Sync Up Your Cycle
Casey:
So I need this to be a relatively short show, which means we're going to go three plus hours.
John:
Do you ever start a show by saying anything other than that, Casey?
John:
It's always like, wait, you always got somewhere else to be.
John:
I need this to be a short show because I need to go fight crime in the neighborhood.
John:
Like, are you secretly Batman?
John:
No.
Casey:
John, you have thoughts about your iPad Pro with the M4 processor.
Casey:
Tell me more.
John:
I've been using it every day as I do with my iPad.
John:
Not too much to note, just a few things.
John:
One, screen.
John:
Screen's real good.
John:
I have seen some people...
John:
make some complaints about the screen online that like they think areas that are just barely not black look a little speckly or dithery.
John:
They might have way better vision than I do.
John:
But if you look real close to like an OLED TV, when you're when it's in a region of the screen that is like really dark gray, you'll see the same thing.
John:
I can't see whatever it is that they're seeing on the screen with any of my corrective lenses or uncorrected eyes.
John:
So it's nice to be almost 50, I guess.
John:
um the brightness is uh not too bright which i was glad about because it can go super duper bright but when i'm in a dark bedroom i can still turn it down to be reasonable loving that oled a lot of the shows i watch have the you know the black bars letterbox top and bottom and those just disappear into the room i did also see some people who had they're like oh the blacks aren't really black on my oled um
John:
uh that will happen if the thing that is projecting the image on the display doesn't specify black for those regions what i told those people is make yourself a black image that you know is 100 black and just fill the screen with that like in the photos app or something it should be completely black and mine is like if the screen is entirely black on my ipad in the dark bedroom it's indistinguishable from it being off because guess what they just don't send any power to any of the pixels like they're literally off
John:
If it doesn't look like that to you, it's because your video player is not projecting black in those areas.
John:
It's projecting really dark gray, which is a bummer, but it can happen.
John:
Face ID.
John:
Yes, it's the landscape camera and the landscape face ID thing.
John:
And I have to say, in the weird scrunched up, totally unergonomic position that I watch television shows on my iPad in bed, face ID on the side could see my face better.
John:
Really?
John:
That's surprising.
John:
It's not a condemnation of the position of the thing.
John:
They put it in the right place.
John:
It is better where it is.
John:
No one should sit like I'm sitting.
John:
I'm just saying as a practical matter.
John:
The face I did on the side could see my face a little bit better.
John:
Uh, sometimes I have to make an adjustment.
John:
I certainly block with my hands a lot less now.
John:
That's, that's certain, but just, just, it was odd to me to think that like there shouldn't be any difference.
John:
They just moved to the top.
John:
In fact, it should have a better view, but for whatever reason, it's a little bit crankier about my face.
John:
And the final thing is volume controls.
John:
Uh, for several years now, there was a thing where Apple introduced like dynamic volume buttons on the iPad, where when you had it in landscape, the volume buttons would switch based on,
John:
uh you know to match essentially the little bar graph that fills on the screen so uh when you had it in landscape mode the right button would make the white part fill the volume bar basically making the volume go up and the left volume button would make it go down and when you made it vertical you know the up button would make the thing go up and you know anyway and that was the setting in settings for years it was like uh do you want it to do that or do you just wanted to say this is volume up and this is volume down no matter how you orient the ipad
John:
And so I got my new iPad.
John:
I'm watching it in bed.
John:
I got to turn the volume up.
John:
Instead, the volume goes down.
John:
And I'm like, oh, I got to change that setting.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Setting's gone.
John:
Modern iPads do not give you that setting.
John:
It's almost, it's not as bad as this, but it's almost as if they went to natural scrolling and they didn't give you the option anymore on new Macs.
John:
I just have to get used to the new setting.
John:
It's arbitrary, which is volume up and which is volume down.
John:
I see the logic and the dynamic controls, but on new iPads, not just the M4s, I think the most recent...
John:
two generations of iPads, that dynamic volume control stuff is mandatory.
John:
There is no more option for it.
John:
So get used to dynamic volume buttons, I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, I can tell you one thing.
Marco:
Mine have had that for a long time.
Marco:
I guess since the last iPad update I did a while, a few years back.
Marco:
I hate not having that option because I got so accustomed to the old way of doing it.
Marco:
And I'm not enough of an iPad power user anymore to have gotten used to the new way.
Marco:
So every time I do it, I do it wrong.
Marco:
Every single time.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm assuming I'll just get used to it.
John:
I'm already kind of, I mean, it makes sense the way they do it is just, it's just jarring because I'm so used to the other way, but I use it every day and I think I will, I think I will come around on it.
Casey:
Is that it?
Casey:
That's all you got?
Casey:
That was quick.
Casey:
I'm surprised.
John:
That's it.
John:
I mean, it's working great.
John:
Love the adjustable stand.
John:
Love watching my stories.
John:
It's just doing exactly what I wanted from a new iPad.
John:
I'm very satisfied with this product.
John:
Oh, and I also enabled the 80% battery thing, which I don't know why I didn't do it on the other one.
John:
Maybe it wasn't an option back on the M1 iPad.
John:
But anyway, 80% battery is perfect for me because this thing spends all its time on my nightstand plugged in.
John:
I never need more than 80% battery.
John:
And if I do, I can just switch that off and charge you the rest of the way.
Casey:
Oh, fair enough.
Casey:
Well, that's pretty cool.
Casey:
I'm glad you're liking it.
Casey:
I know you've been waiting for it a long time.
Casey:
All right, we have further follow-up and feedback.
Casey:
The MKBHD magnets reel, which I think I might have brought it up.
Casey:
Somebody brought it up last week.
Casey:
And apparently I misrepresented it because Odin writes in to say, the reason MKBHD's magnet diagram doesn't show any of the rail of magnets in the back of the new iPad Pro is because there aren't any.
Casey:
The two rails are entirely within the back of the new folio cover itself.
Casey:
I guess I fabricated that memory.
Casey:
That is my mistake.
John:
Your memory is so bad.
John:
Now, that was me that made this mistake.
John:
As I was saying that there was a mistake at the end of the YouTube short or reel or whatever it was.
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
That's right.
John:
Here's where all the magnets are.
John:
I'm like, they didn't put in the rails because they were showing the back of the iPad, not the cover.
John:
So I regret the error.
John:
The video was correct.
Casey:
The offending party has been sacked.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
iPad Pro bending.
Casey:
As everyone expected, we put the iPad Pro through all sorts of bends and twists and turns because why wouldn't you destroy a $1,000-plus device for clicks on YouTube?
Casey:
And a bunch of people have done this, including JerryRigEverything, and The Verge had some coverage about it.
Casey:
And the conclusion The Verge came to was even with some aggressive bending, the central spine helps resist horizontal bends.
Casey:
So that's if you're holding it in landscape, is that correct?
Casey:
And trying to bend it in towards yourself.
Casey:
Vertical bends, so you're holding it in portrait and you're trying to bend it in towards itself or towards you or what have you.
Casey:
Vertical bends don't do as well, though.
Casey:
The Pro cracks right at the charging port, which appears to be the main structural weakness of the device.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dupsies.
John:
As predicted, there wasn't a lot of scientific rigor to the YouTube bending.
John:
I saw some people trying to use a force meter.
John:
Yeah, they were trying to use like a force meter or weights or whatever, but they were doing it in such a bad way.
John:
Like the central question is, is this more bendy than the past one?
John:
I haven't seen any videos that have really answered this scientifically.
John:
They've answered it kind of like, well, it feels like it's kind of the same.
John:
Maybe it's better.
John:
Maybe it's good.
John:
But the upshot is it's definitely not worse.
John:
So if it was catastrophically worse, like it was, oh, this is so much worse, that would be in the videos.
John:
All the videos said it's either kind of the same, a little bit better, maybe a little bit worse in one direction or the other, but I think Apple has safely avoided any kind of bend to gauge because...
John:
none of the videos I saw and I watched so many videos of people bending this thing came away saying, this is so much worse than the past one because it's not.
John:
And so the spine really helps again, only one direction, but I think that, uh, made a big difference.
John:
And I think actually the millimeter wave thing, people didn't really mention this, but the millimeter wave, uh,
John:
little cutout side thing is another weak point for bending in that direction and the fact that this doesn't have one i think helps it like when you see them all break at the at the usbc port it's like yeah because that's the the sidewall is thin there and that's the weakest part and that's where the break begins but you don't see that happening at the millimeter wave thing because there's no you know hole for that or whatever so that's an interesting side effect of them ditching that feature but you know good job apple making a uh stiff little ipad
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Quinn Nelson had a genuinely mind-blowing video, or at least it blew my freaking mind, on Threads.
Casey:
I think Quinn has mostly divorced himself from Mastodon, which whatever, that's fine.
John:
I have an Mastodon link.
John:
It's a Mastodon link to a Threads link.
Marco:
right exactly it's masted onto threads so i used to interrupt here and just throw something real quick and for for the record i know we literally just updated our theme song to reflect that we're all on mass on now um and mass on is the place that i am if i'm anywhere but i've recently been spending a lot more time on none of these services and just doing my work and being in my life instead well doing your work are you feeling right
Marco:
if not mutually exclusive you can do your work and also read threads or mastodon well maybe one one can how about you say that yes right yes that's a better way to put it yeah because i think i have i have shown over the years that i maybe cannot do this combination of things the person who wrote quitter and has deleted twitter from his phone occasionally yes exactly but and i think like threads i probably should have gotten more into threads but didn't because i couldn't use like the tweetbot style apps with it right it's not as good
Marco:
And so I just – like I just didn't get into it and it's been pretty fine for my life, especially like in an election year.
Marco:
Oh my god.
Marco:
To be not there and not constantly in all the constant dialogue everyone has about every little thing, every little thing that we are –
Marco:
That we're mad about today that's going on in tech every little thing that's like news breaking today like I miss most of it until I just get like the summary version later.
Marco:
It's glorious.
Marco:
This is this is the least involved I have been in social media in probably 10 years and pretty much everything in my life is better and I'm missing nothing of value.
Marco:
So just putting that out there for anybody, you know, if you want, if you're thinking like, what would it be like to not be constantly involved and have this information hose like connected directly to my veins?
Marco:
I can tell you that it's, it's actually nice and fine to be less involved with it.
Marco:
And it's totally fine.
Casey:
With that said... With that said, back on the social network.
Casey:
Let's talk about what Quinn put on threads.
Casey:
So I'm going to attempt to describe this.
Casey:
John, feel free to interrupt and do a better job.
Casey:
But Quinn noticed that when you're using... I forget if it was Freeform or something else, but one of these... No, that's just Apple Notes.
Casey:
Okay, thank you.
Casey:
It was Apple Notes.
Casey:
You can select different pens and pencils and whatnot.
Casey:
And what Quinn had selected was a fountain pen.
Yeah.
Casey:
And Quinn noticed that when you do the little hover thing, and I presume it continues while you're actually making a stroke, but one way or another, when you're doing a hover, you'll see the little dot where the pen will draw.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
You know, I have that in my lowly 2021 or 2020, whatever it is, iPad Pro, the M2 iPad Pro.
Casey:
What makes the new one interesting, though, is that you get a full shadow on the screen of the writing implement the pencil is acting as.
Casey:
So in this example, you see a shadow of the fountain pen presented on the screen.
Casey:
It is bananas.
Casey:
It's worth pausing the podcast and quickly watching this like 90 second video or whatever that he put up.
Casey:
It is absolutely bananas and super, super cool.
Casey:
Necessary?
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
But super freaking cool.
John:
He might be in free form there because the fountain pen might not be in notes, but I tried it in notes to confirm all this.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's in anything that has Apple's, like, pencil kit, kind of standard pencil input.
Marco:
And when you watch the video, turn the sound on.
Marco:
So the first time I watched it, I didn't have the sound on.
Marco:
And so I just thought he was showing off, like, look, when you turn the pen, the little, you know, the hovering cursor of, like, the mark you're about to make, that turns.
Marco:
And I was like, okay, yeah, that's really nice, but we saw that in the keynote video.
Marco:
Like, that wasn't new.
Marco:
I didn't really get the appeal.
Marco:
And I rewatched it again today with sound.
Marco:
As he's pointing at the shadow, I'm like, oh...
Marco:
the shadow of the whole pen.
Marco:
Like, that's really cool.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
And so, when doing this, it's interesting that they spent the CPU resources and time to implement this because the shadow only really appears when you get real close with the tip.
John:
And also, when you're using the pencil...
John:
the pencil kind of blocks your view of the shadow.
John:
Obviously he's taking like video of it from the side.
John:
It's easier to see it that way.
John:
So this probably also explains why a lot of people didn't notice it.
John:
I certainly didn't.
John:
Because when you're drawing, I mean, you don't, the pencil blocks it.
John:
Like I wanted to see the cool like, you know, tip of the thing when I rotated it.
John:
Like the one I was using was like the,
John:
The really pointy markers.
John:
You know those markers that have a really thin metal thing with a little marker-y thing?
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
John:
I was using that because it's so differently shaped than the pencil.
John:
You can really see that this is obviously not the shadow of the pencil.
John:
And obviously, it doesn't care about light sources and stuff like that.
John:
It's not physically accurate or realistic.
John:
But it is a fun, whimsical thing.
John:
And it's so weird that they...
John:
apparently it's updating at like 120 frames per second and everything and it's based on like 3D models of the drawing instruments so when you rotate the pencil the shadow also rotates like it's not just a 2D cutout or whatever very well done for something that it's actually really difficult to see if you're the one drawing with the pencil
Casey:
Yeah, super cool stuff.
Casey:
And so Sebastian DeWitt from Halide Camera wrote, I love that people were like, well, I never use all the power in my iPad Pro for anything.
Casey:
So Apple designers and engineers went sick.
Casey:
That means we can render high poly 3D tools with this new Apple Pencil Pro to cast dynamic shadows 120 frames per second.
John:
yeah apparently someone dug out the 3d model if you click through on that uh that toot you can see the the whatever usd file or dot obj file or whatever you can see how detailed the 3d model is of a fountain pen for example
Casey:
All right, moving right along.
Casey:
Marco, a lot of people wrote in, which apparently you were too busy to see because you were too busy actually getting work done.
Casey:
I'm really not comfortable.
Marco:
Some of them actually emailed me, so I actually did see a bunch of them.
Casey:
But anyways, a bunch of people wrote in, and Steve Stutz was maybe the first or perhaps the most thorough.
Casey:
But Steve writes...
Casey:
I would like to let Marco know that you can, in fact, opt out of connecting to audio and joining a Zoom meeting.
Casey:
And a quick aside, this is relevant because of your town meetings.
Casey:
And I guess you have an iPad.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
That's up by you or wanted to have my idea?
Marco:
Yeah, because like the soundboard is not like where I'm able to sit.
Marco:
And so I control it remotely, basically.
Marco:
So there's a laptop at the soundboard hosting the Zoom call, and then I can be anywhere else in the room with what is either an iPad or a laptop being a participant.
Marco:
And then I promote myself to co-host, so I have full control over kicking people out who are spamming it and stuff like that.
Marco:
And my problem was I wanted to use an iPad for that because, you know, it's a small role, but I couldn't get the iPad to not play any volume at all.
Marco:
And because I said, like, even if you turn the volume all the way down, the iPad will cap the minimum.
Marco:
at the first square of volume like it will not let you set zero volume apparently somebody wrote in to say this is actually a problem with anything that uses the ios call kit framework so anything that that provides voip kind of calling you know even like you know like the like the audio calls in in other apps like you know slack or whatsapp or things like that like anything that uses uh call kit to make calls on on iphones apparently they all have this problem
Marco:
um but yeah so basically i i couldn't figure out a way to not have any audio play out of the ipad uh when in a zoom call but apparently if you just join without audio or you can like disconnect audio if you quit and rejoin without it apparently that gives you that option so i haven't had a chance to try that yet but everyone wrote in to tell me that so i assume it works
Casey:
Yeah, so just to finish Steve Stutz's feedback, this can be done by one, toggling on the don't connect to audio option, or two, if you forget to turn on the don't connect to audio toggle, you can tap on or click more, which is the ellipsis, and then tap or click on disconnect audio.
Casey:
Granted, you will not be able to hear the meeting nor be heard in the meeting with audio not connected.
Casey:
However, you can still make yourself a co-host of the meeting and either admit or remove people from the meeting.
Casey:
Zoom also has some useful settings on their website.
Casey:
If you have access to the account you use, you can turn on an option that allows you to request to unmute and mute participants when they join a Zoom meeting.
Casey:
You can also disable participants from being able to unmute themselves at any time during a meeting.
Casey:
And you can also prevent ones who have been removed from meetings to be able to rejoin the Zoom meetings, all of which sounds like stuff you might be interested in.
Marco:
Yes, most of those I actually use.
Marco:
So thank you for that.
Casey:
We have some breaking news with regard to Delta.
Casey:
This is the extremely good and cool emulator for iOS.
