586: Do a Barrel Roll!
09 May 2024Good morning! We have a huge show ahead of us, and it’s all about iPad. This is the biggest show about iPad since its introduction. But first…
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Apple’s May Event
- Post-show Neutral: The Cybertruck has landed across the street from Casey
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple Silicon in AI servers?
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
- Compiler: An original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small, and strange.
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- New wires and holes
- Follow-up: RAM prices
- Follow-up: HomeKit UI
- Sphere speakers
- FineWoven rumor
- Sponsor: Compiler
- iPad Air
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- iPad Pro
- Neutral: That vehicle. Yes, that one.
New wires and holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have rewired my entire desk and I’m so happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It took, this has been maybe two weeks in the making because, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve talked about this before, so I’ll be quick, but listeners, if you missed it the last time we talked about this, the secret
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to clean, nice wiring is to get the shortest wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can that will fit the purpose. Because like what so much wire clutter is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically you have excess wire you have to either bundle up and tie with a cable tie or whatever, like you gotta like bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up excess wire. So the good thing is these days, so many products have standard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connectors, whether it’s like the power plug with those standard like IEC things, or obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C and various USBs. You can just go on Amazon and buy short versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all of those things for almost no money. So measure how long you need a cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be and then go to Amazon and put in your cart the shortest length that will be a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit longer than how long it needs to be just to allow like bending radius and stuff. That makes everything so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier. So now I have a very nice, clean layout. I did have to, also as part of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this project, I did have to add some openings to my desk. I guess some might call them holes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my. But it turns out, look, people out there, if you are not that handy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me, I’m not handy, I’m not a woodworker. My desk, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really like my desk and want it to remain looking nice. But, you know those like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those circular covers with little pass-throughs for wires that many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desks have, like two of it, look kinda like small cup holders? Those are called grommets. And you can go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Amazon, you can buy desk grommets for nothing. You can also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, many people, like me, are handy enough to operate a drill, but not to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do woodworking. Well, let me introduce you to the hole saw. The hole saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a drill attachment that just creates round holes in things. And it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to use. It’s just like drilling. Even people like me can use a hole saw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add grommets into desks, shelves, other, you know, wooden items in your house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or office, uh, to have nice like wire pass-throughs. And so the combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of adding holes and buying short cables has finally led me to a wonderful desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wiring experience. And so I’m talking to you now through all new wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and holes, and hopefully I wired everything correctly, and we won’t have me turning into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey from last week’s bootleg.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s hope not. Tune in next week when Marco discovers the C-clamp. Wholesaurs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazing. Wholesaurs.
Follow-up: RAM prices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up, but just a little bit since this is an event episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Amanda writes in, I’ve taken a stab at calculating the inflation-adjusted market price for the RAM in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starter model of Mac laptop between 1999 and 2024, though finding good data sources is difficult. There is a chart.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We will put a link to this toot in the show notes, which has the chart, or I shouldn’t say chart, it’s a graph
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, and hopefully Marco will make this the chapter art when he edits it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, can you take us through what this indicates?
⏹️ ▶️ John So this was in response to those charts that we had from several past shows. David
⏹️ ▶️ John Schaub made a bunch of them showing like how much RAM comes in the base model, various Macs, and how it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the growth has sort of plateaued and we’ve been stuck in 8 gigs forever. So Amanda was interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in what is the market price if you were to buy that much RAM on the market. How much
⏹️ ▶️ John would it cost? And the RAM chart obviously increases slowly over time
⏹️ ▶️ John before it kind of plateaus, but the price chart fluctuates all over the place. Lots of big swings,
⏹️ ▶️ John because RAM is a commodity and the price is fluctuated, depending if they manufactured too much and they need to get rid of it, or there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough, and there’s demand outstrips supply. Anyway, it bounces
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the place, but given that it’s over a 20-something year span, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see the trend line pretty clearly. And the trend line, Apple, is down.
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, not just the cost of one megabyte of RAM has gotten cheaper, This is, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John the cost of buying the amount of RAM that’s in the base model Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So the amount of RAM is going up, right? So it’s not just like price per megabyte, I believe. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is just the total price. And the total price that, you know, the market price, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John were to buy this RAM on the open market, has been going down despite the fact that the amount has been going up,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what we all imagine to be the case, because, you know, we all had computers when we were children that had
⏹️ ▶️ John very small amounts of RAM, And now our computers have much, much more. RAM gets cheaper over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s something we forget sometimes as Apple customers because it doesn’t happen for us. It doesn’t happen. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John like this chart because, A, it does show the fluctuations because that’s something that people, feedback people gave. It’s like, okay, well, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM chart, you know, getting more RAM is mad because isn’t that easy? Prices fluctuate. Apple has to like time
⏹️ ▶️ John their purchases and do all this clever stuff. Or it was like, okay, that’s all well and good. But still, the trend
⏹️ ▶️ John line is down. And it’s, you know, we should have more RAM for less money.
⏹️ ▶️ John More on that later.
Follow-up: HomeKit UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. We have more feedback somehow on HomeKit Lite Controls UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Max Levin writes, the versions of the Home app on macOS, iOS, and watchOS all feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a card interface for controlling devices, and the card contains two buttons, the body or background,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is all a tappable region and a circular button in the corner of that card. One takes you to the device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings and the other toggles the device state. It’s just that which does which is flipped between watchOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and macOS and iOS. Well done. Yeah, so watchOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the toggle button or the humongous card is a toggle and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s an ellipsis in the corner to get to settings, if you will. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on macOS and iOS, instead of an ellipsis, you have like an indicator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what the device is, like a light bulb, if you will, in the corner. That’s how you toggle and the rest of the card
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is how you get to settings. Cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t tap the wrong thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So many places I could go from here.
Sphere speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, so let’s talk about the Vegas Sphere. The hollow plot speakers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the speakers that are used in the Vegas Sphere and somebody linked us to a video which talks about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the highlight, I did watch this video. I was not that impressed by the demonstration even with headphones on, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hard thing to really get into video form. But what was cool, which John, you pulled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out and noted here, each like module, each speaker module has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere between 80 and 96 speakers, costs between $36,000 and $38,000, and weighs 220 pounds. Holy jamoles.
⏹️ ▶️ John Each module is like a really heavy suitcase, kind of, like that’s the size range that it is.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you look at it, like, you know, 96 speaker drivers or 80 in the one that has subwoofers, so
⏹️ ▶️ John many speakers just spread, you know, nested as close as they could possibly be, however they can get room to them. And they’re all
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially computer controlled. the computer control interface is like inside that box. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John had one of those boxes costs, you know, 36 to $38,000. And I can’t imagine how many
⏹️ ▶️ John of those boxes they have in the sphere. So that’s why the thing costs $2 billion. But it’s really cool. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea of a, having lots of small, relatively inexpensive speakers, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the speaker drivers, each individual one is inexpensive, but when you got 96 of them, and then having computers control
⏹️ ▶️ John them to do the beam forming and everything to be able to target different sounds different parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of the audience or just to make it so that every seat sounds good as opposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John that they compared in the video to the more traditional thing where you do that I wish I had a friend
⏹️ ▶️ John a YouTube link to this but the recent trend that if you go to live music you’ve seen is to have long
⏹️ ▶️ John vertical tower kind of gently curving towers of speakers that was not the case like if you look
⏹️ ▶️ John at a 70s rock concert you didn’t see those but we’ve learned since the 70s that you get
⏹️ ▶️ John better sound and across a larger area in the audience if you do those long vertical towers, but those are fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they don’t adjust or do beamforming or whatever, they’re just speakers, they’re carefully arranged in one
⏹️ ▶️ John position and they try to make it sound as good as they can in as many places as they can,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s kind of, if you were to look at the field of sound that those produce, it is uneven. Whereas these things are trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to give every individual seat sort of the same experience by using constructive and destructive
⏹️ ▶️ John interference and timing and all sorts of other things with what must be hundreds of speakers, thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of speakers maybe. I think they have a number how many speakers are actually in this sphere it’s a huge number and then
⏹️ ▶️ John that through the magic computers they try to make it sound good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah and it’s this is like also not an easy problem to solve because you think about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the acoustics of that space trying to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dome sound good for every seat like even as John said like even setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like you know the cool dynamic stuff if I’m we’re gonna send English to this section in Spanish to this section or whatever, like even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that stuff aside, just making it sound good for every seat in there, that is a massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acoustic challenge. And to make it sound good without those giant tower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaker arrays being visible because they don’t want to block the view of the screen. So all the speakers have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be behind the screen. There’s a lot of like just challenging physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco situations there to try to make that both, you know, sound at all good, but then to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to make it sound good for everybody. And I gotta tell you, it sounds really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like most concerts, I mean granted, I’m listening through AirPods as earplugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s being modified, but like most concerts, despite ostensibly being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the music, the sound is actually not that good. Because it’s just, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a giant acoustic challenge to make that sound good in any kind of, especially indoor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environments. But they did a really good job with making it sound good in what is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very, very difficult situation to be in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room found the YouTube video I was thinking of. It’s from Wired. Why music festivals
⏹️ ▶️ John sound better than ever. And that’s talking about the big vertical towers of speakers. Those are a big advance
⏹️ ▶️ John over the old way, where I guess they just sort of put the speakers on the stage in little stacks or whatever. They figured out this arrangement
⏹️ ▶️ John produces the fewest terrible dead spots or places in the audience that sound terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John as compared to the old arrangements. the computer control one is, we’re going to make sure there are essentially no
⏹️ ▶️ John spots where the sound is totally off or totally bad or there’s no bass or way too much bass or you hear it
⏹️ ▶️ John delayed or echoed or whatever. That’s what the computers are trying to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When I was in high school and had more free time to go to concerts, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vividly, you know, I went to high school in Connecticut and we used to go to what was at the time called the Meadows Music Theater
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Hartford or outside Hartford. And it was one of those theaters where there’s like an amphitheater section and then a lawn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind it. Even though I fully and completely understood the science behind it, I always found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it both funny and kind of mildly annoying that I would be looking at the screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both, you know, behind the stage and at the edge of the pavilion, you know, if I was on the lawn and I’d be looking at the screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would see a snare hit, but by the time the sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made it to where I was, the drummer had moved on like one or two notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past what I was hearing. And it was also, I would see, you know, the future, if you will. It was very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was a very weird bit of time travel. And admittedly, I might’ve had a contact high from everyone around me at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Dave Matthews concert, but I had not partaken myself. So, uh, that sound and light, it’s weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It works in mysterious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ways. The only
⏹️ ▶️ John way they can fix that is you got to watch the whole thing in vision pro because then they can sync up the, uh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey visuals and the
⏹️ ▶️ John audio by delaying, uh, the visuals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey essentially. That remains a product in Apple’s lineup.
FineWoven rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of products that are still, for now, in Apple’s lineup, fine woven accessories may get one last ride
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before Apple pulls the plug. This was reported on MacRumors a couple of weeks back. Over the weekend, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaker and prototype collector Kousutami claimed that Apple has decided to halt production of fine woven accessories over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey durability concerns. In a future update, the leaker has now suggested we might see yet one more round
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fine woven products in a season of new colors before Apple finally says farewell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the material for good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the fine moment thing is weird. Like we saw the complaints about durability and it looking
⏹️ ▶️ John ugly and getting you know and Like the bottom line is if people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like the product and it gets a reputation for not being good They gotta try again that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna go back to leather But yeah, take a second crack at this like they tried something That’s a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John different than what most people do which is they make like they call it, you know vegan leather They don’t want to call it fake leather
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever all sorts of names they have for it in like in the car industry. Basically saying it’s supposed to look and feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like leather but it’s not made from animals at all. It’s made from petroleum. So it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this whole thing, like when this rumor came out last week, it sounds like Apple is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discontinuing the current line of colors and is making a new spring collection. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that. Like they always do that every year with all their accessories. So I’m not that surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that things are changing in that area for the spring, I would be surprised if nothing changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that lineup this fall, when they would typically unveil like a whole new shape and size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the new phones. So we’ll see what happens then, but I think right now it’s too soon to really say that anything’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and despite the petroleum crack, like most of the fake leather stuff does have some plastic component, because you can
⏹️ ▶️ John make various kinds of plastic rubbery type materials look and feel a little bit like leather, that’s what they do
⏹️ ▶️ John in car interiors. often they can be, you can make them more durable
⏹️ ▶️ John than leather or at least durable in a different way because leather wears, which is something people like about leather, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a leather that it changes appearance and feel over time, but that’s wearing, right? It doesn’t stay looking brand
⏹️ ▶️ John new, whereas a lot of the fake leathers can stay looking the same for longer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they may not be as durable long-term as leather and you can sort of recondition leather and dye it and repair it and all sorts of other stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to come up with, Apple’s had this challenge before, to come up with environmentally
⏹️ ▶️ John friendlier versions of things they use a long time, whether it’s putting tin in there, or
⏹️ ▶️ John lead or whatever in the solder, or the plastic that they used to use for the cables that would come with
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone, they had to change that to an environmentally friendly one. And the first time they tried to do that, the plastic was all
⏹️ ▶️ John brittle and broken. Like, it’s hard, but that’s the challenge they’ve put in front of themselves. So if fine
⏹️ ▶️ John woven is a swing and a miss, I give them a pass, good effort, try again next year.
Sponsor: Compiler
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Compiler, an original podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Red Hat, discussing tech topics big, small, and strange. Compiler comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you from the makers of Command Line Heroes. It’s hosted by Angela Andrews, and it closes the gap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between those who are new to tech and those behind the inventions and services shaping our world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Compiler brings together stories and perspectives from the industry, and it simplifies our language, culture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and movements in a way that can be fun, informative, and guilt-free, so it can provide insight for a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generation of it pros. So they cover a wide variety of topics, things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are the components of a software stack. And in fact, they have an episode number 25, the great stack debate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the first and they’re kind of a mini series. And they explore each layer of the stack, what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to work on each one, and how they come together into a whole application. Those are topics like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our big mistakes that big of a deal. They have one called a warning signs episode number 55,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is from their tales from the Database series. Boy, I have some of those. And this is about learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the warning signs of a problematic project from people who have figured them out the hard way and what can happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when these warning signs are missed. And they also have another one, episode 46, that really stands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. This is called In Defense of Legacy Technology. This is the first in their new series,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Legacies, tackling different examples of older hardware and software, breaking down the relevance to today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry landscape, and helping junior tech workers connect the old guard with their own career journeys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is just a great podcast. They’ve been running for a number of years now, and they have a great back catalog to listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to and great new episodes coming out all the time. So learn more about compiler at red hat.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash compiler podcast. Of course, you can listen in your favorite podcast player and we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco include link in the show notes as well for easy adding. Check it out compiler red hat.com slash compiler podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or just search for compiler in your podcast app. Thank you so much to compiler for for supporting our show.
iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Apple event that happened yesterday as we record this. This was, as per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Cook, the biggest day for iPads since its introduction. And we start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off by noting that the Vision Pro remains a product in Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco lineup. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best. Tim was like, this event’s all about iPads. But first, let’s talk about the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wanted to remind everyone. I mean, I think that was as much as I made fun of it and saying that the Vision Pro remains
⏹️ ▶️ John a product in their lineup. I think they have to do this, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they didn’t say anything, we’d be like, look, they had an event and I didn’t even mention the Vision Pro. You gotta mention it. You gotta say,
⏹️ ▶️ John to show that Apple is still committed to doing
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever it’s doing with Vision Pro. Like they’re not ashamed of it. They’re not trying to hide it. They don’t wanna not talk about it
⏹️ ▶️ John because things aren’t going well. They are still behind it. So I think that was an important reassurance.
