kinda sucks.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  The keys are less fabric-y now.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  No, that's just that's

• 34:51Speaker 02

  that doesn't feel

• 34:51Speaker 01

  I've been looking at the pictures.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  It continues to be not backlit, which is dumb.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're less fabric.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  And it's 180 bucks. Is that what the keyboard cost before?

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everything is more expensive. The pencil is 130 bucks.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like, it's 1,300 bucks, just shy of 1,300 bucks to get like the version I want. Now, granted, I want the cellular, which is more expensive. And that's, you know, 1,300 bucks is more expensive than the MacBook Air.

• 35:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna read an ad and then we're gonna shift to the air.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

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• 35:49Speaker 03

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• 35:59Speaker 04

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• 36:18Speaker 03

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• 36:24Speaker 04

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• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  Thank you for that note from Betterment. To learn more about their tools, visit betterment.com/verge.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow dirtbags and everybody else. Welcome to This Week in Elon. I'm your host, Liz Lopato, and I have a special guest here with me, Kara Swisher. Hello, Kara.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Hey, how you doing? You have a This Week in Elon? This is fantastic. I didn't know. I had no idea.

• 37:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, we do this. We do this every week.

• 37:15Speaker 06

  All right. This Week in Elon.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  So you spoke with Elon recently, and we've got some clips we're going to share. You were telling me he seems much more relaxed and just on a more evener keel and was working fewer hours. Is that right?

• 37:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what he said. I visited him on Halloween night. We had a two, almost a two-hour podcast that we're publishing. And he said a lot of things, but one of the things I noticed, I've known Elon for about 25 years, and he's never been as crazy as he was earlier this year. So I was not, I was not unsurprised by it because he's somewhat manic, but forever, he's always been somewhat manic, but he actually was in a much looser frame of mind, calmer, less attacking journalists, attacking people, none of that. There was none of that. And I think it's because he stopped working 120 hours a week and taking Ambien and whatever, you know, the ups and the downs of doing it, of trying to get that Model 3 off the line. I think it drove him crazy.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. It sounds like things are pretty much evening out with the Model 3, too. You know, obviously, the great third-quarter results.

• 38:12Speaker 06

  Yep, exactly. I think, you know, one of the things that Elon has, he's got a little bit, I think he even admits it, of a persecution complex. Like, he's doing these amazing things, like, compared to, like, all these idiots making photo apps and, like, you know, dating services, this stuff is really hard. And I think he was making that point, and I agree with him. You know, he's building a friggin' rocket to the moon, like, or to Mars, excuse me, not the moon, although we talked about the moon, too. But I think he's doing very things with difficulty. He puts these challenges in front of him, and then he doesn't behave as well as he can when it stresses him out. And that's, I think, precisely what happened. And I gotta say, I'm not condoning the things he did when he was under stress, the tweet about funding secure. It's irresponsible, given he's the CEO of a public company. But it is what it is. He's an interesting and unusual character, and I think he put that on display in our

• 38:57Speaker 06

  podcast.

• 38:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you mentioned that he's going to be talking about some of the exciting new products that are coming out from Tesla, you know, the truck he especially seemed excited about. And we have a clip here. These new products, the truck, the roadster. Where are they?

• 39:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I'm super excited about the future.

• 39:12Speaker 08

  Do you have another thing you're making?

• 39:13Speaker 07

  We definitely do.

• 39:14Speaker 08

  Do you have a vertical lift and takeoff?

• 39:16Speaker 07

  The supersonic VTOL jet, electric jet.

• 39:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, perhaps a hovercraft like Larry Page, I don't know.

• 39:22Speaker 07

  Hovercrafts are pretty straightforward.

• 39:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, okay, sure.

• 39:24Speaker 07

  But.

• 39:25Speaker 08

  For you.

• 39:26Speaker 07

  A supersonic vertical takeoff and landing electric jet would be interesting to do at some point, but my head would definitely explode if I tried to do that right now.

• 39:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think so.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  But I've been thinking about that design for nine years. I mean, I wrote down some of it, but.

• 39:40Speaker 08

  But the truck is more immediate, the Roadster?

• 39:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think what fires me up about Tesla is I think we've got the most exciting product roadmap of any company in the world.

• 39:49Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 39:50Speaker 07

  Got the Model Y, which is the midsize SUV. You've got the semi truck, which is can be great for, you know, the really heavy transport. It'll be like the heaviest class of truck, of industrial truck. We've got the next generation Roadster, which will be the fastest sports car on every dimension, fastest acceleration, fastest top speed, best handling. The goal with the Tesla Roadster is to show that an electric car can be the best sports car on every dimension.

• 40:19Speaker 08

  Mm hmm.

• 40:20Speaker 07

  I think it's very important to kind of get rid of this like halo effect that gasoline cars, sports cars have.

• 40:24Speaker 08

  The pickup or the more?

• 40:26Speaker 07

  Well, like I still like to say that the fastest top speed cars in the world are still gasoline sports cars. So I think we, it's important to have an electric car that is faster, electric sports car that's faster than the fastest gasoline sports car. And it helps address that sort of halo effect that gasoline sports cars have. So I think it's important to do that, to show that, you know, electric is the best architecture. Then we've got the pickup truck, which actually I'm personally most excited about.

• 40:55Speaker 08

  Why is that?

• 40:56Speaker 07

  Well, I can't talk about the details, but it's gonna be like a really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner pickup truck.

• 41:02Speaker 08

  Okay, what does that mean?

• 41:04Speaker 07

  It's gonna be awesome.

• 41:05Speaker 08

  Okay. Who are you trying to sell that to? People who buy F whatever?

• 41:08Speaker 07

  You know, I actually don't know if a lot of people will buy this pickup truck or not, but I don't care. I mean, I do care eventually, you know, like, sure, I care, you know, like, we want to get, you know, gasoline and diesel pickup trucks off the road.

