Apple announces M1 chip computers / iPhone 12 mini and Pro Max review / HomePod mini review

Nilay, Dieter, Dan, and Chaim discuss the new computers Apple announced at their "One More Thing" hardware event, as well as their reviews of the iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro Max, and HomePod mini. Stories from this week: US sees two days with over 100,000 reported COVID-19 cases COVID-19 vaccine is highly effective, manufacturers report iPhone 12 mini review: fit to size iPhone 12 Pro Max review: the best smartphone camera The 5 biggest announcements from Apple’s ‘One More Thing’ hardware event Mac users couldn’t launch apps this afternoon after Apple verification server issue Apple announces MacBook Air with Apple’s Arm-based M1 processor Apple says new Arm-based M1 chip offers the ‘longest battery life ever in a Mac’ All the apps and games Apple promises for Arm-based Macs Apple announces new Arm-based Mac mini with M1 chip, starting at $699 Apple’s first Arm-based 13-inch MacBook Pro is here with an M1 chip Apple’s new M1 computers top out at 16GB of RAM The biggest difference between the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is a fan Apple’s M1 Mac design emphasizes continuity over complexity HomePod mini review macOS Big Sur is now available to download Google will end its free unlimited Photos storage on June 1, 2021 Microsoft: ‘please do not blow vape smoke into your Xbox Series X’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Dan Seifert and Heim Gartenberg join us. We talk about the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max reviews, Apple's big M1 Mac reveal that put armships in Mac, and Dan reviewed the HomePod Mini. That's coming up now on the Vergecast.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of processor transitions. It's a niche audience, but I like it. We make a podcast once every five years. Every, every decade, we make a very niche, very popular podcast. I'm your up to my friend, Dieter Bohn is here. I'm your third high efficiency core. Well, our fourth high efficiency core is here. Dan Seifert is here.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  And then we've got one high performance core, Heim Gartenberg. Hi. We're going to let this joke be over now.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I will say that Hyam is definitely the high performance core here.

• 2:21Speaker 03

  He's the L3 cash of this conversation.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. I went with it and I regret it immediately and now it's stuck with us forever. Lots to talk about. Apple event, obviously, the new M1 chip in Macs. Lots to talk about there. Dieter and I reviewed yet more iPhones. They just won't stop releasing iPhones. So we reviewed those. We've got to talk about those. Dan reviewed the HomePod. Big surges out. So just a ton of Apple news. There's a little bit of Google news. People have been vaping into Xboxes. A lot, a lot to talk about. But before, just a little preamble, this was the launch week for Decoder, my new podcast about technology and business and policy all mixed up together. First guest was Mark Cuban. I had been saying, I think everyone's going to like the guest. I was trying to hype it up and I was like, what if Cuban drops out at the last minute?

• 3:08Nilay Patel?

  But he didn't. But I just want you to know how nerve wracking it is to make that promise. But Cuban was great. Go listen to it. It's on the old Recode Decode feed. So subscribe to Decoder. You can search for it wherever you get podcasts. I thought Mark was great. It was fun to talk to him. We've got a whole lineup of guests through the rest of the year booked up, ready to go. I'm very excited about that show. We're trying to push beyond the hardcore tech stuff into a little bit more business stuff. Let me know how it's going, but I'm excited about it. And then always I start by saying it has been 35 weeks since the president promised a website where he could get a test. You know, if you say something over and over again, it kind of becomes a joke and it has been a little bit of a joke. The virus situation is very serious in this country right now. Two days in a row with over 100,000 reported COVID cases.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  It's skyrocketing everywhere. Hospitals are overwhelmed. I think a lot of people know my parents are doctors in Wisconsin. Their hospitals are overwhelmed. Talk to them about it. So just please take it seriously. Please stay home. Like Illinois issued a suggestion for basically a three week self quarantine today. They don't want to say it out loud, but they suggested that everyone just chill out for 21 days. So we're back in that zone. Just please take it seriously. I know we joke about it a lot with the website, but it's real. It's the most important story in the world and I encourage everyone to take it seriously. That said, they just won't stop releasing iPhones.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  So Dieter, you want to start with the mini or the Macs?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  I think we get the mini out of the way a little bit more quickly because it is an iPhone 12, but smaller.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So the question here is, it felt like it really just came down to battery life.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. That's what it came down to. Like, the only other spec is that it fast charges on wireless at 12 watts instead of 15, which is honestly a shrugy. I actually haven't checked to see what the exact milliamps are on the battery, what the watt hours are or whatever, to see exactly how much smaller it is. But yeah, battery life is a question mark, I think. Even having used it a bunch, I think that it is going to be more dependent in how you use the phone than what you're used to. So if you are willing to use your phone in 2020, the way that you use your phone in, say, 2010, you're gangbusters. Golden, you know? Do some email, open up Twitter every now and then. Was Twitter in 2010? Sure.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Play a game for a little while, but for the most part, it's a thing that you have in your back pocket to take photos with and, you know, listen to music with. It does all the phone stuff. It does, it's literally the exact same specs as the iPhone 12. You just can't use it as much as the iPhone 12. However, this all sounds like I'm really down on it. No, it's my favorite iPhone. I was, I was not going to trade up. This year, I was going to stick with my iPhone 11 Pro. And after using the iPhone 12 Mini, I am training in my iPhone 11 Pro for it because I love it that much. I love the small form factor that much. It is, I really struggled to describe this. I don't know why, but it's ergonomic. If you were to go to a store, a kitchen store, and you were to like go buy a whisk,