⏹️ ▶️ John S Apple will take their lumps for saying like, oh, you know, people don’t think it’s going great out there in the world. But by
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about it and trying to show the few positive things they did have to say about, look, the enterprise loves that people
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing surgery with it. It’s great, right? You got to do that. It’s the newly announced product, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of glad that was in the presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They of course have to keep promoting it, but they’re not really giving us anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like they’re, they’re not really adding anything to it. They’re not, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing to announce. Right, there’s nothing to announce, there’s nothing to show off. It doesn’t seem like it’s going super well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so they don’t really have anything they can brag about. They don’t really have any cool new uses they can really specifically talk about that consumers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would care about. So it feels a little bit strained. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John had waited a few more days, like this we’ll probably talk about next week, but there’s this Marvel Studios,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if immersive product, whatever, coming to Vision Pro, but I guess that just wasn’t ready because
⏹️ ▶️ John this obviously this video was recorded before it was shown to us. would have been a nice thing to mention.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like to say, and we actually have some new content and it’s from Marvel and you know, it’s an hour long and that could get
⏹️ ▶️ John people excited, but it didn’t make the cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it didn’t make the cut because it may not have ever been there to get cut to your point a moment ago. Like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I said it made the cut in terms of time wise. Like it had, I think this announcement happened after they had
⏹️ ▶️ John long since recorded the.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. Yep. Yep. Yep. So yeah. So the vision pro still exists. The MacBook airs the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world’s best-selling 13 and 15-inch laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John And 15-inch, do you hear that? Oh, I heard the 15-inch MacBook Air, nobody wants to buy it. It’s the world’s best-selling
⏹️ ▶️ John 15-inch laptop, Apple. Yeah, that’s pretty great. Don’t think about canceling that because it’s not as popular as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So things are going well, at least in the MacBook Air section of the world. And then we end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with John Ternus on a subway. I guess it was the BART. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. And I noticed as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he was standing there that the marquee or whatever behind him, the little like ticker tape, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will, says, this train now goes to 13, which was a surprising nod to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was, you know, expected, but still yet to come. And what was coming was the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air, which is now in 11 and 13 inches. And there was an off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the cuff mention or an offhanded comment that about half of the users choose 13 inch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad. I think it was iPad Pros, I think they were talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was for Pro. They were saying that that inspired by iPad Pro, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about half of the users choose the larger screen. Which is
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. Because the users couldn’t have chosen larger screen on the iPad Air, which didn’t have one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But, and that’s honestly, that’s new information that like of all I have previously, about half choose the 13-inch. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprising to me. I would have expected that to be less, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess it just kind of shows like who’s in the market for an iPad Pro. And I feel like at this point, the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro is like strongest unique selling proposition is the pen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The pencil, whatever. You know, and so if you’re an artist and you’re gonna actually use that pencil, you sure, you
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely want the bigger one, right? Because the same people wanted, you know, bigger Wacom tablets or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, I don’t imagine people are buying the bigger one so they can browse the web a little bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all about having a bigger canvas to draw with the pencil. But for whatever reason, yeah, people are buying the big one, which is the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we get the new iPad Air, 11 and 13 inches. It’s got an M2, it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some okay colors. They’re not super wild, but they’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, it’s the new 11 inch and 13, obviously the 13 inch is a new size. The 11 inch, it’s the same size as the 10.9.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not, they just, Apple has just decided they’re not gonna do the decimal thing, which was kind of weird that they did it to begin with.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the actual screen is like 10.86 inches. Apple used to call it the 10.9 with rounding, but they couldn’t round one more place. Now they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John calling it the 11, but I believe it is the exact same resolution and exact same dimensions as the previous 10.9 inch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that rounding is actually happening across all four of the iPads that were announced today. there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different amounts of rounding, but they’re all being rounded up to the nearest inch, which is fine. Like that’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what they do. They’ve always done that with their laptops. It’s not like their 13 inch laptops has always been exactly 13.0 inches. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just weird that for so long, we’ve dealt with like the 10.9 inch or 12.9 inch. But yeah, that, whoever had that idea, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John snapped out of it. Yeah, I’m glad. It’s much easier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I thought that some, I read somewhere, this was not part of the event, but I could have sworn I read somewhere that there
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels. We’ll get to that. It’s in the pro, not in this one though. This, the iPad Air, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ John has exactly, the iPad Air is essentially the previous iPad Pro, but without
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID and with the Touch ID thing added. Like it’s, I don’t think there’s any,
⏹️ ▶️ John this, there’s new screen. Obviously the 13 inches, no, right. But the 10.9, I believe is down
⏹️ ▶️ John to the pixel, down to the millimeter, the same as it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no promotion in the iPad Air, which is worth noting. But anyways, so yeah, so what is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this iPad Air? It’s an M2, it works with the existing, at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Magic Keyboard. So this is the one that we’ll later find out. Well, we knew that it doesn’t have a function row, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t know yet that that’s what differentiates it. And it works with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Apple Pencil. I still, I need to bring up that stupid chart because I’m still not entirely clear which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Pencils it works with.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the iPads that were announced to, oh, hmm, not all of them. Okay, anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if your iPad works with two
⏹️ ▶️ John pencils and it’s just announced, It works with the Apple Pencil Pro, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the USB one. The USB one works with any of them because you plug it in with a wire and it’s all like, there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of physical incompatibility with them. So that essentially works with all of them. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a flat sided iPad with a landscape camera that’s not the cheapest
⏹️ ▶️ John one, then you work with the Apple Pencil Pro because that’s the only one that has
⏹️ ▶️ John the magnets and inductive charging to work with the flat sided ones with the landscape camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can’t use the Apple Pencil 2, even though it looks like you could, because it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the magnets and inductive stuff to line up with where it is, because they had to move all this stuff around, because it’s got the camera
⏹️ ▶️ John on the long side, and it previously didn’t. So even though we’re still in this transition period of confusion,
⏹️ ▶️ John we are approaching a future year when every iPad, right now every iPad works
⏹️ ▶️ John with a pencil, which is good, and soon every iPad will work with two pencils, the cheap one and the expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John one. We’ll get there eventually. We’re not there
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yet, but we’ll get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. So then, uh, we, so to work with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey existing magic keyboard, a couple of Apple pencils, it now starts at 128 gigs and goes up to a terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting at $600 and $800 available, uh, sometime next week. I thought I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on, uh, upgrade today that it was like Wednesday or Thursday of this upcoming week. So not tomorrow as you record, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a week from or something like that. Um, but there’s some interesting news with regard to packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ John Actually before you get to that just to just to highlight even though this looks like an IP the old iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John like Appearance that can use the magic keyboard and everything. It does not have face ID
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it has the touch ID button thingy on the power button
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is kind of weird to have like oh, it’s just like the old Pro But we pulled out a bunch of stuff to make it cheaper. I guess it makes sense,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Just just to be clear You do not get face ID with this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, according to 9to5Mac, the new iPad Pro and iPad Air no longer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey include charger in the box in the UK and other countries in Europe. And according to 9to5,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this appears to be due to the waste from electrical and electronic equipment rules in the EU.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s applicable to the UK because it predates Brexit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what’s that acronym, electrical and electronic equipment? Weee,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey W-E-E-E rules.
⏹️ ▶️ John The weee rules, weee, no charger for you. They sound so fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then additionally, you’re not going to get stickers in the box because of Apple’s environmental goals. Again, from 9to5Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a memo distributed to Apple Store teams on Tuesday, Apple explained that Apple stickers will not be included in the box for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new iPad Pro and iPad Air. The company says that this is part of its environmental goals as it strives to ensure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its packaging is completely plastic-free. Apple stores, however, are receiving shipments with a limited quantity of Apple logo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stickers that can be distributed to customers who buy a new iPad Pro or iPad Air, but only upon request.
⏹️ ▶️ John What a weird thing the Apple stickers are. We don’t talk about it too much on the show, but how weird is it that for like what, 25, 30
⏹️ ▶️ John years, Apple has been including tiny stickers of its company logo
⏹️ ▶️ John in essentially all of its products and what did people do with those? I mean, I guess you could put them on your car
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but honestly, like if you are an Apple customer for any amount of time, you’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John enough stickers. Like the logo doesn’t change. Like, oh, you got a black one with the Mac Pro or whatever, but like you’re being
⏹️ ▶️ John inundated with stickers that you do not care about. They’re just going in the trash or they’re sitting inside the box in your attic
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re me or whatever. And it’s like, how many stickers, how many Apple logo stickers does the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, a lot of people who don’t have as many Apple products as you, which is most people, they,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I see those stickers on cars. Somebody on my dog walk has them on their trash cans for some
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s like one. Every product would come with two. So you’ve got the one on your car and you got the one spare
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re good until you get a new car. Like, it’s too many stickers. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of amazing that they’ve shipped that long, Especially if you look at everything else that has come with products like they used
⏹️ ▶️ John to come with little instruction manual instruction booklets And those slowly narrowed down to just be like
⏹️ ▶️ John one piece of paper or like a folding thing that folds out it has like three pages like they
⏹️ ▶️ John they have really reduced the amount of literature essentially or paper things
⏹️ ▶️ John that come with all of their products and Because the stickers are plastic there, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s amazing. They last that long. So I’m saying I don’t begrudge people I think it’s great to have in the store That’s exactly how it should be
⏹️ ▶️ John even they can even offer you buy something at Apple store and say hey Do you want a sticker and if you want one you get one and if you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you pass but? Shipping them to everybody whether they want them or not. It’s too much and I agree
⏹️ ▶️ John My view is skewed by buying way too many Apple products But I feel like even if you don’t buy a lot of them Even if
⏹️ ▶️ John you get a new phone every five years and you’re an iPhone customer by now, you’ve got a lot of those stickers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indeed All right, anything else with regard to the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air? I mean I this seems good It seems like a really nice product, I think, for most people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including surely me, if I had any common sense, this was more than enough. I mean, it’s a really nice machine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not cheap, but it’s not absurdly expensive. So, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on board with all these changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really like the 13-inch Air with the pencil. Like, it’s a much
⏹️ ▶️ John cheaper way to get a really big iPad that you can draw on, essentially. Which I just
⏹️ ▶️ John like the 15-inch MacBook Air, like the iPhone plus size, like keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John the big version stuck in the highest end, like trim level, essentially, was always
⏹️ ▶️ John a bad decision in terms of, you know, satisfying customer needs, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s great that there is now a big one that is cheaper and that is, you know, pretty good. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Face ID, yeah, I like it and everything, but it doesn’t affect the drawing experience, right? It’s just the unlock experience, so who cares?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I give the iPad Air mostly a thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s, and we’ll get into this more as the show goes on, but there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of the question of what people use iPads for. And of course, there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different answers to that question, but obviously, a very, very common use case for them is basically being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big screens running low-needs apps, like in terms of computing power. So that would be, obviously, things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like watching video. That’s a very popular use for them. But even, a lot of people use them as kind of light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productivity devices, or kind of like, you know, low-end gaming devices, especially for kids.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I feel like there is a very large market for iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are just decent and have maybe a bigger screen, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new 13 HDR, without having all of the cost of the Pro. And with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Pro, you know, adding a bunch of features for that cost that I think almost all iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owners really don’t need. I do wish it had Face ID. That’s the one big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like, you know, hard to swallow pill here. And Apple PR has obviously been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telling everybody who was at the PR event today, because we’ve heard it on a bunch of other podcasts now, you can tell,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can always see what Apple’s PR talking points are by listening to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the podcasts and YouTube videos of the people who were there, because you can tell they were all fed the same talking points.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But clearly Apple is telling everybody, the Face ID components are expensive. and that’s why it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just can’t be in the air. And they could put it in there if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to. It’s not that expensive. It’s not like Face ID is brand new.
⏹️ ▶️ John The follow-up question would be like, how expensive?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they’re choosing not to put it in there, I think mostly for segmentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because the thing is, I agree that they probably are expensive, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like they’re $300. Right, yeah. So they’re, and how much do they cost Apple?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like whatever they cost, it’s like, because if Apple told you the truth, not that they’re ever gonna do this, but if they
⏹️ ▶️ John told you, okay, when we buy this part plus the integration and assembly,
⏹️ ▶️ John like all told, it would cost us this much more per unit
⏹️ ▶️ John to put Face ID into it. And you would say, great, I’ll pay that. And Apple would be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s not what you would pay. You’d pay that plus our typical 40% margin. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John will you do it? And you’re like, oh, the cost of all
⏹️ ▶️ John that plus the 40% margin, now I’m adding like 100 and something bucks to it. No, actually, I won’t pay that. And Apple’s going to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John see? And we would say, how about you don’t take a 40% margin on Face ID? And Apple’s like, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not how we became the richest company in the world. So that’s how that conversation would go, essentially. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple’s, the Apple talking point is essentially emphasizing that, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM and every other part of computing, apparently the Face ID components haven’t gone down in
⏹️ ▶️ John price over the years as much as you would think. And of course, my follow up with that would be like, what about the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that do go down in price, Apple? You also don’t give us a break on those. So
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, it’s the cheaper product. Like what we all hope is from the good old days of computing is
⏹️ ▶️ John something will come out and it will only be on the high-end model and we’ll just wait a few years and it will trickle down to the rest of the lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for things whose cost follows the typical electronics,
⏹️ ▶️ John computing curve, that does happen. And we do see things trickling down to the lower end models.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple’s talking point on this, which we just take their word for it, I don’t know, is that the Face
⏹️ ▶️ John ID components have not reduced in price like we would expect of typical components that go into
⏹️ ▶️ John things That’s why it hasn’t trickled down yet. We would presume that in five years
⏹️ ▶️ John ten years Eventually it all trickles down like it used to be that the cheap ones had home buttons and we finally got
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of that It took a long time to get rid of that, but we finally did but we didn’t replace it all with Face ID We just have touch ID in the power
⏹️ ▶️ John button, but you know, I I think it will happen eventually eventually, but yes for market segmentation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and yes there’s probably some truth to the idea that those components haven’t come down in price, because I’m not sure how many other manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John are buying those, but honestly Apple is such a big customer, it shouldn’t really matter. So anyway, fingers crossed for what, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John say five years from now, finally getting Face ID on the iPad Air. Not the cheap iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just the iPad Air.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s interesting too, like when you’re comparing, like you’re trying to figure out, you know, relative component costs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at the iPhones. And what’s interesting about when you compare iPhone to iPad is that they do have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the same components. However, iPhones generally cost way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than iPads, but iPads have these giant screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more speakers, and they don’t actually save that many of the components from the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh. Bigger batteries, those cost more too. Right, and bigger cases, like, so like, so it’s interesting, like, when you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look, the iPads actually probably, they probably do need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower end hardware in a lot of ways to hit those prices because they are, while keeping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s margins, because they are so much lower priced than kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar generation or comparable iPhones. Like right now, the cheapest iPhone is the SE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for if we’re matching storage tiers, then it’s 480 for the SE at 128