• 41:22Speaker 08

  Right.

• 41:22Speaker 07

  But if like, if I find like, you know, like, I'm personally super excited by this pickup truck. It's something I've been wanting to make for a long time. I really want something that's like, super futuristic, Cyberpunk, which, if there's only a small number of people that like that truck, I guess we'll make a more conventional truck in the future. But it's the thing that I am personally most, most fired up about. It's gonna have a lot of titanium.

• 41:44Speaker 06

  You know, people eat this stuff up because, you know, it's space rockets and cars and trucks. So, you know, especially his male fanboys, I think they'll go crazy for it. Not that women don't like space and trucks, some women don't. He talked about SpaceX and putting astronauts on the space station. He talked about a lot of stuff. He talked about liking Donald Trump's Space Force, the idea of it. He does not want to make a scooter, just news flash.

• 42:08Speaker 08

  I will think about buying an electric car, probably not. I'm not gonna try.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  I mean.

• 42:12Speaker 08

  Make a scooter, make a scooter, and I'll go for it. Actually, they are electric. What am I talking about? They're electric.

• 42:16Speaker 07

  I don't know, like, there was, like, some people in the studio wanted to make a scooter, but I was like, ah, it's.

• 42:21Speaker 08

  I love the scooter. No, get on the scooter.

• 42:23Speaker 07

  It's like lax dignity.

• 42:24Speaker 08

  No, it doesn't lack dignity.

• 42:25Speaker 07

  Yes, they do.

• 42:26Speaker 08

  They don't lack dignity. What are you talking about? I guess I do it all the time. I look fantastic.

• 42:31Speaker 07

  Then you do not. You are under laboring under an illusion.

• 42:33Speaker 08

  Well, I think I look good, and therefore.

• 42:35Speaker 07

  This is an illusion.

• 42:36Speaker 08

  It lacks dignity. All right, well, let's, everybody at lime, don't worry, Elon Musk's not coming for you.

• 42:41Speaker 07

  Electric bike, I think we might do an electric bike.

• 42:42Speaker 08

  All right, okay.

• 42:43Speaker 06

  So, it was good. It was a very rollicking interview. I think, you know, his critics won't like it so much because, you know, he was in a jolly mood and, you know, he's still got a lot of critics around what he did around the funding secure. We talked about the Saudis, about what happened there with the funding. He still sort of wants to go private. You know, he talked about why he did, and he still seems to be longing for that ability to get rid of the short sellers and things like that, his doubters. So, it was a really interesting interview, and it's a lot. There's a lot there. There's a lot there to unpack.

• 43:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, I mean, you know, this is only five, like, a short segment, and this, the interview itself is going to be something like 80 minutes, so.

• 43:18Speaker 06

  Eighty, he kept talking. It was supposed to be 45, but he just kept talking, so I kept listening.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  Well, that sounds great. Thank you so much for stopping by, Kara. I really appreciate it.

• 43:28Speaker 06

  No problem. I hope you enjoy it. It'll give you weeks of pleasure of Elon, all about Elon. There's a lot you can pull apart, okay?

• 43:35Speaker 05

  All right, thanks very much.

• 43:36Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. Yeah, for $200 more.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  We saw, actually, we saw Joanna a lot this, over the past few days. And that was her catchphrase. Every time she reviewed an ultrabook for us, or previously for Engadget, uh, she was like, "You know, Macbook Air, you should get a Macbook Air." Uh, Steven Sinofsky, who ran Windows for a long time- was tweeting at her just recently, that he was, he would pass around her reviews inside of Microsoft. Yeah. To be like, "This is the reason we need to push in the Surface."

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, she specifically, for The Verge, wrote an article that the MacBook Air is the best Windows laptop.

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  And maybe it was this is my next, but that article exists in the world. And it was true.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Uh, the MacBook Air was the best laptop for most people for easily five straight years.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  And then it just, they just, they, they-

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  They just let it go.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  They stopped thinking about it, and they're like, "What if we made a really tiny, underpowered laptop, and then a really big laptop, and put crappy keyboards on them, and a little touchbar thing, and, uh, made everybody real mad? What if that was the strategy for the Mac?" And, and it didn't, it didn't work.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  And Nilay has a 2015 MacBook Pro- with a completely overpowered GPU for what he does with it, that can't be turned off and kills its battery.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  And so, but there has been a gaping hole. Everybody who just wants to go buy a good Mac, that is, like, thin and good and fine, a mass-market consumer MacBook, has been MIA. Till today, yesterday, whatever day you'd listen to this.

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  And now it's back.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Now it's back.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  And like, literally, they introduced it with, "Everyone loves the MacBook Air, and all you wanted was a retina display, so here it is."

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like, "All right, you filthy Ingrades. You just, you've been bugging about us for so long, fine, here you go."

• 45:23Nilay Patel?

  And sort of the way, they're like, it has the iconic wedge shape. I'm like, that's not why people, like, loved it.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  It is, there is part of me that's like, "Oh, it's just a, it's just a 13-inch MacBook Escape, but they made it thinner."

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  There's a real part of me that feels that way.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  But the differences, so like, Apple, over and over and over again, wants to compare it to the Air, and it's this much faster, and this much better, and this many more pixels on the screen, and the touchpad is bigger, and yada, yada, yada. Um, and sure- But I think the better comparison, the more honest comparison is to compare it to the 13-inch MacBook Escape, the MacBook Pro without the touchbar. And by that comparison, things are a little bit dicier. So it is a little bit thinner, a little bit lighter because it's tapered. The screen is not as bright because it maxes out at 300 nits. It has the same two USB C slash underwall ports, so that's great. And then the processor here is a dual-core, I think it's 1.6 gigahertz, I forget what it supercharges up to.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  Y seventh generation?