Casey:
Riley Tested, who is the primary author of Delta, said that, womp womp, they are in legal trouble.
Casey:
But not from who you would think.
Casey:
It turns out that Adobe was threatening legal action because they think their logos are too similar.
Casey:
And so they had to release, Delta had to release an emergency update to change it.
Casey:
It's a little wonky what they changed it to, but I can concede that they are fairly similar.
Casey:
The original logo and the Adobe logos are pretty similar.
John:
Yeah, it's like an A, like a triangle A with like a little foot on the bottom.
John:
If you know what the Adobe logo looks like and you look at the Delta symbol, you're like, oh yeah, I see it.
John:
They're similar.
John:
And the new version is just the top chopped off of the A and having it rotated.
John:
But I'm pretty sure that little symbol in Delta is from the way they wrote the A in the Game Boy Advance logo.
John:
Because it was, remember, it was like GBA for iOS originally.
John:
So it's just a coincidence that Adobe's A logo is the same as the A in Game Boy Advance from ages ago.
Casey:
uh yeah anyway uh better than getting a legal challenge from nintendo also uh the the greek letter delta which i always used as shorthand for like change which i which is an engineering thing i thought so john i would assume you were aware of this anyways that's a triangle so uh and so i think that that's also where this kind of like i think it's a combination of everything right you know it's the gba stuff and delta being a triangle it was definitely not inspired by adobe but it is essentially the same logo exactly yeah
Marco:
I mean, but obviously, yeah, there's a lot of triangular things in the world.
Marco:
Like Adobe doesn't own triangles, but they do kind of own triangles with this particular kind of notch cut out of them in the computer space.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's talk about, speaking of Delta, why a GameCube or Wii emulator is not possible in the iOS app store.
John:
May not be possible.
John:
You can't say anything definitive about the app store, of course.
John:
Well, fair.
John:
Just make it and submit it and we'll let you know.
John:
yeah yeah right uh do you know that story about delta by the way did you hear he was on a podcast recently he went he went to like a lab at wwdc and said hey i'm thinking of making this emulator will the app store allow this and that the lab they said yeah sure so he spent a year making it and then he submitted it and then like yeah no we're not accepting that
Marco:
And in large part, that was the motivation to start Alt Store because that was such like and just just advice for those of you out there, you know, as we approach WBDC and presumably there will be probably one of those app review lab Slack channels that they have had before.
Marco:
Those people who are in those channels oftentimes know a lot.
Marco:
They usually mean well, but they are not Phil Schiller.
Marco:
And the reality is, with the way the App Store works, if Phil Schiller does not want an app to be approved, it will not be approved.
Marco:
So unless you hear directly from Phil Schiller that your app idea is okay, it won't be, necessarily.
Marco:
You're taking that risk.
Marco:
And if you're somewhere, if you're kind of in the...
Marco:
In like a vague boundary of the rules or you're pushing a little past some previously established ground, like if you're going into new territory and you think your idea might not make it, it probably won't make it or at least you shouldn't depend on it.
Marco:
And no matter what anybody in one of those labs tells you, they're not going to be Phil Schiller.
Marco:
And so they really can't say for sure.
Marco:
Yes, we will definitely allow that.
John:
And this is why Apple has that policy of not telling you whether it will be submitted yet.
John:
They always just say submit it and find out, which sounds terrible, but it is actually the only reasonable solution given the way Apple runs the App Store.
John:
Because unless they're going to sign a contract with you that says, we guarantee, according to these long specifications, that if you submit an app that works exactly like this, we'll approve it, which obviously they're never going to do because that's a huge amount of legal work and it's ridiculous.
John:
There's no way to guarantee because you could talk to Phil Schiller.
John:
He could say, please submit it.
John:
But a year later, so much can change in a year.
John:
And should you be shocked to see that, you know, even though they said you got the most authoritative person who said yes a year ago, things change in a year.
John:
If you're on those, you know, the fringes, or even if you're not, even if you think you're dead center, but Apple makes a strategic change or something in the world changes, that's one of the weaknesses of a having a channel that where you're thinking have to be approved by a company that you don't control.
John:
Unless you literally have a legal contract with a lot of detail and it says your thing is going to get through, you're only going to find out when you submit.
John:
Now, most of the time, if you're making a to-do list app, you'll probably be fine, right?
John:
It's not like it's just this mystery.
John:
We never know what's going to be accepted.
John:
But there are categories that, you know, if you're asking that question at a lab, hey, would you accept this app?
John:
It probably is because you already kind of know that your app is...
John:
close to the edges of what apple accepts and it's not like apple should just tell me and then keep their promises that's not feasible either for a big company or individual or anything it just we can't predict the future things change like the the landscape changes the laws change the apple strategic direction changes so as painful as it is to think well you just have to do the work first and then submit it and cross your fingers that's the way it is but hey if you're in the eu and apple doesn't accept it you have other options
Casey:
So anyway, coming back to GameCube and Wii emulators.
Casey:
So it may, John, not be possible because of just-in-time compilation.
Casey:
So Dolphin OS developer Oatmeal Dome explained how a Dolphin Code Fork, which this is, I'm sorry, I'm reading from Ars Technica.
Casey:
A Dolphin Code Fork, which ports the popular GameCube and Wii emulator to Apple smartphone OS, uses just-in-time compilation to translate the PowerPC instructions from those retro consoles into ARM-compatible iOS code.
Casey:
But Apple's App Store regulations against apps that, quote, install executable code, quote, which is section 3.3.1b, generally prevent JIT or just-in-time recompilation on iOS, with very limited exceptions such as web browsers.
Casey:
That restriction may have some valid security reasoning behind it, but it can also get in the way for developers of tools like third-party browser engines, except recently in the EU.
Casey:
So basically, without Just-In-Time recompilation, it's just not fast enough.
Casey:
And in that blog post, Oatmeal Dome shows a video of the no Just-In-Time recompilation playing a flavor of Mario Kart.
Casey:
I forget which one.
Casey:
And it is just crazy.
Casey:
achingly slow and then the same app well effectively the same app running on the same device but this time with just in time recompilation uh turned on and it runs easily as well if not better than it did on the original hardware so yeah sad times yeah i mean apple could do some kind of work to try to make a somewhat safer version of this but just a free-for-all just in time compilation it basically makes it impossible for apple to
John:
validate for example that you're not using private apis or whatever because the app that they approved didn't use private apis but just-in-time compilation means at any time it can download new data and compile that data into executable code and run it and apple the same way that apple doesn't allow you to like download pieces of your app at runtime and run them right that's against the rules this is the same type of thing of like well if you could take obviously what they're doing here is they're taking like a you know
John:
gamecube game and using that code as data and just in time recompiling it into arm and that should be fine it's not like you're using that to get it secret apple apis or whatever but apple doesn't know and so that's why they have this rule again possibly for security reasons of like we don't want you to be able to conjure up arbitrary code at runtime that does whatever you want it to do that we can never approve because that that is happening in the future so in this case the rule against just time compilation does make some sense but
John:
it's such an essential part of doing things fast, like say running JavaScript and browser engines that Apple really should work towards getting a properly sandbox confined environment in which it is safe to just in time compile code, because these things just want to run games.
John:
Like they're not trying to use just in time compilation to hack into the OS or whatever.
John:
So yeah,
John:
This is a situation where there actually are technical barriers to allowing apps to do this if Apple wants to maintain the level of security they have.
John:
Obviously, you can run these on a Mac or on a PC, and the same exact quote-unquote security problems exist, but everyone's just okay with it.
John:
So it could just be a mindset change, but we'll see how this goes because running Delta, using Nintendo 64 games, NES games, Super NES, stuff like that,
John:
those are super old you can get away with doing those without just in time compilation but as you get closer and closer to modern consoles you kind of start to need this and so even though we're all enjoying all well look at all these emulators there you can get even in the regular app store uh that party is going to if not end then at least get a little bit more tame as time marches on and people want to play their quote unquote retro uh switch games for example in five to ten years
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So it's time for me to have a little laugh at your expense.
Casey:
And I feel slightly bad doing this, but after all you've put me through, not that bad.
Casey:
Mark Gurman writes, Mark Gurman, I love you, John.
Casey:
Mark Gurman writes, no new Mac studio.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
And no Mac pro until mid 2025.
Casey:
I have avoided this pain or I will avoid this pain because
Casey:
for like another year i could not be more excited so uh mark german writes or excuse me mac rumors recaps what german wrote and mac rumors writes german says that apple's current schedule does not include the launch of the new of a new mac studio or mac pro model until the middle of next year all other macs with the exception of the macbook air should be available with m4 series chips by the end of 2024 but german does not anticipate any new models being unveiled at wwdc in june
Casey:
making 2022 and 2023 exceptions for recent mid-year Mac releases.
Casey:
You know, I would love to hear your comments on this, but all kidding aside, this is kind of stinky, and as much as I snark and I joke, I don't love that the Mac Studio, which I think is a very important Mac for the company, you know, it's the MacBook Pro of desktops, if you will, and I'm sure John will correct me in a second, but
Casey:
But it's kind of the... It's anyone's desktop for people who want something strong and powerful.
Casey:
And the Mac Mini is pretty strong and pretty powerful.
Casey:
But if you want more, then you can get a Mac Studio.
Casey:
And the Mac Pro, as much as, again, I joke, I...
Casey:
It kind of bumps me out the way the Mac Pro is now because it's not it's a Mac Pro in name and very little else.
Casey:
So, John, I'm sorry.
Casey:
Tell me what's going on here.
John:
I mean, this is not a change.
John:
This was always the rumor.
John:
But, you know, hey, rumors that they hadn't been sort of solidified.
John:
Like, for example, German had not come flat out and said this is definitively what it's going to be until recently.
John:
But the rumor always was.
John:
uh hey if you're looking at the m4 line of chips the m4 is going to come out and then there's going to be m4 pro and max and maybe a model for just for the mac pro and those timelines were always into next year right but the question always was okay well then what happens to wwdc because the wwdc especially before the m4 rumor started for the ipad the expectation was well surely at wwdc that'll be the time for the mac studio to get an update and maybe the mac pro set aside the mac pro but the mac studio it was due for an update right because we had the m3 m3 pro m3 max
John:
where's the Mac studio with an M3 max in it, right?
John:
And maybe there'll be an M3 ultra.
John:
And we talked about that before, about the interposer and was it on the die?
John:
And will there be an M3 ultra?
John:
Will there not be?
John:
Obviously the M4 threw a monkey wrench into all of that.
John:
This is like, well, wait a second.
John:
They just introduced an M4 iPad.
John:
Are they really going to introduce a Mac studio with anything that has an M3 in front of the name now that the M4 exists?
John:
Um,
John:
What are they going to do?
John:
Is there going to be an M3 Ultra in the Mac Studio?
John:
Or maybe the M4 Max and Ultra are ready sooner than we thought?
John:
And Gurman is here to say no.
John:
There will not be an M3 Ultra or M3 Max Studio.
John:
There will not be an M4 Max Studio at WWC.
John:
There will be no Max Studio at WWC.
John:
And obviously no Mac Pro.
John:
That's disappointing because that's going to mean the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro are stuck on the M2, which as soon as the M4 Pro and M4 Max MacBook Pros come out, they're probably going to be embarrassing, the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, because we know the M4 already beats it in single core on my freaking iPad with no fan in it.
John:
So it's, I mean, geez.
John:
Not that you should feel bad if you had a Mac Studio, if you bought, like, the M2 Max or M2 Ultra when it was new, fine, but don't buy a Mac Studio now, right?
John:
You just got to wait, and the Mac Pro has always been a little bit sad.
John:
So, yeah, like, I was really curious about what they were going to do there, but honestly...
John:
If they had produced an M3 Ultra Mac Studio, I think that would have been a fine product to hold us over until the M4 ones come.
John:
But instead, they're just going to let them languish.
John:
The Mac Pro is used to that.
John:
The Mac Pro is used to being constantly in a state of fighting for its life and in limbo.
John:
But the Mac Studio, I felt like...
John:
They're really, you know, they updated that to the M1.
John:
They updated it to the M2.
John:
It's like the Mac Studio.
John:
It's nice.
John:
You know, it's the Mac Pro for people who don't want a gargantuan thing on their desk.
John:
And especially now with the current Mac Pro, it's basically a Mac Pro without the card slots.
John:
It's a good little computer.
John:
And I felt like they should be as dedicated to it as they are to all their other computers.
John:
But they're not this year.
John:
maybe because of the whole n3b thing and they really wanted to get off it as fast as possible and they didn't want to make an ultra and they didn't want to put out a max studio without an ultra like maybe if it topped out at the m3 max that'd be boring but anyway that you know this that's what i was looking forward to at wwc but you know i was looking forward to seeing what they would do and the answer is nothing so i guess we'll spend all our time at wwc talking about ai stuff
Casey:
You get nothing.
Casey:
Good day, sir.
Marco:
I think what you said a minute ago is correct.
Marco:
They probably didn't want to do or couldn't reasonably priced do the Ultra version of the M3.
Marco:
And they wouldn't update the Mac Studio to the M3 generation and have just a Max and not an Ultra.
Marco:
So that's probably the leading reason they didn't do it.
John:
Oh, it's a shame because an M3 Max Max Studio is still a great little computer.
Marco:
I mean, yeah.
Marco:
Like I'm saying this, you know, from my 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro that's in desktop mode right now.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, not to make Max Studio people feel too bad about this, but, you know, so two things.
Marco:
Number one, like if you want to make sure you always have the cutting edge chips, use MacBook Pros because they always get them because they're the high volume products.
Marco:
And number two.
John:
They don't get the Ultra.
Marco:
Well, and that's true.
Marco:
That's fair.
Marco:
But number two, the Mac Studio, I continue to think that this was a branding mistake that Apple made.
Marco:
The Mac Studio is just the Mac Pro.
Marco:
That's the new Mac Pro.
Marco:
That's the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
Marco:
Just think of it like there's two Mac Pros.
Marco:
One of them has a big case that has card slots, and the other one has a small case with no card slots.
Marco:
Those are two configurations of the same computer, and it's the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Now, if you use that computer and like that computer,
Marco:
that's great for you however you you bring to that uh the all the burdens that the mac pro has always had it is a high-end low volume desktop that apple makes not a lot of people seem to choose the mac studio slash mac pro for their needs so it's never really going to be that high of a priority for apple
Marco:
Yeah, they'll get to it when they can reasonably without too much sweat off their back.
Marco:
But if there's anything competing for those factors, like if they have to bend over backwards to try to get some kind of economy working with low chip yields of a new process, or if their engineering resources are tight and they have to redesign other more high-volume computers first –
Marco:
The Mac Pro slash Studio is always going to be kind of lower priority than everything else because they just sell.
Marco:
I think they sell way fewer of them than the other high end Macs.
Marco:
And so, you know, I think that's the reality.
Marco:
If you're going to be a high end Mac desktop user, you're going to have pretty much the same problems that most Mac high end desktop users have always had, which is you are a small market to them and they still care about you.
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
But you're a small market to them.
Marco:
And as I'm telling you, as laptops have gotten better at being used as desktops, I can strongly recommend if you want something that is updated more frequently.
Marco:
And that's a big if.
Marco:
If you don't, that's fine.
Marco:
If you want something that's updated more frequently and it's driving you nuts as a Mac Studio owner that like the laptops have been faster than your computer in certain ways for, you know, eight months or whatever.
Marco:
consider switching to MacBook Pros.
Marco:
It works really well.
Marco:
If you don't want to do that, then that's great.
Marco:
The Mac Studio is a great computer, but you're going to have to deal with a slow update cycle, just like high-end desktops I've always had.
John:
Yeah, what you have to basically do is, because not everyone buys a new computer every year, right?
John:
So if you buy a new computer every three years, you have to buy on the year that the Mac Studio or Mac Pro is just updated.
John:
Because you don't want to buy, oh, I buy a new computer every three years for my work, right?
John:
Do not buy the M2 Mac Studio like two days before the M4 ones.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like you have to sync up your cycle with the not so frequent release cycle.
John:
And if you do that, you're not losing out.
John:
Because again, if you don't buy a new computer every year, it's not important to you that, oh, this year the MacBook Pros have the new chip sooner.
John:
It's like you aren't going to buy a new computer anyway.
John:
You're going to buy an M4 Mac Studio on the day it comes out and you're going to keep it for three years.
John:
And then when the M6 Mac Studio comes out, then you're going to buy that one.
John:
Whatever upgrade cycle you're on, you need to buy on the release of whatever big desktop Mac you want.
John:
Same thing with the iMac, obviously.
John:
You shouldn't have bought an M1 iMac two days before the M3 ones came out or whatever.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
If you are buying one of the Mac models that Apple is not interested in updating frequently because they're low volume or whatever...
John:
Try to sync up with that, which if you listen to this show, you know when it's happening.
John:
But if you don't, you just wander into an Apple store, you could end up buying, you know, again, don't buy an M2 Mac two days before the M4 version one comes out.