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versus 600 for the cheapest phone, which is currently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old 13 that’s still for sale. $600 is the cheapest phone at 128 gigs with Face ID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that compares to the exact same price as the iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the same storage. And the iPad Air has like the M1 in it, or sorry, M2 in it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right? And a massive screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and a massive screen and more speakers. And so like, you can start to see like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of, you know, they don’t have maybe, they don’t have the cell modem, so that saves some.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they don’t have like, you can get it for more money, obviously, but like at that price, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have less cellular equipment. The camera system is cheaper probably, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can start to see like there is some price pressure there that they’re trying to sell these devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with phone components, with phone profit margins, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re bigger devices. So that does become harder. But all that being said, I do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the choice of Face ID is not about component cost in this case. It is primarily segmentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s the iPad Air, and I think it’s basically two thumbs up from the ATP crew, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think though for our listeners, if you’re trying to consider what to buy, I would suggest,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you are really pushing the processing power of your iPad, which we’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is difficult to do, iPads tend to last a long time in use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they tend to have pretty long lives. I would suggest maybe going for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Pro and just keeping it longer compared to going for an Air. If you are a nerd who listens to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show, who cares about things like the best screen, the face ID convenience, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better speakers, better, you know, all that stuff, like I think you’d be better off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying an iPad Pro every, you know, five years or whatever, compared to buying an iPad Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every three years, or you know, whatever the numbers are for you. I think that, I think it’s, you’re better off getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the nice Pro features if you’re a nerd like us. But for most people who are not nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is a great mid-range product and they won’t care.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can look at a refurb like previous model iPad Pro if you don’t care about the features that are new on this one, because you will
⏹️ ▶️ John get all the Pro features and you’ll get Face ID, you’ll get all the good stuff, you get a fast processor, you just won’t have this year’s stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ John while those are still in stock from Apple or if you can find one cheap elsewhere, that you can get a good
Sponsor: Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you’re just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it easy to create a beautiful website and engage with your audience, and you can sell anything from physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco products to digital content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace has so many great features and they keep adding more. One of the newest ones is called Blueprint.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is their new guided design system, and Squarespace has always been super easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make great looking websites. And now it’s even easier. You choose from a professionally curated layout and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco styling options to build a unique online presence from the ground up, tailored to your brand. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t just look like a cookie cutter. It looks like your brand. And of course, optimized for every device. And they’ve built an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SEO tools so you can show up more often to more people and get growth for your business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you’re selling things, they offer amazing checkout support. So things like of course, credit cards,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your checkout, of course, but then they also have PayPal, Apple Pay, and in eligible countries, you can also offer your customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy now pay later services like Afterpay and Clearpay. It is just a great platform to run your business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve recommended Squarespace to so many people in my life, including many non-nerds. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great because they don’t have to be coding nerds or running servers or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just use Squarespace. They don’t need me to do it for them. And that’s very empowering for them. And it’s great for me too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t have to be involved in their storefront in their business. So check it out Squarespace.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a free trial. You can build the site in trial mode, and you can see how much you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it. When you’re ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash ATP, you’ll save 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first purchase of a website or domain. So one more time Squarespace.com start that free trial,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start building your site, you will see how much you love Squarespace. When you’re ready to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace.com slash ATP for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Thank you so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much extra Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, let’s talk iPad Pro. And as we were transitioning from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ternus in the library talking about the iPad Air, he grabs a little book that says, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey title is It’s Thin Possible, which I thought was pretty funny. And we learn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the iPad Pro. Was it immediately that we get the commercial thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that right? The crushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. weird thing that was. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so again, as we’re recording this Wednesday night, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been mostly offline for most of the day, but I’ve been online enough to see that apparently people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have thoughts about the crushing commercial. So let me describe this real quick. So you see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one of those gigantic industrial presses, just massive, massive, massive industrial presses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s like a piano and instruments and art and paint and all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these different things that are also to represent different flavors of art and whatnot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s on this industrial press that starts squishing it all down. And they do some kind of funny things where there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, I don’t know the name for it, but you know those wooden people, like humanoid models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can pose in different poses? If you saw a picture of it, you’d know exactly what I’m thinking of. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got its arms up and its head looking back like, no, don’t squish me sort of thing. And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a TV with a little animated character. And it looks up and kind of does like an oh no sort of thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, at the time, I didn’t think that much of it. I didn’t think it was stellar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I saw what they were going for. Like it made sense to me at the time. Oh, what they’re doing is they’re squishing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this down and then the end of the commercial, you know, the press comes back up and you see that there’s an iPad Pro sitting there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the ostensible message here is that all these different things that you can do, you can paint, you can play music, you can do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, video, all this stuff, you can squish into this one iPad Pro. And-
⏹️ ▶️ John And this new iPad Pro is really thin. That’s the other thing. We squished the iPad, so it got even
⏹️ ▶️ John skinnier because it was squished in a hydraulic press. That’s why it’s so thin. That’s why it’s thin possible, so our thinnest
⏹️ ▶️ John product there, blah, blah, blah. So that’s why they’re using a hydraulic press in this ad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and so for me, when I first saw it, I was like, eh, okay, whatever. And apparently, there’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some discourse since then. And I mean, I think, again, for me, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really understand it, but if I try to put my head in the, or put my thoughts in the shoes of someone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a creative professional in that sense, like a true to form artist, musician, so on and so forth, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s been going on with AI recently in the discourse around AI. I could see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how it would be a little bothersome to say the least, even.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, God, I think it was terrible. So I am not a creative professional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in any of the ways that were represented there. Like maybe they could crush a podcasting microphone, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. But like, so it starts out and the first thing you see get crushed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a trumpet standing on its end. First of all, my kid plays the trumpet, so there’s trumpets in my house. And I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think musicians will like this. And like, even I, not a musician,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see it, they’re crushing a trumpet. I’m like, that’s so destructive. What a waste. And I’m like, I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re going for. Look, you can cram all this stuff into an iPad. What it looked like to me was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are destroying all of these real world artistic objects because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t need them anymore because you’re replacing them with this fake digital version. And that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, there’s a lot of anxiety about AI replacing creative people and computers
⏹️ ▶️ John taking their jobs and stuff. And I think that’s all tied up in this as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t even consider it an AI thing, although I see why people would be sensitive about that right now. That makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it just showed disrespect for all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these instruments of music and art. It’s like, you don’t need this crap anymore. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just have an iPad. It’s like, ooh, that’s an odd message to be sending.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I see how they came up with this ad, though. So I posted this on Macedon. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John surprised at how many people didn’t know about this, because I feel like it’s one of the most famous channels on YouTube. But there’s a channel on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John called, fittingly, the Hydraulic Press Channel. And they just take a hydraulic press and
⏹️ ▶️ John squish things. And the reason people like that channel is it’s fun to see what various materials
⏹️ ▶️ John do when put under a tremendous amount of pressure. And generally, what people want to see is
⏹️ ▶️ John them do something dramatic. They explode, they shatter, or they crush in a really
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting way, or they’re just destroyed, or they don’t, doesn’t look like anything has happened for 30
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds, and then finally, they just shatter into a million pieces, right? That’s why this channel is popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when they came up with the idea of, it’s really thin, we’re gonna put it in a hydraulic press, oh, let’s make it look like we’re pressing
⏹️ ▶️ John all this stuff into it, like we’re pressing all this creativity inside of it. The problem is that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re shooting this, and you live in a culture where the hydraulic press channel exists. And you know that people
⏹️ ▶️ John like it because of the destruction. That’s the direction you go, which is like, okay, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not just that we have a bunch of musical instruments and sculptures and
⏹️ ▶️ John paints and all sorts of stuff in the thing. It’s okay, but when they get pressed, they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do something dramatic. They’re gonna crumple, they’re gonna explode, they’re gonna squirt. That means at the end of the thing, they had a giant,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a big explosion type thing, right? And so what they,
⏹️ ▶️ John and unknowingly, They think they’re doing what they should be doing, which is like, that’s what people like about the hydraulic press channel. We have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that, of course, but what they’ve unknowingly started to do is show the destruction of things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are meaningful to people. And it mostly doesn’t matter whether it was all CG, all practical,
⏹️ ▶️ John or anywhere in between. Like, I don’t think anyone is specifically angry that they killed
⏹️ ▶️ John one trumpet, right? It’s the idea of showing even a completely CG trumpet being crushed
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is It’s disrespectful to the objects, you know, it’s it
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like because they’re they’re destroying them This is the destruction of them is the point because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what people like about the hydraulic press channels Things are destroyed and they got those wires crossed, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John and so that’s it it’ll pass or whatever, but I feel like it’s it’s an interesting point
⏹️ ▶️ John because everyone making it feels like they’re doing like like, you know, creative
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff is inside the iPad. The iPad is real thin. And also everybody loves the hydraulic press channel.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when they put them together, it’s like, no, you didn’t realize, you know, you took a bunch of individual
⏹️ ▶️ John things that people like, but you cross the streams. To the people watching the hydraulic press channel, like
⏹️ ▶️ John no violinist wants to go to the hydraulic press channel and see them destroy even the cheapest violin
⏹️ ▶️ John in the hydraulic press. Like that’s what they essentially did. They went to the hydraulic press channel and they said, what
⏹️ ▶️ John item do you care about in your life as a creative professional, come to the hydraulic pressure hour, we’re gonna put the data in it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that people don’t like. Like that’s not the vibe. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’ll learn, hopefully learn from this mistake. I think the idea of squishing it to make it real flat is fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they can’t all be winners.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, one thing I noticed immediately too in the video is, you don’t see any Apple products getting squished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they squish, like they have like some PC monitors that look like they might be Apple products, but they just get knocked over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it cuts away, never see them actually get damaged. Like you only see other things get
⏹️ ▶️ John what would they crush into the iPad like what they would put? I guess I put I don’t know the iPod Nano
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well the Mac for a few years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I keyboard we the smart keyboard folio. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, well that’s true. So in any case, so let’s talk about the design and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple said quote we’ve always envisioned iPad as a magical sheet of glass. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apparently, it’s pretty darn close now. So the 11 inch is 5.3 millimeters and just barely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under a pound. The 13 inch is 5.1 millimeters. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have the weight in front of me, 1.02 pounds, I believe. And a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have pointed out, this doesn’t bother me as much as I think it bothers a lot of other people, although it does make me chuckle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPad Pro is now lighter than the iPad Air, which I understand how we got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. And maybe John, you can give us a nickel tour, or I can if you prefer of how we ended up here, but that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of funny that this is where we are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s just more of Apple’s like difficulty, let’s say in naming things.
⏹️ ▶️ John The iPad Air, the original one, Air was because it’s light as air and it’s thin and it fits in a middle envelope. And the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is that product was wildly successful. And so Apple’s like, we need to leverage
⏹️ ▶️ John this brand equity. People like the MacBook Air, Air is good. A, we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John keep making that. and B, we can put the air suffix on other products and make people associate
⏹️ ▶️ John them with the good feelings they have about the MacBook Air, even though it doesn’t necessarily make any sense because they
⏹️ ▶️ John would put air on products that were not the smallest, lightest, thinnest, most Manila envelope, slippy, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just doing it because it’s a brand name that worked and air has long since stopped meaning anything about how small it, remember
⏹️ ▶️ John there was the, you know, the MacBook One, the 12 inch MacBook, was way smaller than any
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco air, but it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John called air, but the air still existed, they were bigger than that, Right, so it’s Air just means
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not the Pro one and we’re trying to leverage established brand equity based on
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air. So it’s not particularly sensible and they probably should have
⏹️ ▶️ John retired it or kept it just in the MacBook Air. When they extended it to the iPad, you’re like, all
⏹️ ▶️ John right, fine, whatever. But anyway, the fact that the Air is a little bit heavier than the Pro now, like
⏹️ ▶️ John who cares? It’s not a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. Well, it made sense. the very first iPad Air was a big weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and thickness savings over its predecessor. So it actually made sense to use it when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first used it. Briefly. But yeah, but then all iPads became those dimensions and now it doesn’t mean anything anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and now the Pro’s got thinner, which is interesting. So Apple’s big pitch on this was,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the thinnest Apple product ever. And I immediately started Googling, I’m like, really? Was it thinner than,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think of the thinnest product. They compared it to the iPad Nano and obviously they showed it on camera. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t, and I look this up, I’m like, surely the buttonless shuffle was thinner than the Nano, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the answer is no, it was not, according to my brief Googling during the keynote. So I take Apple at their
⏹️ ▶️ John word. This is the thinnest Apple product ever. There is some history with thin Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John products, mostly not good. When, what was it, the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 6, I believe, it was- Vendgate. the thinnest
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone they had ever made, that didn’t work out that
⏹️ ▶️ John It turned out to be easier to bend. I guarantee you, you’re going to see bent iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pros on a million YouTube channels. Because that’s, I mean, there’s YouTube channels that are just literally dedicated to buying every Apple product and
⏹️ ▶️ John bending it. Like that just always happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it will happen with these as well. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple does the same thing. Apple bends its own products to see how bendy they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is thinner than it was before. Is it thinner? Is the amount that it’s thinner? Because I think it’s only like, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John the 11 inches, maybe one or two millimeters thinner than it used to be. Right? And it’s noticeable when you pick it up from
⏹️ ▶️ John the reports of the people who were there. Is that change in thickness enough to change the durability
⏹️ ▶️ John of this? Because when you see these YouTube channels that are gonna buy a new iPad Pro and bend it,
⏹️ ▶️ John take note of whether or not they take a previous generation iPad Pro and also bend it. And do they do
⏹️ ▶️ John it on a piece of equipment that can measure the strength required? Like, is it worse than the previous one is my question. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think a lot of the sensational YouTube videos You see will not answer that question. They’ll just say it’s bendy. Look
⏹️ ▶️ John how easy it is to bend Okay, but is this worse than it was before? Is it better than it was before because they reinforce
⏹️ ▶️ John that we don’t know but it is somewhat of a concern because the as far as we can tell the Materials
⏹️ ▶️ John this is made out of are the same as they have been and Apple didn’t brag about any Like like
⏹️ ▶️ John every car manufacturer does every time there’s a new revision new generation of a car They will tell you how much increased torsional
⏹️ ▶️ John rigidity The hit the frame head Apple did not say that about this last time Apple said that was I think with the
⏹️ ▶️ John 6s Maybe or whenever they fix the bendy one before they start making the phone sticker again So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not against thin iPads. I think it’s great. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Do wonder about the durability, but I’m certainly not going to try to bend mine I treat my iPad so gently It’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna get bent. But this is something we’ll find out someone’s gonna buy that 13-inch iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John which is the thinnest ever 5.1 millimeters and they’re gonna put it in their backpack with a bunch of books or something and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna take it out one day and it’s gonna be bent and there’s gonna be story about it and the question will remain,
⏹️ ▶️ John is it more bendy than the previous 12.9 inch was? And that is a question that could be
⏹️ ▶️ John answered with science but I don’t have the science or the money to
⏹️ ▶️ John bend two iPads to find out the answer to that question. Presumably Apple does and they’re okay with it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John for now I would just say if you buy one of these, maybe be a little tiny bit extra careful with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so 5.1 and 5.3 millimeters and the iPad Air is seven millimeters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as they mentioned during the video, it is thinner than the iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nano. I almost said iPad there. And our friend Federico Vatici
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in London at a press event that they had there. And he had the wherewithal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to notice that the standard Apple Thunderbolt cable is just barely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey taller than or bigger than the I presume this is the 13
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inch iPad Pro, which is just bananas that the cable is when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey include, you know, the housing and whatnot is bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than the plastic grommet, the plastic like little thing that has the little Thunderbolt symbol on a Thunderbolt caber
⏹️ ▶️ John that is thicker than the device. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey amazing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just bananas. And they’re really they’re really approaching like the we’ve talked about this when they made the transition from lightning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, these devices are pushing up against how thin you can make a device with a USB-C connector on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John As predicted years ago on past shows, it’s like, if they keep getting thinner, eventually you will hit the limit
⏹️ ▶️ John of USB-C. And the limit of USB-C is a little bit, you’ll hit that limit a little bit sooner than you would have for
⏹️ ▶️ John lightning. You know, they need to do this, because again, this is not just a USB-C port, it’s a Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John port, that’s one of the pro features. But I feel like there is a limit on
⏹️ ▶️ John how thin they can make these iPads, and it’s defined by that plug right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So battery capacity has changed. In the 11 inch, it’s gone up about 10,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little less than 10%, but in the 13 inch, it’s gone down about 5%, which is kind of funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the battery life for all of them is rated the same as it ever was, which is 10 hours. So it’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John how they end up with that. Like, I don’t think the insides of these devices are
