Inside our MacBook Pro 2021 review

Dieter Bohn hosts a discussion with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Verge reviewer Monica Chin about The Verge's approach to reviewing gadgets, focusing specifically on Apple's 2021 MacBook Pro. The crew are still in the process of reviewing the laptop, so the conversation also leads to topics like how battery testing has evolved the past decade, how The Verge scores reviews, and how to find the right angle for writing a review. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to The Vergecast. I am Dieter Bone, and you are listening to our short run of special episodes that are running on Tuesdays that are a little bit more focused than the regular chat show. And this week, we are talking about the new MacBook Pros from Apple. And I'm really excited about this episode because it's something that we haven't really done before. You'll be listening to this after review embargoes go up, but we aren't going to be hitting those review embargoes. We're actually Taking more time to make sure that we can get a bunch of stuff right about these MacBook Pros. And you're gonna hear about that in the episode. But because we are still in the middle of the review process, I wanted to talk about what it's like to review laptops,

• 2:25Speaker 01

  and these laptops in particular, while we are still in the process of figuring out what we think of these things. So you're probably gonna hear a lot of preliminary opinions. You're gonna hear a lot of, "Well, I think it's this, but I don't know." And we just kinda wanted to, like, while we're still in the process, talk about what it's like to be in that process. So, I don't know, it's actually a little scary, a little vulnerable, honestly. It's emotional. It's emotional. And so you just heard the voice of Neelai Patel. Monica Chin is also here.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  You're both very brave for coming. So these two are reviewing the MacBooks. I am just sitting back here and watching the magic happen. Waiting to be told who you should buy. Pretty much. So I think, just to start, we talked about these MacBooks a bunch on the chat show last week. But just in case anybody's not sure, I'm sure everybody knows. But let's get the basics of what is new about these MacBook Pros, why they're interesting, and like what sort of specs there are to pay attention to. Monica?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  The most exciting thing is the new processors, at least to me. They have new chips. There's the M1 Pro. There's the M1 Max. They are making some pretty lofty claims, not only about how powerful they are, but how efficient they are and how powerful they're able to be at lower TGP. There's a notch now, which lots of people have lots of opinions about. The notch has a better camera that still does not support Face ID, but it is better in tight resolution.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Monica hates the notch, by the way. You wanna straight up be vulnerable? She like said it, it was like the reason she said it right away is because it's all she can think about. Yeah, okay.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think about it 24/7. They added some ports back on, and it's a lot chunkier. It's thicker, I think, in part to accommodate the ports. And there's a new, the keyboard is now all black. The deck is black, which is, I think, also likely to be polarizing. It's a very different look. I think you're gonna have to get used to.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Right. And then there's the screen.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Which is mini LED and also supports their high refresh rate promotion.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  So that's a lot. Is that everything? Are there other little things that we can think of in terms like redesigned keyboard, screen, camera, processor, new ports? That's a huge change, especially for Apple, which tends to stick to their designs.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say that having used it now for a few days, we're very excited about the ports.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  But the reality is they've only added two ports. So we're like, ports!

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:51Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, well, actually what they did was they took away one Thunderbolt port.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  And replaced it with MagSafe.

• 4:57Nilay Patel?

  Replaced it with MagSafe to charge it, to get into fast charging. And then they added an HDMI port, SD card slot. That's all great, but it's not like the thing is for students. There's like a VGA port, which, I mean, you know, like, the reality of these machines is they've been starved

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:13Nilay Patel?

  for connectivity.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:14Nilay Patel?

  And they basically just built in the two dongles that you need the most.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  We've been starving for five years and they gave us a saltine cracker and we're like, thank you.

• 5:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's not like USB-A ports or whatever.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  It's three Thunderbolt, four ports, SD card slot, HDMI. And like, just in reality, when you have it, you're like, oh, they just replaced the dongle that I use the most.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  And yes, MagSafe is coming back to the MacBook Pro. MagSafe 3 has a new design that supports more power into the system. And you can still charge via the Thunderbolt ports.

• 5:45Speaker 01

  So this is actually a really interesting place to start because when we get a new thing to review, whatever it is, we often start with like a hypothesis, which may eventually become a thesis if it's proven right. And the hypothesis, I'm assuming with this machine, was kind of where I thought I was going, which is, this is a huge change. And so when you're going to approach this laptop in particular, instead of like, you know, another XPS 13 or another version of the old, you know, MacBook that didn't change its design or whatever, what is your, what's your approach? What's your tactical strategy for, okay, I need to review this thing. I need to form thoughts on it quickly and I also need to test the hell out of it. What are you doing that's maybe different than your typical process?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  For me, it was a lot more benchmarks than I usually run. Because I think, in this case, I really wanted to have a lot of comparison points. I think normally I'll run like a couple and I'll see where it fits on the scale. I really ran like everything I could here. And I think in particular, we wanted to test both the CPU performance and the GPU performance. Because the Pro Max, really the only difference is like the GPU. And I think like generally with a laptop, like you're comparing that laptop to its competition. And here the biggest question for me, or at least one of the biggest questions for me, was who should buy the Max versus the Pro? Because so many people have already been asking me, like, should I get the Max or the Pro? A bunch of our staffers this weekend asked me that.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  By the way, the unfortunate thing is when someone says, should I buy the Max or the Pro? It's hard to know what they're referring to in Apple land. We were referring specifically to the processors, which are...