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  Eighth generation.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Eighth generation.

• 46:28Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they're like legitimate size of relief from the audience.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, eighth generation. Eighth generation. Sorry, I knew that. But it's a dual-core Y series Intel processor, not the more powerful U series. And so people are flipping out, and they may or may not be right. I don't know. The weird thing about this processor is, you know, Intel. Many angry feelings about Intel. Actually, I have a whole rant that Intel has single-handedly held the entire computing industry back and has kept us all from having devices like the iPad Pro be everywhere all the time. But this Y series processor that's in the MacBook Air, the new one, was a mystery because people were like, what is this chip? Blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  And then finally, it like, some white paper came out, somebody found it from an on-tac, I think. And normally, this Y series processor is powered at 5 watts TDP or whatever. This one is 7. So it's a Y series processor, but don't get mad because it's a special like, Apple edition of it that can be, handle a little bit more power, and they're going to have their own thermal profile for it. And, you know, they probably get like, the best stuff off the bin, you know, the real center of the wafer or whatever. You know what I mean? I'm just saying.

• 47:43Nilay Patel?

  But, okay, so they, you heard that, and I heard that, and I've been thinking about this ever since.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  So like, they're, you know, they're at the Intel factory and... I don't know. Johnny Schruge is there. He's like, I want that one and that one. They make so many of these. This is a mainstream product. This is going to be the most popular Mac. So saying we just get the best ones, they have to make so many more best ones. Like I just, I don't buy it.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 48:09Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Well, anyway.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  This will be one of the world's most popular laptop computers.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  By all rights should be. So the, the thing about it, and I was real mad about this first. We talked to a bunch of people about it. Uh, other journalists and analysts at the event. So it starts at 1199, so 1,200 bucks. Uh, for, I think it's eight, eight gigs of RAM and two 56, no, 128 of storage. I don't know. Whatever. It starts at 1,200 bucks. And 128 of storage. Part of me is like, you should have, like, this, this computer is worth 1,200 bucks. Yes. Yes, it is. It, it like whatever, however the process shakes out, it'll be more than enough for most people. Um, and it has the retina display and like you finally released a modern MacBook Air. Good job just calling it the MacBook Air and not overthinking it. That was the right move as well. This computer is worth 1,200 bucks. But maybe you should have made a thousand dollar computer instead.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  But, and, and so someone, maybe it was you, someone reminded me like, we've never made a thousand dollar MacBook Air at the first time we released it. It always, it comes down over time and people got used to the a thousand dollar MacBook Air existing.

• 49:07Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm. So next year.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  You know, the very first MacBook Air was like 2,800 dollars or something crazy.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  It was insane.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  And then when they released the one that was like truly good.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  1,800, I think.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like the wedge shaped MacBook Air, the one that everybody knows, uh, came out at a higher price point. And, you know, it's been a very long time, if ever, that Apple has released like a brand new laptop that costs a thousand bucks.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  I think people are going to get their money out of this laptop. The price thing to me is just, it's the same as ever.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  But, so the, the price thing is different now because the world is different now. When the MacBook, the first MacBook Air came out, it was, um, like a holy crap. Look at like the future that could possibly exist, but I certainly don't want to buy it now because the thing breaks in half if you look at it funny. The second generation MacBook Air was holy crap. This thin and light future exists now. And this is amazing. It is so much better than anything else that's out there. And then ultrabooks came along and they like figured it out and they iterated and got better. And they just kept on putting the new Intel chip in year after year because they actually did that because Apple didn't, who knows why. Um, and now this new MacBook Air is.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  On par with the rest of the laptop market, I think at best. Like, it's probably, you know, to put the whole package together, it's probably higher quality. I don't know, we're gonna review it, we're gonna see. But it is not a category apart from the rest of what the laptop world is doing right now. It does not feel like, oh, Apple just jumped ahead three years, like the old Mac.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  So here's two comparisons. The Microsoft Surface Laptop.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  Seems like a meaningful competitor.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  A thousand dollars.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  Dell XPS 13, thousand dollars.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, both with U-series processors, I believe. Maybe not, I don't know, whatever.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  The, Apple actually took a shot at the Dell onstage.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  Took a lot of shots.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  They took a lot of shots, but they took a particular shot at Dell where they were like, "And it has a FaceTime HD camera above the screen, where it belongs."

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  And like, the four people in the world who have, like, had a video conference with a XPS 13 were like, "Ooh." And everyone else was like, "Yeah, that's where it belongs." Did someone else think otherwise?

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  So, those are good comparisons. So the question is, is macOS worth 200 bucks to you? And the answer for most people is yes.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, for most people, it's still better. Now, would you like to touch your screen? No. We sort of think that, like, I don't know, these are, you're now making these kinds of decisions.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Well, would you like to touch your screen? Would you like to have something other than the pretty garbage Photos app on the iPad pop up when you plug in a hard drive? Right? Like, those are the questions. But, the, it's a super hard comparison. The iPad, I enjoy using the iPad Pro way more than I enjoy using my MacBook Pro right now. It is just a fundamentally nicer experience.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  You're crazy.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  But, I can do way less with it.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. If you had to give me one of these computers on a desert island, I would take the MacBook 10 out of 10.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  And I would be sad, because it can't do so many things. Like, it can't, like, you can't post an Instagram story for a MacBook, right? Like, there's like, stuff it can't do.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. But you can post an Instagram story from a Chromebook. Technically, you can. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We spent five years dunking on Windows Phone and, you know, whatever replaced the Nokia phones, I've sailfish, whatever, and just yelling at these phone companies for not supporting Instagram and not having the apps. And now we could do that to the Mac.

• 52:44Nilay Patel?