• 6:11Speaker 03

  you would judge the whisk or the spatula or whatever in part by how easy is this thing to hold, right? If there was like the best whisk ever, but it weighed 10 pounds and it had a handle that required two hands to use, you wouldn't buy it. You'd want one that you can actually use with one hand because that's like part of the reason it exists. That's what the iPhone Mini is. It's a thing designed for a human size instead of being designed around a screen size.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's interesting that it took them this long to admit it. I don't know if that's the right word. We've been asking about small phones across the whole industry. Every company has said, well, people don't want them.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yep, and every company is probably right. I don't know. Big sales on the 2020 iPhone SE. They were like, oh, wow, this this sold really well. What the hell? Obviously, they had developed the 12 mini before that. There are a bunch of smaller Android phones, right? Like, the Pixel 5 is not that big. The Pixel 4A is not that big. So like, there's a way that that on the Android side gets addressed, but just not explicitly addresses. And I'm going to go buy the small phone. There just happen to be smaller phones out there. This is the first time in whatever, ever. When was the last time Apple said, we're making a small one?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  iPhone 5.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the iPhone 5 was just the iPhone.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, the iPhone 5 was bigger.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  The iPhone 5 was bigger, but like, that's the last time Apple intentionally sat down and was like, we're going to make a phone and it's going to be this size. Instead of, we're going to make a phone and we're going to chase like Android screen sizes. Like, they bumped up the size like two years later with the iPhone 6, and they've been chasing that dragon ever since.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Dieter, I think you might have put this in your review or it was in our discussions while we were editing. But like, the difference with this that I see is that you mentioned the Pixel 4A, the Pixel 5, those are smaller, kind of semi smaller Android phones. But the Pixel 4A is a cheap phone. Like, and the iPhone SE is a cheap phone. It's people don't buy it primarily because it's small. They buy it because it's $400.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  This is a not cheap phone. It is $730. And if you get a $30 kickback from your carrier or whatever. But this is a premium phone. It's a, it's, you know, you, like you said, iPhone 12, but smaller. So it's all the latest guts and specs just in a smaller size. And that's like, the intention is that it is a modern premium phone that you're not compromising on anything and you're getting a smaller size phone. And that is really what is so unique here and why I think we're all so excited and intrigued by it is that. The last time this has happened was like Sony tried it a couple of times, like five to 10 years ago, nobody bought those. And like the last small iPhone, which was like, you know, the iPhone five generation or 5S.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  The other thing we should talk about is pockets, and specifically pockets for clothes that are designed primarily for women are small, if they're existent at all. And this thing can fit in more of those.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I, in your review, I love that you went and talked to Liz.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  So Liz has been on the show. She's our deputy editor. She is very fierce about the fact that phones are too big.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  I think she's written for the site that phones are too big. So this, I think she held it in her hand for one minute and said, I'm buying this phone.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Yep, pretty much.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like, when I say it's taken a long time for manufacturers to admit it, I think that they have not, they've been following what the sales data is telling them, instead of necessarily what users are actually saying about the products.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  Because all things being equal, people always buy bigger screens. Like, we see it in TVs all the time. People will buy a larger, crappier TV over a higher picture quality small TV, just dollar for dollar. That's like what they always do. We see it in phones. There are lots, and on the Android side, there are lots of like, slow phones with huge screens, because that, like, people sort of naturally gravitate to it. But I think what closes the loop is, well, once they have it, do they actually like it? Like, once you're using the thing every day, are you like, oh, this thing is not great? Like, I don't like using it. I think that the mini addresses that moment of, actually, it's a great phone. It's premium, as Dan was saying, and it's small enough to like, fit into your

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  life. And I'm just glad that that loop has been closed.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think that that sales data was also misleading because a lot of those people bought those phones, like, against, they didn't want to. They're like, well, I gotta buy a phone. I guess I'll buy this one. Crap. And that's how they felt about their phone. And this addresses that problem. We should talk about the Macs, though, because there's more interesting things there. And we just spent the last five minutes trying to like, describe the smallness and how that matters as humans of the mini.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  You said Macs, and I thought you meant the laptops.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 10:49Nilay Patel?

  No, the Pro Max, the iPhone 12 Pro Max, one of the worst named products in Apple history. I hate saying, not least because my daughter is named Max. And they have a product called the Mac.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  So just confusing from the jump as we just demonstrated.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Can't wait for the Mac Max.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  My understanding is that the 12 Pro Max is approximately the size of a billboard. Is that correct?

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  So there's a lot of comments on the review and on the YouTube that's like, that notes that it is the same size as like the iPhone 8 Plus.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 11:21Nilay Patel?

  If you're familiar with those phones, those old plus size phones. Yeah, you're, it's correct. Those measurements are the same. But A, those phones were surfboards.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  We called them surfboards all the time. They were not like pleasing to hold or look at. This phone is better than that in that the display takes up a substantially large portion of the front face. But the square sides and just the weight of it, it's not that much heavier than the 11 Pro Max. It's like two grams heavier. It's like a negligible amount heavier than the iPhone 11 Pro Max is like a little bit heavier than the Note 20. But you can feel it and you hold it in your hand. You're like, this is a gigantic phone. And they sent reviewers the gold one. It's like, it's like gaudy, like it's just such an imposing object to hold in your hand. That I have not taken out of the case since I got it.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause like this thing is just gonna fly away. It has its own gravitational pull to the ground. And then I put it in a case and now it's even bigger. And like, I'm a big phone person, like I said in the review and every time I pick this up, I'm like, this is too big.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  All right. What do you think you're gonna do? You're gonna stick with your, your current Macs?

• 12:31Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, I'm gonna buy that.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  So this is, we're gonna, we're gonna get into why Neelai is buying this one. But this is exactly how people who wanted a small phone felt last year buying a phone. Because they're like, I'm gonna buy a new phone. I really am not happy with the size of this. But it's what I want, or I need a new phone and I don't have another option. So tell me, Neelai, why are you buying the phone that you are not happy to hold?

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  Well, the battery life is insane.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  So like just at a minimum, eight hours of screen on time.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  That's wild.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's just like at a minimum. That's like the lowest number I've seen so far.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And let's doom scrolling.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let's doom scrolling. At the high end, it's like 12 or you can push it to 14, like it's just an incredible battery life. I don't know why that matters in my home. Where I'm always near a charger.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Well, you're the kind of guy that sits next to a charger and doesn't plug in.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  That's it's very true. I run down the battery in my own home all the time.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  And then I do think, and this is worth unpacking quite a bit, I think the camera is better. And I, you know, I have a kid, I said interviews, like that is important to me that we always just have the best cameras around for that single purpose of taking photos of our kid.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  So we have a lot to talk about with the cameras. So one more size thing before we move into camera. I think it is completely ridiculous that the software experience that I had on the iPhone 12 mini is not that different than the software experience that you have on the iPhone 12 Pro Max in terms of screen layout and like options for icons and even like lines of text. The 12 versus the regular 12 mini, that's sorry, the 12 mini versus the regular 12, it's like two lines of text. It's ridiculous.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's not that much more, you know, with the plus size phones, they did all the, they launched those phones and they said, we've got a bigger screen. We're going to enable two columns and apps and Safari will have tabs and like, we see the future of big screens on phones. And they have just walked away from all of it.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  And I do think like this thing is getting closer to being a tablet than a phone. And they should let you do, it's so funny that after they peeled the iPad away from iOS, I'm like, they should make the top, they should bring them back together a little bit. But yeah, it is very much just a gigantic iPhone.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  And you can, you can mess with the settings and get to a different experience, but out of the box, just a huge iPhone. And I think that that is a miss and it's something that if they want to, I think it's good that the line has this many size choices in it. And so what that lets them do is it lets them take the biggest and smallest ones and make them more different than the same. Instead of trying to make everybody have the same experience, but it's, yeah, it's a miss.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay. Camera.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  So all these cameras look the same. Like we are clearly at the point where you have to really care about cameras and photos.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Between you, you talk about like between flagships, like a Galaxy S20, a Pixel 5, a Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. Yeah. Top of line OnePlus, that kind of thing.