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, the M1 Max version or the M1 Pro version.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Also has a Pro processor option, or the MacBook Pro has a Max processor option.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Right, and this is just me in my life now, is mixing up Pro and Pro. But, so for me, one of the biggest questions I wanted to look at first was how much of a benefit does the Max, the M1 Max, give you over the M1 Pro? And really, who is that intended for?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  So, we run benchmarks on almost everything that we review in one way, shape, or form, be them laptops or anything else. But we don't always like publish those results because often they're not interesting, or they're not like the thing the thing hinges on. But for this one in particular, you're running not just our standard suite, but like paying a lot more attention to those benchmarks because the processors are like such a pivotal thing for this laptop.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  And especially between the models, I think.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  This versus that, right.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  What else, when, like, and Nilay, you too, when you're thinking about approaching or reviewing a thing, what you are paying extra attention to? Like, I need to make sure that I understand X, Y, and Z about this thing I'm reviewing because it is the, it's the thing that will determine whether or not this is, you know, good or bad or whatever.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think for me with this one, a bunch of the stuff is iterative Apple stuff. Apple makes really good laptop speakers. I have an old, I have the previous generation 16 inch MacBook Pro. It has great laptop speakers. This one a slightly better ones. I'm not gonna like burn my time quantifying the improvement.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:38Nilay Patel?

  But I do think the CPU and GPU is really important because it's a new architecture. We've had a year now of M1. And then I think the most important thing is battery life and measuring battery life has become an increasingly spiritual process.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was, I was maybe gonna try and hold off getting into the existential crisis of battery life because we've done it on the Vergecast a handful of times now.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  And I guess first let's like lay of the land, what, why has battery life testing become an emotional journey and a spirit quest? And not just like, oh, it lasts this long in the last, it like, it feels like-

• 9:11Nilay Patel?

  In the last decade or something.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  In the last decade, but in particular this year, I think that some of the things that companies have been saying about battery life got changed slightly. Or tweaked slightly. And so we're reacting to that in some way. And actually, I also later on, spoiler alert. I want to talk about like when a company claims something that how that affects the review. But anyway, what's going on with battery life?

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  Let's talk about graphs. Um, so with battery life, I just like the, the quick version of this is 10 years ago when we started. You'd have a, a computer with a CPU and a GPU and you'd have some video codecs in the world, right? And nothing was really optimized for each other. So you'd play a video on a computer and it would just be a very taxing-

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  Thing to do.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  And it would require like the CPU to run at full tilt. And so you could get away with measuring battery life because you had this long. You could just like run a video for 30 hours and see where the battery would die.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  I was gonna say 30 hours, 10 years ago, what are you doing? What, what kind of laptop did you have? Holy god.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  Six hours, whatever number it is, right? Like, and it was just like tax the whole system.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:18Nilay Patel?

  It would tax memory perform, like the whole thing. And over time, what has happened is the chips have gotten more efficient overall. They've gotten more powerful. They've also gotten more specialized.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  And the big companies, particularly Apple and Google, Microsoft, they are now participating in video codec development. To optimize them for the hardware of their chips.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  All like all over the place this is happening.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  So something like a video rundown test has gone from being- An overall measure of battery life, like a taxing thing that you can do for a long time, that everyone wants to do, to like, one tiny corner of a highly specialized subset of the chip, will just do it without drawing any power.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  And so you look at Apple's battery life numbers, and they're like, 21 hours of video playback, if you use the Apple TV.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, well, no, no one does this.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I mean, okay.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  You could fly around the world twice, and you're like, I've watched all of Foundation. Grab maybe someone.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  You've learned a lot about people talking about math, not any actual math in Foundation, by the way.

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  But if you're doing that, you are also probably in first class, like plugged in, like, whatever. So like, the things that we think about as battery life testing have now moved to parts of the chip that use less power.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  And I will say that we've been talking about this in terms of, of video codecs and video chips and so on, but this actually applies to other contexts as well. I'm thinking in particular of, of the web and on phones. It's not just that it's apples and oranges for different web browser engines. There are now like optimizations in operating systems for certain things like JavaScript and Java and stuff on the web. And so it's like, it's actually really difficult to compare across platforms, but it's even difficult to compare on the same platform across years, because the way that they optimize webpages changes. So if you've got like a, we used to have a fancy tool that would like, loop webpages. And it just like, one, that's not consistent over time, but two, like, they get more efficient. So like, this is a wonderful problem to have, our computers are more efficient, yay.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  But even when Apple's doing the Intel ones, this was like a famous like Walt Mossberg thing that he would remind me of all the time. He'd be like, they use Intel processors, the processors are the same, but Apple, because they control the hardware and the software, they're able to power down more of the entire computer when you're not using it. Including some parts of the chip. So it's just like, very hard to know what is actually happening inside your computer. And I would compare that to when we do iPhone battery testing, we take their claims a little more seriously. Because Apple, when we've talked about this on the show a lot, Apple in particular collects a lot of telemetry data from iPhone users, right, when you opt in to data collection on your phone.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  So they kind of have this like machine learning model of what iPhone users are doing. And they can apply it to their battery specs and their power consumption of their chip. And estimate about, we cannot replicate that estimation.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  No, not even a little.

• 13:12Nilay Patel?

  There's no way for like, unless millions of you show up at our office and let us monitor your phones.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  We can't do it, but in real life, we can see that it matches up slightly.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  But there's a layer on top of that. They're doing all of that. And the way that they express that number to us is an hour and a half longer use time generally than last year's model. And they're like, okay, well, what was last year's model? Well, last year's model was an hour and a half longer generally in use time than the model before it.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  And like, you have to go back to, I don't know.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, iPhone 3GS got four hours of battery.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  And there it is.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  It's iPhones all the way down. But there's no model like that for the Mac.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  As far as we know.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Well, I think what, part of what makes it such an emotional process, at least for me and I think in the reviewer community in general, is it's somewhat of a different philosophy of like who you're doing these tests for. Like, we don't do synthetic battery tests at all, or we haven't, at least since I've been here. And companies get really mad about it. And I get emailed all the time that are like, you should be getting more. What did you do? I'll tell them what I did. And they said, well, we can't replicate that in our lab. Can you run an industry standard? But can you do this? Can you do this?