  It's crazy, Tom. It's crazy. Look, it's a, it's a, we're gonna have to get it. We're after a review. It's all the same stuff.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  It is very much the MacBook Air that people wanted.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 52:55Nilay Patel?

  It is one of the few times I can like point to where Apple just had to respond to market demand.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like their Mac lineup was not doing what they wanted it to do. People were not buying the MacBook Escape.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Nope. People weren't buying the little MacBook, which is a ridiculous product now, by the way. I love it. I love it, but never buy it.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  And they, people wanted the mainstream consumer laptop, so Apple had to deliver it.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:28Nilay Patel?

  And that is, okay, I'm glad it's here.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  What's confusing to me about that is, duh. People want a mainstream consumer laptop? What a, what a country. Come on.

• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  And the number of people who use these things are just like every, everyone who isn't trying to do MacBook Pro stuff wanted an Air.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like so many people bought like 13-inch MacBook Pros just like, and are salty about it. They're just like, well, I guess I got this thing now. And now like they're, and yeah.

• 53:58Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have the iconic wedge shape. Look, you walk these streets. You're in New York and people are just like.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  You walk these streets.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  I wish it had this iconic wedge shape. That's how they talk.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  The biggest question mark for me is performance. I've got like a 2015 13-inch MacBook Pro, like before, before the keyboard apocalypse. And

• 54:23Speaker 01

  This, I can't ever buy, I want this MacBook Air, but I can't buy it if it's slower than my current computer, because then I'd feel like a big demo, right? And so, you know.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  What's a geek bench score on that computer? Do you know? Do you know the first digit?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Okay. I think the first digit of the single core is gonna be like four on this one.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  It's, that doesn't mean anything to me. It just has, it has to be actually a faster computer and, and like to Dieter's point, you know, the Surface Laptop, it is U-series, it's cheaper. Also, it's on an offset release cycle. You know, Apple just released a perfect computer for somebody going to college.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Like a month and a half after they started going to college.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  Yes, they did.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Microsoft is on, released the Surface Laptop in June, so if they update it, you know, early next year or mid next year, they're gonna have a better chip and still likely cheaper. You know, obviously MacBook Air runs a great little operating system I like to call MacOS.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  That's, I mean, that's all it's kind of going for. I mean, it looks beautiful, it's real simple and stuff, but it's, I think it's, I feel like it's too late. I don't know. You know, it's still, it's gonna be very, it's gonna be very successful, but it's, it's too late to, to be, like Dieter said, it's not a category defining anymore, it's not a world apart.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  The too late question is interesting, because the MacBook Air was the default, right? It was the thing.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Everybody had. And so the question is, can this thing reach that default status before Intel falls into the ocean? Or the iPad gets powerful enough to become the default? It's called Ocean Lake, Dieter.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yes, unequivocally, yes.

• 56:16Speaker 02

  You think so?

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  Yes, no questions asked, right? It is an Apple product that's slightly more expensive. It is beautifully made.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  And there are certainly Windows laptops that are beautifully made, but this one is beautifully made. It has Apple's aura about it. It runs an operating system you can't get anywhere else.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:34Nilay Patel?

  You know, the Touch ID thing is like sitting there for Apple Pay if you have an iPhone. Like, it's just gonna, like, the compromise you have to make with the XPS 13 is the camera is in a stupid position, and it's just like there. It's just like a compromise you have to make every time you use that laptop.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  The compromise you have to make with the Surface Laptop is basically none, except unless you want this operating system.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  So like, of cour-, like, it's just gonna be that thing. Oh, also, Microsoft doesn't sell any of them, right?

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, well, it's unclear. Where the Sinofsky, Stephen Sinofsky had a good tweet, a series of tweets about questioning, or like, just trying to figure out where those numbers were, where like, Microsoft has 0.3 whatever, and the iPad's sold more than everything else. I don't know. The new iPad Pro, in terms of like, a thing that has potential to, like, be genuinely new and category-defining, and what is this thing? And, oh my God, look at all the new ideas, and look how powerful it is, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what the MacBook Air was, you know, a decade ago. And this new MacBook Air has none of that juice. And that's why, in the live blog, I kept on making jokes about how it was really sad about how Apple spent so much time making fun of computers next to the iPad, because

• 57:44Speaker 02

  the MacBook Air is one of those computers.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's just, that's the reality of Sorsion Field. What were you saying, Paul?

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, um, it is, it did feel like they were dunking on the MacBook Air by proxy, for sure. I felt that as well. But, uh, one of the cool features that this MacBook Air has is when you plug a hard drive in, you can see the files on it.

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a computer.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  But the default 128GB storage, I mean, I've suffered through two small SSDs for a long time. Like, it, it just feels so, it just feels so limiting, and it, and, so, so you're gonna wanna upgrade this, like, you're gonna want the $1,400 SKU, or something like that.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Like, at that point, the, the, the alternative laptops that you can get are, you can really spec out a, a, a much better Windows computer for $1,200.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  It's, yeah, it's $1,400, you still get 8 gigs of RAM. If you wanna go to 16, yeah, you gotta spend more.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Wait, hold on.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  I, I think the people listening to the show are aware of this. I have been hypercritical of Apple for the past however long, right?

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:50Nilay Patel?

  There is no world in which saying you can spec out a better Windows computer for the money is a winning argument against an Apple product. That has been true since 1994.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  No, there was a phase, the MacBook Air ascendant phase was the same phase that's like, wow, I did the math and it's pretty much the same price spec wise. And it was bonkers because you're right, there was for, yes, since 1994 or since all time, it's been cheaper, you can get better specs for cheaper in the PC world. And, and then we, we've been through a little bit of a drought where that's not true with Apple's laptops anymore. And I don't think this changes that.