⏹️ ▶️ John different in any way, other than obviously the big one has a big screen, which presumably uses more energy.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s weird that the, well, I guess, you know, it’s weird that the 11 inch got bigger, but this is relative to the previous 11
⏹️ ▶️ John inch and the 13 inch got smaller relative to the previous 13 inch obviously the 13 inch does have a bigger battery
⏹️ ▶️ John than the 11 inch, but whatever they’re doing, like I heard from people who were there in person, like, wow, the 11
⏹️ ▶️ John inch is so thin, even though it’s like only a millimeter, you can really feel the difference. They must have a smaller battery in the 11 inch,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t, they have a bigger battery. It’s the device is thinner and it has a bigger battery or at least a battery with
⏹️ ▶️ John more capacity. I don’t know if it’s physically larger, maybe they have a better energy density with whatever new
⏹️ ▶️ John battery thing they’re using, but don’t think just because these are thinner that they are sacrificing battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not, well, they may be sacrificing battery life, but if they are, it’s probably not because of the thickness,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they actually added battery to the 11 inch. And the 13 inch, the low went down, only went down by like 5%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The colors are, speaking of, same as it ever was. They’re silver and space black. I guess maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s slightly different than before, but effectively it’s the same as it always was. as Jason and Mike have talked about on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Upgrade many times, the fancier the device, the less cool the colors get. Sweet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But John, I’m just gonna sit back and let you take this from here. Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Retina XDR, and it’s on both sizes, baby. So how happy are you, John
⏹️ ▶️ John I did know that the good screen was gonna come on both because that has always been the rumor, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great because in the previous generation, the mini LED backlit
⏹️ ▶️ John screen was only on the big size and I didn’t buy that. I don’t like mini LED and it wasn’t important
⏹️ ▶️ John enough for me to get a big iPad anyway. But yeah, it’s on both. It is as we, as was rumored, as we discussed in the
⏹️ ▶️ John last episode, it’s a two layer OLED. They call it the tandem OLED, where
⏹️ ▶️ John they take two OLEDs and they just lay them on top of each other. And so they can run each one at a little bit lower
⏹️ ▶️ John power to extend its life, but then they get more light output because you got, hey, two screens for the price of one.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a thousand nits max for SDR and HDR. I guess they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I only know how they do these great things on television ratings. It’s not clear
⏹️ ▶️ John how they’re doing it here. But anyway, a 1600 nits peak HDR, which means, you know, not probably the whole screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those numbers, the 1600 one, you may be familiar to you from what the iPhone OLEDs are rated
⏹️ ▶️ John at and what the Pro Display XDR is rated at. And this is kind of like the 10 hour battery life. Apple has just decided
⏹️ ▶️ John that 1600 nits peak HDR, that’s good for a while. So the XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John did that ages ago. All the MacBook Pros have screens that do 1600 nits peak HDR.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, and the phones do, and now this thing does. That’s just what they pick. Because you can drive these screens harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to make them brighter and wear them out sooner. And so you can kind of pick where that is. But that’s what these are capable of, and it’s all in the
⏹️ ▶️ John family. The 1000 nits for SDR is interesting, because SDR is like when you’re looking at your
⏹️ ▶️ John windows and your menu bar and stuff like that. On a Mac or on any other thing, we’re just looking at the UI. The UI is not
⏹️ ▶️ John in HDR unless you like do something weird to force it that way, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John SDR limits for Apple stuff is usually around 500 to 600 nits, like
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Macs, for the iMac, even for the XDR. When I’m looking at my XDR
⏹️ ▶️ John now, nothing on my screen is 1600 nits because it’s just UI, there’s no HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, right? And it’s probably around, well, at a maximum of 500, 600 nits I don’t crank it up that way like Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John does. Anyway, this, this iPads go to a thousand in SDR. And this is the feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of televisions as well, where they’re like, okay, the actual limit for SDR, for standard
⏹️ ▶️ John definition, like before the age of HDR, like back in the 70s or 80s or whatever, how bright
⏹️ ▶️ John are televisions supposed to be? Like what was the mastering monitors they were using? It’s so incredibly dim by modern standards that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John would run into that. So it has been a feature of televisions for ages to say, you can watch non HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John content, like your local news, And you can turn the brightness up so that it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John much brighter than it’s quote-unquote supposed to be Uh for a portable device
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an important feature so you can see the screen outdoors basically like they’re not going to show it at like 300 or 200 nits or some you know
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that’s like What you would expect like in a dark room, you’d want
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at a computer monitor You want it to be able to go brighter. So allowing the ui to go up to a
⏹️ ▶️ John thousand nits Essentially, it’s a software change or whatever is a feature for outdoor viewability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, I don’t know if this is full screen or some portion of the screen on televisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John For power reasons, it is very, very often the case that a very, like, 10%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the screen can light up to some huge number and 100% of the screen can light up to that number divided by like 10 or 20, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Hope that’s not the case on these screens, but honestly, I don’t care that much because I don’t spend my time looking at
⏹️ ▶️ John 100% white images filling the entire screen at maximum brightness. That’s pointless unless you’re using it as a flash
⏹️ ▶️ John There are new resolutions on these screens. The the pixels per inch is still 264 the same
⏹️ ▶️ John as it’s always been The the 11 inch one gets 32 extra
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels and with whoo compared to the old one And the 13 inch one
⏹️ ▶️ John gets 20 pixels in width and 16 pixels at height This is not a feature like obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John this is so small you can even see these pixels are very small It’s just this is the part they got I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how they came to this decision But it is relevant for software developers if you have some kind of pixel perfect layout But honestly you shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John side class size classes have been around for ages flexible layouts that around for ages, but just FYI
⏹️ ▶️ John These screens these iPad Pro OLED tandem OLEDs are not the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size as any previous iPad screens and they’re you know they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly bigger which is fine. You do have a nano texture glass
⏹️ ▶️ John option and we will start getting into the Porsche-ification of the iPad at this stage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nano texture is a feature that was available on the Pro Display XDR ages ago it’s also on the studio
⏹️ ▶️ John display. It’s basically like a matte screen but instead of making the matte screen by putting like a piece of plastic over it
⏹️ ▶️ John or something or whatever they take the glass, the normal glossy glass and they microscopically
⏹️ ▶️ John etch it so the glass is like if you looked at it in a microscope it’s like rough instead of smooth and they
⏹️ ▶️ John do this to make reflections you know more diffuse or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I personally do not like nanotexture and I’m glad about that because it was a thousand dollar option on my already
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive screen. I don’t know how much it actually costs to make nanotexture, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe like the goldmine of profit margins for Apple, but Apple has always charged a huge amount for it. They charge less on the
⏹️ ▶️ John studio display proportionally than they do the XDR, which makes you think it’s just like it’s got to be almost pure profit for them. But
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows? Nanotexture is an option on both of these iPads. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the only way you get access to that option is if you buy the Wysac package.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pronouncing that wrong. Probably Wysac package.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Porsche has these option packages that if you want any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the good stuff, you’ve got to buy the big option package, right? You can’t just get nanotexture because nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ John you just add like what, $100, $200, whatever it is. But no, you can’t even get Nanotexture unless you buy one of the iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John that has one or two terabytes of storage. And what relation
⏹️ ▶️ John does storage have to the Nanotexture?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco None, none whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s totally unrelated. But if you want Nanotexture, if you want the privilege of paying a couple of hundred extra bucks for
⏹️ ▶️ John Nanotexture, you have to pay up to what, $600 more from
⏹️ ▶️ John going from the base 256? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think it’s $100 for nanotexture plus $600 to go to the 1 terabyte model
⏹️ ▶️ John the nanotexture option is essentially a $700 option starting from the base model
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s rough again. I’m don’t care cuz I don’t like that texture I don’t think people should get nanotexture
⏹️ ▶️ John and there are a lot of open questions about nanotexture because nanotexture on the XDR when it first Came out people like oh if you
⏹️ ▶️ John get the nanotexture on the XDR Make sure you don’t touch your screen because it’s really hard to get fingerprints off because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know you have to clean it with Apple special cloth and you can’t use any microfiber cloth, you have to use Apple special ones, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s mostly BS, but if you use a low quality microfiber it might be bad. But if you get finger grease on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, it’s hard to clean off, you can’t use certain cleaners, don’t use abrasive things, you can mess it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And because it is such a micro textured finish, I believe you could mess it up if you used anything
⏹️ ▶️ John even mildly abrasive. And by messing it up, it would essentially like permanently like smudge
⏹️ ▶️ John your screen by making it unevenly rough because you will have disturbed the evenly rough nanotextured
⏹️ ▶️ John surface with like an abrasive paper towel or something and made it unevenly rough.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nanotexture has always terrified me. Anyway, Apple is now selling touch devices that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to touch when you use it. Forget about don’t put your finger, you’re supposed to touch it with nanotexture on
⏹️ ▶️ John them. I don’t know if it’s the same nanotexture that’s on their screens. I don’t know if they’ve tested it and they say it’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John finger grease is fine. It does come with the little special microfiber cloth, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a high quality microfiber cloth. But I personally would not recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John buying any of these devices with nanotexture if you are at all concerned about
⏹️ ▶️ John fingerprint smudges and cleaning the screen. Wait a week, wait a month. See what the deal is with nanotexture.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it okay to have a nanotexture screen that you get fingerprints all over? Is it not a big deal? Or is there some sort of problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this is the very first one of these that has existed and unlike an XDR where you can just be disciplined and say, I just won’t touch
⏹️ ▶️ John it, that’s not an option with the iPad. I guess if you use the Apple Pencil everywhere, you could do it, but even with the Apple Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, do I want to rub the Apple Pencil against my nanotexture screen? Apple has obviously tested this
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m sure they’re gonna say everything’s fine, but I am personally super nervous about
⏹️ ▶️ John nanotexture, which is why I’m absolutely definitely not getting it on anything that Apple ever sells me and certainly not on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how do you really feel about it, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I mean, I’m happy
⏹️ ▶️ John about the screens. The specs look great. Color reproduction looks reasonable. I’m happy the 1600 nits, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like everything looks good about the screen. I’m happy with the battery life, the thickness. Like they put a double
⏹️ ▶️ John layer screen in there that gets way brighter and it’s got the same 10 hours of battery life. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbs up. Like this, from what I want from this thing, it’s looking pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re happy, but you’re less effusive than I thought you would be. I mean, you’ve been waiting for this for a few years now. Aren’t we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like overjoyed? Like I expect to see you or hear you running around the room screaming to the rooftops how excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are. And I’m not getting that from you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, when I get it, I’ll see how amazing it is. But yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are things to modify my happiness that we will get to shortly. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just how John sounds when he’s excited. Yeah, this is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a John sounds like when he’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John excited. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there are some things that are not as exciting about this, setting aside the nanotexture thing, which we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get to. I mean, obviously this works with Apple Pencil Pro, but not the Apple Pencil 2 because of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, just like, you know, just before we leave the screen, I think the screen is a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the Pro story. It is, by all accounts, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really great screen. And what they’ve had to do with the dual layers to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. There is no question, we are all going to just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting and waiting and waiting for these screens to come to the other products in their lineup. We cannot wait for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen to come to a MacBook Pro. We cannot wait for this screen to come, maybe eventually to a desktop size monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is gonna be like the thing we’re waiting for because it is by all accounts, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such an amazing screen. So I’m really happy to see like, they are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leading the industry in really good screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s the Samsung screen or whatever. Like people always attribute this to Apple. Apple’s not making this screen. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this is- Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one else is selling them. Like I don’t see anyone else
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John doing it. Yeah, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have the power of the money to say, we want a screen that works like this. I mean, companies have been trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John these dual layer OLEDs for a long time and it’s been very difficult Apple is gonna Apple gets the good stuff first
⏹️ ▶️ John because they pay the money, right? So they you know I do hope this expands to other products
⏹️ ▶️ John and to review for the people who don’t know why we care about OLED I heard heard Gruber on dithering say
⏹️ ▶️ John he was looking for blooming and didn’t see it You’re not gonna see blooming and OLED like the reason we are excited about
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs is because each individual pixel lights up Individually and you may think isn’t that how all screens
⏹️ ▶️ John work? I have an iPad and each individual pixel lights up Well, LCD screens are done with a backlight where there
⏹️ ▶️ John is there are lights behind the pixels and then like color filters of various Kinds that color it or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John but the lights behind the pixels are not one pixel in size The lights behind the pixels are huge compared to
⏹️ ▶️ John pixels. There’s often like, you know, there’s millions of pixels but there’s like a Few hundred backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John regions of you know The the backlights are like one inch by one inch or one centimeter by one centimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John huge number of pixels especially retin resolution are behind that. And so the worst case scenario
⏹️ ▶️ John for that is like a star field in space. It’s perfectly black with these pinpoints
⏹️ ▶️ John of stars. Each little pinprick of stars is a couple of little pixels at very high brightness. On an
⏹️ ▶️ John LCD display, on a quote, mini LED display, you have to light up the backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John region behind each one of the stars. The star is a pinprick, but the backlight is like one
⏹️ ▶️ John centimeter by one centimeter or one inch by one inch or like whatever size the backlight regions are, You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to light up that entire thing behind that pinprick. So what you end up with is the blackness
⏹️ ▶️ John of space, pinpricks of light, but around each pinprick of light, there’s like a little you can even see the
⏹️ ▶️ John shape of the backlight region. Sometimes it’s like a little square glowing. Right. And for years, manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John have been trying to figure out how can we make it so you can’t see the backlight behind that? Because LCDs
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t block all the light. Like when you turn off the when you make an LCD black and you tell it block all the light from
⏹️ ▶️ John the backlight, they block as much as they can, but they can’t block it all. and that light that leaks through where
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not supposed to be there, where there’s supposed to be black space, but now there’s gray space, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is bloom around those those pinpoints of light or whatever. OLED doesn’t have that problem. Every individual
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel in OLED lights up all by itself. There’s no backlight region. There’s no how many different regions of backlights,
⏹️ ▶️ John how many individual backlights. There’s essentially one backlight for every pixel. That’s why we love OLED.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no blooming in OLED other than the natural blooming of a pinprick of light. When you look up at the sky, you see
⏹️ ▶️ John a star. It is a point source because you can just light up that one pixel. That’s why everyone goes
⏹️ ▶️ John gaga over OLED. Our phones are OLED. You can buy OLED televisions. There are OLED
⏹️ ▶️ John screens on laptops and so on. And this is Apple’s introduction to larger than iPhone size
⏹️ ▶️ John OLEDs. And of course, OLEDs burn in. So now they got a dual layer one where you can run them at lower power to
⏹️ ▶️ John hopefully combat burn in and you can make it very bright and very colorful. And so anyway, yeah, this is this is a great
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. As I said last episode, I think this will be the best screen Apple has ever made. I think Apple itself made that pitch.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like Margo said, that means we want screens like this to be on all devices, assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have any bad burn in problems. But again, we’ll find that out as these enter the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the I should know this, but I do not. What is the longevity for OLED? Because don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they eventually it’s organic light emitting diodes, right? So something
⏹️ ▶️ John every time you use a pixel, it wears down a little bit. Cool. Yeah. So I mean, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John ideally what you want to happen, and the television does as well, is as they wear down, they do like
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially a compensation cycle where there’s like a computer that figures out how much each one has worn down and it tries
⏹️ ▶️ John to level them because they could say, okay, this one is worn out, so we gotta give it a little more power than that one. They wanna make it so
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s even, but inevitably what happens is over time, if even this, if these compensations are
⏹️ ▶️ John working perfectly, the max, if you just put the whole screen being white, that will just slowly
⏹️ ▶️ John get dimmer over time because you will be slowly wearing out the pixels. What you want is for it to get dimmer uniformly and not
⏹️ ▶️ John have like the logo that’s in the corner of the screen burned in or whatever. Like that’s what the compensation
⏹️ ▶️ John cycles are trying to do. But yeah, they wear it over time, but they’ll, and OLED should last
⏹️ ▶️ John the normal usage lifetime of an iPad. I mean, look at our phones, like same deal. We’ve had OLED phones for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years, right? And if you buy like a five-year-old phone, maybe you could detect some kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, image retention, burn in, worn out pixels or whatever. But in general, they work, OLED phones work until
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wants to buy them anymore, right, until they’re so old that they’re obsolete. So the same should be true of this screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No promises though. All right, so let’s talk performance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There were some rumors, which I think we discussed last week, that, oh, you know what? This might have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M4. And when I first heard this, I was like, NFW. And then after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hearing a bunch of our friends talk about it on various shows, and after we talked about it, I was like, Well, I’m still really skeptical,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but maybe. And so sure enough, Tim Millett comes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and says, we’re going to 4, M4 time. And this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second generation 3 nanometer technology. And I’m just going to step aside and give you back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the floor, John Syracuse, to tell us about this, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John N3E, they didn’t say it in the show. But the closest they’re going to get to having a slide that says N3E,
⏹️ ▶️ John because, yeah, That’s second gen 3 nanometer technology from TSMC. And like I just said
⏹️ ▶️ John last week, the rumors of this, once the iPad model numbers and the part number things
⏹️ ▶️ John were dug out, like iPad model numbers were dug out of iPad, iPadOS 17.5 beta, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s hard evidence. And you could say, well, you don’t know that they’re gonna keep the numberings. They
⏹️ ▶️ John were, you know, they were increasing the numbers by one for each M1, right? And they skipped over M3. And so that was pretty much hard
⏹️ ▶️ John evidence. So like with so many of these things, It’s a rumor, you don’t know, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of. And then as the date approaches of the announcement, things solidify. And since we had the
⏹️ ▶️ John luxury of recording just one week before the event, they had solidified pretty much. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I really expected to see M4 and lo and behold we did. What is the M4?