• 15:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Two years ago, three years ago, maybe we would sit here and talk about how the Pixel had a look and the iPhone had a look and they were, those looks were divergent and. You know, Mark Lavoie would come on and talk about Carvaggio and how, you know, the Pixel team stared at paintings, tie on shrooms to like come over the camera. And like now that now they all just look the same like they all realize that photos have looked like that for a long time for a reason.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  And they've they've kind of backed off their their super intense looks. But, you know, the iPhone 12 Pro Max does have the bigger sensor. And that means in lower light, it has a higher maximum ISO. And I've like really struggled to explain, to put this in a context. So every time Apple says it can capture more light. That's the thing they're always saying. And they describe either the lens that way or the sensor that way. The sensor is bigger, so it can capture more light. If you really take that apart, that you have to put a number next to it. That number is ISO.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. So what they're really saying is that at any given ISO, the bigger sensor captures the same amount of light with less noise. That's really what they're saying.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  And so their higher ISO is less noisy. And so the 12 Pro has like 5800 top ISO. And the Max has like a 7600 top ISO. So they'll just run it. They'll run the sensor at a higher ISO all of the time to get more light with less noise.

• 16:50Speaker 03

  Usually higher ISO means more noise.

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. So but any at any given number.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Oh, I see.

• 16:55Nilay Patel?

  So if you run the 12 Pro at 3000 and the Pro Max at 3000, the Pro Max has generated less noise.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  So that the system is comfortable running at higher ISOs. That is fundamentally the thing that's happening here. That means they can use faster shutter speeds. And that means you get more detail on the photo because if you are shooting photos of things that move, like toddlers, you freeze more motion in them and you capture more detail. And that little equation is really hard to communicate. And it is particularly hard to demonstrate if what you're doing in a review is shooting a lot of photos of things that don't move. Right. Like if you're it's it's even true in in my review, like the stuffed animals aren't moving. It would be very strange if they started. I'm moving, right? My hand is moving, but that's

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  what the stabilizer and the lens is supposed to help you do, or the sensor shift is supposed to help you do. But the real benefit, I think, of the Pro Max camera is that basically shot for shot, it'll run at a higher ISO and a faster shutter speed. Right. And so if you have a kid, you have a pet, whatever, you're going to see that benefit, especially as light goes down. And it's just very hard to... It took me publishing the review, seeing the questions about it, watching Marquez's review, where he's like, all the pictures look the same, and like, really thinking it through one more round before I, like, could clearly communicate what was going on with this camera. Right. Dan, did I do the math right? Either camera nerd, did I get that right?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's fundamentally it. But I just want to clarify that when you say shutter speed, it's not the response time of you tapping the button and it taking the picture. That's the same across the board. Shutter speed is how long it takes to let in the light that it needs to capture that picture. And that's when you're talking about...

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  The thing opening and closing.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  The thing opening and closing. That's what you're talking about when, you know, if your kid is moving around in that time, they will be blurry. So the faster that time is, the easier it is to freeze their action. And when you're saying, like, you don't see it if you are taking pictures of something still, because the camera knows you're taking pictures of something still, it doesn't need to use a high shutter speed or a higher ISO, it kind of ends up looking the same. But it is when you are in those situations where you do have lower light, faster moving subjects, the toughest subjects ever to shoot. And like, any parent will tell you, the hardest thing for any camera is taking pictures of their kids indoors in terrible, you know, indoor artificial lighting. That is where you would

• 19:22Speaker 02

  see the notice the difference. Now, the difference is there, and it's noticeable, and we saw it in our tests. I wouldn't say it's dramatic. Like, if you're going from ISO 5800, which is roughly the 12 Pro is, to ISO 7600... That sounds really big because those numbers are big, but that's at the high end of the ISO scale. It is like going from ISO 400 to ISO 600 on the low end of the scale. So it's a, it's a, it's not what we would call in photography a full stop, which is twice as much light. It is a, you know, 25, 30% more light, which is, you know, you can see that if, if, when it comes down to it in really those edge cases, but it's not like you're getting twice the better,

• 20:07Speaker 02

  twice as better, you know, performance or things like that. You really, really have to care about those specific scenarios and encounter those specific scenarios a lot with your shooting and be willing to put up with a phone that is the size of a surfboard to use those scenarios.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, but I'll tell you this, you know, I have, I've got my now ancient Nikon DSLR, D7500. I've got any number of Sony RX100 variants floating on my home now. I never want to run those things over ISO 100 ever. I just don't like doing it because they, they fall into noise so fast. Right? And I, I think it's remarkable that these tiny sensors and Apple's processing are just so comfortable always at the top of their range.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that, that is, that is where computational photography comes in because the reason they're able to run at 5000 or 6000 ISO when, you know, your DSLR will fall apart at 3200 is it is stacking images together and, and reducing the noise because it has 10 images instead of one, and it can get more data out of those 10 images than one image, and that produces a cleaner output. That said, these are still on the scale of like sensors, small sensors, and they do hit their limits and that everything will, you know, usually look pretty good on your phone. But if you're the type of person that prints something, you blow it up on a, a big computer monitor or something like that. You will see a difference with something that has a larger physical sensor in it,

• 21:35Speaker 02

  like an actual physical or actual camera DSLR or what have you, RX100, because because there is a limit to what these can do. It is remarkable what they are doing within that limit. But for me personally, it's not replacing a mirrorless camera for photos of like my kids that I want to print.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  Okay, so a lot of quantitative stuff, a lot of numbers. I get that the 12 Pro Max is better for movement in low light. But Neil, what's the qualitative experience? Like when you, me and Joanna were talking about our last iPhone reviews on the Tuesday show, I pointed out that I just I feel with iPhone, I know what it's going to do and I feel more confident in what's going to happen when I hit the shutter button. Was there a significant difference in your level of confidence or knowing what you're going to get or being willing to even try or whatever with the 12 Pro Max compared to the 12 Pro? Because if people are like, fine, I'll get the big one because of the camera. Like, is there anything other than it can take pictures of kids in low light better that you experienced?

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  You know, what's interesting about that question is it either that is the most important thing for you, or you don't give a shit about it. There's like no middle ground in whether that is important for you from a camera. And I will say that I just, like Dan, when it's important, I will always go get a big camera, which is what I'm going to do. But that that middle ground of like the hundreds of photos we take of the kid every day, which is insane, but we do it. It's it's better as soon as the light goes away. Like, there was a little bit of a difference where I could say, okay, I know the camera will perform. And maybe it's just because I had them both side by side, right? Like Becky does not want the Pro Max. She's like way too big. She doesn't want anything to do with it.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna buy the 12 Pro because it is a step improvement over the 11 Pro that she has. But between the two, it really comes down to And are you going to turn on portrait mode? Right, like stuff like that portrait mode at night, it's going to be substantially better than the 12 Pro. That is the tiniest edge case inside of already a very, a very sharply set off use case that some people really care about and some people don't care about at all. And some people have pets.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, but so the, the movement, the, the slight increases at the edge cases, it doesn't translate into feeling more confident and willing to take a photo in the middle. Right. It doesn't translate to better photos in the middle. But does it, does it, does it like your, just like human feel of taking pictures on the phone? It sounds like it's like basically the same, but you're more willing to do it in some of those edge cases.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it, I would put this into the context of the price. The phone is a hundred dollars more than the 12 Pro.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  For that, you get a substantially improved battery life and you get a camera that will perform better in low light.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  And you get a ping pong paddle in case you forget that at home.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I was thinking a life raft.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. If, if you're ever in danger, you can ward someone off with this phone just by brandishing it then. Yeah. I mean, like for the money for an extra hundred dollars, like, yeah, I think that's worth it. But the size, I, I think this is going to be a unique cycle for Apple because people can't just go hold the thing. Is, is they might have felt comfortable doing before. And, you know, if you can find a way to do it safely, you should do it, but it is big. And I, I think if they get any bigger than this, we are going to say it's too big. It's not quite too big yet. You know, like it's, it's right there where people can disagree. A little bit bigger and ever, everyone will be like, yeah, you're, you're over the line.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  A little bit bigger, it's an iPad mini.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like a little bit bigger from 6.7 is seven.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  That's like you were in tablet territory. So, yeah, I, I don't think people should buy it for the camera alone, but I think the combo of the camera and the battery life more than justifies the price premium.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  One thing as a camera nerd, and I know a lot of people were very interested about this. We had a bunch of questions about this. With the bigger sensor, we, when you think about that with, with traditional cameras, the larger sensor, it usually gives you a shallower depth of field. So it's easier to blur your background and things like that. But we were discussing it. It didn't, you didn't really encounter that much in normal day-to-day photography, did you? Like, the sensor size didn't make the depth of field dramatically shallower?