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Can you run an industry standard battery test? Sure, make one.

• 14:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  There is not one.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  It's ultimately a question of like, do you care more about accurately stacking up laptops on the market against each other? Or do you care more about giving readers an approximation of how long they can expect, even if it's only an approximation?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And I think our test leans a lot more towards the latter. It does not give us a very, very accurate list of this laptop can do this much and this laptop can do this much. But I think that running an industry standard video playback test does not tell a reader how long they can work on a laptop. And our test might.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  It may give you some sort of comparative idea. Like, I'm trying to pick between two laptops and this one did better on a video runtime test than that one. But I think what's happened. Because processing has become heterogeneous is that all you learn from a video rundown test is how long it lasts running down on video. Like, and you don't actually, it does not, it doesn't translate to the general use.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  And you, but you're also kind of like, you could back into an answer like that much more simply, right? Like, the 16-inch MacBook Pro that I'm looking at has a 100 watt hour battery, or 99, whatever the number is that lets you get on a plane. Like, just below that, it's like 199. We know the maximum power envelope of the chip.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we know that we should subtract another 10% for the display.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Great, now I know how long the battery lasts. It's like, I could just do that math and get there without having to, like, set up Foundation to run for 21 hours.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, I already know.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  That's just, that's just how long the first episode feels, by the way, of Foundation.

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  But that math is like, also not useful. All I've really told you is how big the battery is.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Right? What is actually useful is, some people are gonna buy this machine, and it will be total overkill for them because they use Excel all day long.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  But they want the nicest one.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  Those people will probably get eight hours of battery life. Some people are buying this thing, by the time this goes up, our hands-on video will be up.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  And Alex Deaconis, our video producer, she edited that hands-on on the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  With the M1 Pro, on battery. It lasted about four hours. And she said it was the nicest laptop she's ever had.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:27Nilay Patel?

  That is a useless piece of information for the Excel jockey with ambition.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:31Nilay Patel?

  It is a very useful piece of information for a video editor.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  So like, I think we're, when we say we don't do these industry standard tests, it's because all they're really telling you is how big the battery is.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  And what we're trying to tell you is, how long will it last for various kinds of tasks?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Right, and like, if you read our sections of our battery bit, you know, the paragraph about battery, there'll be like, a very boring sentence of like, "It lasted this long for me for my typical workday," which by the way, happens to consist of Chrome and this app and Slack and blah and blah. And that's because, like, in the same way that, like, I don't know, tech companies are like, this is the video rundown test. We need to tell you what we did in some way, shape or form so that you can, that information can become useful in some way, shape or form.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  And then complicating that, a year ago, when we did that with the M1 Air and the M1 MacBook Pro, we were using a bunch of apps that hadn't been released for Apple Silicon yet.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  We were using Chrome that was in Rosetta, made for Intel.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:25Nilay Patel?

  We were using Zoom, we were using Slack.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  They are all updated now.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  So, we're gonna say that now, and it's not just the chip that's been improved. It's not just the larger battery.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:35Nilay Patel?

  It's an application ecosystem that is optimized to run on these processors.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Right. But, so Monica, we had that variable last year. This year, there's another variable that the M1s were amazing for battery life, like, mind-blowing. And oftentimes, we're like, well, the second generation will be just as good as the first. But it's no guarantee that the M1 Pro and the M1 Max are going to have the same battery life that the regular M1 did, right?

• 17:59Speaker 02

  In fact, we would be surprised if they did, just because they're more powerful.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  So, it would be shocking to me if they lasted as long as the original M1 did.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Unless they did something special with, you know, cores and what's lit up and what's not. But it's another assumption we can't make about these machines because they're so new.

• 18:14Nilay Patel?

  In general, the M1s ran on their efficiency cores more often.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  They had more of them.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  And in general, what they have done with both the Pro and the Max is they have cut the number of efficiency cores down by two.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  And they've added high-performance cores, which necessarily use more power.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  So, we are expecting some difference because the chips, as Monica said, are more powerful in the specific way they're more powerful, is they literally have more, more powerful cores.

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• 19:48Speaker 01

  Okay, let's take a look at these things.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  What was the first thing that struck you when you pulled it out of the box?

• 20:03Nilay Patel?

  They're very square.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah?

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're very square. They're, you know, MacBooks are the 16, they're round, they're easy to get your fingers around on the side.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  This one, they're, these are harder, they're square. It's like you gotta get up under it. So that was, I think, just like the first thing that jumped out to me.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  I had a number of people walk by my desk when I had these on and be like, oh, is that the new one? Oh, no, that's the 2015. I'd be like, no, no, no, come back, it is, it is the new one.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  Your reference point of what it looks like, it's either the 2015s, or it's like way back, it's the titanium power book.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:33Nilay Patel?