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Casey:
All right, so we have an interesting thing to cover.
Casey:
And before you just mash on the chapter skip button, I'd encourage you to give us a chance here.
Casey:
So Microsoft has, is it Build that's going on right now?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, well, this was an event the day before Build started.
Casey:
Sorry, that's right.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Anyways, one way or another, Microsoft is in the midst of their build event, which is kind of their WWDC.
Casey:
But like John just said, a day before that, they had kind of a keynote sort of thing where they announced a whole bunch of new hardware that Microsoft, amongst others, are making.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I got to tell you, I watched this when it appeared in the show notes.
Casey:
I didn't pay that much attention to it before then.
Casey:
It's a little over an hour.
Casey:
I mean, I watched it 2x, but it wasn't particularly boring.
Casey:
And in fact, I would go so far as to say it was actually really interesting because this is Microsoft.
Casey:
Yeah, in a lot of ways, they're aping Apple's style and whatnot.
Casey:
But in terms of what they were announcing...
Casey:
It was a lot of stuff that I thought was really interesting.
Casey:
And some of it looked really compelling.
Casey:
So I don't know how we want to go through this.
Casey:
John, if you want me to start reading bullets that we have in our show notes or if you have like an opening statement or something.
Casey:
But how do you want to handle this?
John:
Well, let me just read the first line item and paragraph here because then I'll have something to say.
John:
So this is the kickoff with The Verge story about this.
John:
And their headline was, Inside Microsoft's Mission to Take Down the MacBook Air.
John:
Straightforward, pretty provocative title there from the post.
John:
Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to ARM chips.
John:
So confident that this time around, the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air.
John:
All right.
John:
So we've talked about it on the show many times in the past.
John:
about windows on arm and pcs on arm chips very often it's in the context of everyone's casey's favorite topic the mac pro because what i'll always say about the mac pro and arm based mac pros and we got like ask atp questions about it or whatever like hey are you going to game on your mac pro when you get a mac pro with arm in it do you care about gpu what are you going to use all that gpu for if there's no games or whatever and why i've always been saying for years and years is hey windows runs on arm like windows microsoft did like windows rt or whatever years and years ago right
John:
Windows runs on ARM and ARM CPUs are, you know, more widespread than they used to be.
John:
I have always been rooting for the PC world, the Windows PC world, to make a transition to ARM.
John:
Mostly for selfish reasons, because I want all the PC games to be compiled for ARM so that I can run them at native speeds on my future ARM Mac Pro.
John:
But even setting that aside, it's just nicer for everybody.
John:
when Macs and PCs use the same architecture.
John:
And we had this beautiful golden period where Macs were x86 and Windows was x86.
John:
And as a Mac user, that meant you could run a virtual PC or not virtual PC, VMware or Parallels or whatever.
Casey:
and run windows at full native speed with really good compatibility yeah just to briefly interrupt here i don't think i would be a mac user right now if it wasn't for that because i had been a pc user my entire life granted i had some time with linux on the desktop i had my my college period if you will um but anyways i i needed a way to ease into the transition and
Casey:
and i like so many other people had convinced myself i can't do everything i want without you on mac os i i need to or os 10 as it was called at the time be honest you probably called it os x i don't think i did but it would i'm not above it so anyway um i i needed a way to ease into it i needed to be able to walk into the shallow end or wade into the shallow end and
Casey:
VMware Fusion is what I happen to choose, but that's what I did.
Casey:
And then that allowed me to use certain apps that, and I don't even remember what they were now, but that I didn't think I could live without.
Casey:
And then it wasn't long after I started using a Mac that I realized, oh my God, this is so much better than my PC.
Casey:
I really kind of want to use this for everything, not just personal stuff.
Casey:
I could just use VMware Fusion and make a VM that is my work computer.
Casey:
And I can use my work computer inside my Mac.
Casey:
You know, hey, dog, I hear you like computers.
Casey:
Let's put a computer in your computer.
Casey:
And so that's what I ended up doing.
Casey:
And for a long time at work, I was using a personal Mac with a VM, a Windows VM.
Casey:
And it ran really well.
Casey:
I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was really good.
Casey:
And I don't think I would be a Mac user today, and I suspect that's true of a lot of people, if it wasn't for that.
Casey:
And my understanding was this was garbage when you were trying to cross a processor architecture, and that's kind of where we are right now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so Microsoft did have Windows on ARM from ages ago, but they didn't really have a good compatibility story of how to run x86 apps or whatever.
John:
And Windows RT was not particularly popular.
John:
They had, you know, all the PC makers making Windows RT devices, but most PCs were still x86.
John:
Certainly most games were x86, you know.
John:
And this is kind of their second, maybe I'm missing the counts, but it is a subsequent run at the same idea.
John:
Now, here's the thing about Microsoft and ARM and Windows.
John:
Unlike Apple, Microsoft just can't say, guess what?
John:
We're transitioning to ARM because Microsoft doesn't make all the PC hardware in the world.
John:
They make some PC hardware, which is a change from years ago, right?
John:
But they don't make most of the PC hardware.
John:
Apple makes all the Mac hardware.
John:
So if they want the Mac to transition to ARM, guess what?
John:
They just stop selling the x86 ones.
John:
and the Mac is transitioned to ARM, right?
John:
Microsoft can't do that.
John:
So they have to convince the PC makers to make ARM PCs, which is relatively easy because the PC makers rely on Microsoft, right?
John:
But then they have to convince the customers to buy them.
John:
And their second run at this, their way of convincing them is twofold.
John:
One, we're going to make, like, good laptops.
John:
You know the MacBook Air that everybody loves?
John:
We're going to make a laptop like that.
John:
And people like that, right?
John:
So now you want to buy this, right?
John:
And it's better than the Intel laptops for all the reasons that the MacBook Air is better than the Intel laptops.
John:
Better performance, lower, you know, power draw, all these wonderful features, right?
John:
So we're going to make hardware that you like.
John:
And also we're going to do or try to do an Apple style backward compatibility thing.
John:
Every time Apple has done a processor transition and they've done it three times on the Mac, they always have a way for you to essentially run your old applications in a way that's good enough that you don't care.
John:
right and every single time they've done this amazingly they say hey do you have an old 68k application your power pc mac will run it faster than 68k one ever ran before you have you have an old power pc app and you want to run an intel we can do that for you too and then same same thing with you know running x86 now on arm things it's not ideal eventually you want everyone to port their apps you want to support fat binaries universal binaries blah blah right
John:
But you really can't sell someone a new computer, a new architecture and say, yeah, most of your old apps won't work.
John:
Sorry about that.
John:
You have to provide a smooth ramp.
John:
And they're trying to do that this time.
John:
But the way they're doing it is they're not saying that this presentation wasn't, oh, this is Microsoft announcing.
John:
that arm is the future and all pcs have changed arm that's not the presentation they gave they can't give that presentation they shouldn't give that presentation they didn't give that instead they said here are some amazing new pcs that we hope you'll really like and they look certainly by microsoft standards they're pretty amazing actually so uh yeah reading from the verge microsoft is confident it finally nailed the transition to arm chip so confident that this time around the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against macbook air so let's start with performance
Casey:
Over the past two years, Microsoft has worked in secret with all of its top laptop partners to ready a selection of ARM-powered Windows machines that will hit the market this summer.
Casey:
So, quick aside, they launched, I think like a year ago now, they launched something called Copilot, or maybe it was a GitHub that launched it?
Casey:
One way or another, somebody Microsoft-related.
John:
No, it was a Microsoft thing.
John:
That was their AI branding from multiple years ago, I think, maybe.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And I love that.
Casey:
I think it's great.
Casey:
I really genuinely do.
Casey:
I think, you know, Copilot is a way to like assist you in getting your work done.
Casey:
I think it's great.
Casey:
And so kudos to them for that.
Casey:
It's a surprisingly good name, especially for Microsoft.
Casey:
So coming back, machines that will hit the market this summer known as Copilot plus PCs.
Casey:
They were doing so well.
John:
So this name, you have to read this three times to be like, wait, what?
John:
That's the name.
John:
These new kinds of PCs that Microsoft is promoting here, they have a name that's applied to them that not just Microsoft sells them.
John:
Anybody who sells one of these things, Dell, Asus, whatever,
John:
They are selling a co-pilot, then a plus symbol, then the PC.
John:
Do you have a co-pilot plus PC?
John:
Yeah, I have a Dell one of those.
John:
I have a Microsoft one of those.
John:
It's a co-pilot plus PC.
John:
Terrible name.
John:
But you can see the reason they did it, and it's also a terrible reason, but you can see why, right?
John:
Because...
John:
What they want to say about these laptops, there's a new kind of laptop in the PC world.
John:
It's called the Copilot Plus PC.
John:
And what they want to say about them is these PCs can do AI stuff because Copilot is our AI thing.
John:
It helps you along with your work, right?
Yeah.
John:
why it's called copilot plus pcs and not just called copilot pcs but anyway they're gonna say this is what distinguishes these laptops they can do ai stuff ai stuff is novel lots of people haven't seen it and only these can do it because for reasons that we'll get into shortly right um i get that ai and copilot is a popular brand or whatever
John:
But I can almost guarantee you that the main reason people are going to buy these laptops has nothing to do with Copilot.
John:
So by calling them Copilot plus PCs, it's like, I hope they're not, I mean, they'll probably just change their mind.
John:
But like, you don't want to be stuck with that name.
John:
Because as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I think the world's concerned, it's like, oh, these are the PCs that are good like Macs are good.
John:
Right.
John:
In terms of laptops, you know, size, weight, performance, battery life.
John:
Right.
John:
These are the PCs that aren't burdened by Intel falling behind an x86.
John:
Right.
John:
That's what these PCs actually are.
John:
But Microsoft is entirely branding them based on AI features that.
John:
frankly, I think are of speculative usefulness to customers.
John:
I know people are interested in them and there's buzz around them and they're novel, but I don't think the market has shown that they're so important that people are willing to buy a different PC with a different architecture just to get access to AI features that they've never used before, but that Microsoft tells them will be super useful.
John:
So, bummer on the branding, bummer on the name, but you can see how they got there.
John:
It's like when a company has something like, this is the future, and we should... It's like if they named, like... I don't know.
John:
It's like if they named the new line of Max to be, like...
John:
I'm trying to think of a good example of like, you know.
Marco:
They could use their Siri branding, which has been their machine learning brand so far.
John:
All our Macs from now on are going to be Siri Macs because Siri is so important.
John:
Siri plus Macs.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Or Max Plus Siri.
Casey:
has some benefits.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
So known as Copilot Plus PCs, they're meant to kickstart a generation of powerful, battery-efficient Windows laptops and lay the groundwork for an AI-powered future.
Casey:
So the minimum specs for a Copilot Plus PC, and I think these are the only three things that were ever enumerated.
Casey:
Maybe there's more.
Casey:
But you need 16 gigs of RAM or more.
Casey:
You need a 256 gig hard drive or more, and you need a NPU or I guess neural processing unit.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Uh, capable of 40 tops.
Casey:
They talked about tops all the time, all over and over again.
John:
So these minimum specs apply to everybody who wants to use the copilot plus PCs branding.
John:
And this is how Microsoft is essentially trying to herd the PC market in a direction.
John:
Hey, Microsoft's going to put a lot of money into marketing this terrible name, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Do you want to be able to say that you're selling a Copilot Plus PC?
John:
They went to all their PC hardware vendors and said, we want you all to make Copilot Plus PCs.
John:
We're going to market this.
John:
You're going to sell these things.
John:
You're going to do it.
John:
We're going to do it together.
John:
But to get the Copilot Plus PC branding, you have to meet this minimum spec, 16 gigs of RAM, 256, blah, blah, blah, right?
John:
16 gigs of RAM as a minimum spec for Copilot Plus PC is yet another slap in the face of Apple and their stupid 8 gigabyte RAM based on so many of their models.
John:
now you might say well it's because windows uses so much more memory and the ai stuff uses so much more memory and apple is more memory efficient so they only need eight gigs yada yada yada the point is apple puts too little ram in its things and so the minimum spec being 16 really is starting to slap around apple 256 gig hard drive is a little small but whatever the npu thing we talked about this last week 40 trillion operations per seconds what kind of operations
John:
8-bit integer operations, 64-bit floating point operations, 32-bit integer operations.
John:
No one ever wants to specify.
John:
But based on what we saw last week of how Apple's own numbers change from the M3 being 18 tops to the M4 being 38 tops...
John:
And that'd be because, oh, that was 18 16-bit tops, but it's 38 8-bit tops.
John:
I have to think this 40 number is 8-bit.
John:
But Microsoft didn't specify.
John:
So if you're trying to compare tops, it's a bad... It's not really a unit because you don't know what they're operating on, right?
John:
How many 1-bit operations can you do per second?
John:
You could do even more.
John:
And for people who don't know about SIMD instructions and stuff like that, it's basically like you have...
John:
a certain amount of space to put a bunch of numbers in and you could put like two 8-bit numbers or one 16-bit number if you put two 8-bit numbers and you add that value oh i just did two additions but if you put one 16-bit number you just did one addition but in either case you added that you know those things to another set of those things right so it's a little bit fudging of these numbers and what tops means and i'm really not happy about tops being a thing that manufacturers are touting because none of them seem interested in telling us what
John:
those operations were performed on.
John:
Maybe there's some kind of unification about them always touting the biggest number, which I guess everyone's decided going, going smaller than eight bit seems kind of cheap.
John:
So maybe it's 40 trillion eight bit operations, but we don't know.
John:
But anyway, this is basically saying you got to have some kind of neural engine to use Apple speak that has decent performance to be a copilot plus PC.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like this is just a bunch of BS, that they're actually inferior hardware that is that they're just pumping up at the stats.
Marco:
It seems from the tests they've shown so far, of course, with all the caveats that these are like demo tests from a keynote or whatever.
Marco:
It seems like this is actually likely to be real competition for Apple's M chips.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's fantastic.
Marco:
Well, the M4 was 38 tops, and this is 40.
Marco:
So yeah, ballpark.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so far, the rest of the performance seems like it's actually theoretically going to actually provide really good competition.
Marco:
And for me, even though I'm a huge Apple fan, and especially of the Mac,
Marco:
I hope these are faster than the M chips because Apple is at its best when there's really good competition.
Marco:
And we've seen and like there are parts of Apple that are extremely complacent recently.
Marco:
Now, the thing is, the Mac hardware division really is not among them.
Marco:
The Mac hardware is great, and it's better than it's ever been, and it's updated despite earlier conversations about the Mac Studio and Mac Pro.
Marco:
The overall Mac hardware lineup is updated pretty well now, and pretty much every model of Mac now is in a really good place for the most part.
Marco:
And so I wouldn't say Mac hardware is being complacent or slacking off or taking their foot off the gas.
Marco:
I would say Mac software is.
Marco:
And I would say certainly we'll see what happens with Apple and any of their modern AI features that may or may not be announced in a few weeks.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
That remains to be seen how that goes.
Marco:
But what I love about this announcement is that it looks like Microsoft and all the various partners therein, it looks like they're actually going to really provide strong competition for the first time in a long time, at least in some areas, in the hardware areas.
Marco:
And to attack the MacBook Air with what looks like a pretty strong attack is
Marco:
I think that's fantastic.
Marco:
That's great for the industry.
Marco:
That's how we get really good change coming.
Marco:
That's how we get really good improvements.
Marco:
That's how we get 16 gigs of freaking RAM.
Marco:
That's how we get everything getting better for the customers.
Marco:
It happens when Apple is forced not to be complacent, when there's actually a real competition.
Marco:
And this will be a theme, I think, throughout the next few years.
Marco:
I suspect – granted, this is – again, we have yet to see what Apple has in response to the recent AI mania.
Marco:
I suspect whatever they unveil at WWDC is going to underwhelm most of us in that area.
Marco:
I think they're going to be way behind.
Marco:
I think they're going to take a very, very conservative approach to any kind of, quote, AI-based features.
Marco:
And I bet the companies that were there earlier and have invested more heavily in it, basically Google and Microsoft especially, I bet Google and Microsoft are going to be way ahead of Apple in AI-based features for a long time, possibly for like a decade.
Marco:
I think this is a direct assault on Apple's core businesses, even the iPhone.
Marco:
And I think that's fantastic.
Marco:
I think Apple needs that more than anything.
Marco:
Because I have not kept quiet that I really do think there's a lot more parallels between Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer than most Apple fans are willing to admit.
Marco:
Steve Ballmer did not make Microsoft unsuccessful.
Marco:
He made Microsoft miss the next big thing.
Marco:
I think that's substantially at risk here with Apple.
Marco:
I think Apple may have missed slash be missing a lot of new tech around these new AI techniques and models that their competition is investing very heavily into and developing very quickly.
Marco:
They're iterating quickly.
Marco:
They're turning things around quickly.
Marco:
A lot of it still, yes, it's vaporware.