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says it has 28 billion transistors. To give a comparison, the M3 has 25 billion transistors.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this does have more transistors than the M3, not by a lot, but it’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you just think this was, oh, this is just the M3, but on the M3E process, it’s not. It’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ John SOC, as we’ll see as we go on here. And again, the M3 is the comparison because the M3 Pro has 37
⏹️ ▶️ John billion and the M3 Max has 92 billion. So this is the little one, just
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain old M4, no suffix. It does have 128 gigabits per second
⏹️ ▶️ John memory bandwidth, which is up from 100 on the M3, M2, and M1. So this is a bump.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, we went three generations of the plain M-series chips, so they all had 100 gigabytes per second, now we’re up to 120.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re either using faster RAM, or I mean, that’s what it’s gotta be. I think there’s like a LPDDR
⏹️ ▶️ John standard that’s slightly faster. So that’s good. So we’ve made, it’s kind of like a, the first
⏹️ ▶️ John generation of leap in the baseline, smallest M-series chip memory bandwidth.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has a new display engine, which Apple didn’t elaborate on. I imagine it’s, I don’t even know. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t say, oh, we need this new display engine to drive the two layers of the screen. Maybe that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine there’s some display firmware that does that and they don’t have to. I don’t even know what they mean, but anyway, new display engine.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a new media engine, which is like the thing that does H.264 and H.265 and ProRes decoding, encoding
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff. Apple didn’t really talk about that, but if you look at the specs, only
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 models say hardware accelerated 8K, H.264, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That 8K is only in the specs for the M4 ones. So I guess the other ones couldn’t do hardware accelerated 8K.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had to fall back to software or something. I don’t know, but anyway, it does have a new media engine. So that’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s also good because M1, M2, M3, whenever someone tested
⏹️ ▶️ John any computer with that thing in it and they do like, let’s see how fast it can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John encode or decode H.264, that was just running on the media engine. It didn’t matter how many
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU cores it had, how good the GPU was, there’s dedicated hardware in these SoCs
⏹️ ▶️ John to do stuff like H.264 encoding and decoding, right? And that dedicated hardware has
⏹️ ▶️ John not gotten faster or better that quickly. I’m not sure if it’s changed at all from the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1 to the M3, but it has changed in the M4. Kind of like the memory bandwidth, this may be, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t say this for certain, but this may be the first time that the media engine hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John decoder encoder thing has gotten substantially faster. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John at a certain point in the presentation, I forget who it was, but the person on screen said, The
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 has up to four performance cores. And I said, wait, what now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Up to four performance cores? Anyway, and six efficiency cores. And so the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John had four performance cores and four efficiency cores. So you got two new efficiency cores, same
⏹️ ▶️ John number of performance cores compared to the M3. Are these the same cores as the M3? Well, Apple says
⏹️ ▶️ John that the M4 cores have, all the cores in the M4 come with,
⏹️ ▶️ John quote, next generation ML accelerators. Not the neural engine,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the GPU, the CPU cores all have next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John ML accelerators. I have no idea what that means. But what it does mean is these cores are not the same as the
⏹️ ▶️ John M3 cores. The power cores aren’t the same, the efficiency cores aren’t the same. They’re probably similar in size,
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably have a close to the similar amount of transistors, but they are different enough that they have whatever the hell
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sure we’ll find out as time goes on.
⏹️ ▶️ John but just to be clear, and then Apple throughout this entire presentation does the thing that they love to do, which is only slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more justified in this case, which is let’s compare it, not to its predecessor, but to
⏹️ ▶️ John its predecessor minus one, which makes some sense in this one because there’s never been an M3 iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John so what are you gonna compare it to? You’re gonna compare it to the iPad Pro that it’s replacing, and the one it’s replacing came with an M2,
⏹️ ▶️ John so they say it’s 60% faster than the M2. And as we always say
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talk about Apple’s comparisons to multiple generations old, people are like, well, that just makes sense
⏹️ ▶️ John because people have old stuff. No, not everyone has the latest and greatest. We want to know how fast it is compared to the old thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John most people have. And I will explain again our reasoning. It’s not that we think everyone has to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John newest stuff. It’s because what you want to know, at least if you’re kind of a tech nerd enthusiast, is,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this the one to buy? Is this a year where we make a big leap? Is this a really good one?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And the way to know that is, how big a leap is this one
⏹️ ▶️ John over the one that came before it. And again, the one that came before it is M2, I understand that. But just talking about the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John as an SOC, like is M4 just like barely
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the M3 or is it twice as good as the M3, right? Even if you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John an M3, what you wanna know is, is this the year we make a big leap? Is this a good one to buy? I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John bought an iPad in six years. Is this the year for me to buy? Because we’ve just made a big leap. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t wanna buy, if you’ve been waiting years and years to buy a new one, You don’t want to buy when they come up with a model that’s 1% better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the previous one. You want to wait for that year when it’s 5% or 10% or 20% because it gives you the most bang
⏹️ ▶️ John for your buck. That’s the point of the comparison with the predecessor,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And again, I know the predecessor only had an M2 because there never was an M3 iPad, so it makes this a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit tricky, but there are devices that have M3s in them, right? And so setting aside the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just want to know how good is the M4 compared to the M3, Apple does not want to tell you. We will find
⏹️ ▶️ John out shortly, but Apple’s not interested in that comparison. So anyway, it has a 10 core
⏹️ ▶️ John GPU, which is the same as the M3, although the M3 is binned sometimes because sometimes you get one with
⏹️ ▶️ John eight cores active instead of the full 10 because binning, right? Apple bragged
⏹️ ▶️ John about how much better it is. It has the same performance as the M2 at half the power. That’s great, it’s a two
⏹️ ▶️ John generation newer chip. Thumbs up, we like it. But the binning continues.
⏹️ ▶️ John And binning, we use that term to be like, when you make a CPU or make a Silicon chip and
⏹️ ▶️ John some parts of it don’t work, you can just turn off those parts and sell it anyway for a cheaper price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because every time you make Silicon, some parts, some of them don’t work at all, some of them have parts of them that don’t work, and instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of throwing them out, you can just sell them at a lower price and then save the ones where everything is working
⏹️ ▶️ John and sell them at a higher price because you get fewer of those, right? That’s binning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is binning, and that’s a term for the Silicon industry. Apple has always been at Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John when in the Apple Silicon age. Now they’re essentially doing the equivalent of binning
⏹️ ▶️ John with the entire product, but for the CPU itself, they are binning that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you buy an iPad and you want a M four with all the parts
⏹️ ▶️ John working, you have to buy, let me know if you’ve heard this one before the one terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the two terabytes storage model.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what does the storage have to do with the SoC? Nothing. It’s separate chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not related in any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. It’s price. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Because they want you to buy the Vysok package, right? Oh, you want to step up to the, you want the good
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Well, you can’t just get the CPU with all the stuff working. If you want the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the stuff working, you have to buy into other stuff. Whether you want it or not, maybe you don’t need a terabyte of storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have no choice. So they have tied those two things together. So if you get the 256 gig or the 512 gig model,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get an M4 with, and I think this is the first, three performance cores
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of four. You’re missing a performance core. Not in GPU cores, which I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done many, many times. Oh, you don’t get all the GPU cores. You’re missing a performance core.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know enough about silicon manufacturing to know, like, is it because the cores
⏹️ ▶️ John are new or trickier or something? Why do they usually bin based on GPUs? Why are they binning based on a
⏹️ ▶️ John performance core? Why aren’t they binning based on efficiency cores? because the performance cores are harder to make. I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Well, I think it’s probably about just surface area. The performance cores are always much larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the area diagram.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think that the GPU is, the total die area spent on GPU is bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than total die area spent on CPUs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? You’re probably right, but keep in mind, when they bid in GPU cores, usually they lop off two of them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be like, where is the defect in this area? Odds are it’s gonna land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within one of these blocks. the odds are this percent. And so like, you know, they work the numbers, they optimize it, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, all right, well, we can bin based on the loss of these like large zones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if it’s somewhere in this zone, we can still sell the chip because we just disable one or two GPU cores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or we disable one of the performance cores or whatever. So I’m guessing it’s all about, you know, area and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the odds that it will be there or
⏹️ ▶️ John not. Yeah, well, they didn’t bin based on GPU cores because no matter what storage you get, you get a
⏹️ ▶️ John full 10 core GPU, I believe. And they also bend, this is not bending again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using, I’m overloading this term. If you buy the model with 256 gigs or 512 gigs of storage, you get eight gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM. And this is something we’ve done in the past as well. If you buy the one terabyte, two terabyte,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get double the RAM, 16 gigs. I believe they started doing that last iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. I think even the one before that, I think that might’ve been in the A12Z generation, the 2020
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, those things are, they’re a little bit more related because the RAM is on the SoC. So I kind of, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of an excuse for like, well, that’s part of the package, you know, so anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want any of the good expensive stuff, you must get all of the good expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Which, you know, that’s business for you. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got you where they want you. This is not an a la carte thing where you just spec it out exactly how you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things are bundled together to a degree they’ve never been.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so, you know, comparing this, so the M2 had four performance cores M4 efficiency cores and the M4,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the M2 is the predecessor in the iPad line, the M4 has
⏹️ ▶️ John four performance cores and six efficiency cores. But if you get a binned
⏹️ ▶️ John M4, you are getting an SoC with one fewer performance core
⏹️ ▶️ John than its predecessor. So the question asked by Rick Williams, which I think is a good one,
⏹️ ▶️ John Rick Williams on Mastodon, is there some benchmark where the M2 iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John will beat the lower end M4 iPad Pro because it has
⏹️ ▶️ John one more performance core.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I think there could be a constructed benchmark where that might be the case,
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least I thought that might be until I saw the preliminary Geekbench numbers for the M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco safe, because
⏹️ ▶️ John remember, we’re comparing to the M2, because there is no M3 iPad Pro to compare it to. And that would have been like
⏹️ ▶️ John a closer fight, but the M2 is kind of older. Here, I don’t know if these are true because Geekbench scores come
⏹️ ▶️ John in at this stage. We don’t know if they’re like official or just random people trying things or they’re fake or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, here as of Wednesday, May 8th is the
⏹️ ▶️ John Geekbench scores for M3 versus M4. I’m not even doing M2, I’m doing M3 versus M4.
⏹️ ▶️ John Single core M3 score, which is currently the maximum single core score for any Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John in Geekbench is 3,131. That’s a 16 inch MacBook Pro M3 Max, right? 3131. The
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 single score, single core score, as if this is true, is 3767, which is 20%
⏹️ ▶️ John higher in single core than M3. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a small number. 20% higher in single core. Oh my god. So that’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe these power cores really are difficult to manufacture and, stand, 28 billion transistors
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to 25. It’s not a massively bigger chicken. This is single core. Who cares how many cores there are? This is
⏹️ ▶️ John single core. That’s a big if that’s real. That’s a big leap in single core,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes me think a three Performance cores in the m4 will crush
⏹️ ▶️ John for performance cores in the m3 and m2 with numbers like this
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, it depends on the the algorithm or whatever and then the multi-core This is an m3 iMac, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John the fairest comparison plain m3 iMac is a multi-core is eleven thousand 702 for the
⏹️ ▶️ John m3 and 14,000 677 for the m4 so it’s a 25% gain in multi-core and again
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the the multi-core I believe is the same no no
⏹️ ▶️ John because you have the extra efficiency course anyway 25% higher multi-core not that big because I think you have the two
⏹️ ▶️ John extra efficiency cores but 20% higher in single core that is significant that tells me
⏹️ ▶️ John that aside from the media engine being new, faster memory bandwidth, 20%
⏹️ ▶️ John higher single core, the M4 is not just a warmed over M3 if these benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John are to be believed. Obviously we have to wait until people get this into their hands and start testing them but I am optimistic
⏹️ ▶️ John that the M4 looks to be at least as good a leap over the M3 as the M3 was
⏹️ ▶️ John over its predecessor. Oh and then one final thing the 256 gig model if you get
⏹️ ▶️ John the smallest amount of storage, the default smallest amount of storage and the iPad Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John the specs that Apple has say that you can only do ProRes video recording at 30 frames
⏹️ ▶️ John per second at 1080p instead of 30 frames per second at 4K. And the speculation
⏹️ ▶️ John is that’s because everyone’s favorite, there’s only a single NAND flash chip in there,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you get the half speed.
⏹️ ▶️ John course. We won’t know until there’s a teardown or a benchmark, but Apple’s own specs say, oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John video recording is slower on the one with 256. So that makes me think they cheaped out on that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is bananas, the difference between the M3 and the M4. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it’s real. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real. That’s what I was going to say. Like, this seems almost too good to be true. But credit to Apple, they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such an incredible job with Apple Silicon that I could believe it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is definitely in the realm of possibility that the difference is that strong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of if it’s real, this is the final bit here. The neural engine, it’s there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a 16 core neural engine, just like the previous one was. They say it does 38 trillion
⏹️ ▶️ John operations per second. And they did some comparison of like, look how much faster it is than the one in the A11 Bionic. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. It’s great. That’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco old, it’s 60
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco faster, right? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much faster is it than a 486? Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John faster is it than our last Intel iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, we didn’t make
⏹️ ▶️ John those. Here’s the thing. I tried to look this up. I’m like 38 trillion, that number seems big.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to look up the M3’s neural engine score,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the number I found was 18 trillion operations per second. But then I also remember something about how Apple is changing what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re measuring. And previously they were doing like 16-bit floating point, or previously they were doing 32-bit floating
⏹️ ▶️ John point operations, and they changed it to 16-bit, and they can do twice as many of those because they packed, you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if this is an apples to apples. So I can’t tell you whether 38 trillion versus 18 trillion is
⏹️ ▶️ John a massively better neural engine in the M4, or whether Apple has changed what they’re measuring
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re doing 16-bit floating points instead of 32-bit. So the jury’s still out on that one. But that’s another interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing of like, the media engines have mostly been similar. The neural engines have been getting
⏹️ ▶️ John faster. They’ve been adding more cores. They’ve been adding more dye space and they’re getting better at what they do. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple didn’t make any specific claims about amazing AI stuff because I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we’ll get to in a little bit about the iPads in general, there’s a software story to these iPads that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John not ready to tell until W3C. So they said, oh, this is great. Everything’s great for AI. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the neural engine is great for AI. We even put in neural engines or whatever, but they don’t have any features to show us because
⏹️ ▶️ John they haven’t announced those yet. So it was a little bit of an awkward intro, but I would imagine that when they do
⏹️ ▶️ John announce all the AI features of their various software products, they may revisit how amazing the M4 is at
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But here they just said, it’s great. It’s got a neural engine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then some other interesting pieces, There is graphite sheets in the main housing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and copper in the Apple logo for thermals, which apparently gives you 20% better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thermal performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like this by the way, because the cooling thing, for years, people have been complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about essentially all of Apple’s fanless devices, that they are stupidly
⏹️ ▶️ John not thermally conductive enough. And as we’ve discussed on past shows, there are limits to how thermally
⏹️ ▶️ John conductive you want it to be, and there are like actual legal limits Like you can’t let the outside of your device get too hot because it will
⏹️ ▶️ John burn people So sometimes Apple is not conducting heat away from the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John to the outer world because they don’t want to burn your legs essentially Right, they’re like legal safety reasons why they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. But Various YouTube channels are forever tearing open Apple’s fanless devices, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John they be phones or iPads or MacBook Airs putting in Literally any
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of thermal anything the world’s cheapest two-cent thermal pad slapping on a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air Wow, it doesn’t thermal throttle anymore. Right? And we say, okay, well, is it because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple can’t do that because it’ll burn people’s legs or whatever? But like, we’ve always, you know, all these rumors like the next iPhone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna have a heat pipe and it’s gonna have, you know, this cooling thing or whatever. Finally, finally, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John includes and brags about a thing they put in one of their flat fanless devices that helps it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John cooler. And graphite chips, they use these in televisions as well to help cool them. So thumbs up, Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, you can brag about cooling technology. It’s not admitting your things are too hot. Put better cooling in there
⏹️ ▶️ John so it spreads the heat more so it doesn’t get too hot. I am a graphite sheet fan and I give that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. All right, cameras and my own. I’m sorry I’ve got ahead of myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is apparently four times faster than the M2 and 10 times faster than the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad Pro. March of progress, baby. Cameras and microphones. 12 megapixel back camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same as previous model, but no ultra wide camera. that is gone. They have removed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, for studio quality microphones, the LIDAR scanner remains. There’s a new adaptive True
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tone flash that apparently makes document scanning better than ever. When I think it was Ternus said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, I was like, okay. And then I saw the little video demo that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did and I was like, okay, that actually sounds pretty great.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, as soon as he said that I was like, yes, somebody, somebody actually scans that. You know how much I,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you would know, Like anytime I scan anything I have to try to carefully arrange it to the shadow of my phone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yep, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like yes, they can solve this for me in software And I think there’s a hardware component to this I don’t haven’t seen this confirmed
⏹️ ▶️ John yet But if you look at the camera bump on the back of the new iPads obviously they’re missing the ultra wide
⏹️ ▶️ John camera Which is oh well? But I think there’s a new thing there like
⏹️ ▶️ John the the true tone flash thing I think it was like a ambient light sensor that lets them
⏹️ ▶️ John helps them do that I don’t know maybe that hardware was already there But anyway, the result they showed in the demo was perfect. He
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a giant iPad, hovers it over a piece of paper, it casts a giant shadow on the bottom of the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and they fix it in software. Love it. I want that on every I want that on the on the new iPhones, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. As was foretold, the front facing camera is on the landscape edge, which is true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for anything they announced today, unless I’m mistaken. And they have a, quote, completely new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging and pairing system for the Apple Pencil. And we’ve kind of been bouncing off this all episode. but basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s why you need the Apple Pencil Pro for all of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new devices or the Apple Pencil that charges via USB-C because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that you and I have in our houses today, that one, the magnetic one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the magnets and whatnot and the charging apparatus is in a different spot than it needs to be for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new iPads where the camera is kind of in the way. Other changes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from previous iPad Pro, no millimeter wave 5G antenna. This is very sad news
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me. I did go to my picnic table, don’t call it a park bench, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my picnic table just a week or two back, but it turns out that the tree cover was not conducive for the time of year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and very quickly it ended up that I was in full sunlight, which was not desirable. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t go for long, but I will, honestly, I’m skipping ahead here, but I don’t plan on picking one of these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads up because my, you know, my M2 iPad is just fine for me, but that is a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like that’s genuinely a bummer. I get why Apple has done it because there’s really not that much millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wave deployment here in the States. And I think it was only ever in the States to begin with, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of stinky. No ultra wide camera, which we mentioned, four microphones instead of five and eSIM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only. So eSIM only for
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an interesting decontent in here, dropping the camera. Like the camera, the one they did include is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as it was. So there’s no camera improvement and they ditched a camera, which probably, you know, it’s the lesser used camera or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they got rid of that. They got rid of the five millimeter, the 5G millimeter wave. It
⏹️ ▶️ John makes me wonder if the next iPhone will have the millimeter wave, but anyway. They’re removing some stuff here. Presumably
⏹️ ▶️ John this is to preserve margins with the more expensive new screen, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John remember we had those rumors like, the new iPads are gonna be thousands of dollars. And yes, you can spec this up to be like $3,700
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but because the screen was so expensive. So there is some decontenting going on here. I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John made pretty wise choices like cutting out the ultra-wide camera on an iPad Probably not that big
⏹️ ▶️ John a deal. Although it does hurt their demo that we’re gonna talk about in a little bit of like Controlling a multi-camera
⏹️ ▶️ John like device things. Well, you can’t do multi-camera on the iPad anymore because it only has one camera. So
⏹️ ▶️ John no multi-camera Ditching five five microphones instead of four that maybe that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the arrangement of stuff inside the thing Maybe they didn’t need five. That’s fine. E sim only is the way everything is going
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the final thing on the camera bump it looks smaller than, unlike every
⏹️ ▶️ John other device Apple makes, the camera bump on the iPad, I think got smaller this year, which is a welcome
⏹️ ▶️ John change. I mean, the whole thing is thin and obviously Apple, when they compare
⏹️ ▶️ John the thickness, they’re not comparing the camera bump. If they did that, it would not be the same size. But the whole rest of the device is super thin,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the camera bump looks like it is thinner than the previous one. And it is certainly not growing like the camera bump on
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones are. So I don’t care about the camera on my iPad. I would have liked it if the
⏹️ ▶️ John one camera they did include got better, but it didn’t, but oh well, but I do like a less prominent camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do we know that for certainty or is that just a theory based on the picture?