  Depending on just like what imprinted on you when you were like a baby duckling. The other thing that I noticed right away is we spent so much time talking about the feet. They've got raised feet and Apple like zoomed in, they showed you the feet on the computer. And like, are they for cooling? And like, in practice, they are invisible.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  They just don't exist to you.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  And then the third thing, it's like, here's the divergence point for you, Monica. I was like, the screen's beautiful. And Monica's like, this notch sucks.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  I do think the screen's beautiful.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Okay, but, so why does the notch suck? Because I went on this rant, like, they gave you more screen, why are you complaining? That the notch is in the menu bar, it's not actually killing anything, is it just ugly?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  So I'm gonna caveat just here that I am still rocking an iPhone 8 Plus because I don't like the iPhone notch also. So I'm a specific use case, however. I just don't like that my cursor like disappears under it. It it just feels like it's covering up content that I would otherwise be seeing, which is true. And I know that it's not like content, content. It's just like the bar, but it just throws me off. I it seems like one of those things you get used to as you use it. But it was disconcerting for me to start out.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I will say that it chips with a very dark wallpaper. And Mac OS Monterey is it's ugly. It's an ugly operating system. But the way the wallpaper is expressed on Monterey is that it kind of fades into the menu bar. And so they like out of the box, they're trying to hide it as much as they can.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is not new. App Apple did it with a notch in their wallpapers. And then every Android phone for a while when they started doing hole punches, the wallpaper just happened to be black in that section of the wallpaper.

• 22:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  It took a minute for people to realize, oh, hey, we can make a joke about this and like have it be a minion. And then the eye is the hole punch or whatever.

• 22:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, it's surprising me how big the notch is for what it contains. My iPhone 13 Pro Max.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  Has a very good camera.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  It has a Face ID system with like an IR light and a dot projector. It has a speaker and like this notch is like a camera.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  And it doesn't do Face ID and it's still pretty big.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Monica, what struck you first?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  I think it was definitely the squareness. I think also the black keyboard was like weirder to see originally than I thought.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  It sort of looks it looks like this like square of black and an expansive gray. Like there's a lot of gray around it. But I think I that has faded into the background for me for for me as well over time.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  One of the other things I like to do in my reviews is tell the reader some detail about the thing that I learned from using it that isn't necessarily obvious. Like when you're reviewing a laptop, it's like, well, you can't know what the keyboard is unless you have it and you review it. Right? So that's pretty standard. But often there's like, there's some things like, oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. I would have thought that would be that way, but it is. And there's something vaguely interesting about it. Was there any any detail like that that you've come across and using it, they're like, oh, you know, no one who hadn't spent a week with this would ever have like noticed this little thing.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  So for me, I do not have the new iPad with mini LED display.

• 23:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  So these have a mini LED display. And you can see that when you like play an HDR video, you can see the display brightness ramp. Okay.

• 23:33Nilay Patel?

  Which is, you can see it on an iPhone. I'm used to it on iPhone. But seeing it on Mac and like seeing how it ramps and seeing that it ramps because the backlight is able to ramp independently of the rest of the display.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  It's like watching just like it ramp in the corner is like, there's no way to show you that.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Cause I'm shooting an SDR video.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  There's just like no way to communicate like, oh, this display is extremely bright.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  And also able to control where it's bright in surprising ways.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Right, right. For me, and I'm not reviewing them, but when I picked it up, the Touch ID button, the one in the upper right, is, it's like a similar size, but it has a much harder click and it's also lower profile to discourage you from hitting it accidentally, I think. And so it was just interesting that like you would expect it, it looks like a button, but when you actually are up there with it, it's like a different kind of button.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  I guess I haven't Touch ID'd into this thing very much.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  For me, I think it's just, I didn't realize how happy it was to have the touch bar gone. Like, I knew it was, I expected it.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  A glass of ice water.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Keys are back, but actually just like spending a day having keys there instead of a touch bar was just wonderful.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The first time I reached up and just like turned the volume down, I was like, ah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I don't have to, yeah, keep doing that.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Hitting the mute button for me is that moment. It's like, oh, nah.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  The physical keys replace the touch bar. The keyboard is set in a double anodized black well that elegantly highlights the backlit glyphs on the keys.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're working on the reviews. How do you come to an angle? Like, when we, when we're writing, we like to have, you know, a point of view on the thing and we want to tell some story and that often for us boils down to saying, what's our angle on this thing? And I'm curious if you have gotten to a place where you think you might have one.

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  So the two things that are in my head that are going to form that angle, that I think we have some testing to go. One, they're expensive.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  And so is it actually worth it over a MacBook Air?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  Which is a very good computer and probably the computer most people should get, right? And MacBook Airs are expensive, but they're not. They're expensive compared to like mid-range Windows PCs, right? They're like just above where you-

• 25:41Speaker 01

  A little bit more.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like a couple hundred bucks, but they're in the pocket.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's a pretty good deal. These computers are just really expensive, right? The 14 base model is $2,000. The one, the 16 I'm looking at right here is $3,500. That's just a lot of money for it. Is that worth it if you're, you just want the nicest one? I don't know. Like, people got money. I'm watching the crypto market. I'm like, oh, there's a bunch of money floating around. Like, okay, maybe that's worth it. Is it worth it if you're a professional and use this for work?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. Like, I just want to figure that out. Like, I want to put that price in the context. And the second thing, for me, anyway, and Dieter knows where I'm going, because I've been whining about this for like five days.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  We gave the M1 Air and the M1 Pro 9.5 scores, and we said, but for this garbage webcam, these would have been 10s.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Right. So, this is another thing I was gonna try and say to the end, but let's just get into talking about scores here. They're very contentious. We, we tend to score things, you know, six, seven, eights, nine, sometimes.

• 26:40Nilay Patel?