Marco:
A lot of it still is not as good in practice as it demos.
Marco:
But there's a lot of value there that Apple is so far not capturing.
Marco:
Again, it remains to be seen.
Marco:
What will happen?
Marco:
What will they show us in a few weeks?
Marco:
And how will that stage out the rest of the year into various products and releases?
Marco:
We'll find out.
Marco:
But I have a feeling the most likely outcome of all that is they're way behind and dipping their toe in very conservatively while their competitors are pushing really hard.
Marco:
And that's a threat to the iPhone.
Marco:
That's a big deal if that's the case.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think this is going to be a really exciting time, not because I want Apple to lose, but because they're going to, I think, have really strong competition, stronger than they've had in a long time.
Marco:
And they're going to start seeing actual disruption in their core product lines because their competitors are going to be doing substantial things that either have matched areas that Apple's had a lead in for a while, like some of this hardware from Microsoft and Qualcomm and everything,
Marco:
or their competitors are going to be doing things that Apple just can't keep up with in the areas of AI and AI-based features.
Marco:
I think this is going to be a really exciting time for computers and for Apple fans because we're going to start actually getting punched here and there.
Marco:
We're going to start losing some things, and that's going to make Apple wake up in some areas that they need to be woken up in and actually get them to make some really good stuff again in a lot of these complacent areas.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So as we continue, Ars Technica writes that right now, the requirement of 16 gigs RAM, 256 gig hard drive, and NPU capable of 40 trillion operations per second, or 40 tops, that can only be met by a single chip in the entire Windows PC ecosystem.
Casey:
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite.
Casey:
God, I'm fumbling all over my mouth here because these are so terrible.
Casey:
Oh, they're terrible names.
John:
I'm just like M4.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, which I'm assuming are X's.
Casey:
Maybe they're 10s.
Casey:
Who even knows?
Casey:
But those are the only chips that are capable of doing it.
Casey:
And I think that basically only one of these two is out today or something along those lines.
John:
No, I think they're both available.
John:
So this Qualcomm Snapdragon thing, so we've been hearing about this chip for a while now, for like months now.
John:
People are saying this is going to be the M... First it was going to be the M2 killer, then it was going to be the M3 killer, now it's the M4 killer because Apple keeps releasing new chips.
John:
Um...
John:
This is from Qualcomm, Apple's friendly neighborhood supplier of cell modems and other things that Apple wants to replace in its hardware.
John:
Qualcomm bought Nuvia in 2021 for $1.4 billion.
John:
Nuvia was a startup making ARM chips.
John:
I think they were making like ARM server chips.
John:
Nuvia was started by a bunch of Apple Silicon people that left Apple and formed their own company to make ARM chips that Apple was interested in making.
John:
So Qualcomm essentially bought a bunch of the people who helped Apple make all of the M series chips and the A series chips or whatever.
John:
That was a wise move because Qualcomm's ARM SoCs were not as good as Apple's for many, many years.
John:
And this seems to be the first fruit of the Nuvia acquisition.
John:
uh which is an arm chip that is in the conversation with apple's arm chips and it's the snapdragon x elite and x plus which is not great naming um the plus is has a 10 core cpu and goes up to 3.4 gigahertz and the elite has a 12 core cpu that clocks higher it goes up to 3.8 with a quote dual core boost to 4.2 gigahertz and
John:
And they both have 136 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth.
John:
The M4, remember from past show, the M4 just broke the 100 gigabytes per second barrier because the M1, M2, and M3 were all 100 gigabytes per second.
John:
M4 is 120 gigabytes per second.
John:
The Snapdragon X chip is 136 gigabytes per second.
John:
So spec-wise, clock-wise, these are a little bit slower than the M4 as well.
John:
But if you look at these chips and you're like, okay, well, just based on this part of the specs, I can see how this potentially could be in the conversation with Apple stuff.
John:
Now, when the rumors were going for the Snapdragon X, the main ding against these chips and the rumors was...
John:
okay so the the specs are comparable to an m2 or better than an m2 comparable to an m3 and now maybe within shouting distance of an m4 but we don't know how much power they take that was the kind of the the ding on the intel chips before the arm ones you could get intel laptops that had cpus that could match or beat the cpus in apple's laptops
John:
But they used so much more power, and their battery life was awful.
John:
And some of them, even when they weren't plugged in, they would clock themselves down and get even worse performance.
John:
So it was like, okay, we can't just look at whether you can beat a Mac in performance.
John:
If your battery life is half as long, nobody wants your laptop.
John:
So that was always the ding in the rumors against the Snapdragon X things.
John:
Oh, they're probably going to be comparable, but I bet they're going to get way worse battery life.
John:
But this presentation spent a long time trying to say that that's not the case, that these laptops are not only MacBook Air caliber performance, which is so weird that they're judging against the MacBook Air, which is not Apple's most performant laptop.
Marco:
Well, it's their top seller.
Marco:
It's probably Microsoft's top competition for anything in this price range.
John:
Right, but you would think what you'd be doing if you're competing against the MacBook Air is just showing battery life things or whatever, but they want to show that it has the speed.
John:
And it's a little bit like,
John:
So obviously the MacBook Air only has the M3.
John:
Apple rolled out the M4, but it's not in a MacBook Air yet.
John:
So this is the time to strike because when the M4 MacBook Air is out, maybe the comparisons won't be as favorable because the M4 looks pretty darn good.
John:
But anyway, that's what they were comparing against.
John:
Now, the one thing they do have going for them is...
John:
These are PCs, which you would presume they're going to be less expensive with better specs than Apple stuff.
John:
Now, Microsoft's PCs, because Microsoft does make hardware, Microsoft's PCs historically have not actually been super cheap, right?
John:
You could always get cheaper models with similar specs from other PC makers.
John:
Microsoft, from the beginning with its whole, you know, self-branded service line of Microsoft PCs,
John:
has been trying to be the apple of pc hardware right down to their hardware very often looking a lot like apple hardware um and so they have a new laptop they call the surface laptop seventh edition at least they didn't call it seventh generation uh and so there's been a lot of surface laptops before but this is the good surface laptop
John:
Because it comes with this ARM processor that is potentially, you know, M3 or M4 class.
John:
So looking at the pricing just at a broad level, because remember, this starts at 16 gigs.
John:
So what I wanted to see was, okay, it starts at 16 gigs.
John:
you know you can't the base macbook air doesn't start at 16 gigs but you can get it up to that i think so what are the what are the price comparison looks like so the base model 13 inch surface laptop with 16 gigs of ram and 256 gigs of ssd is a thousand dollars
John:
uh you cannot buy a macbook air with 16 gigs of ram for a thousand dollars you haven't been able to ever uh and it's a shame because that extra eight gigs of ram is not that big a deal if you want a macbook air with that i think you have to pay an additional 300 which doesn't sound like a lot extra but in a thousand dollar computer that's like a third of the price you just added to go from eight gigs of ram to 16 gig and your ssd is still tiny
John:
So it doesn't seem like, oh, look, they're in the same ballpark.
John:
Three hundred dollars, three hundred dollars is nothing.
John:
It's a big bump on a thousand dollar computer.
John:
If you want to go sixteen five twelve, that's fourteen hundred on the surface.
John:
Oh, it looks like Microsoft has learned something about SSD pricing from Apple.
Yeah.
John:
Because adding 256 gigs of SSD space does not cost $400.
John:
But in Microsoft and Apple Land, it does.
John:
And so now the MacBook Air is only $100 more expensive than $1,500.
John:
If you go 16 gig, one terabyte, again, there's only $100 price difference between the MacBook Air and the Surface.
John:
The MacBook Air obviously being $100 more expensive.
John:
And if you go 32 gig, one terabyte, the MacBook Air is actually cheaper, but you can't get the MacBook Air with 32.
John:
You can only get it with 24.
John:
So it's $100 less expensive.
John:
So pricing-wise...
John:
They are similar to MacBook Air.
John:
That's their competition.
John:
They undercut it significantly at the low end.
John:
Like, to be able to get for $1,000 a machine with 16 gigs of RAM, that's the way the world should be, and it's only not that way because of Apple's stubbornness about getting off 8 gigs.
John:
But all the rest of the prices look like, all right, I see what you're pricing this at.
John:
You're pricing this like a MacBook Air.
John:
All the other makers who make these, because I think there's a whole bunch of PC makers that do, presumably will undercut them.
John:
But the Microsoft ones want to be...
John:
The good ones.
Marco:
Again, I think this is fantastic competition.
Marco:
Finally, this is great.
Marco:
I mean, the real... I think the problem here or the challenge here that Microsoft is going to have, which I think we'll get to in a moment, is...
Marco:
Microsoft is clearly trying to sell this to MacBook Air customers.
Marco:
And I think they will do a pretty good job of giving Apple a run for their money for certain target audiences.
Marco:
The question is, Microsoft has tried before to sell good next-generation ARM hardware, but Microsoft's customers didn't want it.
Marco:
Their customers wanted something that was what we always buy and cheap and easy and works with everything.
Marco:
Because it turns out that not every customer base is the same and wants the same things and has the same priorities.
Marco:
Microsoft here is making a product line that looks like it will actually be pretty competitive with Apple customers.
Marco:
But whether they can get their customers to buy it is a very different story.
John:
Well, their customers just want to be able to run their apps.
John:
And I think that's the story they're telling them here, because I don't think obviously the pricing is out of whack in this.
John:
I think people who like Windows PCs and like, for example, the corporate world, a lot of Windows PCs get sold into the corporate world.
John:
All those people have had to endure now, what, three years of going to meetings with their Mac using employee, you know, coworkers.
John:
and seeing just how much better battery life the Mac users get and how much nicer their laptops are.
John:
But they don't want a Mac.
John:
They want a PC.
John:
They just want it to be nice.
John:
But they don't want it.
John:
It's like, okay, well, we can get you one of these Windows RT laptops.
John:
They'd be like, oh, they're slow and they're worse.
John:
They're slow.
John:
The battery life isn't even that good and they have compatibility problems.
John:
And so Microsoft, I think, is talking to those people and saying, it's now safe.
John:
for you to buy a Windows laptop that's good like the MacBook Air, and it will run all your stuff.
John:
That is the thing that needs to get them over.
John:
It's not so much the pricing because, again, there are cheaper brands to buy from than this.
John:
It's the safety of saying, this will just work just like your Windows laptop that you have now.
John:
There's no excuses we have to make, no compromise.
John:
It's not, well, it gets good battery life, but half is slow.
John:
But hey, battery life is like, no, it's faster.
John:
It's like the M1 pitch.
John:
It's faster, it runs all your old software, and the battery life is amazing.
John:
It's an easy sell.
John:
And you're right that Microsoft is selling to the people who are buying the high end of that, but Dell is going to sell PCs with similar specs at the low end of that.
John:
They're uglier, cheaper, but more appealing to people.
John:
So I think they have...
John:
I don't think they're trying to like, you know, let's poach all the Mac users or whatever.
John:
I think they're just finally trying to give all the Windows users who have been suffering with inferior laptops since the introduction of the M1 to say, now you're free.
John:
Now you can have a good laptop again.
John:
Don't even tell them that there's an ARM CPU in there.
John:
They won't even need to know.
John:
It just runs all your stuff, and you don't need to know about it.
John:
All you know is my battery life is better and my performance is better.
John:
It's the same pitch as the M1 was over x86.
Marco:
Let's talk compatibility because I think that's key here because you're right that what everybody wants in the Windows world is we want to do things the way we've always done them.
Marco:
We want to run the software we've always run.
Marco:
We want to have it work with all the tools we already use, all the things we already know.
Marco:
We want it to integrate with all of our enterprise systems.
Marco:
We want it to run all of our enterprise software and have all our enterprise licenses transfer over to it.
Marco:
And we want it to be really cheap and easily dealt with in a fleet.
John:
that's what that's what microsoft's customers want and so does this actually deliver that in in the compatibility uh realm you think yeah so their their claim is that it's twice as fast as their previous extremely bad emulation right that doesn't mean anything they name checked rosetta they they in the presentation they literally name check rosetta they said it's you know it's just as efficient as apple's rosetta like
John:
Their target is 100% what Apple did with the M1.
John:
They've got software makers on board even better than Apple did because Microsoft actually knows how to talk to third parties where, like, the browser vendors have promised ARM version of their stuff.
John:
Photoshop is there.
John:
Obviously, Office is there because Microsoft knows how to port its own apps on, like, Apple.
John:
Their compatibility story is good.
John:
They put a claim in the presentation that was like, I've seen it.
John:
They use both 87 and 90 because I think they're just rounding.
John:
This is 87.
John:
Microsoft believes 87% of the total app minutes spent on a Copilot plus PC will be inside native apps.
John:
So they're not saying that 87% of the apps will have been ported.
John:
They're saying, look, the apps that people use every day, 87% of their time, they're going to be using a native app.
John:
But as we know from the M1, that doesn't even matter.
John:
If you have Rosetta Caliber emulation,
John:
The apps that aren't native, unless they're performance critical, people won't even notice, right?
John:
So their claim and their demos essentially say, this is an M1 situation.
John:
Most of the apps that you care about, most of your day is going to be spent in a native app.
John:
We made sure we put our apps and the ones that aren't native, you won't even notice.
John:
Like, that's their pitch.
John:
Unlike the hardware side, on the software side, they can deliver on that both by porting their software, because honestly, lots of people who use Windows use Microsoft software a lot of the time, and by getting third parties on board, which they seem to have done a pretty good job of.
John:
So, you know, we'll see what the market thinks about it.
John:
And there are other wrinkles that we'll get to a little bit.
John:
But that's what makes this time different.
John:
It's, well, two things.
John:
One, they have a good SoC made by ex-Apple people.
John:
And two, they actually have a compatibility story that appears to be Apple caliber.
John:
You know they're confident when they're literally name-checking, like, Rosetta.
John:
They constantly said MacBook Air.
John:
They said Apple.
John:
They said Rosetta.
John:
You don't throw out those names.
John:
You don't invite those comparisons if you know you're going to look terrible.
John:
So they are at least confident that they have met that bar.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
We should probably go back and talk a little bit about specifics.
Casey:
The Surface laptop is 13.8 inches.
Casey:
It is a 201 PPI screen at 120 hertz.
John:
Now let's just stop there.
John:
You know, in the PC world, they're not shy about giving you technology that is modern.
John:
They don't say, oh, well, this is the 13 inch low end laptop.
John:
So we're not going to give them 120 hertz screen.
John:
That's a pro feature.
John:
No.
John:
They just give it to you because it's a part that they can buy and it doesn't actually cost that much more than the 60 hertz part.
John:
So it has a slightly bigger screen than the MacBook Air, slightly lower PPI, but it's 120 hertz.
John:
This is like a MacBook Air with ProMotion in Apple parlance.
Marco:
Oh, and by the way, they're all touchscreens with pencil support.
Marco:
Yeah, of course they are.
Marco:
Every single one of them.
Casey:
Then there's the 15-inch, which is also 201 ppi.
Casey:
This is in comparison to the MacBook Air, both of which are 224 points per inch.
Casey:
Is it pixels or points in this context?
John:
Points, yeah.
Casey:
There are two USB-C ports, which are USB 4.
Casey:
And wouldn't you know it, there's one USB-A port, which is USB 3.1 on all of these.
John:
Yeah, it is interesting that they didn't, I mean, obviously, well, the MacBook Air doesn't have Thunderbolt, right?
John:
They're USB on the MacBook Air as well?
Casey:
No, I thought they were Thunderbolt.
Marco:
No, it's Thunderbolt.
Marco:
Everything's Thunderbolt now.
Marco:
Everything after the first, the MacBook 1.
Marco:
Everything after the 12-inch was real Thunderbolt.
John:
Anyway, Thunderbolt is an interesting Apple differentiator because, I know this is the whole USB 4 thing versus Thunderbolt is not that big a deal, but Thunderbolt still seems to be a thing that only Mac users really care about.
John:
But anyway, Microsoft does give you two ports plus that A port with USB 3.1 for the people who need it.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
There's a headphone jack.
Casey:
They all support three external 4K monitors plus the laptop screen.
Casey:
Let me tell you, of all the complaints I've heard about modern Apple laptops, I think the only one I've heard with any regularity is Apple.
Casey:
What do you mean I can't run a second screen?
Casey:
Which I think that has not changed.
John:
And now you can close the lid.
John:
You want to run it?
John:
Just close the lid.
John:
And so this, and again, if you don't want to watch this presentation, be assured that they weren't just doing this as like, and Apple users will know what this means.
John:
They were calling out the MacBook, like three external 4K monitors plus the laptop screen.
John:
This is because they know that this is a weakness of the MacBook Air.
John:
We've talked about this for multiple generations of the MacBook Air.
John:
Is this the one where they're going to do, you know, they decided not to put the display drivers forward.
John:
It actually is a hardware limitation.
John:
This is how they've chose to apportion, you know, for power usage and all these reasons why Apple didn't do this.