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it changes either. I think, but in terms of experience that you're going to have with a laptop, it's still like a winning experience. There's a reason I'm using a 2015 MacBook Pro instead of Windows laptop right now. It's because my entire workflow is geared around this operating system that I prefer. And I think the people using MacBook Airs right now who've been desperate for an upgrade, they're just going to buy a new one. I mean, it's frustrating. If you're like, if you're a Vergecast listener, if you're us, it's frustrating to know that Apple's gravitational pull is just, is like, it obliterates your reference frame.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like everyone's reference frame is their MacBook Air that hadn't been updated, that didn't have a retina screen, that had giant bezels, that had old processors, that had old I/O. And then they're going to get this thing and be like, what a huge upgrade. And you're like, no, they didn't give you enough, but it doesn't matter. Right? And that, every year at the iPhone review, I go through the same thing where I'm like, the Pixel camera is better, but everyone really just has an iPhone 6. So this is going to blow their, like, you know what I mean? Like, that is just like the Apple universe. And for those people, they're going to be really happy.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  So yes, you're totally right. A lot of people are going to be very happy with this computer. All I'm saying is it could be either cheaper or better.

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  Yep. The Vergecast, everyone.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Oh, also, also, Apple remembered the Mac Mini existed. They did all the stuff that they should have done.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  They put desktop chips in it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  They're using removable RAM, I believe, on SODIMs, which is a thing.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it is soldered, uh, storage is onboard now, so whatever. Actually, I'm not mad about that.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  The Mac Mini has USB-A ports, which is adorable.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  That thing is, I want one. It's like, that's, of all of the things they announced, it's like, that's the one that I'm gonna invent a need for. You know, like, I didn't, I didn't look at the iPad Pro and be like, "I'm gonna learn how to illustrate today." Like, with the Mac Mini, I'm like, "I should build a home theater PC." I don't know why. It's just like, where my brain went.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  What you, what the Mac Mini is great for is you, you, you have a MacBook Air, but you want to offload, uh, your, uh, compile, your Xcode compilation to, to the Mac Mini.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  They showed, at the hands-on, they had a stack of Mac Minis doing that.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Remote into it, in a, oh, that's, that's the answer to my arm, my MacBook Pro arm thing, is you're, they're just gonna stop selling MacBooks, and they're just gonna tell you to buy Mac Minis, and then you'll remote into it, uh, via, you know.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. VNC is the future of macOS 10.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, okay, we're gonna take another break. Have a breath. I'm gonna read an ad.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  And we're gonna spend just 10 minutes talking about what Foxconn is doing to my hometown, and we're gonna, we're gonna be done with this thing.

• 1:02:11Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody, I want to tell you something really cool that The Verge is doing. It's called Better Worlds. Everything today is so dark. The news is dark, the movies are dark, the superheroes are dark, the TV shows are grim. So we're trying to clear all that away, uh, with a project we're calling Better Worlds. Basically, we hired, this is true, 10 science fiction writers to write us positive science fiction, to imagine better worlds. It's a huge project, so we have 10 stories on the site, we have a bunch of animated videos that'll go up on the YouTube channel, and most excitingly, we're having those stories read to us on a new podcast feed, the Better Worlds podcast feed.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Paul.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  Every week, you do a thing.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Without fail.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Same name, which is?

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Always this, it's called first to fold.

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  Alright, alright.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  So, we've been hyping this rumor, I don't even, it's not really even a rumor. Samsung seems like they're coming out with a folding something.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  Hey. Maybe they keep talking about.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  But yeah, folding something. But be, but before Samsung's folding something. Uh huh. A complete unknown company named Royal. Wait a minute. Back up, back up, back up, back up. What is this segment called? First to fold. Okay. Wait, do you have, do you have a, a, a folding predecessor that I'm unaware of? Laptops.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  No, but the screen didn't fold.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Okay, fair. Yeah, we're talking about folding screens here. I'm sorry, I wasn't very clear. So, this, the Flex Pi is like a, it's like a tablet, but then it folds with the screen on the outside. So that you're holding, it's just so dumb.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  But yeah, just look it up. It, it's so, it's every, it's as bad as you can imagine folding phones will be. And I, I, I still have no idea how Samsung or anybody's going to make a folding screen. Because the big thing with folding screens is you can't put a crease in them. Yeah, yeah. Cause they, so they, they don't fold flat. So they're always going to be dumb and bulky until somebody solves that problem. This device is just hilarious and, and wonderful and maybe it's going to ship in, I think, December. So we'll see if this is the first ship, first to fold. It's gonna be about a thousand ish dollars.

• 1:04:32Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'm in it. Let's get it.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  Flex Pi.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  What's the other, we covered another really dumb phones today. The one with dual screens to get rid of the notch.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yes. Yeah, so there's a screen on the back. So when you take a selfie, you could see here, because there's, there's no front facing camera to get rid of the notch. So they put the, an extra screen on the back, uh, which is awesome and hilarious and probably not the ultimate solution to notches, but I like it. What was this phone called? I'm trying to find it. Oh, the Nubia X.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's horrible. Okay, I want to talk about Foxconn just for 10 minutes before we go. So.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  Hey, where is, where is that new factory located?

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  So you might remember. Uh, the state of Wisconsin.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  I don't call it Wisconsin.

• 1:05:19Nilay Patel?

  My home state.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  I, I call it Wiscon Valley.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God. Announced a few years ago.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  That it would, it, Scott Walker, the governor.

• 1:05:27Speaker 02

  Of Wiscon Valley.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Of Wiscon. And Paul Ryan, my parents representative in Congress.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  And that's, we've struck a deal with Foxconn.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Hooray.

• 1:05:36Nilay Patel?