⏹️ ▶️ John I just look at the picture. I don’t know for certain, but I’d be surprised if it’s not smaller.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we’ve got some software updates. Final Cut Pro 2 and Logic Pro 2 are a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. Final Cut Pro 2 is two times faster final rendering than M1 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve got live multicam, which you just made mention of, and there’s actually its own bespoke app now called Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Camera, or I believe, maybe that’s on the iPhone side, I forget now. But basically, the way it works is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can connect and preview up to four cameras all at once in one spot on the new iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can even adjust those remote cameras, exposure, focus, white balance, and more, which is really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really neat. And you can do, they mentioned direct editing of, this is separate from the multicam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff, you can do direct editing. If you have a Thunderbolt drive plugged in, you can edit the project that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is stored on the Thunderbolt drive. So that’s pretty neat. Logic Pro 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they did a lot of stuff for music and, you know, forgot that any other kind of audio exists, but that’s what we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected. Session players, bass and keyboard players, now they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like AI or, you know, machine learning generated automated bass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and keyboard players. They talked a while about Chromaglow, which I guess is to fake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sound of the warmth and depth, if you will, but especially the warmth of fake of of analog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey equipment, and they also have stem splitters. So you can drop in like a complete track that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything in it, and then it will cut out or separate really the bass, the drums, the voice,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then everything else into four different tracks, which that is super duper cool if it works. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit of software. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is a good kind of way into AI here. The rumors were they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna lean heavily into AI. The headline in tech for the last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two has been AI everything. And what you see, last year, what was interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about last year’s WWDC presentation is that even though the entire industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was saying AI every five seconds, Apple didn’t mention that term once. You could tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was a choice they made. It seemed like Apple’s opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the term AI was not maybe that high back then. And now what we see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is them leaning into it because I think at this point they have to. The industry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has gone that direction. The media, the markets, everything is going, is wanting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know what’s Apple’s AI story.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they didn’t make up their own term for it as people thought they might. Like, Apple’s not gonna call it AI, they’re gonna call it something else. They
⏹️ ▶️ John said AI dozens of times this presentation. They’re just calling it AI. They’re not making up their own thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what’s interesting too is, what they described as AI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is many of the features that have already existed that were previously called machine learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And before that, we’re called Siri, briefly, in a weird time. But obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to hear a lot more about this at WBDC. And so this is kind of a weird in-between time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they had a big product launch, they want to market it with the hot terms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think this isn’t just them doing a term grab. Apple, I think, legitimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and again, this is talk about figuring out Apple’s talking points from the event. Everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was at the event has story about how Apple has been ahead of this game forever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could see it in the presentation too. Apple wants everybody to know that they think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re already shipping AI-capable hardware. Look at our amazing neural engines and our amazing processors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and our amazing GPUs and all the amazing software features we’ve had for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they do deserve a large amount of credit for that. Apple really has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping really great hardware that has a lot of ML
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acceleration features. They’ve been doing this for a long time. What we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t see though today is use of large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco language model based features or generative based features that are really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people are mostly talking about today when they say AI. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw Apple rebrand ML features they’ve had for years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as AI features. And I don’t think that’s completely unfair, but it’s also not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people are asking them to do. So I think two things are simultaneously true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it was totally warranted for them to co-opt the term
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to apply to stuff they’re already been making. Because first of all, that’s what everyone does. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marketing. everybody does and the term AI is being used all over the place anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also true at the same time, they didn’t really answer the question. But this wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right time to answer the question. The right times to answer the question are WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this fall’s iPhone event. And between those two I hope to have a better answer because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people actually want when they say AI I think largely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is generative AI features and LLM based features and how that can possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrate into better Siri and better like phone assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features built into your phone. That’s what everyone really wants to hear from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPad Pro event was not the place for that. So given what the event was and when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was and what Apple had to work with, I think they did a good job managing expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around AI for now by basically kicking the can down the road while also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think fairly touting that they’re already making really good chips capable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what people mean when they say AI already today but I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M4 I don’t think we have enough information yet to know like is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this really meaningfully different is this like quote the AI focus chip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no this is continuing the path they were already on. But the path they were already on was pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And interestingly, for the rebranding of it, you know, they said AI tons and tons of times like they I think they even called like
⏹️ ▶️ John one of their like three year old features like this uses AI even though
⏹️ ▶️ John three years ago, right? Like that the image dragging thing, but like, interestingly, on the CPU cores, when like the
⏹️ ▶️ John m4 CPU cores, what I’m trying to find the text that they said the CPU cores have.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is it? Next generation, they used ml in the
⏹️ ▶️ John in the CPU cores. They didn’t use AI. They said that the individual cores have next generation
⏹️ ▶️ John ML technology or something. Yeah. Next generation ML accelerators, ML accelerators, what the hell is ML?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco generation AI
⏹️ ▶️ John accelerators. That’s what your CPUs have. I don’t know if the CPU, the silicon team didn’t get on board. Obviously, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what they mean by that. But they made a point of it to saying these CPU cores are not the same as the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU cores. They have next generation ML accelerators. So yeah, maybe not everyone is on on the
⏹️ ▶️ John same page with the AI branding, but they were so close to being able to call that AI.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, on the Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro things, like it wasn’t clear from the presentation because they were showing them on the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are Mac versions of these same apps with the same features
⏹️ ▶️ John that I think were announced simultaneously, or Apple said are coming or whatever. So these are not like iPad only.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you don’t want to use the iPad version of Final Cut or the iPad version of Logic, you want to use it on the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll also get these features, I believe. Oh, that’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if the multi-cam thing is coming to the Mac, but otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe you’re correct. So new Magic Keyboard. This was a series of ups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and downs for your boy Casey over here, because it looks really great. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want it for the function row because that’s one thing, because I am a Magic Keyboard person on my iPad Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like it, although I think I said last week it’s not aging terribly well, but be that as it may,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really wish it had a function row. I wish the trackpad was a little bigger, yes, but I really wish it had a function row
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and holy crap, an escape key. Oh my gosh, what I wouldn’t give for an escape key. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfortunately the new Magic Keyboard, officially anyway, and I suspect this is probably a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physics problem, so it’s not just an Apple like, you know, gating it sort of thing. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officially it only works with the new iPad Pro, it does not work with any other iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that makes sense for two reasons. One, thickness. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco new one is thinner
⏹️ ▶️ John and this thing accommodates exactly the thickness of the, whether it’s the 11 inch
⏹️ ▶️ John or 13 inch that fits between it. They could have added a little bit of slop in there. I think I’ve done this in the past. Like, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can kind of wedge it or whatever. But the second thing that’s less easy to deal with is the fact that the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen has all the weight in it. And that’s why it has to be kind of cantilevered over the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit to keep it from tipping over when you tilt the screen. And the new ones weigh less
⏹️ ▶️ John and have their weight distributed differently. And the tilt is different. I think partially to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John leave room for the top row of function keys, because they added a new row of keys on top of the existing keyboard. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you do, from the reports of people who are there, you do kind of have to sometimes reach like under
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad, depending on how you have it tilted to get to that function row, right? Because they, like, there’s no,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t get, there’s no extra space to be had. So they tried to make it so it doesn’t cantilever out as much,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s lighter, so you don’t need to. It’s hard to explain, but if you look at it from a side view and look at the
⏹️ ▶️ John one that you have, Casey, on the side, but you can see the one that you have has to stick more of the weight of the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John out over the front of the thing to make it all balance. So I think this
⏹️ ▶️ John magic keyboard would not work for the thicker, heavier models, just
⏹️ ▶️ John like you said, just because of physics, right? So I don’t begrudge Apple making this iPad Pro M4 only,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s just, it wouldn’t work. And I do think this one is better. I think they have made as much
⏹️ ▶️ John room as they can by making it not have to stick out as much over the keys
⏹️ ▶️ John and with the thinner iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, this thing looks really good. So yeah, so you’ve got two colors, you got a function row.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Palm Rest is now aluminum, and again, you’ve got a larger track pad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interestingly, it now uses haptic feedback. So it’s not a diving board scenario, as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s got haptic feedback. Again, M4 iPad Pro only. Also you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey increased pass-through charging power. this was stated to MKBHD, it was the first place I saw it, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can get up to 60 watts pass-through charging. I don’t recall what the number was, I think it was 20-ish watts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the one that I have, but if you’re really running low on your battery, you definitely wanna plug directly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the iPad on mine. Now it looks like it really doesn’t matter. And then Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noted that, hey, the total weight of the 13-inch iPad Pro plus the Magic Keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is within a couple of grams or something like that of a 13-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air, you know, just as is. And so they really are effectively equivalent once you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put the iPad Pro in a Magic Keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, one of them is a bunch of pieces that’ll come apart and it’s all floppy and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco interestingly,
⏹️ ▶️ John like about the aluminum, the aluminum is on the side that faces you when you’re using it, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the palm rest or whatever. But the whole outside of this Magic Keyboard, I’m led to believe
⏹️ ▶️ John is continuing to be whatever that gummy, like other material is, which is interesting because
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I guess the part, like you can tell me Gacy, the part that’s wearing, is that the part that you touch or is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John part that touches the surface that the thing is sitting on?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s more of the like corners in particular, the outside corners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So like I’m looking at it right now, the corner nearest the camera bump, the rubber
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the outside or whatever this is, I mean, it’s not rubber, but you know what I’m saying? Like that material is peeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away on the corner really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John badly. So aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ John is not helping you with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, no, it’s not. Yeah, you’re exactly right. But, uh, yeah. Then in the surface that you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey touch, I mean, mine isn’t spick and span cause I haven’t cleaned it in a little while, but I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it’s wearing particularly badly. Um, the left hand, actually, I guess the left hand side, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just tactically. It feels a little bit different than the right hand side. I guess maybe because my right hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my right hand is doing a lot more mousing than my left hand. Cause I basically don’t mouse with my left hand at all. So there’s less contact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the right hand side. I don’t know. That’s just a theory. But, you know, I don’t think it’s wearing poorly on the interior,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey although aluminum would certainly be welcome, but it’s the exterior that’s the problem. And to your point, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem like that’s gonna get any better with this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Some people have had problems with like the keyboard and the membrane that’s around it and all sorts of other things with their,
⏹️ ▶️ John with the various gummy iPad accessories. So we’ll see how this holds up. Yeah. The trackpad is a pure win though. Like having,
⏹️ ▶️ John having a haptic trackpad instead of the little diving board thing is great. And I think having aluminum on the surface will be good, but
⏹️ ▶️ John like when this thing is closed up, you’re not gonna confuse it with a MacBook Air because it’s all soft
⏹️ ▶️ John and gummy on the outside, like an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me one of you, because I’m not trying to be funny, and this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just me playing dumb for the purpose of the show. So the Smart Folio,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that has a keyboard, whatever that’s called, that’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Smart Keyboard Folio. Yeah, I think I just mean the Folio. Yeah, I’m talking about the one
⏹️ ▶️ John where you get an iPad and you just want a thing to cover it. No keyboards, no trackpads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just called Smart Folio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’ve made, what was the first style of iPad Pro keyboard that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not have a trackpad, that was called the Smart Keyboard Folio. And that’s always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my preferred iPad keyboard. And even after the Magic Keyboard came out, I actually briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bought one when it first came out and then returned it because I really didn’t like it on the 11-inch because it added so much bulk to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t even like the keys of it. I actually really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the smart keyboard folio. It is, compared to the Magic Keyboard, it is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less bulky, so it’s lighter. It’s probably thinner, but it’s definitely lighter. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 2 3rds the price. It’s $200 instead of $300, both of which are ridiculous prices, but you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s at least cheaper, less expensive. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it didn’t have the cantilever design because it didn’t need to shove the keyboard all the way back to make room for a trackpad. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you only need a keyboard and you don’t want a trackpad, it is, I think, the better product in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ways. And unfortunately, there is no smart keyboard folio update for the new iPads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it probably won’t work, even if, like, you could maybe try to make it work, but it probably won’t be very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good because of the way it mounts, the iPad has to rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in these slots in it, and the new iPads are thinner. So they’re not gonna really fit and mount properly in those
⏹️ ▶️ John You could do something with magnets. I think maybe Logitech or somebody, some other third party might try their hand at
⏹️ ▶️ John replacing that product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might try, but people have had, I mean, how long has this keyboard style been the case? It’s been since the 11-inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s 2018. So from 2018 to 2024, zero other companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have made an iPad keyboard that looks, feels, and works as good as that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s because the Apple had one, but now Apple doesn’t have one, so there’s no competition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess, but I mean, honestly, this really disappoints me. I’m not surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all that they went this direction because it was very clear that the Magic Keyboard is where they wanted to go, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Magic Keyboard is heavier and bulkier and more expensive and more mechanically complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t love that trade-off for my own purposes, but we’ll get to my purposes in a little bit. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just pour one out for the Smart Keyboard Folio.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the Magic Keyboard, the new Magic Keyboard is actually lighter than the previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one. It is, but it still has a lot more in there and it is still heavier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the Smart Keyboard Folio.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the smart folio, the reason I put this in here is because I think in their copy and maybe in the presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John as well They make note of more viewing angles for the for the again The smart folio is just like
⏹️ ▶️ John it puts a cover on the front and back of your iPad Pro. That’s it There’s no electronics or anything in there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it folds up kind of like into a little triangular wedge that you can prop it up or whatever I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t for the life of me figure out what the more viewing angles are It looks exactly the same as all smart folios for iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can make the little triangle You can prop it up this way, you can lay it flat, and that’s what it does. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, we’ll see. Oh, and by the way, one more thing on the SmartFolio. With the
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPad Pros getting so thin, especially the really big one, I feel like we’re approaching the point where
⏹️ ▶️ John adding a SmartFolio, again, the cover that has nothing in it, no keyboard, no trackpad, no nothing, is coming close
⏹️ ▶️ John to doubling the thickness of your iPad now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Adding that stupid cover.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not that I’m complaining, it’s just a little bit absurd. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would argue that it substantially improves the utility of the iPad to have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard. Even though I will, I strongly regret the loss of the smart
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard folio line. If I’m going to make good use of an iPad at all, it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have a keyboard. It’s simple as that. Like that is no longer an optional thing for me when I’m buying. Like that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like when I briefly owned the iPad mini, that was one of the biggest problems with me trying to use it for anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that there were no good keyboard options for it. I need a keyboard and Apple makes the best keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the iPads by a mile. And it’s just a shame my favorite one’s gone now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I was gonna get one of these iPads, no question I would get it with the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and by the way, Logitech does have a new keyboard for this that, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s different than the Magic one, the cantilever one, because it uses a kickstand, which is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the Microsoft Surface stuff do that. If you can deal with the kickstand thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you get an arrangement where the key, the iPad doesn’t block
⏹️ ▶️ John any of your function keys, you get a track pad, you get a pretty thin keyboard, but you have to deal with the kickstand,
⏹️ ▶️ John which might be a little bit awkward. I will try to put a link to that one in the show notes too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a new Apple Pencil Pro. There is a new sensor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which allows you to squeeze it to bring up a new tool palette, and then third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers can do something else with it if they so desire. There’s a haptic engine for feedback, so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know when you’ve engaged, you know, a squeeze or what have you. Uh, and you know what you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do, John, you should do a barrel roll because now there’s a barrel roll gyroscope