  The scores look like they're, like, an objective measure, and what they are is like a very emotional reaction.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're, emotional is like being a little bit too dismissive. We put more objectivity into it, but they're not, they're not an objective measure. That is true. It is another piece of opinion. And instead of writing a sentence, we're giving it a number, and that number is an opinion. It's not a, like, objective ranking. And the discussion that we're gonna end up having is, the 9.5 for the MacBook Air in particular was, this laptop that is generally used for this kind of thing at this price point, you know, it's like a 9.5 for like your general-purpose, ultrabook-style computer. If we, you know, were talking, if, for the pros, it's like a video editor, if I'm like, a video came to me, it's like, oh, you gave it a 9.5, I'm gonna edit video on them, the

• 27:30Speaker 01

  MacBook Air. It's like, well, yeah, you can, but it's not like, you, you still could do better elsewhere. So it's not a 9.5 for video editors, or, I don't know, CAD files, or, you know, whatever, whatever the thing is. It's the 9.5 for the thing that we generally understand this thing to exist in. And so for the MacBook Pros, going, you know, that score should be in the context of that. It's a- Price factors into our score quite a lot, actually. When you see the score and it's like, huh, that seems kind of low. Often it's because, well, this thing is overpriced. Yep. And we don't have a precise metric for it. It's like, you know, it's a piece of opinion. But the discussion is going to be, you know, in the price point, in the range. What does this thing do for the kind of people we imagine ought to be buying this thing?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  This is, I'm rehearsing the argument I'm going to have in July.

• 28:16Nilay Patel?

  We've been like half having it for many days now.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  The thing we're walking up to is the Verge has never, to my knowledge, given anything a 10.

• 28:24Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  And it's not because we don't believe that perfection exists. It's not even, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that we think giving it a 10 means it's perfect. We do not.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Like a 10 is, again, it is an editorial statement. Instead of writing a sentence saying, oh, my God, this thing is amazing, blah, blah, blah. The 10, you know, an image is a thousand words, so is a review score.

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Right?

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  In our case, like 5,000.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  And so that is the interesting thing that we are batting around right now.

• 28:55Nilay Patel?

  But so here's what I know. I know that if you took this webcam, this 1080p webcam

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 29:00Nilay Patel?

  From the 16 inch or 14 inch Pro and put it in the MacBook Air.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 29:04Nilay Patel?

  I would tell you the MacBook Air is a 10 out of 10.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so here's the thing, probably, yeah, I think we would do that. But I don't know, maybe I would tell you that it's a 9.5 because it doesn't have a notch and the bezel on the top is too big.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's all, it's all in there. It's just like, when you're like, what is your angle? Part of where my head's at is, wow, they're expensive. And so just from the jump, it's, are they worth it?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  Are they worth all this money? And, you know, that is even in the context of so many people rushed out to buy them right away. Then Apple's website slowed down.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:36Nilay Patel?

  That's remarkable. Like, I think more people rushed to preorder this than like, in our little world, than the iPhone.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Or they were happier to have preordered the iPhone. Like, preordering the iPhone at this point for like, our subset of tech and media Twitter is like, ah, I'm doing this again.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  Like the rush to like post your receipts and be excited about these. So clearly, a lot of people think it's worth it.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? Without any hesitation. But is it really? The performance suggests like these are some of the fastest laptops we have ever tested. Like leaps and bounds in some cases.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  It depends.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  It depends.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Really?

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you're doing all the performance testing. What do you mean by it depends?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  So it's a very, uh, the performance tester seems to be good at very specific things. It's very good at our 4K export test, like very, very good.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Very good.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Except the Pro Max is the fastest time I've ever seen on the export test. The M1 Pro is like one of the fastest. That said, that is a difficult test to do head-to-head comparisons with because Premiere Pro is changing all the time. So for a while, a couple of previous versions of Premiere Pro like had trouble with our export test and did it kind of slowly. So that's more of sort of a like, that's more intended to be like, this is how long you can expect an export to take.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  On Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it is performing around where we would expect a high-clocked RTX 3060 to perform, based on recent results that we've had, or a lower-clocked RTX 3070.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Which is reasonable. It is much more expensive than you can get like an RTX 3060 to the first G14 for. Looking at like synthetic graphics benchmarks, they're a little bit, uh, they're like in the mix when it looks, when you look at like gaming creative laptops, but they are not blowing everyone out of the water.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  So, you know, it depends on your use case.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yep. And I think one thing that might be interesting as you're listening to this is Monica's running all of these tests. We might not publish all of the results. We, in fact, we almost surely won't like tell you every single thing we did and what the score was. But it's part of our process anyway, because it helps inform, you know, what we're, when we're trying to, you know, tell the story of this thing.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Um, and actually, when we talk about angle, especially in reviews, it's like our point of view on the thing. It's, it's our way in. It's the angle, it's like the direction into the thing. Feel free to steal this. If I were writing this review, like often when I'm writing a review, I have like in my head, like an imaginary first sentence, and maybe it becomes the first. Sentence and maybe it's not, but it's like the frame of like how I want to think about telling the story of this thing. And for me, the thing that feels important about this laptop, maybe not the most important thing, but like the thing that helps you understand why it's interesting and different is just that it's thicker. Yeah. If you just say like my, my imaginary starting sentence would be the MacBook Pros are thicker. And a bunch of stuff falls out of that observation.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Apple is willing to change its design philosophy. Apple is thinking about thermal throttling in a different way than it has for the past five years at least. There's, there's a bunch of stuff in there like they, they could have made it thinner than the last one with these chips because we know they're more efficient than Intel. So at the same time are using more efficient chips that they made themselves. They're also giving them a higher thermal headroom. Yeah. And the philosophy and the thinking and the intention behind those two things together is very different from what we're used to seeing from Apple.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  You were asking about, talk about score philosophy, which you asked about earlier. I think I do it a little differently from what a lot of people do. I think partially because I just review so many myself.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Generally, I little secret, generally I look at the closest competitor that I've reviewed or that someone on our staff has reviewed. And I very closely compare my impressions of each part of both devices and try to come up with the most objective impression I have of how much better or how much worse the device I'm reviewing is than that close competitor. And sometimes I'll look at multiple. In this case, I think that the, the competitors that are relevant mostly are the M1 and the Intel MacBooks that we have already.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  So for me, the weight there, at least especially compared to the, the M1 13 is going to be a big part of it. One of the things I really like about the, the M1 MacBook Pro 13 is how light it is and how easy it is to slip into my bag when I'm walking around with it.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  And these things are going to be not that.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  You know, you said efficiency and we were talking in the context of performance. And you were talking about GPU performance. And RTX 30, 60, 30, 70, they use a lot more power.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  So they could be faster, but then what we're saying is, but here the battery life will be longer.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  And like the famous graph for that is the one that Apple made. And a thing that is driving me crazy is that we have no way of recreating that graph.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  We just cannot do it.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  Because we don't know what the Y axis of that graph is. Right. It's just relative performance.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  I have my suspicions about what it is, what it is based on the scores that we have.

• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  What do you think it is?

• 34:38Speaker 02

  So I think, I think it's Geekbench.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  The one that they were, the one where they're diverging like that.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  But how are they measuring power?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  So you want to run a program that's looking at the clock speed that the processor is running at. And then like run a benchmark and see how high it goes.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  So you're using the clock speed of the GPU or whatever.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:56Nilay Patel?

  As a proxy for power draw.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  And presumably Apple actually knows its power draw.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, they could, they can measure that directly, I'm sure.

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  One hopes. There's actually like some terminal stuff on a Mac you can do.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  And then on the Windows side, it's a lot easier. But that to me is like, that's the graph they're showing to make their claims. And it is a graph because we're only guessing at the Y axis. It's not a graph that we can recreate.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  But it's a very important piece of information in the context of this review.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  Maybe it's only 70% of the highest performing Windows graphics card in a notebook. But if the power usage is half.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  That trade off starts to look really worth it.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. If you can get 70% of the best performance you can get for three times as long. That's pretty good.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'll take that.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  But we have to like prove it.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  And because we don't know what Apple is using to make its claim. We can't just like prove it.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:50Nilay Patel?

  We have to prove everything around it and be like, okay, we now, the shape of this puzzle piece is clear.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  So like that to me is like, they should just tell us what they're doing so we can just repeat it. And then that's over, but because they won't be clear. And we have, Dieter and I have been in a meeting and we have asked and they're like, we are not going to tell you.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  We have to like do all this stuff around it.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  So the larger context of this discussion about the graph that doesn't have numbers on the axes or whatever, or it has numbers, but we don't know what the the units of measurement are, is often with these products, the company will make a set of claims. This thing is important because of X, Y, Z, or this is the thing that's really good about this laptop or phone or whatever. And so a lot of the review is often a reaction to the company claim. And, you know, when something comes in, we don't just have like, all right, standard, you know, objective set of, you know, checklists to go through, and then we get to the end of it, and now we have reviewed the thing. We're reacting to the story that the company is telling about the product. And I sometimes feel weird about that. I sometimes feel like, yeah. But on the other hand, I tell myself, like, look, they're they're also telling this to

• 36:55Speaker 01

  customers. And so the thing, the service we're providing is we're like providing a counter narrative or a confirming narrative or whatever to the claims that they're seeing in ads and they're hearing from like store reps or whatever. That we are trying to do the the job of putting what they what the company is saying into a context that's like deeper or richer and confirming or denying or disproving or whatever.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  I would say our best review, the best reviews, period, are ones where we completely ignore what the company is saying. Right? If we're able to do that, we usually do our absolute best work. And that's challenging, right? Like, that whole find an angle conversation, like, I'm guessing that the 45th mid-range laptop or the 500th mid-range Android phone, we cannot just invent a narrative out of whole cloth for every one of these things.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a huge challenge.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  We're just like, it's another phone. So that, I think, then we tend to do either one more standard thing or we respond to the company. But then there's the times when like, I think with this product with a bunch of other stuff, with new products and particularly new categories, where it's useful to just like step away. In the case of these, and I think largely with phones, there is a step where we're just like, is this company lying to us? Or are they shading the truth? Or they're exaggerating what it can do?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  What is coming to mind immediately for me is cinematic mode of the iPhone 14. Like, that's an exaggeration of the capability of the phone.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  So like, I think there's always just this dance between, I need to, I need to tell my own story. That is actually more interesting and relevant. It will be, you know, there's no shortage of tech reviews in this world. It will be the most different and most useful because I'm not doing what everyone else is doing.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Then there's the like, well, we gotta test the battery. And then there's the, well, every company is making all these claims and we have to say whether they're true or not.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  And that kind of gets you into their, their box very, very quickly.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you want to not be in the back. So when we have this, I, we don't have a good term for it. I, I think of them often as like occasion reviews. And what I mean by that is the review of the thing. You're reviewing the thing, you're doing the benchmarks, you're saying what's good, what's bad, whatever, but you're actually using it as an occasion to say something that you want to say about the tech industry at large or whatever. I think the one that I, for me, that was like the biggest one was, um, I reviewed the Avagant glyph, which has the, you know, shoots lasers in your eyes or whatever. And it was like, if these things become popular and VR headsets were also coming, what will it mean if like our displays all become personal and like we're not looking at each other? And it's like literally on our head. And like, that was more interesting to me than the product, which, you know, lasted.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  You're correct in this.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like, for a high profile review like the MacBook, it's probably not like one of those occasion reviews because there's enough interest that you got, you just got to talk about the thing.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  You said it would work. Is it worth the money?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Is the angle?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  But there's, there's like still, especially, especially for us at The Verge, even if it's not like the main thing you're doing is like this, I'm just using this thing as an excuse to talk about another thing. We do try to have some sort of commentary in the state of computing or the design direction of the company or, you know, some other trend that's happening in tech. Do you see anything in this MacBook yet where you're like, oh, I'm definitely going to have a paragraph about blah, blah, blah?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Uh, I think the webcam for sure.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  For me.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Tell me about that.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Just because it was such a downside of the last one and there was so, I think that that's clearly a thing that should have eyes on it. It's like, did they achieve what everyone was yelling, did they fix what everyone was yelling about?