  To build a huge factory in Wisconsin.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  And then a little bit later it came out that it would be in Racine County.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Hooray.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm from Racine. And further, in a village in Racine County called Mount Pleasant, which is where my house is.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  So that's where I grew up.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  So they're building the factory on your house.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  They're coming to town. It's on Iowa 20. It's like, I've taken the exit off I-94 on a, for, 10,000 times now. So I, that's horrible. And then it came out they, they were gonna write a $3 billion subsidy for Fo-, to Foxconn in exchange for this, like, $10 billion factory.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Scott Walker, the governor, is like, very proud of the fact that he makes all of his deals in the back of napkins. This is true.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  He's always like, I wrote it on the back of a napkin. It's gotta be good. So like, wrote this deal with the CEO of Foxconn in the back, famously in the back of a napkin. Okay, well, I haven't heard anything about it.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  All right, we like, covered it, I laughed about it.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  Donald Trump took credit for it.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Donald Trump was recently in Racine. He had a picture with a shovel.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  It's on the website, you can look at it.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  He may have been confused and thought that they were Apple Jobs, briefly.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  He definitely thought it was Apple Jo-, Kanye West was like, the Foxconn deal is so great, I mean, like, this is a shining star.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so we're, no one's paying attention to it, Foxconn's in my hometown, great. This is true. This is how the genesis of the story that's on our site. My parents were coming to New York to visit Max. Very excited, seeing the grandkid.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Love her. They're supposed to land early on a Friday, spend the day with her, and we get this call, hey, we're gonna be really late, we missed our flight.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  And my mom goes, it's all of the traffic from Foxconn.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:07:02Nilay Patel?

  Because they, they have to widen I-94 to support.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  I-94, they have to widen?

• 1:07:07Nilay Patel?

  They're widening I-94.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  I-94 is a major freeway, it's not wide enough already?

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  No. They have to widen I-94.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  To support Foxconn.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  So it's under construction and right now it's cut in half. So all of the traffic, both directions, are now on one side.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  Oh, sure, yeah.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  There's actually, you can see it, we ran a photo of it in our piece.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  So my parents missed.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Can we just talk about Midwestern road construction problems for the next 45 minutes?

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  Cause I have so many feelings.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  Anyway. So I was like, I hadn't heard anything about Foxconn in a long time. It hasn't broken out in like national press. So I go looking, I'm like searching, uh, and you know, like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is doing a great job of covering what's going on at Foxconn. Uh, little local sites are doing a great job with covering what's going on at Foxconn. Like it's being covered in the region. And what struck me is if you just read a lot of that coverage. Yeah. It adds up to a disaster. Right? Right. So I was like, hey, this is my hometown. They're like doing something bad. So we, we found a, a local freelancer, this guy named Bruce Murphy, he's in Milwaukee. He's been a long time journalist there. Hired him to write this piece, hired a photographer, go take some pictures of the Foxconn site. The walls are up at the factory. So let me tell you what, so that's the genesis. Literally my mom missed her flight to visit Max and

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  I was like, we should write a story about Fox. I must get revenge. Cause it's home. It's my hometown. So let me just lay out the chronology of what's happening with Foxconn in Wisconsin because it is crazy and we left stuff that is even crazier out of this story. So the first thing that happened is years ago, Scott Walker and the Republican government of Wisconsin passed a law reducing state taxes on manufacturers to zero. They're close to zero. Mm hmm. Just keep that in your mind. That happened. Then they signed a deal with Foxconn to give them $3 billion in tax subsidies, but they already pay no taxes. So they are writing

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  Foxconn checks, right? The tax subsidy, they're just giving Foxconn billions in cash, which will be paid, that cash comes from the people who work at Foxconn because they pay their state taxes. So this is just a circle of weird money. So they give them $3 billion in cash. Then, uh, the, the city and county governments gave Foxconn additional subsidies. So now the total subsidy is up to $4.1 billion, some enormous portion of it paid to Foxconn in cash. This is for a factory that is supposed to be a generation 10.5 LCD plant that will build panels for 75 inch LCD televisions. That's the deal. That's on the napkin. So $4.1 billion for 13,000 jobs is like $300,000 a job.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:09:43Nilay Patel?

  It's like, that's, that's bad math right there. Like, you can already tell. There's economists who are like, the state of Wisconsin will never get this money back. It's gone, but whatever. Oh, and they waive environmental protections on Foxconn, let them build all this stuff. They also allow them to pull 7 million gallons of water out of, like, Michigan every day, up to 39% of which will evaporate. So like, the other states in the Great, in the Great Lakes region might sue Wisconsin because this violates the Great Lakes Compact.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  But is it, are they actually not building 75-inch panels?

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So then, in order to build the 75-inch pieces of glass, Foxconn had hoped Corning would build a factory there, because they need the glass to be closed, because it can't move huge sheets of glass. And Corning says, oh, we want a subsidy too. And Wisconsin says, no, we can't, we just, no, absolutely. So Corning says, we won't do that. So they scale the plant down to a generation six LCD plant, which requires only $3 billion to build, not $10 billion to build. And they say, actually, we're not, this is true, this is in our story. We're not even that interested in television anymore. By the time this plant is up and running, China will supply the world's television needs. We're looking to build-

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  I can't even say it out loud.

• 1:10:52Nilay Patel?

  We're looking to build an AI 8K plus 5G ecosystem in Wisconsin, where the good people of Wisconsin will help us find uses for LCD display technology, including healthcare and self-driving cars.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  All thanks to Donald Trump.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I don't even know. I mean, Foxconn has played other states, to be clear.

• 1:11:18Nilay Patel?

  AI 8K plus 5G. And I was sitting here-

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  No, no, no, hang on, I just, we cannot walk away from AI 8K plus 5G. We just can't. If you were gonna try and snow somebody by-

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  With buzzwords.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  With buzzwords. What would the buzzwords be that you picked? Well, obviously, you're gonna pick AI, and you're definitely gonna pick 5G, because that's a thing that everyone's talking about. What else, what else? They're like, well, okay, those are the two. But then, they're like, you know what? Say that we were gonna make panels here, so.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  Eight K.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Let's just throw eight K.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say one more thing?