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to allow you to roll the pencil. And that’s very useful, for example, to change the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey orientation of a shaped pen or a, or brush. Uh, so that’s pretty neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it also supports find my, which Holy smokes, I would really love that. It’s only been a handful of times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my pencil has walked away, but then those times, it would have been convenient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so Procreate CEO, James Kuda, whatever, came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out and said that among other things, developers can create their own custom interactions using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this new Apple Pencil Pro and the new sensors and whatnot, which is really cool. And so you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can use this with the iPad Air and the iPad Pro, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new ones, that is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. That’s going to be Apple’s some rare props for reasonable naming. This is called the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Pencil Pro instead of increasing the number like Apple Pencil, Apple Pencil 2, then the Apple Pencil USB,
⏹️ ▶️ John calling this Pro makes so much sense because it’s the expensive one. And the only
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, adjustment you might have to make in your mind is this is not the Apple Pencil that only works with the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, it is the pencil itself that is Pro. It is the Apple Pencil Pro. And so this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good name for what will be the slot for the expensive pencil. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ John the goal state in the future will be Every iPad can work with a pencil and you can pick the expensive one or the cheap
⏹️ ▶️ John one and the expensive one It’s called Apple pencil Pro and that makes perfect sense. Of course now we have to deal with Apple pencil Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John second-generation Apple pencil Pro Apple pencil Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with two USB C ports,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? We’ll see but anyway good kudos to Apple to not increasing the number
⏹️ ▶️ John by one and making confusing as the Apple pencil Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s the iPad Pro. The keyboard is is 300 or $350 depending on what size. The Pencil Pro is still $130,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I would have expected them to raise the price and they didn’t. And $130 for the Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels like a lot at first, but then actually, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this one, I feel like there’s a lot of tech in there, even more than there was before. So I’m not really that bothered by the Pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very bothered by the price of the keyboard, not that bothered by the price of the Pencil. You can already order the Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is available sometime next week. And the Pencil, MacRumors has discovered, has five different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey box designs, which are all very cute. And so we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. And the original
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad has been dropped, or I shouldn’t say original, excuse me, but the, what is it, iPad 10th gen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that right? That is now 350 bucks. So that’s the same, you can get an entire keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or you can get an entire iPad, take your pick.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the ninth gen is gone now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, well, you know, except for like education discount channels, so that, but what this means is like for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most channels, the home button is gone from the iPad. We still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone SE to deal with, but from the iPad, the home button is gone and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has, oh, not Face ID, but we’ll get there, we’ll get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s the event. For me, I think the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro looks great. It’s expensive because it starts at 900, we didn’t actually talk about that, did we? It starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at $900 for the 11 inch and it just goes up from there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that like a $200 increase from where the Pro started?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I believe that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean to get the more expensive screen, we’ve worried how much more expensive it would be. It’s more expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John they decontented some to keep it, but it’s still more expensive than it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And honestly, like for… For what they are giving you, you know, they’re giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you a MacBook Air class processor. They’re giving you MacBook Air levels of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Giving you a way better than MacBook Air screen. Right, the screen is way better than any Mac screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what they’re giving you, that is a reasonable price for what these specs actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are. So I actually have no problem with this price for the product that it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Until you start adding storage, obviously, right? Yeah, and the accessories. I mean, because the reality is, like, you know, the MacBook Air comes with a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without charging an extra $300. But the thing is, like, once you actually add the accessories,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cellular, thank God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey and other things, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you end up in, like, you know, the $1,500, $1,600 range, at least. you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you need a lot of storage, you might be even higher than that. Yeah, you can push up against four grand if you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dick this out. Right, but I mean, but almost no one’s gonna be doing that, but I think a lot of people are gonna be in like the 1200 to $2,000 range,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s, those are laptop prices,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good laptop prices too. Like that isn’t like, you know, some base level crappy PC thing. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are good laptop prices.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s either, you know, MacBook Pro price, or it’s a MacBook Air with decent storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so that brings up the big uncomfortable question is like, well, how many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are, first of all, using an iPad in ways that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even use all of this hardware power? And then second of all, how many people can justify
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying this much for an iPad? And that market exists for sure. Like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has shown over the years that the iPad Pro market is there. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does exist. People do use iPad Pros. My wife uses one. but they keep pushing it higher and higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both price and in hardware specs. And what I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing is a lot of software that can push those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs. Like I’m not seeing a lot of actual use in the real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world of people who are like really burning up that processor and really using all that RAM using iPadOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve said many times before, like I think it’s unwise for tech people to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco condescend to other people by saying, you don’t need this benefit, this resource,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you won’t use this. And it is something that tech people do a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of down talking the less technical people that they know of in their lives. They’re like, oh, you don’t deserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use high-end hardware, I deserve to, you don’t. So I’m trying to avoid that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem like the iPad Pro continues on the path it’s been on for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. amazing hardware, ridiculously high-end capabilities for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tablet and for, honestly, for almost any computer, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still just the huge question mark of what are people who actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy iPads and who are using iPadOS actually doing with this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will take advantage of any of that power? And I’m not saying that there is no market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will use it, But I think the market is really small.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so obviously, as we said before, the software side of this, which is obviously the biggest problem, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC. We’ll have ample time to complain about it then.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right? So we’re not gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ John we had no expectation that in this iPad event, that they would roll out the new version of iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ John early and show us all the things they’ve done or whatever. But like this, there is a software side of this. And a lot of people see
⏹️ ▶️ John this and they see the amazing hardware. And setting aside like how big the market, people almost get kind of resentful. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, the last thing the iPad needed was better hardware. Or like they map things onto Apple and they think,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple thinks the problem with the iPad is hardware. No, Apple doesn’t think that. Apple, for whatever problems
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad has that Apple acknowledges or knows about or whatever, they’re just doing what they’re supposed to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is make the hardware better. There is a software side of this where we all agree they’re dropping the ball, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John just because they make the hardware better doesn’t mean they think that’s the problem. They don’t think that, they’re just making the hardware better.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what computer makers do. So kudos for Apple for making the hardware better. and we’re setting aside the software conversation until
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, right? But I do wanna say, when we’re talking about the hardware, there is one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, the hardware, that is essentially not allowing users of this
⏹️ ▶️ John product to take advantage of the power. And then no one ever talks about it. They all talk about how the software stopped people from taking advantage, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a thing. But the hardware, this point, especially now that they skipped a generation to giving it, it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the only product they have with an M4, right? The iPad Pro needs more ports. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a hardware limitation. Now you can use external drives with Final Cut Pro. You can have Thunderbolt or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the MacBook One with a frigging M4 in it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What if I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John power my thing, but also connect with Thunderbolt drive, but also connect to the USB? Sorry, you can’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it mean 50 ports? No, but it needs more than one. I don’t know what the solution to this
⏹️ ▶️ John is. I don’t know where you put the port or whatever. I’m just saying this is the rare hardware feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that is letting down the power of this device. The power of this device is constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John more every year by the fact that it has a single port. That single port has gotten better. Great, it’s Thunderbolt. We
⏹️ ▶️ John love it, it’s good. You need more than one. Like, think of it if the MacBook One, the
⏹️ ▶️ John 12-inch MacBook, had one port and it was Apple’s fastest Thunderbolt port. No, it had one port
⏹️ ▶️ John and it was cheap. It was a cheap model. It was like USB. It wasn’t even good. This has, you know, fast port for
⏹️ ▶️ John using your video, 8K video streaming to the thing, blah, blah, blah, but there’s just one of them. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John one area where the hardware is letting this thing down, which is kind of a shame. And as for the software stuff, like
⏹️ ▶️ John setting aside all the issues with multitasking, whatever we’ll talk about at WWDC, Steve Trout and Smith were recently complaining on Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John about sort of like a software model thing that’s a problem, like say, oh, Final Cut Pro on the iPad, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. You got all this power. Here, Marco, here’s an application that takes advantage. The Final Cut Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad can burn everything that the M4 has to offer. It’ll use it. If you use the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad as your video editor with Final Cut Pro, that’s what you need this hardware for. And he says, well, if you do that
⏹️ ▶️ John and you start like a long running operation of Final Cut and then you switch to like Springboard or go back to the home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John your Final Cut Pro job gets canceled. Yeah. Because like, oh, now you’ve swapped something
⏹️ ▶️ John out. And it doesn’t get canceled because 16 gigs of RAM and an M4 aren’t enough
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Cut Pro job in the
⏹️ ▶️ John background. Just get a MacBook that has those same specs someday. You can run Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro in the background. It doesn’t cancel itself when you switch apps, but the software model, the application model,
⏹️ ▶️ John the environment on iOS, like setting aside like multitasking and file system access or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, just like the overall like, how does iPadOS work? It
⏹️ ▶️ John works in a way that is fundamentally unfriendly to pro apps, fundamentally unfriendly
⏹️ ▶️ John to letting people take advantage of the power of the things to the level of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh yeah, on iPadOS, if something else wants resources and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not the front most application, we just kill you, take the resources away from you, cancel your job, and that is
⏹️ ▶️ John not a pro environment. So setting aside all the other software things that we will surely talk about, there
⏹️ ▶️ John are fundamental issues, fundamental, essentially invisible, non-UI related issues to how
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad OS works that are at odds with the hardware that Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just the bigger story, like we’re seeing this from a lot of people today, like if you were already able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do significant tasks on an iPad, like if you were already using an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro substantially, then this is a great upgrade for you. Like this, this is an awesome product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you. If you were not already doing that, you probably still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to buy this thing. I would love it because it’s so cool and so new and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so shiny and so thin and light when you pick it up and it has the awesome new screen. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love a justification to buy this thing, but I’m not one of those people. There are times in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life where I have used an iPad more or less, I’ve gone in and out of it. Recently, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty far out of it. Like, I haven’t actually used an iPad in, I think, about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco six months. But there are certain things, like, you know, if I went to WWDC this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, I would definitely plug in, you know, dig out, plug in my iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run all the updates, and bring my awesome smart keyboard folio because it is the best device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bring into, like, a small place to take notes on in your lap with that keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with cellular. Like it’s great for that, but I have found that in most of my life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad is not for me. And you know, when I look around the tech business, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tech business is really big and we’ve obviously never been able to cover all of it. We don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cover a small amount of it. The tech business is huge. We cover the parts of it that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are closest to, mostly around the products and services we use ourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has grown so big recently. person used to be able to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple and Apple products fairly well. I think Apple’s big enough now that that’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really reasonably possible anymore to really have any depth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all their stuff in one person. It’s a big company, they make a bunch of different product lines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think it’s okay for us to specialize and say, you know what, this product and this product I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use like crazy. This one and this one, I don’t really have a need for that in my life or it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit my needs well enough. And for me, I realized over time that I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was the kind of person who could use an iPad more. The same way as we talked about recently, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wish I was a notebook person. Like I wish I used fancy pens and cool paper notebooks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wish I was that person, I’m just not. For me, I’m finally realizing the iPad is that for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I think it’s worth accepting that about oneself. Like even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of us are like gadget hounds, We would love a reason to buy this thing. It’s so cool, it’s so new,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cool pencil. And I would use it for like three days and then I would never use it again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m giving this a pass, but the great thing about having this breadth of products
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that there’s other products that I love and use constantly. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love the Mac, I love the phone. Like I’ve even started to really enjoy the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in recent years and I love certain ones. This one’s not for me, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone out there who’s like, I gotta have my MacBook Air, there’s also people out there who are like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta have the iPad Pro. Now, I don’t think there’s as many of them by a mile, but those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people out there, and so if you’re one of those people, this is a great update. I’m personally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just giving it a pass though, because for me, I would be running to the nearest Apple store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if even half of this stuff came to a MacBook Air. But unfortunately, that’s probably not in the cards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s ultimately what I want is to continue getting really awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac laptops for these needs. But if you’re an iPad person, this is awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, the iPad for me is, fits an odd space in my life because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desperately want it to be more for me than it is, but I do enjoy using it for what I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use it for. It’s a very, very good couch computer. It’s a great,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, passenger princess computer if Aaron’s driving somewhere and I just want, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goof off in the car, because what does it have in it, Marco? You’ve mentioned this already. Cellular.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. So it’s a great, it’s a great, you know, kind of toting around computer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, as you said, you know, if you want to take notes or something like that, I don’t even necessarily mean with a pencil. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you just want to have a small computer that’s on your person that you can use here and there, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at a conference or whatever, it’s great for that as well. I really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I enjoy my iPad enough that I don’t think I would want to live a life without it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although between just the three of us, I’ve had some really bad thoughts about getting a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bumming around laptop, which I’m really uncomfortable with, but we can explore that another time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, are you saying that maybe having a desktop laptop and a laptop laptop is a good idea?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm. We’re not going to go there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco What a surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m having very impure thoughts. All right. So anyway, so with regard to the iPad, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Air, it’s so freaking good. I’m telling you, I shouldn’t be turning the iPad celebration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode into a MacBook Air sales pitch, but I’m telling you, like for the price of this iPad Pro, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can get a MacBook Air. And if you like for your purposes, Casey, for definitely for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mine, for definitely for yours, that’s the better computer for a lot of what you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it really is. And honestly, all kidding aside, and I really not trying to make a whole topic out of this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I could have a MacBook Air with cellular, I probably would already have one because it genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that important to me. And if you don’t agree, you know, you, the two of you and you, the broader listener, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey totally cool. But cellular is that important to me and for, for, for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like bumming around on the go kind of computer. And if, if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Air had cellular, I would probably already have one, but that’s That’s neither here nor there. Let’s move on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to get one of these because I just got this iPad, what, like a year, year and a half ago, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s serving me perfectly fine. It’s an M2 iPad Pro. And even though the keyboard is wearing in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I don’t love, it still works. And so for now, I’m sticking with it. I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needs in the house to like pass down my iPad or any other iPad. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not in for this one, but I cannot state
⏹️ ▶️ Casey strongly enough how impressed I am by this hardware. I mean, not having seen it in person yet, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by looking at the specs and seeing the reviews and seeing the introductory video, it’s incredible, incredible hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t want to derail us on another why is iPadOS the way it is discussion, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wish for more for my iPadOS, for my needs, maybe not for your needs, but for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my needs. I just can’t get that yet. And so for that, for all of those reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not in for this one, but John, I am hearing that you are probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to be in for this one, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. So my iPad, I probably watched like half of my television movies on my iPad. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s all about the screen and I am a TV snob and I love OLED and I was
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely a hundred percent going to get this one. So I ordered one. Uh, what did you buy? Paint. It
⏹️ ▶️ John pained me a little bit to 11 inch. Should pay me a little bit to see the SOC
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It doesn’t matter for TV watching, obviously, but it’s like, oh, I kind of like to get the silicone
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the parts working, but there’s no way I was gonna pay for the, it’s just, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds of more dollars so that it would be pointless for me. I don’t need that to watch TV and movies. I barely,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t need any of that thing. I just need like the H264 decoder, right? It’s all I need, right? So I got the 11 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I was picking the storage size, I have an M1 iPad Pro right now, so I’m replacing the M1