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  Not, it's, it's shallower, not dramatically so. And I think we saw it with the, the other phones with gigantic sensors. They had issues focusing, not so much here. And I think it just comes down to the sensor isn't quite that much bigger. It's a little bit bigger, but yeah, it's there, especially if you have something close to you in the foreground and there's a lot in the background. But anything in that middle distance, it's about the same. In a way that a middle distance with a long lens on a DSLR, you would still get that dramatic background blur. I would not say it's in, you'd still need to turn portrait mode if you want that to happen for you. Other than that, you know, it's like, it's an iPhone. It's gigantic.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Is that enough about the Mac? Should we talk about the Macs?

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  God, it is so confusing. Um, yes, we should take a break and we can come back and talk about M1s.

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• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  We're back. We want to talk about the M1 Max, but we just figured something out that is completely wild. So you don't know this because you're listening to this on Friday, but we were 30 minutes late to recording today because everyone's Macs just lost it. I have three Macs here, all of them just like wiped out. I was like, am I just having the worst computer day of my life? Andrew's computer, our producer, his computer is crashing. Dieter's, yours were crashing. Hyman, you said yours crashed? Yep. I couldn't, I just like couldn't open an app for a while. It was a disaster. And now we know why. Hyman, explain what is going on.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  So apparently, so Apple just released Big Sur this afternoon at 1:00 PM. And apparently there are so many people downloading it and it's such a big file that it just wiped out one of Apple's servers, which is key thing, which is its OCSP server, which is what it uses. It's the certificate that it uses to authorize basically all the programs and services on your Macs. Like when you open like iTunes or Apple Pay, your computer goes to Apple and is like, hey, is this real? Before it does it. And then that server, that certificate gives it a nod back and it's like, yeah, that's good. So Big Sur's rollout hosed that whole thing for at least some time. It looks like it's still coming back

• 28:45Speaker 04

  now. And like huge chunks of apps and services just couldn't launch or had difficulty connecting. So they couldn't do anything.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  And they had difficulty connecting in a way that wasn't clear what was going on because it was this subsystem of macOS validating certificates, sort of like in the background.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  The icon would just bounce in your dock. Like the app should be working on your computer, but in the background, it's like frantically waving at Apple being like, hey, can I do this? Like, like, and Apple's just like, don't know.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  How many times in the Verge chat have we talked about whether our computers belong to us? This is my Mac. It's from 2015. It's mine. You, there's, you have no claim on it, people. It's mine.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  If you turned Wi-Fi off, everything would have worked fine because if it can't hit the server, it's like, eh, it's probably fine.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  But it's I, the one who downloaded Chrome. I told the computer ages ago, this is my, yep, I want to run this app. I don't care that it came from the big scary internet, Apple.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Regardless of the fact, I'm launching it and it's asking Apple for permission to launch.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  Can't take that risk, Neelai.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  One server is like, I don't know, I'll get back to you. And my computer is like, right, that's right on the other side of the line of how much control do I want to give, uh, operating system vendor?

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  That is a great segue into what we're about to talk about.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, that's crazy, right? That like, yeah, I get it. Apple web services go down, Apple Pay and messages and all that other stuff that I sort of understand it.

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, this happens.

• 30:17Nilay Patel?

  I can't launch an app on my own computer because Apple is, their servers cannot give me permission is insane.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, this happens with app stores, like this has happened before with like iOS things with like Facebook certificates, like companies do screw this up. It's just bad when it happens on like a computer level.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I didn't download Chrome from your dumb app store, Heim.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  You gotta be sure though.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  There was no way to know that this was happening. The icon would just bounce in your dock and like, like you were trying to open it and it just, the system didn't tell us anything. We're all freaking out. We're in Slack saying, I gotta reboot, I gotta reboot, like nothing's working. And, and then on like, eventually we got zoomed to open or Chrome to open. And it's just like.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  The lesson here is that people just need to like chill when downloading their software updates. If you tried to install Big Sur today.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's the lesson.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  We're not blaming the users, the customers here.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  I'm blaming, I'm blaming really myself because I could not install Big Sur today.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  I mean, the, the lesson is fail gracefully. Setting aside, and you shouldn't, the idea of, um, my computer shouldn't need to get Apple's permission for every single app. There's this whole question about notarizing apps and blah, blah, blah, that has been increasing with Big Sur and like, what are the permission prompts? And is Apple asking, you know, you to approve things too often? There's all this stuff. But even if you are like, you know what? All that stuff is fine. You shouldn't. But even if you are, there's still the issue of things should fail gracefully, or they should degrade gracefully. So they should either tell you what's happening in a clear way, or they should just work. And if the thing like, borks in the background, but otherwise, everything is

• 32:01Speaker 03

  fine, it should keep going. You know, like, it can't reach the server, it'd be like, well, he still wants to launch the app, so we're gonna let him.

• 32:08Nilay Patel?

  The opposite of failing gracefully is that whatever happened on my MacBook Pro was so upside down today, that for a while, it just insisted it didn't have a keyboard.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  You gotta check with Apple Server for the keyboard, Neil. I mean, come on.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  It was like, where's your Bluetooth keyboard? And I was like, it's right here. It's not Bluetooth. And then it just sort of came back.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  I don't really be sure on that on the servers.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  The worst. I'm having like, a full give my, let my machine be free moment.

• 32:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm done with this. I'm running Linux. This is the year of the Linux desktop.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  We have a great how to up on the site. If you've got a laptop that you would like to run Linux on, go check it out.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  From now on, I'm running the verge from that $400 Raspberry Pi keyboard. You can't stop me. How does that thing run Zoom? Is it good? Okay. Speaking of extremely locked down computers, fully controlled by Apple, there was an Apple event this week.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  There was. The last one, I hope.