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  That's what happened.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I'm dying for your read on this, but can I say one more thing?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  You can drive again.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  All of this, the dudes like Louis Wu, Louis Wu, who's the Foxconn guy, who's like in charge of the thing. He's like, actually, and by the way, the employment mix here, you know, if we were building one of our Chinese factories, I would say it's like 75% labor and then 25% engineers and managers. I would say right now, we need 90% knowledge workers, engineers, and most of the actual work will be done by robots. So like this whole deal has flipped.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  Okay, what were you saying, Paul? AI, 8K plus 5G.

• 1:12:20Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  I've got a few things. First, I'm gonna explain what AI.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Are you?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Plus 5G. Possibly mean, yeah.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay. You will be the first person in history to do so.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  We'll do it in reverse. Okay, 5G, what do you go with 5G? You probably get low latency and you get high bandwidth, right? Okay, so you could possibly stream something around like a good 1080P, right? Then you use the AI to upscale to 8K.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, AI upscaler 8K. I got you.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  We gotta actually be clear, Paul. I don't know if that's quite right because it's AI 8K plus 5G. That plus is important.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  It's about AI.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  8K and then also 5G is in the mix.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  AI 8K is just you can plug your DVD player into it and it's gonna upscale to 8K. 5G means that you also pay, it's you add a line to your Verizon.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  So basically what you're saying is that Foxconn in Neelai's hometown of Racine, Wisconsin, is building a giant $4.1 billion motion smoothing factory.

• 1:13:30Nilay Patel?

  No, it's 10 billion.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  I wanna die.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Crony capitalism is garbage.

• 1:13:35Nilay Patel?

  I haven't even gotten to the crony capitalism yet.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  And I hate it. The other, I'd like to hear you guys' input on this because this is something I always think about like with, especially with this environmental stuff, right? I understand that there's like sort of like, I'm not in my backyard aspect, but like it happens in somebody's backyard. Like we like technology products. But those technology products require, you know, mining of, you know, rare earth minerals and, you know, dumping, you know, sludge into preschool playgrounds.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  And all, you know, there's a lot of side effects to building technology.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Sure. So the, so one of the arguments is everyone says they want the iPhone built here. No one wants the pollution that China's willing to put up with.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  So the price of the Chinese economy is like massive pollution that you see in that country. That's great. But to crony capitalism, I want to say two more things and I want to address the environmental thing. There are things we left out of this story because we just wanted to tell one story, right? The story was they wrote them a check for a generation 10.5 factory and what they ended up with was the same check for AI 8K plus 5G.

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Motion smoothly.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  Literally, they made a buzz, a buzzword factory instead of a factory. That's like, that's, that's all the more I really wanted people to get from this story. Cause again, the local papers, they're doing good coverage, but I wanted to add it up for like the zoom out for the verge audience and the bigger audience. But the stuff we left out, like that, this is stuff we have to follow up on. So the state of Wisconsin, crony capitalism, declared the area Foxconn sits in like an enhanced manufacturing zone or something like that. Then they passed a law saying any company located in one of these enhanced zones, if they're sued, the only court of appeals in the entire state that can hear the case is the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And the decision, if they lose at like the

• 1:15:28Nilay Patel?

  district court level, is automatically stayed. It's like suspended until the court can hear the appeal. So fundamentally, the only court in Wisconsin, in this entire state of Wisconsin, that can deal with Foxconn is the Supreme Court. That's just insanity. No other company in Wisconsin has that problem. So that's one. Two-

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  And that's only for Foxconn? Or is there a literal geographic area that other companies could, could enjoy this?

• 1:15:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, as far as I know, it's only for, we have to like follow up on it, but that's just like one of these things that came out. You know, like we published a story and people started telling us more stuff. So that's like the first one. Like, do you want the state of Wisconsin to craft its laws around one company? That's, that's a little dicey, right? Second, Wisconsin, Scott Walker is running for reelection. He has, he stopped talking on Foxconn because most people in the state thinks, think it's a bad deal. But he's out there promoting really low unemployment numbers in Wisconsin, as he should. Good job, low unemployment in Wisconsin. Well, you gotta add these like $13,000 jobs. Where are you going to get the people if everybody has a job? So Foxconn's like, we need to build a train from Chicago where all the engineers are. So the people in Chicago can come to Wisconsin and work. So now they gotta ask for like an Amtrak expansion.

• 1:16:36Nilay Patel?

  So that's like another one, we should go look into it. And then third, and this is in the story, but I don't think we hammered it enough. Other states in the region were competing for this deal because to make the LCD panels, you need the water from the lake. You need fresh water to like wash the panel. And so Wisconsin just got played. Like John Kasich, who is a Republican governor over Ohio was like, I would never pay this money to get this plant. Like this is a bad way to do business. And so Wisconsin used its leverage to extract the environmental protections they might want, to extract the money to recoup some of the thing to say, actually, if you want to use the lake water, you have to do blah, blah, blah. They just wrote them a check, right? So I think that's to the environmental point you're making.