John:
And Microsoft is capitalizing by saying we don't just support one external monitor, three 4K monitors plus the laptop screen at the same time.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
There is Wi-Fi 7.
Casey:
There are touchscreens, as previously mentioned.
Casey:
It goes up to 600 nits with quote-unquote HDR, has Dolby Vision IQ.
Casey:
There is no notch.
John:
They said that in the presentation.
John:
Literally, they said, hey, our camera is built into the frame of the monitor.
John:
No notch.
John:
And why are they saying no notch?
John:
Because Apple's laptops have notches.
John:
They're calling out every single thing that is weird or bad or wrong about Wi-Fi 6.
John:
Does it Max have that?
John:
No, Max don't have Wi-Fi 6.
John:
We just got a 7 rather.
John:
We have 6E because Apple is not, you know,
John:
has not always been on the cutting edge of these standards.
John:
This has been true forever for PCs, but now this is like a PC worth paying attention to, and it's got all that PC stuff, and that PC stuff is, hey, whatever the latest standard is for the stuff, even on the lowest-end laptop, of course it's got Wi-Fi 7 because that's the current version of Wi-Fi, and we're a PC, and PCs have the newest stuff in them when you buy a new PC.
John:
The screen which they claim is HDR, I'm like, really?
John:
They put an HDR screen in this?
John:
No, it's 600 nits.
John:
don't get too excited about the hdr like it's hdr on the same way as the max studio is the display is hdr 600 nits is not hdr and by the way double vision iq is the thing where i mean again dolby vision with 600 nits max anyway double vision iq is a thing where it just does ambient light sensing to adjust the thing but honestly this is not a very bright screen but
John:
it is 120 hertz it is the dpi is ppi is a little low 201 versus 224 the resolution is a little bit lower than the macbook air it's 2300 instead of 2500 across right uh so this is kind of like a the pixels are a little chunkier the screen is a little bit bigger but as marco said it's a touch screen it has pen support 600 nits is not bad and no notch and how did they do it with no notch they just made the bezel a little bit thicker it's not that much thicker look at it it's fine apple could have done this but they didn't so yeah
John:
This next one kills me.
Casey:
There's a micro SDXC card reader, but only on the 15-inch.
John:
Look at that.
John:
You can put an SD card slot on the MacBook Air.
John:
You believe that, Apple?
John:
Has that ever been done before?
John:
Oh, it has been done before on the MacBook Air.
John:
On the, I believe, didn't the 11-inch have it?
John:
I know the 13-inch did.
John:
I think the 11 might have had it.
John:
And again, we celebrated when the SD card came to the MacBook Pro line.
John:
And at the time, I said, you know, you could put this on the MacBook Air.
John:
We're just so happy to have it on the MacBook Pro.
John:
Thank you, Apple.
John:
But here is competitive pressure.
John:
Hey, in a MacBook Air class machine, can you fit an SD card slot?
John:
Yeah, you can.
John:
Apple's done it before.
John:
They can do it again.
John:
Microsoft just did it only on the 15-inch.
Casey:
There is a fan, and there's a Daring Fireball post about this.
Casey:
There's a fan, which, you know, that's fine.
Casey:
I'm not near as bothered by this as I think you two are, but it is there.
John:
Yeah, so we'll start getting into this a little bit now.
John:
The rumor of the Snapdragon X thing was like, okay, it'll be competitive, but it'll use more power.
John:
It's like, oh, fans.
John:
There's a different power class of chip.
John:
The direct comparison really should be with the base MacBook Pro and not the MacBook Air, not the fanless MacBook Air.
John:
but as we'll see, there's some conflicting info.
John:
Microsoft is clearly targeting the MacBook Air.
John:
They're saying this is the MacBook Air class machine.
John:
It does have a fan, and the MacBook Air doesn't, so that's leaning us a little bit in the direction of maybe this is using a little bit more power than the MacBook Air's SoC.
John:
And that's what led me to say, okay, well, if this thing really is using more power, let's look at the battery size.
John:
Let's look at the battery capacity.
John:
Because the claims they make about the battery life are MacBook Air caliber, but maybe it just has a bigger battery.
John:
Like maybe this is a more power-hungry SoC.
John:
They put a bigger battery in it and that's how it can match the MacBook Air in battery life.
John:
But the battery sizes are almost exactly MacBook Air.
John:
So in the 13 inch, it's 54 watt hours and the MacBook Air is 52.6.
John:
In the 15 inch, it's 66 watt hours and the MacBook Air is 66.5.
John:
Like these batteries, it's like when car manufacturers produce a car that competes with some other company's car.
John:
in the same sort of model category and you look at the specs and you're like, wow, the wheelbase is one inch different.
John:
The rear seat room is like one inch.
John:
Like it's so clear that they target each other and they just match each other's specs exactly.
John:
Cause they don't want to, they don't want to be rejected in the market because they fall down in one category.
John:
So just what, you know, whatever the Toyota Camry does, we're going to do.
John:
Cause we're making, you know, a cord Camry or whatever.
John:
Like,
John:
You look at these specs and you're like, this is not near the airline limit of like 100 watt hours.
John:
So it's not like they all ended up at 100 because they were at the limit.
John:
These specs, like they're targeting the MacBook Air.
John:
They put the same size battery as the MacBook Air.
John:
So that is, once again, arguing towards that this SOC might be MacBook Air caliber in terms of power efficiency.
Marco:
Yeah, this is very promising for competition.
Marco:
Again, I'm so excited about this.
Marco:
I really hope that Windows customers actually start making this transition for lots of reasons.
Marco:
It's better for so many reasons that they do this.
Marco:
And number one for me is this is going to be a really exciting competition.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So continuing on, I don't even know what the source of this is anymore.
Casey:
I think it was The Verge.
John:
The Verge article, I think.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
For years, the MacBook Air has been able to smoke ARM-powered PC chips and Intel-based ones too, except this time around, the Surface pulled ahead on the first test.
Casey:
Then it won another test.
Casey:
and another after that.
Casey:
The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes it's now in a position to conquer the laptop market.
Casey:
So here we go.
Casey:
Microsoft's claims for the Snapdragon 10 or X Elite.
Casey:
See, it's actually X, I think, but I just said 10.
Casey:
It's Snapdragon X Elite.
Casey:
Up to 23% faster in peak multi-threaded performance and up to 58% faster in sustained multi-threaded performance.
John:
The second spec you read, you know what that spec says?
John:
our laptops have a fan that's the translation of that thing why is it 50 faster and sustained multi-threaded because the macbook air thermal throttles this is the our laptop has a fan spec because the 23 faster we'll get to that in a little bit like it has more cores than the m3 so okay well like i get it it's you know that's not that's not much of a bragging right has more cores it's using more power during that time i'm sure right
John:
58 faster and sustained multi-threaded what does that mean it just means we have a fan they they blow air on it so it doesn't throttle and that's why it's crushing the macbook air and which is again i don't blame the macbook air for that i love that it's fanless apple has other computers with fans that are better competition for this but that is them literally calling out their fan in a in a specific slide and
John:
So getting numbers on these things, I was trying to look up like the Geekbench.
John:
They put some Geekbench numbers up in their presentation.
John:
It's hard to find Geekbench numbers for the M4.
John:
There's tons of entries.
John:
Like, what do you mean it's hard?
John:
There's tons of entries, but they vary so much.
John:
So I'm like, well, what is, like, is one of these things sitting on top of a block of ice that's cooling it?
John:
Are these real numbers?
John:
So I'm, you know, the same thing with the Snapdragon thing.
John:
We just have preliminary numbers from Microsoft.
John:
People don't have these in their hands.
John:
So take all this with a tiny grain of salt, but...
John:
Here's what the Geekbench things look like.
John:
So Snapdragon X Elite, this is a 12-core CPU.
John:
It's 2700 single, 14,000 multi.
John:
The M3 is an 8-core CPU.
John:
So the fact that it's, oh, we get 23% faster and multi-threaded, well, you got a lot more cores there.
John:
So that's not surprising.
John:
And again, the M4 isn't out in the MacBook Air yet.
John:
So this is the time to pounce with your comparison.
John:
But the M3 still beats it in single core, 3100 compared to 2700.
John:
And multi-core, it's 11000 versus 14000.
John:
The M4-ish modified by this isn't an iPad, yada, yada, yada.
John:
The M4 just crushes all of this in single core.
John:
We talked about this before.
John:
Last show, I think we said it was like 3,700 single core, which would be the champ for any Mac ever.
John:
Now the numbers are in the 4,000s if you look at Geekbench.
John:
4,000 single core versus 2,700.
John:
The M4 is smushing the Snapdragon X Elite.
John:
But again, the M4 is not in the MacBook Air, so fair comparison.
John:
And multi-core, the M4 is a 10-core SoC, the CPU part of it.
John:
10 core versus 12 core snapdragon x elite it's basically matching it so i think the snapdragon x elite is probably m3 performance caliber not as good in single core a little bit better in multi-core it's got it's got to end up using more power than the m3 because it's got more cores so when you crank up all those 12 cores it's going to use more
John:
than the eight core uh but the m4 essentially bests it with two fewer cores in multi-core and crushes it in single core so i think apple is not like oh they've made the soc that's going to crush us but they what they have done is they've made a competitive soc it is competitive it it's it's specs its performance look good its power envelope if if you are to believe microsoft's battery life claims
John:
Its power envelope is also competitive.
John:
I think when they test this, they're going to find that the Apple ones still best it in battery life because the batteries are the same size and it's clear that the M3 uses less power, if only because it's 8-core versus 12-core.
John:
So watch for the benchmarks when people get these in their hands.
John:
But I think essentially that the rumors about the Snapdragon X were true, that it has comparable performance, but it uses a little bit more power.
John:
I think that the tests are going to bear that out.
John:
And because these laptops don't have bigger batteries, they're going to get slightly worse battery life than the Mac.
John:
book air but on the other hand they will beat them in multi-core because they have a fan and won't thermothrottle
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right, we already talked about compatibility.
Casey:
Then third-party support.
Casey:
Many of the biggest apps now natively support ARM chips.
Casey:
Photoshop, Dropbox, Zoom, Spotify, and other top entertainment apps like Prime and Hulu are all native ARM64 apps now.
Casey:
Google and many other browser makers are moving to ARM64, a native version of Chrome launched recently, followed by Opera just last week.
Casey:
Then also Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, and Microsoft Edge are all ARM64 native.
Casey:
Overall, Microsoft believes, and we talked about this a minute ago, that 87% of total app minutes spent on these Copilot Plus PCs will be inside native apps.
Casey:
And then we also should mention that there's a Microsoft-approved, it's not like sponsored by Microsoft, but it's a Microsoft-approved website that tracks how Windows games specifically play on ARM.
Casey:
This is worksonwa.com.
Casey:
What is WA?
Casey:
Windows on ARM?
John:
Windows on ARM.
John:
It's a terrible name.
John:
Works on Windows on ARM.
John:
But this is the website that I want to be keeping an eye on because one of the reasons I want RPCs, I want all those PC games to be ported to RPCs.
John:
Now, this is a tough sell.
John:
I understand that because lots of PC games are old.
John:
They're never going to get ported to whatever.
John:
But going forward, I would love it if modern PC games were cross-compiled.
John:
for x86 and arm and this website is tracking hey if you buy one of these arm uh pcs if you can check if if this game runs natively on arm and if it doesn't it might still run fine in emulation as many mac games did when apple made the transition but yeah it's not as if game makers are entirely ignoring arm we'll see how that goes as time goes on
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then AI.
Casey:
These Copilot Plus PCs are equipped with a neural processing unit from Qualcomm that hits 45 trillion operations per second of compute for AI tasks.
Casey:
That results in more AI task operations per watt than a MacBook Air M3 and NVIDIA's RTX 4060.
Casey:
The M4 is 38 tops.
Casey:
M3 is 18 tops.
Casey:
We already discussed.
John:
But again, the 8 versus 16 bed is tops is a crappy number.
John:
Tops is a crappy way to talk about these things.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
But here we are.
Casey:
They did a few demonstrations.
Casey:
They did a demo of a four-person, I don't know if it was literally Zoom, it probably was Teams, but a four-person chat or a conference, if you will, a meeting, and everyone was speaking a different language and it was translating the, it was subtitling basically live as they were talking.
Casey:
It was very impressive.
Casey:
And then they also did a draw along image generation thing where a woman drew like some mountains and some flowers and you could crank how creative the AI got.
Casey:
Like, did it stick with basically what she drew or did it get totally off the wall?
Casey:
And they were the draw along thing.
Casey:
I mean, I'm not an artist.
Casey:
That was like, yeah, whatever.
Casey:
But the multi-language live translation, that was pretty slick.
John:
Yeah, so again, these things are called Copilot plus PCs, and these are the features they demonstrated.
John:
There are obviously way more.
John:
There's way more things that Copilot does, and there's some other demos, but they were leaning heavily on the live translation and the draw-along stuff.
John:
In Microsoft Build, they talked about this more, but the pitch for what they've done with Windows to add AI to it,
John:
is that there's an API, there's libraries they can use or whatever, but essentially Apple, or I keep saying Apple, what Microsoft said was that they are running 40 different AI models within Windows to provide all these services.
John:
It's not just like one large language model that they're running locally.
John:
It's not like they send all requests out to OpenAI.
John:
They're running 40 different models locally, plus also sending stuff out to presumably OpenAI things.
John:
And there's a software story for application developers to do this type of stuff.
John:
And this kind of sets the bar for Apple because they're adding features to Windows that if you want to make an application on Windows and you want to leverage some of these features that are available to you, and then Windows itself has these things woven throughout it where you've seen so many...
John:
ai branded things where it's like in some random application there's a text box where you can send a string and we'll send the chat gpt and tell you what it sent back or send it to an image generator and tell you what it sent back there was even that whole thing with like the logitech mouse drivers adding oh and this feature in the mouse driver click the mouse button and we'll open a text box wherever your cursor is
John:
And you can send a message to ChatGPT that is so sort of bolt on, not understanding what the value might be.
John:
Microsoft is trying to say, here are the things you could do that you couldn't do before.
John:
Now, any audio that plays anywhere on the system, because again, they make Windows so they can make this happen.
John:
Any audio anywhere on the system in any app, you can just say,
John:
uh turn on live translation so it subtitles this and it doesn't do every language i think it translates everything to english it supports like 40 languages blah blah but like that's an os level feature that apps don't have to like add support for or whatever it just exists on the system that's the type of thing that we were hoping that we hope apple will do with with its
John:
rolling ai out and it's not just like oh we just have one model and we run everything through it and it does what it does they have many models working in tandem so anything with the draw along thing you have to give it a prompt and then you start drawing and it copies it and this is questionable usefulness that's a little bit more like let's send something to an image generation but there again there are apis for that so i'm sure i build they had way more story on the ai angle but for laptops that are again branded as ai pcs
John:
The part that at least everyone on this show is most excited about has nothing to do with the AI and everything to do with these look like they're good laptops.
John:
Finally, after, you know, since the M1 came out, PC laptops have been not good compared to everything that Apple makes.
John:
And now these this line of laptops appear to be good.
Casey:
They really do look impressive.
Marco:
I'm excited about both aspects, though.
Marco:
When I look at AI features of various platforms so far, Google had their vaporware keynote where they demoed a whole bunch of stuff that you can't use.
Marco:
I'm sure Apple's going to give us a similarly vapory keynote in a couple of weeks.
John:
But Apple will ship the stuff that it shows probably, maybe in spring.
Marco:
I have a feeling a lot of Apple's announcements are probably going to be like later this year and coming next year, you know, like a lot of that, you know.
Marco:
But I have not seen a ton of, quote, AI features that actually hold up in practice and reality that are really compelling.
Marco:
But I have seen some.
Marco:
And for every person, it's only going to take one or two of those really killer features before they're like, oh, I have to have that.
Marco:
I will buy new hardware or possibly even change platforms just to get that one thing that is very high value to me.
Marco:
And that's why I really hope Apple's taking this seriously, because this is going to have a lot of disruption.
Marco:
It already is doing some level of disruption, and it's only going to get more so as the platforms integrate this.
Marco:
Because here's what's going to happen.
Marco:
Google is going to go all in on LLM-based and generative-based features in Android, system-wide.
Marco:
Microsoft is going all in on AI things in Windows, system-wide.
Marco:
Apple is going to face a lot of pressure to do that same thing in their OSs because the system integration is where so much of this value can get unlocked.
Marco:
There's a lot of amazing functionality that people will not only really enjoy and will very highly value, but they'll come to expect it.
Marco:
Imagine if you had a phone today, if you wanted to make a phone platform today that didn't have a basic voice assistant functionality.
Marco:
Every platform has had voice assistants now for so long.
Marco:
People take it for granted.
Marco:
People assume, of course, I can talk to my phone and it'll try to make sense of what I said and do something.
Marco:
That same expectation is going to arise in phone and PC operating systems whether Apple makes it there or not with theirs.