• 33:06Nilay Patel?

  He said, Tim Cook at the end was like, we'll be back next year. And you could see that the relief over his face. That dude's going on vacation. So they announced three new machines, but really what they announced was their new processor, the M1 chip, that is in a new MacBook Air, which completely replaces the existing MacBook Air line. It's in a 13 inch MacBook Pro, which replaces only the bottom end of the 13 inch MacBook Pro line. You can still buy Intel MacBook Pros. And the new Mac Mini, which again, replaces the bottom end of the Mac Mini line, you can still buy Intel Mac Minis. From what we can tell, Apple is insanely confident about this chip. Heim, what do we know about the M1?

• 33:50Speaker 04

  All right, so M1, it's an ARM-based chip. So it's not x86, it's based on, you know, different architecture entirely than Intel. It's the same architecture that your iPhone uses, that, you know, Qualcomm Snapdragon chips use. But it's in a computer, which is a thing we've seen before. Qualcomm has made, you know, the 8CX, it showed up in a couple of Windows laptops. There's the custom SQ1 and SQ2, which is in the Surface Pro X. But this is Apple's first shot at it, which is interesting because we haven't actually seen this as like a high-powered thing. It is usually in ultralight devices, it's in tablets, it's in phones, it's in, you know, the Nintendo Switch uses an ARM chip. But the idea of using an ARM chip for something in a powerful laptop or desktop is not a thing we've seen.

• 34:35Speaker 04

  As a chip, it's actually like fairly by the numbers in terms of just like what Apple's doing here. It is a 5-nanometer process, which is, you know, a smaller process than we're using on, you know, any mainstream x86 laptop. Intel's still at the 10-nanometer node, AMD with TSMC is at 7-nanometers, which means you can fit more transistors, this has 16 billion, it's a lot. Not really a number you care about. It is an 8-core CPU, but it's not an 8-core CPU in the same way that like Intel is, because it uses an ARM big-little breakup. So it has four high-performance cores, so there's four big cores that do like the real beefy processing. And it has four high-efficiency cores, which are more efficient but less powerful.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  This is again extremely standard across ARM. Your Snapdragon phone already does it, your iPhone already does it. But you get benefits on the computer. So Apple's making a boatload of big claims. They're saying, you know, it's the best CPU performance per watt of any, you know, CPU core. It's the world's fastest CPU core for the high-performance core. It has a second-integrated 8-core GPU, which Apple says is the fastest-integrated graphics, which is a big deal because AMD and Intel both just released like big new laptop chips this year that they claim have super-beefy-integrated graphics. So Apple is really pushing this as like a big thing, which it kind of has to be because otherwise why would they be dumping Intel in the first place?

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  So one of the things that is difficult here, and Dieter pointed out first in the live blog and he's been tweeting about is... Intel and AMD are vendors. They have to sell their products to other people to make computers out of. And that means there is just a wealth of information about their products on the market, right? There's white papers and tests and reference designs. Like, if there's something you want to know about an Intel chip, Intel has produced that information in a regularized, systematic way for like a decade.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, except for their product names, everything about Intel is clear and obvious. You can just go look it up.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  Yep. And it's the same for AMD. It's the same for Nvidia, right? Like, they are, their customers evaluate information to make buying decisions about computers.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  Apple does not have customers in that way. So what we actually know about this chip is significantly limited. It comes down to one graph without labels. That's what it is. It is one power versus performance graph without labels.

• 37:05Speaker 03

  No, there is one label on it. Somewhere on there, it says 2X or 3X in the middle of the graph, but there's no X or Y axis.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  There's no X. There is one label on the X axis at 10 watts.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's it. That's the only number.

• 37:19Speaker 04

  That's the one number is it's two, two, 10, two times the CPU performance at 10 watts compared to an unnamed latest PC chip.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Which has got to be Tiger Lake, right?

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Maybe? I don't know.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  We don't know. That's the thing. They didn't label it.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Name names.

• 37:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we don't know.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  This is such a Bezos chart, right? Like,

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's bad.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  I would say that it's probably not Tiger Lake, if only because there are no Apple devices with Tiger Lake yet. And all of their comparisons outside of this chart were to previous Macs, previous heirs, which were older generation.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  All I'm saying is Steve Jobs would get on stage and he would put up a picture of a Dell laptop and be like, this is the 13 inch Dell whatever by the model number. It was engineered by Steve Dell and it sucks, right? Do it every time. And like now Apple's like the highest selling PC and it's price band. And we're like, we don't. What, what firm are you measuring that? Did you just, did Craig stand in a Best Buy and count? Like, where is this information coming from? So we don't know. What I do know, and this is actually very funny, we asked, I said, are you playing any games with this chart? Is that, is that a log scale? Is it? And so we were told the chart is linear. And so I tweeted

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  out the charts linear. And already there are YouTubers who are like, doing the geometry to figure out the max TDP of the chip. Because you can just, since you know, you know where zero is, and you know where 10 is, you can just like make an X axis. That is bad. So we don't know a lot about the chip itself, but we do know, we do know that Apple has huge claims about it. It's already showing up on Geekbench as of the time we're recording. It seems very fast. But the thing that is most interesting to me, so MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and a Mac Mini. The chip is exactly the same in all three. We asked, it's not like I can tell where there's, the words core i5 is like a concept.

• 39:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. There is one tiny difference. I think that there's a, there's a build of the MacBook Air that has seven, it's seven core GPU instead of an eight core GPU. And the assumption is that that's just binning. Like, sometimes the chip doesn't get all the cores right, so they just turn off the one that is busted. And so it's a seven core GPU, totally normal thing. But I think that's literally the only difference.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  And that's what they did with the A13Z Bionic in the iPad Pro is the exact same thing.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. A13Z and A13X is one X, A12, is one extra GPU.

• 39:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's the one difference. But the actual chip die in all three computers is the same. The difference in performance, which I think is interesting, is that the MacBook Pro has a fan, and that lets it have higher sustained workloads. Which was true of the Intel based ones too. But I just think that is fascinating, that they took the fan out of the air. And that means it's basically moment to moment, they're going to perform the same. But if you have some extremely intense workload, the fan is going to let the chip run hotter longer, and give you that higher sustained performance.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:30Nilay Patel?

  That's sort of unlike what we expect from chips in laptops over time. Like, it's, that makes sense logically, it's how cooling works, it's how performance works. But when you come right down to it. You're saying, I want to buy a fan because I run Photoshop a lot. And that's like the difference, the fun. I mean, there's some other little differences, right, Teeter?

• 40:50Speaker 03

  I mean, the battery is bigger on the Pro. It has a touch bar. Hooray.