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  If you do want this stuff and you want Foxconn to be there and you want manufacturing in America, well, then you should say like, make these promises to us. And instead, say, Wisconsin did not, in literally my hometown.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  What I would like in the US is a Shenzhen style special economic zone. And it's like no rules, just right. And you'd have to hammer out some sort of environmental thing so that, yeah, they're going to maybe wreck the specific area, but it won't, you know, leak out to surrounding area, you know, like you can just have a, an angry industrial zone of, of wild capitalism. And so, because otherwise we're never going to make anything that is actually technologically advanced in the US. Because the only places that can do that are places that have far different rules than we do about employment, about taxes and about environment.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  And that's kind of what Scott Walker tried to do in literally my hometown, right? Waived a bunch of rules, wrote a bunch of checks.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, doing it in a one-on-one sweetheart deal with one company is gross.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but Foxconn famously did this to the state of Pennsylvania. They famously did, they promised India a bunch of investment and they didn't build a factory in India. So this is like a pattern. Also AI AK plus 5G. Like, my friends from Wisconsin were like, we were wondering when you would wake up to AI AK plus 5G. Because it's just buzzword soup, and I don't think they know what they want to do. So, we published a story. That same day, you know, Foxconn's executives are on some panel to talk about economic development in the region. And they're like, we're surprised at this criticism. We thought people would roll out the red carpet for us. That's like, that's where they're at. Like, they own the state. They're also doing some insane thing with like, there's a bunch of ginseng farmers in Wisconsin. This is true. It's a hundred percent true. And Foxconn has a big ginseng processing business.

• 1:19:08Nilay Patel?

  So they're gonna like, buy all the ginseng farms in Wisconsin? That's just a thing that's be under-reported on. They've also signed a deal, so they're getting, you know, 4.1 billion dollars for the state. It's not like they're paying it back in various ways, like spreading some of this money around. So they signed a hundred million dollar deal with the University of Wisconsin system, where they're gonna share like patents and IP and inventions. But that deal, this is also true, the University of Wisconsin has a port of trustees, has an oversight process, has transparency rules. The deal with Foxconn, uh, uh, just not subject to any of those rules. All of it will be conducted in secret.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:19:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's just crazy. So anyways, I'm sorry that I ranted about Racine, Wisconsin. But, you know, you made my mom late.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Wiscon Valley.

• 1:19:49Nilay Patel?

  If you're from Foxconn and you're listening to this, I will be home for the week of Thanksgiving.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  I would love to tour your magic factory, and I would love to hear what your letters mean.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's great. On a positive note, the 1 plus 6T, which by the way, I heard, I was not reading tech news while I was on vacation. And so someone's like, the 1 plus 16, and I was like, wow, I didn't know they were up to that high.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  The 6T is a flagship phone that is not a million dollars.

• 1:20:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  It's like, it's, it's like it's still possible to make a relatively affordable flagship.

• 1:20:28Nilay Patel?

  The, one, I'm really sad we don't have time to talk about the red phone, which is, would also be positive because it's so bad. The thing about the 6T, very good review, and I think you're right that it basically counts as a flagship, but the camera is like, you know.

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  But it has the in-screen fingerprint for all that stuff. The question then becomes, how much is the Pixel's camera worth to you? And that's actually a surprisingly hard question because we're talking like 400 bucks to get the 3XL.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  In my case, the Pixel's camera was worth switching from iOS and having everybody be completely incapable of communicating with me.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  It's a lot of pain, but I think it's worth it. It's a really good camera.

• 1:21:09Nilay Patel?

  The Pixel also has a far better display. Dan has the 6T here and it's a beautiful phone and the notch design is good and all that. The display, it's just like rainbow colors when you get off axis. It's just a thing that does.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Do you only look at your phone off axis?

• 1:21:23Nilay Patel?

  I move my phone around my hand, so if you notice any amount of off-axis shift, like if you're in a car and the whole thing is like a rainbow spiral, like you're it.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  That's fair.

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  I only look at my phone sideways.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:21:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. A happy note. 6Ts for everyone.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Yay!

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  AI can place a 6T. Just letters, all the letters. I'm so mad. The Foxconn people need to call me. That's all I'm saying. I'll go do the next story.

• 1:21:49Speaker 02

  Okay. I believe you.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  You're just mad that you weren't there with a shovel, breaking ground with all your buddies.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  He's looking at me like he wants me to wrap up, but I don't have the wrap-up script in front of me.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  That was the show. It was wonderful. Thank you both. We gotta get this stuff. We gotta review it. It's coming. I want you to listen to Why Did You Push That Button? I want you to listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. I want you to listen to Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway. We actually just met Scott Galloway walking into here. Lovely man. I want you to listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. Those are all wonderful shows. We know we've been doing the interview episodes. Next week, I got the CEO of Anchor, who is just the most excited person about USB-C I've ever met in my entire life. It's coming on-

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  And Neelai's met me.

• 1:22:33Nilay Patel?

  Stephen Yang from Anchor, CEO of Anchor. We talked about USB-C and its future and power delivery and what Anchor is doing for 45 minutes. It's coming on Tuesday. Check it out. He's got more thoughts about USB-C than anybody. You know, we ship the world, ships like 3 billion chargers in the boxes, in like phone boxes and whatnot, every year.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we should stop doing that.

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and here's the USB-C. It's a whole thing. His was, it was like a religious experience when he told me this.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:59Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so that's coming next week. You can talk to us. I'm at reckless, Dieter's at back on, Paul's at future Paul. And you can also follow us on, you know, the social things and rate us on Apple Podcasts. That's it. Those are our chest. Rock and roll.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  Paul.

• 1:23:11Nilay Patel?

  Promo code.

• 1:23:29Nilay Patel?

  Subs of the Verchast brought to you by Ericsson. 5G isn't just a step up from 4G. It's a game changing advancement. It's 100 times faster than the ultra reliable, low latency network. It means it can connect more than phones and tablets. It connects everything. Imagine a jam session with a band members miles apart and perfect sync. It's happening. Imagine an 8K entertainment system in your self-driving car that rivals your home theater. 5G will have the power to revolutionize existing industry models where you can create new ones. This is just a glimpse of what the future will look like with Ericsson and 5G. Find out how 5G will transform the world at ericsson.com/5g. That's E R I C S S O N dot com slash 5G.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  I was waiting for you to say AI. Just slip it in there.

• 1:24:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy. All right.