⏹️ ▶️ John with the M4 Again, the only reason I’m replacing it is because of that screen. That’s it. I don’t care about anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else, right? And so when I picked storage, I looked at my M1 and said, how much storage are this amount
⏹️ ▶️ John using? And I have a 256, I think, and I’m using like a little bit more than half. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can just get a 256 again. But I thought about it a little bit and I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if the screen is as good as I think it is, I’m going to be much more likely to
⏹️ ▶️ John take some of my big honking Blu-ray rips and put them on my iPad, like not, you know, put
⏹️ ▶️ John them, like copy them to my iPad so I can watch them with like Infuse or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I got the 512. That doesn’t give me anything. The SoC still has one performance core disabled. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that storage size upgrade, I guess, I didn’t know this at the time, but I guess it gives me the faster storage instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of, but I don’t need the faster storage either. It’s like, it’s all pointless, right? But I got it for the storage space, anticipating
⏹️ ▶️ John that I may want to put more actual video files, big video files
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad, which I haven’t done with my current model because I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna like the screen so much. So that’s what I did. I got an 11 inch, 512, space black. I got
⏹️ ▶️ John the folio case that’s just, you know, no keyboard, no trackpad, no nothing. It’s just a gummy
⏹️ ▶️ John little case that will even out the camera bump. And, you know, I actually use that case to prop
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPad up when I watch it in bed. Like that’s what I actually use it for. So it is an important accessory for me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did I was like, oh, you know, I should try to buy this through my son’s college to get that educational
⏹️ ▶️ John discount and There is an educational discount and it’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ John But for whatever reason the educational discount I don’t know if this is also discounted
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever and I googled for it a little bit But the educational discount if you buy Apple care plus they make you get the one
⏹️ ▶️ John where you pay for two years up front And that’s it You can’t get the monthly one literally can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John at least in the my son’s college store And I wanted the month by month one
⏹️ ▶️ John because the month by month one it goes until you stop paying It doesn’t stop after two years
⏹️ ▶️ John and I plan to use this iPad For way more than two years if I possibly can again The only reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m ditching my old one is because of the screen and if the screen is good Screens never gonna get any worse
⏹️ ▶️ John other than getting a little bit dimmer, but it doesn’t matter because I watch in the dark anyway So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m in for the long haul. I want the, and if I drop it and break it, I want to get it replaced. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John got the monthly AppleCare, paid full price for everything and get any kind of discount. The monthly AppleCare,
⏹️ ▶️ John I set aside the educational discount and left probably hundreds of dollars on the
⏹️ ▶️ John table just so I can get the month to month AppleCare Plus because I couldn’t figure out or be bothered to figure out how
⏹️ ▶️ John to somehow do that through the school or whatever anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, why didn’t you you could have bought it without any sort of Apple care and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the settings app You can actually enroll in Apple care in there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah there when I was googling for it There were some people who are buying through edu or have some difficulties
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey getting to see
⏹️ ▶️ John like It was there was enough things about like oh it turns out you couldn’t buy after the fact if you
⏹️ ▶️ John bought it through edu or Some crap and I was like, I just don’t want to deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t like it wasn’t that big a difference by a couple hundred dollars or whatever but like I’ll survive. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I got. And I’m looking forward to it. Again, I use I
⏹️ ▶️ John use it like literally every single day. And what I’m just using it as a glorified TV, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John just as a glorified. I’m gonna say like, Oh, you just use a glorified TV. I I’ve said this before, I do the multi
⏹️ ▶️ John screen experience on a single screen. When I watch TV, I’m slipping in slide over
⏹️ ▶️ John things of like ivory. And I’m sometimes doing it like picture and picture
⏹️ ▶️ John and using that news wire while the thing I’m watching is in floating like picture and picture in the corner. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m using my iPad. Yes, as a TV, but as a TV where on the same TV
⏹️ ▶️ John with my fingers, I can dork around other things if it’s, you know, something that I don’t have to pay too much attention to. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully I can get the brightness under control so my wife doesn’t kill me for watching
⏹️ ▶️ John things in HDR. People tell me that I should have got a $3,500 vision pro or whatever, but yeah, This is what
⏹️ ▶️ John I got. My folio has already shipped, I believe. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I should have the iPad and the M1. Oh, and I also got the Pencil Pro. Not because I use the Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot, because I don’t, but I do have the Apple Pencil 2 with my M1 iPad Pro, and I do
⏹️ ▶️ John like it for the few times that I’ve used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John feel the same way. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly got the Pencil so I can talk about it on the show, because I don’t really need a new Pencil. And also because
⏹️ ▶️ John when I hand this down, like I’ll probably hand it down to my son who does do like digital
⏹️ ▶️ John art stuff with the Pencil, and I want him to have a pencil that goes with it. So there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exciting, John. And so it arrived, do you know when it arrives? Are
⏹️ ▶️ John you sure? I think that like, is it May 15th or something? Whatever day one is like for the arrival
⏹️ ▶️ John of the new iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Well, that’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Compiler and Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks for our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join. Today’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco member exclusive bonus segment in ATP Overtime is on Apple Silicon in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI servers. This is a story that broke, I think just today, that Apple is allegedly developing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI chips for data centers to run in custom servers. We’re gonna be covering that in ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, members exclusive, join at ATP.fm slash join to hear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much, and we’ll talk to you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John ♪ Now the show is over ♪ They didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Mastodon You can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, that’s Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, Auntie Marco Armin
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check podcast so long
Neutral: That vehicle. Yes, that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Outside of my neighborhood, there was a house that was sitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vacant for literally five or 10 years directly across the street from the exit I used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get in and out of our neighborhood every day. Before it sat vacant, there was actually a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Z32, a 300ZX that parked there for a while, like I used to have many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years ago, and it always made me so happy to see it. it, then it sat vacant for forever. And then all of a sudden, somebody moved into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or whatever. It’s, it’s no longer vacant. And there are like two or three Wranglers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that park there all the time. And that just kind of makes me smile a little bit. I still think that the Wrangler was probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the right choice for me. And I’m glad that you two numnuts were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apart in talking me out of it. But, um, that house is now dead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me because in the last few days, would you like to guess what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is now parking in the driveway of the house that I see every time I leave my neighborhood?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it a cyber truck? A yellow Rivian?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, I would much prefer to see a yellow Rivian.
⏹️ ▶️ John A yellow cyber truck?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, it’s going to be yellow when I pee on it. No, not really, but it is a cyber truck and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, I’m trying to be gentle. It is not for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. You know what? It’s I don’t get it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get it. It looks ridiculous It it screams I am very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not confident in myself and I am compensating for my lack of confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, does it scream that any more than the typical pickup truck? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John zillion feet high. I don’t think it does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yes Honestly, I would much rather see a cyber truck than one of those like giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new regular Ford trucks That is just like the giant block like I don’t know I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the Cybertruck okay look let’s just claim a couple things up front Elon Musk is a turd and a horrible person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay I’m not gonna defend him at all I don’t like him at all I sold my Tesla in part because of how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like him so this is not about him in particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the Cybertruck is ugly but I’m glad they tried something I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they actually made something that was noticeably different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and an opinionated design now that opinion was bad but at least it’s an opinionated design.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well I’m gonna say it’s bad but like like you know so that’s what everyone says about the Cybertruck, like they’re glad that someone tried something
⏹️ ▶️ John new but when someone tries something new and it really is bad nobody congratulates them. Nobody congratulated
⏹️ ▶️ John Pontiac on the Aztec.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No one said well I don’t like how the Pontiac
⏹️ ▶️ John Aztec looks but I’m glad Pontiac tried something. Nobody said that. Nobody was glad they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the Aztec was not, it was not like a strong opinion. The Aztec was like a mishmash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of of like design by committee. Oh no,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a strong opinion. It was just a bad opinion. The thing about the Cybertruck is some
⏹️ ▶️ John people like how it looks, which is not true of the Aztec. Well, obviously some people like the Aztec, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a large number of people who think the Cybertruck looks cool. So although it may not be to
⏹️ ▶️ John your particular taste, I think it is more successful than many other ugly cars that have come
⏹️ ▶️ John out. So when people say, I’m glad they tried something new, what they’re really saying is I’m glad they tried something new
⏹️ ▶️ John that enough people actually like, even if it’s not for me. There
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many boring, bland car designs out there. There’s a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car models for you to pick from if you want a really average looking, quote, normal looking car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did see a Cybertruck on the road for the first time about a week or two ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, me too. I saw my first one like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t as shocked to see it as I thought I would be because everyone, you know, when you see everyone reacting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online like, oh my God, so weird. Like I, it wasn’t that weird to see like, cause I’ve already seen it online. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was fine. I commend any, any risk taking in visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car design these days because it is so rare and John’s right. The cyber truck is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some people. It’s not for me, but it’s for some people like the iPad pro, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming off, coming around. Oh, the iPad pro is probably a much better all around product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And the cyber truck, enough people like how it looks. I don’t know if it’s 50% or whatever, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like the number of people, the percentage of people that like the Pontiac Aztec. It is a pretty big number of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is a large contingent of people who think the Cybertruck looks really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it succeeds at its goal. The goal of the Cybertruck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was to be a really bold design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It was a statement car. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it is that. Setting aside thoughts on its founder and setting aside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the various flaws it’s had so far, like the terrible gas pedal thing. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of flaws in it, and I’m not taking the safety flaws lightly either, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge, obviously a huge problem. But as a visual design of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vehicle, it succeeds in taking a bold statement and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something crazy. Like recently, my dog walk route, one of the houses on it added a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hummer EV, and it’s the first time I’m seeing a Hummer EV in person. And the Hummer EV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is kind of striking looking, but it’s striking because it just looks a little bit wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in its proportions. Like it looks like you’re watching a movie in the wrong aspect ratio. Like it looks like it’s being stretched wide,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it looks like just a regular modern SUV, just widened. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t look like a bold choice in design. It looks like a boring car, wider.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that widening thing is the Hummer thing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is Hummer’s thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Hummers always look more like, you know, a little more of the military, like a utilitarian style. They look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wider than you think they’re going to be. Yes, but this doesn’t look like a Hummer. This looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like every other boring SUV stretched out a little bit wider, like weirdly wide.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it doesn’t look like cool or
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Yeah, they didn’t capture the distinctiveness of the actual original Hummer in the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the Cybertruck is very distinctive. It has this very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco divisive design. It is a bold choice. No one can look at the Cybertruck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, that was designed by committee. That’s so bland. Whereas the Hummer, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hummer EV, I think when I saw one in person here, I think it looks really bland.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Big and weird and wide, but just bland. It doesn’t, it looks like designed by committee.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas no one would ever accuse a Cybertruck of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the Cybertruck is kind of the perfect pickup truck for America because pickup trucks have long since
⏹️ ▶️ John not been judged by their utility. and the Cybertruck is perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John utility of any pickup truck ever made. Because it’s so, so many parts of it are like sacrificed
⏹️ ▶️ John on the altar of that look. And like, it’s like, oh, you’re sacrificing practicality. It’s like no one buys,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, not no one. So few people in this country buy pickup trucks for their utility. They
⏹️ ▶️ John buy them for all sorts of other reasons. And the fact that they’ve been slowly shrinking the beds and making them harder
⏹️ ▶️ John to maneuver and bigger for no reason other than to like make people feel better. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what the pickup truck is in this country for most people who buy them, right? They’re the best selling vehicle, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is like, oh, a pickup truck where you don’t care about how useful it is and everything about
⏹️ ▶️ John it is super weird and annoying but you just want it to look cool, let’s do that to 11. And they did, it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John sharp angles everywhere. The bed is actually bigger than it is on a lot of the other big pickup trucks, but like it’s, you know, and they did,
⏹️ ▶️ John they did do some smart things by trying to make this big truck easier to maneuver than other ones, but like, it’s just, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, It’s a, it’s probably not a great choice for the company
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of how many of these they’re going to sell because it’s a $100,000 pickup truck. And yeah, they sell a lot of pickup trucks, so they don’t sell
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of $100,000 pickup trucks. It doesn’t have a lot of utility. Half the people or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the percentage is think it is hideously ugly and the other half loves it. But it’s iconic
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll remember it in history the same way we remember the Subaru BRAT.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, we will not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And the El Camino, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t you even you bite your tongue, sir. Both of those are way better looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and way better cars than this is. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John iconic people. So this doesn’t look like the usual car that I’m used to seeing. I don’t even know what it is. I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at and we remember them to this day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look at the original MacBook Air. That was a terrible. I believe I owned one. It was a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer, but it was iconic and some people loved the design of it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it doesn’t need to necessarily be a great car in like, you know, the the stats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the on paper ways to be like an iconic success story in that
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s more like the Lamborghini Countach, which is totally impractical, very difficult car to live with, but everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like, don’t they? Yeah, and I think if the Cybertruck was made by somebody who wasn’t a total turd,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would not hear nearly as much negativity about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, goodness. Well, until people start slicing people in half with those stainless steel panels and everything. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there are like a-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s part of what I’m saying. There are safety concerns with its design.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we don’t know. There are unknowns. There are unknowns, setting aside, like, oh, defects in the pedal, like things they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John to do on purpose. They meant to, on purpose, make it out of stainless steel. And it is yet to be seen. And they meant to, on purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ John put those sharp corners in it. And I’m not sure if there will be any fallout from that. But that is a direct
⏹️ ▶️ John consequence of the look they’ve chosen. That look has ramifications in the real world
⏹️ ▶️ John for, possibly for safety, but certainly for things like practicality and that ridiculous windshield wiper and all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not have on my bingo card for today that I would be the only person that does not like the Cybertruck and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you two would be defending
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I mean, I don’t like how it looks either, but I think Marco and I appreciate, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciate someone trying something new and succeeding enough that some people really love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not letting concerns like regulation and safety water down the
⏹️ ▶️ John applaud that too much. Not worrying about the accelerator pedal staying attached
⏹️ ▶️ John to the pedal, because that’s not that important.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you just put a rivet in it and call it a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are legitimate safety concerns, but as a designed object, I honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I saw it in person, I did not hate it as much as I thought I
⏹️ ▶️ John badly. Speaking of design choices, did you hear about this one? You probably haven’t if you’re not super into this. So when
⏹️ ▶️ John you saw the Cybertruck when it was announced and everything, there was like these wheel covers, like the aerodynamic wheel covers that sort of essentially cover
⏹️ ▶️ John over the wheel to make it, you know, but they’re removable, right? It was very often those wheel covers are removable because people think the
⏹️ ▶️ John wheels look better without the aero covers on them. But the Cybertruck ones, I don’t know if you remember, I can go pull up a picture of
⏹️ ▶️ John it now, they have these little things that stick out basically over the rubber,
⏹️ ▶️ John like into the sidewall a little bit, like it’s part of the look, right? So it’s not just a cover that covers the metal part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the wheel, that cover also extends into the rubber part. But,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it looks cool in all the demos, and like, wow, it’s a distinctive look for the Cybertruck. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John you notice how the rubber on the wheels are made, the parts that stick out from the wheel
⏹️ ▶️ John cover, sort of essentially mate with or line up with structures in
⏹️ ▶️ John the sidewall. Like it’s, you know. Oh yeah. You can’t just rotate it. The wheel cover has
⏹️ ▶️ John to be lined up with the rubber of the wheel. And that’s not how cars work. You may not
⏹️ ▶️ John know it, but your rubber tire does move
⏹️ ▶️ John within the wheel, slip a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco within the wheel. Whoa, I didn’t know that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they thought they were gonna ship this, but they realized if you actually drive the car with these on it, especially with the
⏹️ ▶️ John incredible power this thing has, they quickly go out of alignment. Like the wheel,
⏹️ ▶️ John the rubber goes out of alignment with the metal wheel that it’s on, which makes the wheel cover also go
⏹️ ▶️ John out of alignment. And so they basically, if you buy a Cybertruck, you do not get those covers that you ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ John paid for. And Tesla said, yeah, those, that doesn’t work. So
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I don’t know that they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John give them alternate wheel covers that don’t extend. Are they gonna give them all new wheels? But there are a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of things about the Cybertruck that they either didn’t think through
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way or didn’t quite work out the way they wanted. I love that one because it just shows the kind of like, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John a young car company that either no one thought of or was overridden perhaps by some other jerky person to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, you can’t make part of the wheel be forced to line up with part of the rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John and give you a car with a thousand horsepower. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna work after like, you know, 10 minutes to a couple of days.
⏹️ ▶️ John So no wheel covers for you, Cybertruck owner. Not yet, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hi. Well, I agree lightly that a bold
⏹️ ▶️ Casey statement was made and I admire that, but everything else about it, it’s hideous, it’s way too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big, it’s obnoxious. It’s just, it’s not a DeLorean. Like the DeLorean was wrong in other ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it was also adorable and delightful. There’s nothing adorable or delightful about this monstrosity.