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Like, did they actually make a thing that is more functional or were they just trying to like throw the bone that people were yelling for?

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Well, so there, there's two sides to that, right? There's, they have to make better webcams because we're all working remotely more and more. And so like, it's like a thing that was always bad, but now we're like, we care now, way more, and so they do it. So that's one side of it. The other side of it is the meta narrative for this entire laptop, which is Apple has responded to all of the negative feedback they've gotten over the last

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  years over this thing. And so is this a Apple is being responsive to feedback again story?

• 40:57Nilay Patel?

  I saw a, um, Apple engineer, you know, very excitedly tweeting that this thing I've been working on is finally out today. And they had a timeline in the tweet. It was like, I started working on this first component of this computer in 2019. I spent all of 2020, like, doing some other stuff, and obviously a huge part of 2021. And it's like, yeah, they're responsive to criticism, but they're responsive to criticism way ahead of when we think. Right. They respond, like, they were responding to our criticism from the 2018 machines. Right. And now they're here. And that, to me, it's just, we know it. We intellectually know this information. Yeah. But like, sometimes you see it, and you're like, oh, in 2019, they internalized the feedback. Right.

• 41:40Nilay Patel?

  And we have spent however many years with however many new machines, being like, what's up? And they know they're gonna change it. Yep. And that's, it's just like a weird dynamic that every now and again it hits you, and you're like, oh, that was really weird. Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Well, I guess to me, it gets more at like, I, I think that reviewers sometimes get caught up in like, did the company do what the reviewers wanted? And I care a little less about that, and a little more about like, did the company make the machine more functional? And I think, in a lot of cases, reviewers are able to guess somewhat correctly at what is most functional for customers on the ground. But I think what's interesting about the webcam is they can say it's 1080, and we can go, oh, good, we asked for that. But those webcams with that spec can still vary widely in how much better they actually are than bad webcams. So it's, it's like, is this actually gonna, like, make meetings better?

• 42:25Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Which is still an open question.

• 42:28Nilay Patel?

  And like, I'll just connect the dots there, like, maybe one step too far. Apple as a company does not wanna work remotely. Right? Like, Apple's management and its employees are like, in a lot of controversy right now, because they want them back. And so it's like, at the same time, there's a product manager at Apple. It's like, well, everyone's working from home, except us, and we, and like, that's, you can just, some of those things like surface in products in weird ways. I think the webcam is a really interesting one. The processor is here is, you know, it's related to the iPhone webcam. They're making this big claim about the image signal processing from their A series chips that have now moved into the M1s, et cetera. There's, this thing is not as good as an iPhone 13 front cam. No. It's good.

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  It's way better than the old ones. Yeah. But back to in the frame of their claims, if we just like live it, their claim is like, look at what we were able to bring over from the iPhone. And I'm like, well, look what everyone else has been able to do for years without that technology, but just giving a shit about it, right? Yeah. And it's like, we'll see. We, I think we do have to spend some time here. We also have to spend a lot of time on this one.

• 43:44Speaker 05

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• 44:28Speaker 00

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• 45:07Speaker 01

  Another thing we often will have an occasion where we're using the review as an occasion to do something is to have a moment where we explain or care about some spec or like new kind of tech or like we just need to explain the way some piece of technology works and this review is a really good opportunity to do it. We've done it with HDR, for example. There's a chance that we're going to be doing it with USB C and power delivery on this one because of the way the cables work and I don't know if you want to get into that. But I also think that the screen is an excellent opportunity to like get into some, you know, occasion, explain the spec because we could talk about blooming and we could talk about refresh rates and we can talk about brightness and HDR and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  When you're looking at the screen and you're finally done being angry at the notch, what are you thinking about in terms of judging it, but also like making, you know, having something to explain or needing to convey something to potential buyers?

• 46:03Nilay Patel?

  So the screen technology, mini LED, now slightly more familiar because it is in the iPad Pro, it's in some other computers, it's even in some TVs. It's a complicated thing. It's a complicated system. So, you know, the history of backlights is like original LCDs had literal fluorescent tubes up and down the side of the screen. They would light up. That's all you got. That's why blacks were kind of gray. Now you've got a grid of thousands of tiny LEDs that create white light and they can turn them off, on and off really fast as things happen on the screen. This lets you get really dark blacks. It also leads to just, you know, on the iPad, I think you noticed in your review, weird stuff happening. In very specific situations, weird stuff happens. And so we have to test

• 46:45Nilay Patel?

  that. I've already seen on some of the same, I mean, like when I say you have to do specific things, it's like you find YouTube videos specifically designed to make weird things happen. And like, yep, the weird stuff happens again. In practice, like, you know, we got to use it more, but I have, I think Apple's figured a bunch of it out. We'll see.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  The other thing is because they are HDR displays or XDR displays, the brightness modes of this thing are so complicated. The main mode runs up to 1600 nits of brightness. But that is not a, that's like a general usage mode. Then it has a bunch of reference modes, which actually drop the brightness way down. So like, I think about how am I going to explain this display? It's like...