Marco:
And if they don't start matching some of those features in compelling ways, they're going to fall behind and they're going to start losing people and they're going to have a hard time attracting new people.
Marco:
That's why this is disruptive even though I think we can all look at a lot of these features that are out there today and say, yeah, that kind of sucks or that thing they did that failed or that gave them a wrong answer.
Marco:
Yeah, that's going to happen.
Marco:
That's going to keep happening.
Marco:
But not everything fails and not everything sucks and not everything is wrong.
Marco:
Some of those things – everyone is throwing so much spaghetti at the wall right now because there is so much value to be had.
Marco:
And yeah, most of it's not going to turn into anything.
Marco:
Most of it's going to flop.
Marco:
Most of it is going to suck or fail or be better done with simpler tools.
Marco:
But there are going to be some of those things that stick.
Marco:
It's going to happen.
Marco:
It's already starting to happen.
Marco:
So to me, what is exciting is seeing Google and Microsoft go straight for OS integration.
Marco:
Go right for the jugular.
Marco:
Make Apple do this at OS level.
Marco:
Make Apple integrate all this good stuff into Siri.
Marco:
The crown jewel is like, get this into Siri.
Marco:
Whether Apple is doing that, I think remains a huge open question.
Marco:
I don't think anybody has any solid rumors or intel either direction on that.
Marco:
We've only heard like little bits and pieces like, oh, they might be improving it.
Marco:
There is.
Marco:
We'll get to it in overtime.
Marco:
oh good okay uh because like i like that to me is like this all this all this stuff wants to be os level integrated and on in the phone especially it all wants to be integrated into the system voice assistant and siri is just dying for this and and i hope apple knows that and is and has already started taking lots of action in that direction but until then we're going to see some really exciting stuff from microsoft and google and that's
Marco:
Awesome.
Marco:
As Apple fans, again, that's great for us, not only because they're going to do stuff that Apple won't and can't for a long time, but then that'll force Apple to get better on their end.
Marco:
That'll make for great stuff for everybody.
Marco:
So again, if you're looking at this AI stuff and saying, eh, nobody needs any of that,
Marco:
Trust me, that's going to be a short-sighted view.
Marco:
This is not cryptocurrency.
Marco:
This is real.
Marco:
This actually has real value to more people.
Marco:
It's similarly inefficient in terms of energy resource usage, which we should get to.
Marco:
But there is real value here that is being created whether you're on this train or not.
Marco:
So just be ready for it.
Marco:
And I hope Apple is.
John:
I think I mean, obviously, we don't know what Apple is going to put out because WDC hasn't come yet.
John:
But I think the the rumored Apple approach here and what I expect them to do is a comfortable position for Apple, because as you noted, like Google and Microsoft are throwing everything against the wall.
John:
I think the the quote unquote AI features that will be compelling, that will stick, that will become the new normal are essentially the ones that if you show them to somebody, they would have no idea that it's AI branded at all.
John:
So to give an example that essentially everybody has now, background removal in photos.
John:
Apple's had that on the last two versions of its OS, right?
John:
That's touted as an AI feature powered by neural engine, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But from a practical perspective, people using it don't have to know or care anything about AI.
John:
They just know, and it's, you know, this will be differentiated for these copilot plus PCs.
John:
I'm just used to the idea that anytime I see an image, I can tear the person off of the background.
Casey:
Right.
John:
That just becomes a feature that I expect to exist.
John:
And if somebody buys a Copilot plus PC and they've never used this ability before, and now they have the ability to easily separate people from the background or remove objects from the images or just some other things that people have demoed, like Adobe's new Lightroom has, you know, everyone has that now.
John:
And yeah, they brand it with AI or whatever.
John:
But users are just like, oh, this is now a thing I can do with my computer.
John:
So if you have a Copilot Plus PC and you're used to any time system wide that you see an image, you can pull the person off the background.
John:
And then you try to use your co-workers Intel powered Windows laptop that they bought at the same time you got the Copilot Plus PC.
John:
And you literally can't do that because I believe Microsoft is gating some of these features Apple style on the presence of the NPU.
John:
Like, oh, we could do it with the Intel things and it would be slower and yada yada.
John:
But let's artificially semi not really artificially gate this on the NPU.
John:
You're going to be like, well, your PC is broken.
John:
It's going to feel like I do on my Intel when there's some feature that Intel Mac when there's a feature that comes out that's only available on Apple Silicon Macs.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Some of it's legit, some of it's not legit, but it's a way to get people to say, like, I want a PC that can do that because they just expect it to be done.
John:
The multi-language translation is that AI, large language.
John:
You don't need to know how that's implemented.
John:
You just know, oh, in the new version of Windows, anywhere there's audio, I can see it subtitled in any app with no support from it.
John:
That doesn't look like an AI feature.
John:
That's not you drawing a picture and AI completing it.
John:
That's not you chatting with a large language model like it's your friend.
John:
That is just a feature of the operating system.
John:
And you don't have to know that they're using a large language model or if they're doing it on device or if they're sending it out.
John:
You don't have to know any of that.
John:
It just becomes like the status quo, like kind of how we all give examples from Apple's operating system.
John:
Oh, now anywhere there's text in an image on a Mac, you can pull it out.
John:
Because that's a feature Apple added.
John:
What did they use to implement?
John:
We don't care.
John:
You just eventually get used to the idea that in the system-wide image viewer, if there's text in an image, you can select it and it will try to OCR it, right?
John:
And there have been third-party products that did that before, but you just get used to that being a feature.
John:
I think that's where Apple is going to concentrate.
John:
My big question is, and we'll get to, again, maybe in overtime, is what about the things that clearly are AI where you describe a picture and it draws it for you?
John:
You're chatting with a chatbot or whatever.
John:
What is the utility of those?
John:
Will Apple feel like it has to compete in that area?
John:
But like...
John:
To your point, Marco, about these things being useful, these are just going to be features of an operating system that we just assume that every Mac and PC can do.
John:
And it's already happening.
John:
We just don't notice because the branding isn't as in your face.
John:
But under the covers, a lot of these translation, for example, I think the translation is using LLM to do translation.
John:
And the background image processing is using the AI powered image, whatever stuff like those are the features that I think will stick.
John:
I have a lot of questions about the, you know, chat GPT type things, even though they get all the press like, oh, that's what AI means.
John:
That's not the most slam dunk sure thing.
John:
AI powered features and Microsoft and Google probably they're just going to do them all.
John:
And, you know, the bad ones will fade away and the good ones will stick.
John:
Apple thus far has only been doing the features that are clearly useful and will stick like the ones they've already implemented that I mentioned already.
John:
they called them ml but like the branding wasn't that big of a deal but the bottom is they're useful features that are max that we all just get used to existing and if they went away we would be sad about them and there is some you know quote-unquote ai ml tech behind them so it's legit so i think that's what apple is going to end up doing is do just do the features that stick and let everyone else throw the spaghetti at the wall and they'll just pay attention to what actually does stick
Marco:
Well, and again, you can look all over the system.
Marco:
You can see so many features that are already there now, but that could be done better with an LM-based approach.
John:
Yeah, that's what we said when we were talking about the AI sauce.
John:
There are as many things that Apple's trying to do, not well.
Marco:
And look, they already mentioned last summer in the We Won't Say AI WWDC keynote, where they mentioned things like that they're using a transformer-based autocorrect for the keyboard and some of the dictation features and stuff like that.
Marco:
yeah autocorrect for the keyboard that is a great application for llm based uh you know algorithms uh dictation of recognizing what you're saying just through the dictation microphone thing on the keyboard again huge huge opportunity there which some of which are already doing uh for improvements using modern ai techniques and modern ai models translation right which apple has a translation api right that could be better use llm translation is huge like that's a massive you know possible application there
Marco:
And then, again, think of Siri.
Marco:
Even if all they do with the LLMs is make Siri – Make Siri do what it's already supposed to do.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Make Siri have an LLM front end maybe that – forgive me.
Marco:
I'm not an LLM expert yet.
Marco:
I swear I'm going to get to it one of these days.
Marco:
But like suppose they can have a model in front.
Marco:
First of all, there's going to be some modern AI techniques involved in figuring out what you say.
Marco:
But Siri is actually pretty good at figuring out what you say a lot of the time.
Marco:
It's what it does with it that is oftentimes the problem.
Marco:
Well, what if you can use a model to help parse what you say and choose what other back-end service or model should answer this question that you said?
Marco:
There's opportunities there.
Marco:
What if they can – if you ask it a factual question and right now they just say,
Marco:
I found these results on the web.
Marco:
You can view them on your iPhone or whatever.
Marco:
Like, what if in the background it says one moment and it actually fetches those three web pages that it found and it uses AI summarization to roughly try to tell you the answer to your question via voice like you asked it for?
Marco:
Like there are so many opportunities there where existing features, things like transcribing the contents of voicemails, like basic stuff that we have already in the system that could be made better here.
Marco:
And then, of course, as we talked about about a month ago, the idea of replacing a lot of the like Siri intent shortcut kind of API surface with let the app just say what this thing does.
Marco:
And have Siri be able to see that.
Marco:
And then if somebody asks, hey, give me a list of the chapters of the current podcast in Overcast, without ever having created a shortcut to do that, it can look and see, okay, Overcast vends this action, this action, and this action.
Marco:
This one says get list of chapters.
Marco:
To be able to map that and then give a response without ever having created a shortcut or set anything up.
Marco:
There is so much opportunity for things like that that are not anything like generate me an image that won't offend anybody.
John:
Or ask me an arbitrary question that will answer you with some weird chat thing, right?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Or write me a paper for my fifth grade homework.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
for modern AI-based approaches and models to make existing and only slightly advanced features better on the operating system that already exists that we use all the time.
Marco:
And again, as John was saying a few minutes ago, you don't even think of that as AI.
Marco:
You think of it as I'm typing on my phone or I'm dictating to my phone or my phone is telling me what this voicemail message said or whatever.
Marco:
You think of that or you think, I just asked Siri a thing and it worked somehow, which is a rare thing sometimes.
Marco:
You don't care if that's AI.
Marco:
You just want this to work better.
Marco:
And every year or every few years, Apple does usually revamp some of these systems.
Marco:
Hey, we found a new ML-based approach to do this better or whatever.
Marco:
This is just the next step of that.
Marco:
This is a big step.
Marco:
This has really, really big gains when used well.
Marco:
And that's what we're hoping Apple's going to do is use this well.
Marco:
And I don't care if they don't match every feature that everyone else is trying.
Marco:
That's not their style.
Marco:
They never have.
Marco:
They never will.
Marco:
I just want them to match the good ones or maybe get there before, maybe be first to some of the good ones.
Marco:
And that's the part like I really hope they're not sleeping on this because there is so much opportunity for the stuff they've already decided is important to them to just get better or work more reliably.
Marco:
that's what I want at least to start.
Marco:
And then we can start getting more exciting stuff down the road.
John:
One brief little bit of hardware before we move on to this final thing.
John:
I know we're running along here.
John:
As we said, a bunch of PC makers are making Copilot Plus PCs, which is good.
John:
They also announced the new Surface Pro, which is their name for their sort of convertible tablet thing.
John:
It's like an iPad, but with a keyboard or whatever.
John:
It's got an OLED.
John:
It's 13 inch.
John:
It's 267 PPI, which is close to the iPad Pro's 264 PPI.
John:
The screen is a little bit higher res.
John:
It's got two USB-C ports.
John:
On an iPad?
John:
On a tablet?
John:
Are you allowed to do that?
John:
Microsoft did it.
John:
Wi-Fi 7.
John:
Are you allowed to do that on an iPad?
John:
Yes, you are.
John:
Bluetooth 5.4. iPad Pro just has 5.3 because this is a PC.
John:
It has the latest version of everything.
John:
Detachable keyboard with trackpad.
John:
Integrated haptic pen.
John:
Let me know if this sounds familiar to you.
John:
They use carbon fiber in their keyboard.
John:
They have something they call a bold keyset, which makes the text on the keycaps bolder so they're easier to see.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
Apple does everything fine and low contrast because it looks beautiful and elegant.
John:
And unlike the software where you can turn on increased contrast, you can't turn that on in the hardware.
John:
Microsoft will turn it on the hardware for you by putting bold on the key sets.
John:
Kudos to Microsoft.
Casey:
Very quickly, maybe this has been a thing for a while and I just didn't realize it, but I was not aware of...
Casey:
the detachable part of the detachable keyboard for their tablets and that is very slick so because they believe in kickstands which i'm not a big kickstand person like i don't love that but here's the advantage of it you can stand up the quote-unquote ipad the surface pro on its own and then you can have the keyboard somewhere that's more ergonomic and or convenient convenient and it has a little like tray in it for the pencil or whatever they call their stylist imagine that
John:
Yeah, their pencil is flat, which is not a great idea.
John:
But the advantage is, hey, where am I supposed to put the pencil?
John:
Instead of magnetically connecting the pencil to the side of their tablet, they have a little slot for it in the detachable keyboard.
John:
I think this is not the right choice because I think I'd rather have a round pencil while drawing.
John:
rather than you know and stow it somewhere else rather than because i feel like you spend more of your time drawing with if you actually use the pencil the drawing time is the important time not the storage time as this pencil seems optimized for storage but it is convenient especially if you don't plan on using the pencil a lot that there is a place to put it where it is securely kept and this is the keyboard that marco wanted it just unplugs it doesn't have a weird flappy thing around the back why because this case you said it doesn't need to hold up the ipad doesn't need to hold up the tablet part the tablet the tablet part holds itself up with the kickstand which i
John:
I'm also not a big kickstand fan, but this is the advantage.
John:
The kickstand lets the tablet part stand on its own, and the keyboard can just detach and attach very easily.
John:
It even has a little foldable triangle thing to prop up the keyboard, right?
John:
And you may be wondering, what operating system does this thing run?
John:
It just runs Windows.
John:
Because Windows works with touch.
John:
Windows works with the pen.
Marco:
This can just be your laptop and it can be both a tablet and a laptop because it has a touchscreen and it runs a PCOS and everything.
Marco:
It can just be your one thing as long as that one thing is Windows.
John:
This is not like a separate product from like, oh, you said the Surface laptop but the Surface Pro must run a different OS that's more limited.
John:
No, it just runs Windows.
John:
And this has been Microsoft's thing since forever, since Windows 8 or whatever.
John:
Their whole idea is, hey, we have an OS that works with touch, it works with this, it works with that.
John:
They don't have a separate mobile operating system for phones they used to for Microsoft.
John:
They don't have a phone operating system.
John:
And their tablet operating system is just Windows.
John:
Think of it as a convertible Mac laptop with a 13-inch OLED screen.
John:
It's not a dual-layer.
John:
Is it a dual-layer?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I didn't see the specs on it.
John:
I don't think so.
John:
I don't think it's a dual-layer OLED.
John:
But anyway...
John:
Just FYI, in the PC world, they make different... And this runs a Snapdragon, the whole nine yards that we were talking about, but they have an iPad Pro competitor as well, and it is pretty strong hardware-wise.
Marco:
What I like about Microsoft's hardware is that
Marco:
Apple for a lot of – a lot of Apple's designs, they're very opinionated of course and a lot of that comes with the priority of like design purity over practicality.
Marco:
We've talked a lot about this before.
Marco:
It was much worse I think in the end of the Johnny Ive era.
Marco:
But a lot of times the design purity for Apple is more important and they are willing to sacrifice usefulness in order to achieve it if necessary.
Marco:
And so examples of that are like getting rid of old ports because they just feel dirty or they can't make it quite as thin with the old port or whatever.
Marco:
The notch is a huge compromise in that way because they don't want the top of the screen bezel to be thicker than the side bezels.
Marco:
Like all these new Microsoft displays.
John:
Asymmetry makes Johnny Ive cry.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
All these new Microsoft displays that have no notch, it's because the top bezel is thicker than the side bezels.
Marco:
Like they used to be on Apple laptops.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Like they used to be on everything for that reason, to fit a webcam.
Marco:
So Microsoft is willing to say, you know what?
Marco:
We will sacrifice the visual design purity to give our customers what they want.
Marco:
Like the bolt keycaps.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Microsoft is willing to do that.
Marco:
Apple will not sacrifice design purity or, say, economics.
Marco:
in a lot of cases, that really would benefit their customers.
Marco:
But Apple said, no, we don't want to make that, so we just won't.
Marco:
Whereas Microsoft is willing to let customers drive the design a little more.
Marco:
And sometimes that's bad, and sometimes that's good.
Marco:
And again, I think that that forms the basis for great competition.
Marco:
If so many people are saying just over the last few weeks with the new iPad release, so many people are saying, hey, we would love if the iPad was pushed a little bit more towards the Mac in terms of certain capabilities or whatever else.
Marco:
Microsoft is saying, we'll give you both.
Marco:
Here, it's one thing that runs our full PCOS.
Marco:
You can do everything with this one thing.