• 40:56Speaker 03

  And the screen gets brighter. It's like those standard differences, but the chip is the same. It's just whether it has the fans. And in fact, there might be other similarities like down to like the logic board. Like, one of the things that they've done here is their shared memory between graphics and the CPU. And so it, there's like, I don't know, less duplicating of that or whatever. But the whole thing, they've been able to put more into the system on chip. So like, there's no longer a separate T2 chip for handling the secure enclave and Touch ID and whatever else. They can, they can put more stuff in a smaller area. They don't need to duplicate stuff across, you know, a big old motherboard or whatever.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  I'd be very interested to see the teardowns and how different the, you know, logic boards are across these two laptops. If it's just like, one has aluminum for heat sync and one has a fan.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And obviously, the other difference notably is the battery life claims. The MacBook Air on a video playback test, which is not realistic, says 18 hours. 15 hours of web browsing, that's up from 11 hours. I reviewed the last MacBook Air, did not have great battery life. To me, it was more like five hours of realistic real world use. So a big jump up to 18 and 15. We'll see how that translates. And then the Pro has bigger batteries in it. They're saying 17 hours of web browsing up from 10 and 20 hours of video playback up from 10. So that's a doubling.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  If you are the sort of person who watches 20 straight hours of video on your laptop. So Julia, I think, is that person.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  And to be clear, we asked, and the batteries have not increased. That's the same batteries on both these laptops as the Intel models.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And one of the sort of interesting stats that Apple gave out was, was 4X the number of code compiles. On a charge, which is not a measure of battery life. It's a measure of like efficiency because what you're doing is you're killing that battery much faster. So it's like, if you think of the battery as a total sum of energy and you're going to drain it really fast, Apple's like the, the combination of efficiency, of power efficiency and performance means you're able to do four times of that kind of work on a single battery charge, which is like a different way of thinking about power and performance. But they're trying to come at this. They're just very proud of the fact that they architect their chips as performance per watt is the key metric versus clock speed or whatever else.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  In terms of Apple's confidence, there's one more thing that came through in the event, but really came through in, in talking a little bit after. It's not just the way you think of Apple being really good at stuff because like you, if you just run Apple software, like if you just run Safari, you're going to get great battery life. This also is running Rosetta 2, which is their translation layer for Intel based apps. Apps assume there's an Intel processor there and they are very confident about those apps as well. If you just go re-watch the presentation when they like show Rosetta 2, it kind of flies by and I'm really bummed that this wasn't live because I really wanted to see like actual live demos of this stuff instead of pre-recorded, you know?

• 44:00Speaker 03

  But it seems like they just are not going to tell anybody that they're like, oh yeah, no, it'll be bad in this one way. There's no hint anywhere that there's a problem, which is like.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, they said some Rosetta 2 stuff works faster on the M1 than on Intel stuff, which is like a huge claim to make for emulated software. And I'm.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Let me tell you, over in the, the Windows ARM world, there is nothing that runs faster on Windows ARM through emulation versus native. So.

• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  Definitely we were like, what about Chrome? Do you test Chrome? Like.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  But did you, but did you test Chrome? But no.

• 44:35Nilay Patel?

  But like, like billboards descended and it like Safari is a great browser that we think people enjoy. The walls went up. So there are some open questions, but Dieter is correct. No hesitation about these computers. And I think the MacBook Air is their best selling Mac. You cannot get it with an Intel chip. You cannot opt out of this processor transition right now. The, the majority of people who buy a new Mac are going to get an M1 chip. That is an astonishing amount of confidence. We'll see. Now, there are some limitations here, which are, we'll, we'll just see where they're at, right? You can only get this computer with two ports right now, which

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  this is your time to just give up, right? We made a new chip. Like, would you like a USB port?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Are you, are you surprised they left the, the headphone jack on there? I could see a world of like, eh, you know, our chip doesn't support headphone jacks.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  We didn't put the lanes in for, for analog audio conversion.

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  I put it in the live log and a number of people called it out. And I was like, everyone always wants to know. They had them before. Um, but yeah, there's like, there's, they look the same, but it's only the low end of the line. So we don't really know. They, they all top out at 16 gigs of RAM. Um, they all top out at 512 gigs of storage. The RAM is integrated into that SoC. So you can't add RAM, you can't add RAM to the Mac Mini, which seems challenging.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  That's a thing people like to do. And in those cases with the Pro and the Mini, their answer is like, look, you can still buy an Intel one. They're right there. If that's the thing you need, if you need 64 gigs of RAM, buy an Intel based system because that's available to you.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  That's not a good long-term, like Apple's, Apple's thing here is that all the computers are going to be like this, or, or like this in some way in two years. So go buy an Intel Mac is not a great long-term answer for these questions like.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  I, but I feel like if you are the sort of person who's like, what I need is an, in a Mac Mini with 64 gigs of RAM. I, I'm just confident that that's because your work demands a Mac Mini with 64 gigs. It's either that or you run a Plex farm. Like those are your, your choices.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Hey, man, I'm using a Mac Mini with 32 gigs of RAM right now.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  Because you run a Plex farm.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  Have you tried running Chrome on a Mac Mini is all I'm saying.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  No, but I just think that's the reason that they're comfortable with that answer is the vast majority of those use cases are professional ones. And in two years, when the transition is complete, you have to assume that they will make computers with 64 gigs of RAM and arm chips in them.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  I mean, there's other, there's other professional quote limitations here as well. You can't run external GPUs over Thunderbolt, even though these have Thunderbolt support, you can't run external GPUs with them. There's no dedicated discrete GPU support at all in any of these products. So we'll have to see how that shakes out over the next two years. I think it's kind of telling that they didn't release a MacBook Pro 16 with an M1 this year because you can't really release a MacBook Pro 16 that can't, that doesn't have a dedicated GPU for video editing. And so like, we're not there yet. I would greatly assume that's coming. And for pros, they're just going to have to wait a little longer.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  That's also like another full tier of processor that Apple then needs to say this is replacing. Like Apple's saying this replaces an Intel Y series, this replaces like an Intel U series. That's like a full, what's an H series run at? Like 28 watts?

• 48:06Speaker 02

  45 watts. The H series is 45 watts.

• 48:08Speaker 04

  That's a, that's another huge leap forward for Apple to be like, this 10 watt chip that we have can, can crush this 45 watt Intel thing that we like throw in gaming computers.

• 48:18Nilay Patel?

  But so the, the, there is a possible future where they, Macs don't work with discrete GPUs. We don't need them. Like that's, you can't kind of just plug a discrete GPU into an iPad.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Oh my God.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  If you can.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  You're right. And that probably is the future. But the integrated GPUs that are on this M1 chip are not to that level of the whatever Radeon card you can get in a MacBook Pro 16 right now. And so I think that's, that's kind of telling in like, even the 13 inch. Pro, which like a lot of people don't really consider the Pro, it's just kind of like a nicer air. The fact that you can still get that with an Intel chip with the 32 gigs of RAM and things like that. They're like, there are, they are saying that there are people who would want this level of performance and whatever specs that you just can't get on the M1.

• 49:06Nilay Patel?