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  There's a dropdown menu in a system preference that you have never looked at before in your life.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  And like, gonna explain this to you. And that, you know, I think some people really need that information, but for most people, what that is designed to convey is out of the box, this thing is designed to look good, maybe not designed to be perfectly accurate.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Right. So, so it's, so it's a Samsung.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  It's not that bad. It's just like, it's optimized to be really bright.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  And if you actually want to do the serious work on it, you gotta fiddle with it to make it way less bright.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  And it's, it's actually the same as the Pro Display XDR that Apple made, which is optimized for like office work out of the box.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  Which is like surprising. It makes sense that this would be optimized for, but like, all of that is just like, ah, I'm like, I'm in spec land.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  To just get to like a very simple idea, which is, it's complicated. But to Apple's great credit, this, I would have, I did not expect this to work, but I opened Chrome, I went to YouTube, I typed in HDR, I played an HDR video and it all just worked.

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Bam.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  And that is surprising for Apple.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Very, actually, yeah. You, you brought up the Pro Display XDR, which whenever I think about, I just have emotions that they don't just make a, a good Apple monitor that costs less. And I, I, maybe this is a place to end that these cost a lot. It's really fascinating to me that, like, the reason people are like, oh my God, thank you, is it's a computer that has ports and, you know, no touchbar. You can get a good computer without the touchbar now for relatively cheap, but it's interesting that there's like this middle zone between like, pretty good and great. There's like, you want like, good, good. Like, I, I would love to have this computer with its ports, but I don't need the mini LED display, you know, and I don't need

• 49:08Speaker 01

  the M1 Max or Pro. I'd be actually okay with an M1. If they would just put the ports on the air or like the base level MacBook Pro, that would be really interesting. And it seems like it's, Apple, you know, famously had like the, you know, good, better, best. They had the product grid, you know. I don't subscribe to the idea that Apple needs like a perfectly coherent product lineup, but it does seem like there is a gap. I can't decide if that gap is there because there's not enough customers or if that gap is there to convince me to buy the thing that's more expensive than what I actually need.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  I think that gap is there in the 13 inch MacBook Pro with a touchbar. And if they have any sense,

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  They will get rid of that computer.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  They will use the 14 inch MacBook Pro design language, cut down on some of the features.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Maybe even just put an M1 in it.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  And like, we're off to the races.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  I think they've chosen not to because then nobody would buy the MacBook. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but yeah.

• 50:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe you put the M1 Pro in it and it's way more expensive.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like the MacBook Air is what, 1,200 bucks?

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Give or take.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  MacBook Air starts at 9.99.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  But when you spec it.

• 50:11Nilay Patel?

  You had like, you had an appropriate amount of memory and storage and like get to 1,200 bucks. There's a lot of space between that kind of good, better, best configuration of the MacBook Air.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  And $2,000.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  We know this actually about the MacBook Air specifically. They have tried to kill it and people won't stop buying it.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  Like they're like, this computer sucks.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  This is.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have a retina display.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  This is the old, old MacBook Air, not old.

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the old, old one.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  And they just like didn't rev it for like three years.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Longer, like forever.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  And like Apple, like we would be told, we can't get people to stop buying this computer.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, fine, like, all right, we're just gonna, here it is. Like, here's the thing you want.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  And so I, I think that like idea that Apple can get, like, we know conclusively that they cannot kill the MacBook Air. So like, I think there's a lot of room there and that 13 inch Pro looks, it's, it's looking not long for this world.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. All right. Last question. You're gonna go away from here on Sunday. Thank you for coming in on a Sunday to record this.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's being too nice. We had our 10 year birthday party this weekend.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  We've all been together. It's been great to see everybody. The real thing you should be thanking us for is doing this as hungover as we are.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  You're going off to do more review work. What is like, what's the next thing you're going to do in your review process? And to get ready to write the thing, write the VO, get on camera later, blah, blah, blah. Like what's the, what's the next step for you in these reviews?

• 51:40Speaker 02

  Running down the battery.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Running down the battery?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, it's the main, main thing.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  I haven't been able to do it yet because it takes like 10 hours and I haven't had, hopefully, and I haven't had that much free time.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  It's use it for a work day to try to kill the battery. And then for me, it's spending a lot of time unpacking the display meds.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  Which are, they're just, it's just, you can go, if you're listening to this, go and read the Pro Display XDR review. A version of that review has to get embedded into this review because it's just very complicated.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  And I'd like to do some more graphic testing as well. I think my current thought is like, the M1 Max is clearly like very, it's insanely impressive for integrated graphics. It also is like a CPU with a GPU stapled onto it. So it's sort of unclear like whether that. Is really the comparison we should be using. So I'd like, I'm gonna be doing some more. I think digging into that and thought on like, who the comparison is to.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Saying that it's a CPU to GPU stapled onto it is not inaccurate, but it's also like, you definitely have made a bunch of Apple chip engineers just, just.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Johnny Shergie just like turned off the podcast. Come back Johnny. But that's a good point. Like it's calling them integrated graphics is totally unfair.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. But also just like technically. Also like there, you know, there's the, well, I will end where Monica started. Everyone's asking us, which one should they get? And the only real difference is a number of GPU cores.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. And we don't know.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Because processor wise, they're, they're the same.

• 53:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's like, well, I don't, how many GPU cores do you think you need?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. And like, if you have twice as many, is it the GPU twice as fast?

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  Which does not actually appear to be the case, surprisingly. So like, we'll just see. I think we have to, we're gonna have to invent a language to talk about Apple's approach to GPU.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Right. Yep. Well, stay tuned for that. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We will be back on Friday with the regular chat show and back again next week on Tuesday with another focused episode of The Vergecast, which is a contradiction, but we're gonna keep trying to do it.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  If you want to follow us on Twitter, you absolutely can. I am Backlon, Neily is Reckless, Monica is McSquare96. All right. That's it. Thanks for listening.

• 54:03Speaker 07

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