Marco:
People want Apple to make touchscreen Macs.
Marco:
Microsoft's been making touchscreen PCs for, what, 12, 15 years at least?
Marco:
More than that.
Marco:
Microsoft is willing to – and the PC world in general, but I think Microsoft does a good job of it.
Marco:
They're willing to meet customer needs where they are.
Marco:
If a customer says, hey, we want this thing to do everything and be everything, and as a result, it has to look just a little bit like the Homer Simpson car –
Marco:
Microsoft will say, fine, this is what you want.
Marco:
We will give you what you want.
John:
Or PC vendors, even if Microsoft not, right?
John:
Because they're not the only ones who make the hardware.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Although what you were saying about competition, though, you said this multiple times that you're so excited for competition, but you also just, what you just said now should sort of dampen your hopes.
John:
Thanks.
John:
Right, so like...
John:
i i also agree that this is good competition i hope it wakes apple up and makes them do things that they otherwise wouldn't do like with the ram and stuff like that but here's the thing historically speaking back when both windows and the mac operating system were on x86 during that golden period when the you know performance uh battery life everything of the laptops were essentially comparable because they were all using the same intel chips right during that time
John:
Apple removed so much stuff from their laptops and made them so bad.
John:
And there was tons of PC competition that was exactly comparable power wise because they were literally using the same Intel chips.
John:
And that did not motivate Apple to change.
John:
Like we were like, oh, if we get to a period where the PC laptops are competitive, that'll make Apple change its ways and do better with its laps.
John:
Like they were being crushed.
John:
in terms of feature set like when they went to like the all usb all thunderbolt ports or whatever no sd card slot no hdmi or whatever you could buy a million pc laptops that had exactly the same performance that had all the ports you ever wanted that had higher resolution screens that had like faster versions of the same uh cpu that were cheaper that had more ram that had more ssds and it was just like apples to apples comparison they're all on intel and that did not motivate apple to change and
John:
And so I want to believe that they're going to see this and feel motivated to like, oh, we got to keep up with Microsoft here.
John:
But I've just lived through a period in which Apple did not feel compelled to compete and, in fact, continued to make its laptops worse and worse and more and more limited while the exactly comparable or better PC laptops were not so constrained.
John:
So...
John:
Now, that was a different Apple.
John:
Johnny Ive was there at the time.
John:
Different regime, right?
John:
Before Apple's recommitment to the Mac, which we applaud, before Apple Silicon.
John:
I know today's Apple is different, but I'm not 100% confident that Apple will see this and say...
John:
We need to keep up with the Joneses.
John:
We should rethink the base RAM on not the M4 MacBook Air, but on the M5 MacBook Air.
John:
Let's think about 16 gigs.
John:
Are they going to do that because of these, or were they going to do that anyway?
John:
And it's like...
John:
We'll see.
John:
Like they've never felt compelled to be like, oh, we got to have Wi-Fi 7 because PCs do.
John:
No, Apple has never done that.
John:
They're like, oh, you know, we're always a little bit behind, but it's fine.
John:
Right.
John:
That is more of the Apple way.
John:
I hope these laptops and light a fire under their butt.
John:
But again, Surface Pro has existed for ages.
John:
It's just now it's way better because of the Snapdragon, you know, SoC.
John:
But convertible PCs with touchscreens and pens.
John:
Like, this is not a new product.
John:
And has that improved the iPad Pro?
John:
Maybe, maybe that's why the iPad Pro has gotten better in the ways that it has, but it almost seems like, I mean, from our sort of insular Apple world perspective, and maybe also from Apple's insular perspective, being Apple, that the only thing that seems to motivate Apple to change
John:
are its own customers like i really do feel like the reason apple's laptops got better is because of the the sadness of apple's laptop customers you know i mean like that it was because apple customers were saying mac laptops used to be good but now i'm unhappy with this one
John:
And it doesn't matter what was going on in the PC laptop world almost.
John:
It's like the only thing that can change Apple are its own customers.
John:
The sadness of its own customers is saying, we feel like the Mac has been abandoned.
John:
We think the laptop should have an HDMI port and an SD.
John:
I'm not saying like we on this podcast, but I'm saying like Apple's customers writ large.
John:
I think that's what has motivated Apple to come around on the Mac to make all the improvements that they have made.
John:
to rededicate themselves to the Mac.
John:
And it wasn't the fact that the PC laptops had existed for years and years that were better in all the ways that Apple's laptops were bad during the Intel era.
Casey:
All right, before we go, we should bring up Microsoft Recall because this has been kind of a pet thing for the three of us over the last few months.
Casey:
John, what is Microsoft Recall?
John:
It's been longer than a few months.
John:
So you may be familiar with this feature because we've talked about it on the show many times.
John:
We talked about it.
John:
We called it Lifestreams, which is a feature that I've wanted for years.
John:
And then there was a feature for the Mac called Rewind that would form a similar function.
John:
Microsoft calls it Recall.
John:
If you heard our past shows about Rewind on the Mac, you know what this is.
John:
If you know what timeline was in Windows 10, if you happen to be a Windows user, you know the idea here.
John:
Keeps track of stuff that happens on your computer so you can retrieve it later.
John:
Rewind approach on the Mac was that it would essentially take a screenshot of your screen every few seconds and OCR'd and store it in a big database so that you can ask questions later and it could look it up in your timeline and, you know, do translation, not translation, transcription of things that happen in voice calls.
John:
And, you know, the rewind feature, right?
John:
Microsoft is building this into their operating system.
John:
Again, they tried to build a feature like this into Windows 10.
John:
called timeline that one didn't work out as well because it required application developers to integrate with it and microsoft does have a little bit of a tough time getting its application developers to integrate new apis in a timely manner so that one didn't catch on but they're taking another run at it and they are essentially using the rewind approach
John:
They're going to screenshot the screen.
John:
They're going to OCR it.
John:
They're going to throw large language models at it.
John:
They're going to get, they have a cool interface scrubbing through your timeline.
John:
And they've even got one better than rewind because guess what?
John:
They're Microsoft.
John:
They make windows.
John:
So not only can you see stuff from your past and search for it, but also like they give an example of like, oh, there was some text and it's like, oh, it turns out that text was in a PowerPoint slide.
John:
You can click on it in the recall timeline and it will jump you right into PowerPoint to that slide.
John:
Application level integration.
John:
which Rewind can't do because they don't make the operating system and they don't make PowerPoint.
John:
But Microsoft can do it, and they did.
John:
Surprisingly, to me anyway, PC users and people who don't listen to this show and have no idea what Rewind is and don't know what a live stream is are flipping out about this for privacy reasons.
John:
I feel like on this show we've had the privacy discussion before many times.
John:
It's the same privacy story as Rewind, essentially.
John:
Oh, it's all local.
John:
It's encrypted.
John:
You can turn it off.
John:
You can exclude applications.
John:
There's no smarts in it to automatically exclude passwords and stuff, which is flipping people out.
John:
I'm assuming you can just turn this feature off.
John:
This is one of those features that, obviously, I love the utility of.
John:
I love the idea of.
John:
I see the privacy implications.
John:
I do not have Rewind installed on my system for multiple reasons.
John:
One, I feel like I don't want the performance.
John:
Two, I'm not sure about the...
John:
privacy angle of it as well.
John:
And three, I've always imagined that it would be better if implemented by the platform owner.
John:
So Microsoft is the platform owner.
John:
They're implementing this.
John:
I think this features like this are essentially...
John:
inevitable and will be useful but there will be a growing pains period when people freak out about it when there actually are privacy concerns because microsoft hasn't thought through all the bad things that can be done with us right we're in that period now so while i'm excited about this technology and this feature i agree with the caution of like essentially it's basically impossible that microsoft or rewind or any of these companies have gotten this right on the first try
John:
There are going to be trials and tribulations.
John:
There are going to be problems with it.
John:
But the utility, the utility of being able to do this, of being able to say, where was that thing that I saw earlier today or yesterday?
John:
And especially throwing large language models at it so you can ask, you know, plain English questions and get reasonable answers from your history that it has saved securely.
John:
And being able to find the thing and click on it and jump into the application that had that file open to the exact part that you, like...
John:
microsoft is taking a step in that direction this is a great example of what marco was saying before of like microsoft being willing to do something that apple we can't imagine apple doing this rewind it it's great that it was a third party thing they did it's really really cool that's why i was excited about that product but do you think at wwdc apple is going to have a system-wide screen screen recording and cataloging thing
John:
I don't think they will.
John:
For the privacy reasons alone, Apple is not ready to try to do a feature like this in a privacy-preserving way, I think.
John:
Prove me wrong, Apple.
John:
Show me the Apple Rewind built into all of your operating systems.
John:
I will give you the big thumbs up, but this is such a hard problem.
John:
that right now, you know, third parties are taking a run at it, and so is Microsoft.
John:
Apple will, I think, have to do this eventually, but eventually it could be decades.
John:
Or it could be two years from now.
John:
We'll see how much this catches on, right?
John:
Because, again, Microsoft tried this in Windows 10, didn't work out.
John:
This is their second run at it.
John:
Usually Microsoft takes three tries to get something right, so we'll see how it goes.
John:
But this is all part of the Copilot Plus PC.
John:
You need the NPU to do the recognition and the LLM and the blah, blah, blah.
John:
This is...
John:
another way to try to sell these new pcs to people because they can do things that your pc can't do uh and is it an artificial gate is it a marketing gate or is it real because of the mpu or we kill your battery otherwise you know i think is rewind uh apple silicon only i think it is because it uses all the the soc like there is there are legitimate reasons to to gate this right and also it eats up your disk space and you know there's there's
John:
Lots of caveats about this, but links in the show notes where you can read more about it.
John:
But I think features like this have utility that is undeniable if and when we can figure out how to do them in a secure, tractable way that everybody understands and is okay with.
John:
We're not there yet.
John:
clearly because again i've seen so much outcry about this so people like i can't believe this what spyware microsoft's taking screenshots of my screen like people who have not internalized have not had months to internalize the idea have not had years since lifestream to internalize the idea of this are flabbergasted in the same way that if you took someone from 1982 and explain you're going to carry a rectangle in your pocket that keeps track of your location and transmits it to google headquarters they'd be like what it's tracking you everywhere you go with satellites
John:
We're all okay with that now.
John:
It's been worked out to the degree that humanity is comfortable with having GPS in our phones.
John:
Yes, there are still security concerns with GPS.
John:
Yes, a lot of people don't like it to be sent to Google and only trust Apple with it or whatever.
John:
And some people may disable GPS, right?
John:
But like in general, something would be...
John:
that inconceivably privacy invasive to someone in the 70s or 80s is now something that the world just accepts you're going to have a thing in your pocket that tracks your location and by the way sends that location usually over the network somewhere you know if only so your family can find you with find my friends or whatever right to either one of the world's biggest corporations or one of the world's biggest advertising corporations right that the government can spy on you like oh yeah easily
John:
yeah so this there's an overton window situation here with with uh these rewind technologies but the utility is there i just think the implementation is going to take a little bit more work and so i think apple will have to have an answer for this but i really doubt this is the year that apple is going to have an answer this and like i said i think apple has to be the one to answer this because to do this feature well and correctly it has to be in the platform um
John:
and ideally it would be in the platform in a way that third parties could augment it but that's not the apple way and even microsoft's not doing that so we'll see how it goes but yeah that's yeah by the way uh copilot plus pcs can also do this and i the final note i know we are running on here but the final note on i copilot plus pcs i will just add that uh you may have been surprised if we just heard us talk about this event
John:
You'd be surprised to hear that the Intel CEO and the AMD CEO were on video talking during this.
John:
What did they have to say?
John:
And what they had to say was, we still make PC stuff.
John:
It's good.
John:
So but here's the thing.
John:
And here's the here's the big the big the big sad for me, because I want PCs to go to ARM.
John:
This is one SOC, the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus.
John:
I mean, it's two variants of the same SOC, right?
John:
It's a MacBook Air class SOC.
John:
Other PCs exist that are not MacBook Air class.
John:
Faster ones, more powerful ones, right?
John:
There is no ARM answer to that.
John:
Microsoft does not have a Snapdragon X Elite Pro, Snapdragon X Elite Max, Snapdragon X Elite Ultra.
John:
They don't have that.
John:
It's as if Apple went to ARM and introduced the M1 and there were no other M chips.
John:
Just the M1.
John:
AMD and Intel are still an incredibly important part of the PC market because there's no, like all the more powerful AMD, there's nothing for them.
John:
There's no, I mean, right now there isn't, right?
John:
So there's no denying, there's no getting around them.
John:
And I don't know how Apple's, I keep doing it.
John:
I don't know how Microsoft's going to deal with this because all these great features they rolled out, these require copal outposts.
John:
And I'm sure next generation Intel and AMD chips are,
John:
We'll have 40 tops and we'll be able to qualify and so on and so forth.
John:
I don't want that though.
John:
Like we can't go on with the some PCs have ARM and some PCs have Intel and some PCs have AMD.
John:
Microsoft, just pick a horse and get your whole, get the whole PC market.
John:
You can do it.
John:
I believe in you.
John:
Get the whole PC market onto something.
John:
And ARM is good because ARM doesn't necessarily just mean Qualcomm because other people can make ARM chips too.
John:
So it's not like you're stuck with one vendor.
John:
You'd still have an AMD Intel, right?
John:
Intel can make ARM chips.
John:
AMD can make ARM chips.
John:
Let's all make ARM chips.
John:
Can we all do that?
John:
Can we all get on the same platform again?
John:
The answer right now is we can't because they just have one MacBook Air caliber slash low-end MacBook Pro caliber SoC.
John:
And every other processor in the entire PC market is Intel or AMD.
John:
So...
John:
We're not there yet, but I can see in the distance a way to get there, and I really hope this time Microsoft is able to get everybody onto the ARM bandwagon.
Marco:
I think this is fine for now.
Marco:
First of all, just volume-wise, everyone buys this MacBook Air class laptop.
John:
If you're going to pick one, it's the right one.
Marco:
right exactly so it's important to have that one covered and at the high end you have a lot of you know serious nerds and gamers who are going to they are going to crap all over this kind of thing so there is like it's almost like don't even try for the gamers they're going to hate you no matter what you do so don't even bother trying let the gamers keep having their giant hot pcs don't make a good arm cpu for gamers
Marco:
No, I mean, eventually that's possible, but that is so far beyond the horizon right now because gamers will just be so incredibly resistant to any of this.
John:
I mean, the good thing is the gamers can continue to use their NVIDIA GPUs.
John:
You're not taking that away from them like Apple did, right?
Marco:
Yeah, hopefully.
Marco:
And that certainly helps, but gamers are going to be the last people to move off of Intel and AMD.
Marco:
So let them have that.
Marco:
They are ultimately a fairly small part of the PC market.
Marco:
The big part of the PC market is this stuff.
Marco:
It's the 13-inch laptops and the cheap desktops for businesses.
Marco:
That's most of the PC market.
Marco:
So if Microsoft and Qualcomm and everybody else, if they can work out the...
Marco:
13 to 15 inch laptop category everything else is secondary to that let them do this first and then you know if they establish a big footprint with these like if they actually are able to sell a bunch of these then windows software makers will have to have you know dual uh architectural support like they'll you know whatever they call universal binaries or however they work that out over there
Marco:
They're going to have to all do this over the coming years.
Marco:
And then eventually, when the gamers start grumbling and slowly coming around, when an ARM chip is released that actually is faster than what they need, then there will be a lot of software there and the kinks will have been worked out and things like that.
Marco:
Things will be more mature.
Marco:
So they'll come in time, but it is totally right for Microsoft to completely ignore gamers right now.
John:
Part of the reason we loved it so much when Apple went to ARM is because of the whole, like, can you believe I now have a laptop that performs like a desktop?
John:
And they don't have that unless they have the equivalent of the Pro Max and Ultra things.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That part of the transition that we enjoyed...
John:
They are not going to be able to enjoy until they have some chips.
John:
And again, I'm sure there are chips coming.
John:
Like it's not it's not an impossibility.
John:
It's straightforward.
John:
Just make a bigger one of those.
John:
Like obviously their cores are pretty good.
John:
The tech is good.
John:
Like they just don't have it yet.
John:
Right.
John:
But that was part of our transition was the glee of like of you having your desktop laptop.
John:
I mean, like there's no more compromise.
John:
This is desktop caliber.
John:
And a MacBook Air SoC is not desktop caliber.
Marco:
I know you used the MacBook Air as your desktop laptop and you enjoyed it but like when you could get a better one you did and it's way faster true however man the like the MacBook Air is so good also like I mean it really like you're right it is wonderful to have the additional resources of the bigger chips however
Marco:
almost everybody can do almost everything they need to do just as well on an m3 or m2 or m4 than they could on you know the max chips like it they're just they're that good for so many things i i think i think uh despite this terrible name that pc users and companies will learn through like the grapevine when you ask for your next pc makes for you ask for a co-pilot plus and they'll be like what am i
John:
supposed to ask for just trust me just i know it sounds stupid but just make sure whatever laptop you get next time say it has to be a copilot plus pc here i'll paste it to you you're like with a plus sign like yeah just ask for that because like you don't have to know i need an arm piece don't ask for an rpc you might get a windows rt one you don't want that right just
John:
You want one of these, right?