  But it's, but it's a very specific and targeted level of performance. I think that the thing that I saw, right? What are the big questions that we had? Intel owns Thunderbolt. Will Apple be able to put Thunderbolt on these? Well, they made their own Thunderbolt controller and put it on this package and that they have Thunderbolt. Will they issue any caveats about the experience of this? They issued no caveats and they put it in their most popular consumer computer. Do they think that they're gonna overperform on battery life the way that we think that iPhones and iPads overperform on performance and the combination of battery life? They are more than confident about that. So like, one of the things, like, we have to get them, we have to use them, we have to read them, we have to see if all the claims are true.

• 49:48Nilay Patel?

  But I think saying like, because they released these at the beginning of a tier transition, that they won't be able to just replace the AMD chip, the AMD GPU, like, we don't, we don't know. Like, I don't think this tells us anything about that. They replaced their Intel chips with integrated graphics. And so every computer where they were shipping that part, they were like, this part's better. Off we go.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  I think like what we were saying, what we see with this lineup, to your point, Neelai, the fact that these are the most popular Macs that Apple sells, Apple Air by far is the most popular Mac. It's very different compared to what we saw in the Windows world where the least popular Windows laptops get ARM computers. And they're high-end and they're expensive. The mainstream Windows laptops, even like the Dell XPS 13s that are premium level, are not running ARM chips. Because there is like, when you're using Windows on ARM, you are going to run into a lot of scenarios where you're going to give up performance compared to Intel. You're gonna give up app compatibility compared to Intel computers and things like that. So I think, at least, like, a lot of us that have had experience with those ARM Windows computers

• 50:53Speaker 02

  are like rightfully skeptical about this transition for Mac, but Apple is saying they're very confident in it. And they're, the way that they're doing it.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  Not only is Apple saying that, they have gotten Adobe to commit to timelines for ARM on Mac in a way that Windows never has for ARM.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Oh, come on.

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  They really, like.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  What's that a time? They're like, early 2021 is not a timeline.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, they got Adobe to be like, fine.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  I mean, for what it's worth, Microsoft got Adobe to go onstage for the Surface Pro X, and that hasn't launched their app yet either.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  Believe it when I see it.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  So we gotta get them. I will just say that we had a lot of outstanding questions. Apple was like, a little bit irritated that Microsoft and Qualcomm had done such a bad job.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  They're like, look, we don't have to put that all aside. Like, just think about these computers as they are. So we gotta get them. We gotta see if these claims are true. But as always, Apple is very confident. And again, you just go on the Geekbench website and see, Apple employees are getting their computers running the benchmarks. That's what it seems like. And the numbers are pretty good. So we'll see how it goes. We gotta take a break. We got one more Apple thing to talk about. And then maybe, maybe Tim Cook will let me run applications on my computer again. We'll be right back.

• 52:18Speaker 05

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• 53:03Speaker 01

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• 53:40Nilay Patel?

  We're back. Dan Seifert.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  You reviewed the most diminutive Apple computer.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:47Nilay Patel?

  That's not true. The watch is the most diminutive.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  One of the least expensive Apple products you can buy right now.

• 53:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  The HomePod Mini at 99 bucks.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  What'd you think?

• 53:55Speaker 02

  I think it's great. Oh, I think it's good. I shouldn't say it's great. And I'll get explained to why. But I think that if you have been waiting for an Apple ecosystem smart speaker, that you could buy a couple of, put in various rooms of your house, and use it to listen to music, weather reports, whatever you do with a smart speaker, the HomePod Mini works great. It's really small. It's really compact. It puts out a surprisingly good sound for its size, and it supports out surprisingly good volume for its size. And compared to the Echo Dot and the Nest Mini, which are other small smart speakers, it basically wipes the floor with them. That all said, it costs twice as much or more as those.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  You can get a Nest Mini for like $25 any given day. So you can buy four of those for the cost of one HomePod Mini. And when you compare a HomePod Mini against what Amazon and Google are selling at the $100 point, it doesn't compare that favorably. The HomePod Mini sounds very good for its size. Next to a fourth gen Echo, it does not sound that great. It's not as loud. It doesn't have the bass, doesn't have the presence, doesn't have the soundstage. So that's like on the sound side of things. Then over, of course, it's a smart speaker, so it runs Siri. Siri's gotten better. And believe it or not, Neel, I'm gonna blow your mind. You reviewed the original HomePod two and a half years ago.

• 55:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Siri can now do multiple timers.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  Yes. They hired that guy from Google. No, they hired Gene Andrea from Google, and he was like, y'all, I brought some AI stuff with me. It's two timers at once. Here's the thing, though. The phone still can't do it. Yeah. And the watch.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Listen, listen. Baby steps. Baby steps.

• 55:37Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the fastest processor in the world.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  So it's still Siri. Siri's gotten better over the years. You can do multiple timers. It can do individualized voice responses. One of the biggest criticisms we had against the original HomePod was that I could walk up to Neelai's HomePod and send a text message from his phone. The new one will know that Neelai is not speaking. The original HomePod got this update as well, but now with the HomePod Mini, it's there. I did run into some bugs with it. It identified my wife's voice versus my voice. However, it didn't know her name and called her Supported User 1. I could not fix that bug. I still haven't figured that out.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  Are you, are you going to refer to her as Supported User 1 from now on? Is that going to go well for you?

• 56:21Speaker 02

  I don't think it is. I don't think it is. I don't think she's talking to the HomePod much anymore.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  This right here is why I don't trust my HomePod in my apartment with roommates. Just, I have that feature turned off.

• 56:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I will say that it's not, it's good that they made it. It's good they're being more aggressive with the price. I just think they should make one with a screen. Like, I think this is the miss. This isn't, this isn't the place to win.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  I, I think you're right. It would be great if there was one with a screen. I would love to see, and, and this is the thing that I don't know if they're ever going to do, but maybe they will, is like just better cross-platform support. Because right now, a HomePod Mini is effectively an accessory to your iPhone. You need an iPhone to use it. You need an iPhone to set it up. You need an iCloud account set up to use it. And it really still works best with all of Apple services, which was what we said the first time around. Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Books, et cetera, so on and so forth. Apple Calendar. They are making like very small steps towards opening that up. You can use Pandora as the dedicated or default service on it now.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  That's what everybody wants.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  It's just Pandora. You know, Spotify, is Spotify going to build support for that? We don't know yet. Every time we ask, they kind of give us a shruggy. So like-

• 57:34Nilay Patel?

  Every time you ask Spotify, they're like, please refer to the number of lawsuits we have filed around the world.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Spotify's responses are like, we oppose Apple's, you know, gatekeeping policies.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, it's very harsh. Yeah.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  So are, are you going to get other services on there? It really, like, Apple, it doesn't seem like Apple is doing the legwork to reach out to other service providers and be like, hey, please build this for the HomePod. We'll help you out. Whereas we know that Amazon and Google have done that. And that's why the Echo supports basically every music service you can get. And the Nest Audio supports almost every single one. So- It doesn't feel like Apple is doing that. They're just saying, we put these tools out there. They can use it if they want. No big whoop. Sign up for Apple Music.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  You know, one thing that is, uh, has just surprised me. All right. We moved to the woods. We have a house. I keep buying dumb smart home stuff. We had this big fear, uh, two, three years ago, that sort of your voice assistant would dominate the ecosystem, that like whether or not you bought an Alexa device or an assistant device or a Siri device, HomeKit, that would sort of filter into everything and you get this lock in. And I'm realizing I have all this stuff and I run HomeKit and Google Assistant just simultaneously. They don't, they don't bother each other. They seem to work fine. Everything interoperates. That was a fear that just hasn't come to pass.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  What's very interesting about that is with, with very few exceptions, I can think of like one manufacturer of HomeKit accessories that doesn't support Alexa and, and HomeKit or Google Assistant, is that if it supports HomeKit, it also supports Alexa.

• 59:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  It also supports Google Assistant. Like, like if you get something that supports HomeKit, you're almost guaranteed it'll work with anything. But if you buy something that supports Alexa or supports Google Assistant, there's not a high chance that it also supports HomeKit. You, if you are anticipating using a HomePod Mini as a smart home controller, you really have to do your legwork and buy smart home accessories that support HomeKit. And they're out there. There's like, you can get door locks and lights and fans and smart switches and blinds and like most categories that you can think of, but you're going to have fewer choices within those categories of devices to choose from. Whereas like Alexa and Google Assistant are huge.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  But Dan, there's really good news. Uh, all these problems are going to go away. You don't have to worry about it anymore because the HomePod Mini supports Thread, the most important standard. It's also on Eros. It's on, uh, you know, Google. Like Thread, it's happening. This is the year that Thread is good. It's the year of the Linux desktop. It's the year of Thread. I'm telling you.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  There's like one, one LED light that supports Thread.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  So like Thread is actually really interesting and I didn't get into this in the right now.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  That's the Vergecast, everybody. You can, the one person who wants to know about this, you can call Dan directly.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Thread is the product of the chip initiative, the connected home over IP, which Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung, all the big names are part of, and they've done a lot of like releasing press releases about it. But we haven't seen actual like products come out as part of this chip initiative. Thread is like the unifying factor that they've all agreed to. And it's very interesting that Apple is like the first one to release a device in terms of a smart speaker that supports Thread.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  What do you say, very interesting?

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  On the scale of a server failed and every Mac in the world stopped working and Apple supports a radio standard, where would you place a very interesting?

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  I would say that it is interesting in terms of, you know, nobody else has gotten Thread pickup yet or to go. Google actually had it in its early, early on hub routers. It has it in the, um, the latest Google Wi Fi's or desk Wi Fi's. I don't even know if it's turned on in those at the, at this point yet, but it couldn't get any pickup. Eero has had it in all of its routers for the last four years. Couldn't get any pickup.

• 1:01:31Nilay Patel?

  The CEO of Eero, Nick Weaver, will tell you it's gonna happen. And we've asked him over and over again. So.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  So Apple puts it in the HomePod and what do you know, NanoLeaf releases a light bulb that supports Thread.

• 1:01:42Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. All that means is that Eddie Q is an investor in NanoLeaf or something. Like, come on, that's whatever. It's, look, Thread is real.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  So like anyways, what Thread is?

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh no.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  A smart home protocol.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  I can't make it stop. I've been trying so hard.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  You get one sentence.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  It lets it connect instead of Wi Fi or Bluetooth.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  There you go. That's what Thread does. Anyways, HomePod Mini, if you live in Apple's world, it sounds pretty good. It's easy to use. It's nice and small. It fits in a room very easily. You'll probably be happy with it.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  I will give the same advice to Apple and Amazon. For Apple, it's, you have a photo service that people like to use and you have great cameras on your phones. Make one with a screen. People will reward you. With Amazon, they made one with a screen. They have an absolutely garbage photo service.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  They can't even like, give it away. The thing is like, Amazon Photos is free with your Prime membership.

• 1:02:40Nilay Patel?

  Well, no. So here we go. So this is our last little bit. Uh, Google's gonna start charging for photos.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Which is a product people love. I actually think it's like a sign that Google won't kill photos. Like, they realize, I think they've realized two things. One, no one knows what Google One is, or why it's valuable.

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:02:58Nilay Patel?

  So they've just glued their most popular, outside of Gmail, most popular service to it, and said, if you need storage, you can get it. They're trying to do it in a responsible way. There's a 15 gig cap, but any photos you have uploaded don't count towards it.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the 15 gig cap starts on June 1st.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  Starts on June 1st. They're gonna help you delete crap, blurry photos, long videos, and all this stuff. They're gonna try to help you do that. And then if you need more, you gotta pay, what, like, one, two bucks a month?

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  No, two bucks a month gets you 100 gigs, I think, is, and then the tiers go, there's a 200 gig tier, and then it's 1 terabyte, 2 terabyte. Although you have to like, 150, 150 terabytes if you want, if that's, that's the world you live in.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  So the, the argument here is that Google killed a bunch of promising photo startups by making photos free. Now they're all dead, and Google's like, we're gonna charge for this.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Do you remember, some of these photo startups were great by, like, Everpicks was a big deal when it launched. We were really into it. I loved it. And it like, it lasted not very long.

• 1:03:57Nilay Patel?

  Google Photos. Google Photos is free. And now they're all dead, and Google's like, here's the money. So I'm just saying, karma suggests, Jeff Bezos, if you're listening, this is the time to launch your killer free photo service and stick it to Google, and be like, isn't this the reason to own a Google Home, the best reason to own a Google Home instead of an Alexa device, has gone away? I'm just, I don't know how vindictive Jeff Bezos is. I have an idea.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  This really feels like that, like, you know, the image of the, the big fish eating a small fish and then the bigger fish.

• 1:04:36Nilay Patel?

  I was just saying, but that's my advice about Apple and Amazon is that you're, the opportunity with these, with these devices in your kitchen is photos and both of them have missed it and is where Google is far, far ahead and Google is creating an opportunity. So just putting that out there. Okay. I wanted to mention the people vaping into their Xboxes, but here's what you need to know. There was a hoax and then poor Microsoft had to release a tweet being like, don't blow vape smoke into your Xbox.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I don't want to encourage hoaxes. I don't want to encourage vaping. I don't want to encourage blowing anything into an Xbox, especially smoke. However, there is something about this whole story that just kind of warms my heart.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a delight. If like, if you're gonna have like disinformation and vaping in a story, this is where you want it to be. That happened. I just can't not mention it. We were going to talk about Big Sur, but the only thing to talk about Big Sur is that everyone's computers died because of Orwellian gatekeeper software.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  It's literally called.

• 1:05:32Nilay Patel?

  It's literally called gatekeeper.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying. Anyway, that's it. We've gone over. I'm not going to tell you by how much. You'll just have to guess. We're running Decoder on Tuesday in the feed as the interview episode. Next week, it's Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, the online learning platform. We had a really great conversation about online learning in the pandemic, as you might imagine. Check that on Tuesday. We'll be back next Friday with the chat show. On on it goes. You can tweet at us. I'm at reckless, Dieter's at backlon. Dan is DC Seifert. Heim is Seegartenberg. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Wear a mask.

• 1:06:23Speaker 07

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