John:
And it's so weird that they've bundled that.
John:
I was like, but I don't want to do that AI thing where I talk to, you know, chat GP.
John:
It's like, no, that's not why you want it.
John:
It's just a good laptop, right?
John:
Just get that one.
John:
I think that will happen.
John:
I really hope that happens.
John:
And then, yeah, eventually they need to make new chips.
John:
You know, the problem is AMD and Intel are also...
John:
you know in the mix here they also they all have cpus and soc type things that will eventually qualify but i said i don't want them to qualify i want just you can't i don't think it's tenable put it this way i don't think it's tenable to have a dual cpu architecture windows strategy like in perpetuity like that windows runs an x86 and arm and forever and ever
John:
you just you buy one pc and the laptops come with arm and the desktops come with intel like i don't doesn't make any sense to me it doesn't make sense there's no reason it has to be that way arm socs can be just as fast as the intel like there's no reason for it and just adds confusion to the market and obviously if you're intel and amd you think there is a very big reason for it because you make you sell those things but if you're microsoft
John:
I really hope Microsoft, despite having those friendly relationships with AMD and Intel and putting them in their keynote, I hope Microsoft is talking to Qualcomm and saying, or other people to make ARM things and say, when are you going to get those desktop ARM SOCs ready for us?
John:
Because we're ready to ditch these Intel guys.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace.
Marco:
Thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, a bonus topic segment that we do every week.
Marco:
This week's Overtime is about Apple and OpenAI.
Marco:
There's been some reports recently about Apple possibly, very possibly, partnering with OpenAI for some of their upcoming features.
Marco:
So we're going to talk about that in ATP Overtime.
Marco:
You can join and listen at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Check podcast so long.
Casey:
So over Mother's Day weekend, I had been to my parents' house for an overnight for the first time in a while.
Casey:
The whole family went.
Casey:
And I brought the Vision Pro, even though they didn't ask me to.
Casey:
And I thought, you know, maybe one or both of them would want to try it.
Casey:
Because my mom is interested in, like, pop-cultury things.
Casey:
And my dad is super interested in technology and that sort of stuff.
Casey:
So we stayed, I think it was Friday into Saturday, or maybe it was Saturday into Sunday, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
But on the first day, mom tried the Vision Pro.
Casey:
And my parents are 70-ish, give or take a little bit, and they don't have stellar vision, and I don't have any lenses in my Vision Pro because as garbage as my vision is without contact lenses in –
Casey:
With contact lenses, it's actually pretty good.
Casey:
And so I do the whole guest thing.
Casey:
This was at their kitchen table.
Casey:
I set up my iPad Pro as the screen mirroring and strapped the thing on mom's head and
Casey:
And I had her try, like, I think, I forget exactly what I did and in what order, but basically I had her look at panoramas that I had taken.
Casey:
Like, I think I showed her one of Cape Charles.
Casey:
I think I showed her one at the top of the pyramid in Memphis from a couple of weeks back.
Casey:
I had her try a couple of spatial videos I had taken, one at Hanukkah and one, I think, of Mikhail on a Swing.
Casey:
And I had her...
Casey:
watch a little bit of the Alicia Keys thing, do the dinosaur thing, uh, and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And actually quick aside, um, there's some new stuff developing, uh, coming up in the next week or two.
Casey:
There's a Marvel app, uh, called what if that's, um, debuting, I think Friday tomorrow, sometimes we record something like that, or maybe it's next week.
Casey:
I forget exactly when it is, but soon.
Casey:
And then apparently in Apple's adventure series that
Casey:
They have a new video coming for a bunch of dudes.
Casey:
I think it's dudes, maybe it's people, just people in general, a bunch of people doing parkour somewhere.
Casey:
And that's going to be in the same series as the woman who was doing the high wire, tightrope, whatever, walking at the fjord.
Casey:
But anyways.
Marco:
Yes, isn't that great?
Marco:
After five months, we get episode two of that series.
Casey:
Excuse me, it has been four months.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Marco:
Oh, my mistake.
Marco:
Only four months we get episode two.
John:
Things are going fine.
John:
They're doing the opposite of when Netflix drops the whole season in once.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
One episode every four weeks.
John:
Four months.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Anyway, so mom tries it out and...
Casey:
At first, you know, with the panoramics, she was like, wow, that's really cool.
Casey:
And then I think it was the dinosaur thing.
Casey:
And I'm not going to put a picture in the show notes because, you know, it's a picture of mom and I don't know if she wants it on the Internet or whatever.
Casey:
But I looked up at her and it was so funny to me.
Casey:
And again, I'm pretty sure it was during the experienced dinosaurs, whatever it's called, thing where, you know, like T-Rex or what have you, I don't remember exactly what dinosaur it is, is walking up to you and whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But one way or another, it's approaching her and I can tell she's not scared of the dinosaur.
Casey:
but it's the funniest picture that i took of her because like take your hands and like bring them up to like your collarbone you know like kind of clutch them to your chest you know what i mean that like feeling that that you know she wasn't i'm again i'm almost sure she wasn't scared of the dinosaur it's just it was like such a striking weird experience for her
Casey:
that she like her, her natural, like visceral reaction was like to bring her hands in close to her chest and kind of be like, Oh, what's going on.
Casey:
And it was so funny to me watching her do this.
Casey:
And she was surprisingly into it.
Casey:
She doesn't want one.
Casey:
She just, she seemed super duper into it.
Casey:
That being said, a couple of problems.
Casey:
Number one,
Casey:
For the love of f***ing c***, can we please get mirroring for DRM content?
Casey:
Oh, preach.
Casey:
It is so frustrating.
Casey:
It is so frustrating.
Casey:
I intellectually get why it is this doesn't work.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Apple controls everything.
Casey:
They make it work for their own iPad minis in the store.
Casey:
They know if there's another monitor plugged into an iPad or into an Apple TV or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
You can't plug one into an Apple TV.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Or if there's anything plugged into an Apple TV.
Casey:
Or tell me I can only do it with an iPad so they have control.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Or black it out on HDMI, but don't black it out on the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Figure it out, Apple, because it's over.
Casey:
frustrating.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
I feel like there are 800 different ways that they can make this work better, and they have chosen none of them.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
Also,
Casey:
I don't watch a lot of Apple TV Plus.
Casey:
The stuff that I watch, I really enjoy.
Casey:
But I generally don't watch a lot of Apple TV Plus.
Casey:
And to me, thus, to me, the Apple TV app basically does not exist for me.
Casey:
You know, not the device, the app on your, like, phone or Vision Pro or what have you.
John:
You mean the TV app on your Apple TV where you watch Apple TV Plus?
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
That app basically does not exist for me.
Casey:
And because of that, I am not used to it.
Casey:
And I'm giving you the world's biggest air quotes, information architecture, which is to say it is such a mess in there.
Casey:
It is such a mess.
Casey:
And so I'm trying to explain to mom and I'm no longer mirroring to my iPad because I want her to see the stuff, the DRM stuff, like the dinosaurs, which why that's DRM, whatever.
Casey:
But I'm no longer able to follow along.
Casey:
And I'm trying to describe to her, well, there's this stuff on the left on the toolbar.
Casey:
Try in there and go to this and go to that and then scroll down and scroll over and this and that.
Casey:
All I wanted to do was find the immersive demo, which I think she might have, like, come across and just not realized, you know, I wasn't doing a good job describing what she needed to look for.
Casey:
But it should be pertinent.
Casey:
particularly on the vision pro it should be front and center right big as day or there should be a specific tab for like apple's immersive junk there's a tab for 3d but there's no tab for apple's immersive junk it's the same way you can't find the square that lets you resume watching the show that you were watching last night they hide it they hide the thing you want to get to
Casey:
I don't understand.
Casey:
Apple is so good at design and the design of the app, like visual design, it's pretty good.
Marco:
It's fine.
Casey:
But the information architecture is trash.
Casey:
It's straight up trash.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Casey:
It makes me so angry.
John:
It's very hard to find what you want.
Casey:
It's impossible.
John:
Sometimes intentionally for finding the next episode, but sometimes unintentionally.
John:
The immersive thing is not them being intentional.
John:
Well, they get sideswiped by the whole, like, we have to show you new stuff all the time.
John:
But they know you're using a Vision Pro.
John:
They can tell.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
You know, we've gotten this question a couple of times.
Casey:
If you could go to Apple and be king for a day, what would you do?
Casey:
Honestly, today, I might fix all this junk with the Vision Pro.
Casey:
Let me see DRM content, even if it's with humongous restrictions.
Casey:
Another example, actually, which I didn't think of.
Casey:
And again, intellectually, I understand how they landed here.
Casey:
I have mom do an immersive environment.
Casey:
I think it might have been the desert.
Casey:
It might have been Mount Hood.
Casey:
I don't really recall.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But whatever immersive environment she cranks a little digital crown to get into...
Casey:
She is in a place and it has some sort of ambient sound.
Casey:
Let's say it was like the crickets or what have you at Mount Hood.
Casey:
I'm saying to her, well, do you hear anything?
Casey:
She says, no.
Casey:
All right, well, look up and then look to the right and spin.
Casey:
And then you try to turn the volume.
Casey:
And she's like, no, I still don't hear anything.
Casey:
Come to realize I was still mirroring to my iPad.
Casey:
And when you're mirroring to your iPad, what are you mirroring?
Casey:
You're mirroring the video and the audio.
Casey:
I don't want that.
Casey:
I want the audio to stay in the Vision Pro.
Casey:
I want the video to be mirrored so I can see what the hell she's doing.
Casey:
But I want the audio to stay in the damn Vision Pro.
John:
Again, in the Apple store, they do this.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
It's just, it's so frustrating.
John:
And by the way, looking at these pictures of your mom here, Casey, the bottom part of her face is your face.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Look at that picture.
John:
I'm like, is that Casey wearing a wig?
John:
I totally believe you.
John:
She's wearing a Vision Pro, but there is no doubt this is your mother.
Casey:
I'm not offended.
Casey:
I totally believe you.
Casey:
I can't say that I see it, but I'm.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
A hundred percent.
John:
Especially the smile at the top one.
John:
Holy, holy Casey.
John:
And the second thing is the forced perspective in this picture, because the battery pack for the Vision Pros in the foreground, it looks so big.
Casey:
i mean it's like a laptop small it's not small it looks like a laptop in that picture again i'm sorry for those of you who are listening because i i would rather not share these publicly but i obviously shared them with the boys it's nice that also that your mom has easy as a decorator there's
John:
That clock is huge.
Casey:
So funnily enough, if funnily enough, Marco of all people might recognize that clock, not from Virginia, but because that's from the lake.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
It is from the lake.
Casey:
And, uh, and you know, my grandmother is still around, but in body and not really in mind.
Casey:
And they unloaded their lake house many years ago.
Casey:
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, uh, we did our origin stories, uh, as an ATP, uh, members episode, uh, time before most recent, uh,
Casey:
And Marco and I talk about how we met, among other things.
Casey:
Well, anyways, that clock was my dad's mom's up at the lake where Marco and I had met.
Casey:
Spoiler alert.
Casey:
And they eventually made its way down to my parents' house.
John:
But yeah, the thing weighs... It's a three-foot diameter clock, people.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And allegedly, it weighs like 7,000 pounds.
Casey:
Not literally, of course, but a lot.
Marco:
It looks like the back is solid wood.
Marco:
So like, yeah, that's going to be heavy.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So in any case, so mom tries it, and she is blown away by it.
Casey:
And as much as I'm grumbling about the experience and as much as I'm grumbling about the fact that the DRM stuff, the mirroring, et cetera, et cetera, the information architecture –
Casey:
honestly one of my favorite things to do with the vision pro no hyperbole i am not messing about i'm being deadly serious one of my favorite things to do with vision pro is to have other people try it because it is unreal and as much as i'll whine and moan about certain aspects of the vision pro i cannot stress enough how incredible this hardware is and how you are looking at the future today so
Casey:
So mom was overwhelmed by it.
Casey:
And my mom is the boisterous one of my parents.
Casey:
You know, any gregariousness, I think that's right, that I get, I get from her or that I have that I get from her.
Casey:
And so she was blown away.
Casey:
And then the following morning, I had my dad try it.
Casey:
And he was much quieter about it, but it blew his damned mind.
Casey:
And he was like, I think if I told him that he could buy concerts, because my dad is hugely into music, whatever that I get from my dad, like my mom likes music, but my dad...
Casey:
Always has music playing.
Casey:
That's where I get it from.
Casey:
Constantly finding new stuff to listen to.
Casey:
If I had told him that he could get Alicia Keys style concerts on the regular, you know, if he could go somewhere and buy them.
Casey:
And yes, there's an app whose name I don't remember.
Casey:
I think Amaze VR or something like that.
Casey:
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago that does this sort of thing.
Casey:
But if he could watch concerts...
Casey:
In there, I think he would have bought one already because that's just his jam.
Casey:
And watching this Alicia Keys thing, like he likes Alicia Keys.
Casey:
I don't think she's his favorite by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
But being able to look around and, you know, if the bass player is just going nuts, you can look over at the bass player who may be across the room from you, but at least you can look over there and watch him.
Casey:
You're not at the mercy of the director.
Casey:
He was fantastic.
Casey:
flabbergasted by the whole thing and i did a little better prepping the vision pro before handing it to him and i made sure that the apple tv app was right before the immersive thing that's the other that's the other frustrating thing actually is when you're on the main apple tv app screen or wherever screen it is that brings you into the immersive demo there's no like landing page so i couldn't queue up a landing page that's explicitly the immersive demo
Casey:
It's just you have to get it tweaked.
Casey:
All the scroll views you have to tweak just right so that it's ready to rock because the moment you tap on that little rectangle, you're in the immersive demo.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
John:
How are you preparing it?
John:
Did you put on the Vision Pro to prepare it?
Casey:
You have to because that's how you enable guest mode.
John:
But then when you take it off, doesn't it go into guest mode and lose everything that you did?
Casey:
I believe it.
Casey:
I haven't been on the receiving end of guest mode ever.
Casey:
I don't think, but my recollection is watching them.
Casey:
And, you know, when, when mirrored is that it, the apps are resident, even if they're not open, you know, in apps, stay open in the vision pro.
Casey:
And there's actually that force quit menu, you know, that you can get to, and they actually stay apps in general, just during general, you stay open the vision pro much longer than you would expect.
Casey:
So when he opens it up, it's right there, exactly where I left it.
Casey:
But yeah,
Casey:
All this to say, they were both, and again, these are 70-year-old people.
Casey:
My dad is very into technology, really good with technology.
Casey:
Mom is capable, for sure, but is not an enthusiast in the way that dad or, you know, we are.
Casey:
But both of them were just blown away by it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think it's a healthy reminder for me how incredible this tech is, how cool this tech is, even if it isn't being realized the way we want, even though all three of us were just a few minutes ago snarking about, you know, four months later, we get episode two.
Casey:
And I think that snark is reasonable.
Casey:
I think Apple deserves it.
Casey:
But what cool tech.
Casey:
And I am glad that it exists.
Casey:
And I think I'm glad I bought one.
Casey:
I'm not so sure, but I'm definitely glad it exists.
John:
You get a rented one to show your family.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
That's an important real-time follow-up.
John:
Flavor Flav was the guy with the big clock around his neck.
John:
Not Eazy-E.
John:
I regret the error.
John:
How many people sent feedback about that before I sent this?
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I should have corrected you.
Casey:
I knew exactly what you meant.
Casey:
I loved Flavor of Love back in the day.
Casey:
And if you don't know what I'm talking about, congratulations.
Casey:
You're better off for it.
John:
It's not what most people know I'm from, but okay.
Casey:
Nope, nope, nope.
Casey:
But I loved it.
Casey:
But anyways, yeah, the Vision Pro is just so much fun to do a demo.
Casey:
And if Apple is still doing demos, which I think they are, I know we said it several times, so I'm going to bring it back up.
Casey:
go do a demo at Apple.
Casey:
It costs you 30 minutes.
Casey:
That's what it costs you.
Casey:
And gosh, is it so cool.
Casey:
It's worth it to go do the demo.
Casey:
And if you live overseas, when the time comes that you're up, which honestly I thought would have been by now and clearly isn't, but presumably shortly after WWDC, go do a demo because it is worth it.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the demo of the Vision Pro is actually better than owning a Vision Pro for most people.
John:
Like a lot of luxury goods, actually.
Marco:
It's like you can buy an amusement park ride and keep it in your house, but you're probably better off just riding it a couple times in the amusement park and then going home.
Marco:
Indeed.