588: Sync Up Your Cycle
24 May 2024We… talked about Microsoft for 90 minutes?!
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- John’s iPad Pro (M4) review
- MKBHD’s magnets reel doesn’t show the rail; it’s on the cover. (via Odin)
- The iPad Pro can bend, but it’s difficult
- Quinn’s stunning Pencil Pro observation
- Zoom audio for Marco’s town meetings (via Steve J Stutz, among others)
- Delta gets its first legal challenge
- The reason behind the lack of GameCube/Wii emulators on iOS
- No New Mac Studio nor Mac Pro Until Mid-2025?
- Microsoft pushes [again] toward ARM PCs [and AI]
- Post-show: Parental Vision Pro demos
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple 🤝 OpenAI
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Chapters
- John’s iPad Pro review
- Misc. follow-up
- Emulator updates
- No Mac Studio/Pro in 2024
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- Copilot Plus PCs
- MS Recall
- Ending theme
- Parental Vision Pro demos
John’s iPad Pro review
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I need this to be a relatively short show which means we’re gonna go three plus hours
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you ever start the show by saying anything other than that Casey? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey always like where
⏹️ ▶️ John you always got somewhere else to be I need this to be short show because I need to go fight crime in the neighborhood like you secretly Batman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John you have thoughts about your iPad Pro with the m4 processor. Tell me more
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using it every day as I do with my iPad Not too much to note just a
⏹️ ▶️ John few things one screen screens real good I have seen some people
⏹️ ▶️ John make some complaints about the screen online. They think areas that are just barely not
⏹️ ▶️ John black look a little speckly or dithery. They might have way better vision than I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you look real close at like an OLED TV, when it’s in a region of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John that is like really dark gray, you’ll see the same thing. I can’t see whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re seeing on the screen with any of my corrective lenses or uncorrected eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s nice to be almost 50, I guess. The brightness is not too
⏹️ ▶️ John bright, which I was glad about, because it can go super duper bright, but when I’m in a dark bedroom, I can still turn it down to be
⏹️ ▶️ John reasonable. Loving that OLED. A lot of the shows I watch have the, you know, the black
⏹️ ▶️ John bars, letterbox top and bottom, and those just disappear into the room. I did also see some people who had, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, the blacks aren’t really black on my OLED. That will happen if the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that is projecting the image on the display doesn’t specify black for those regions. all those people is make
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself a black image that you know is 100% black and just fill the screen with that like in the photos app or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be completely black and mine is. Like if the screen is entirely black on my
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad in the dark bedroom, it’s indistinguishable from it being off. Because guess what? They just don’t send any
⏹️ ▶️ John power to any of the pixels. Like they’re literally off. If it doesn’t look like that to you, it’s because your video player
⏹️ ▶️ John is not projecting black in those areas, it’s projecting really dark gray, which is a bummer, but it can happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, face ID. Yes, it’s the landscape camera and the landscape face ID thing. And I have to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the weird scrunched up, totally unergonomic position that I watch, uh, television shows
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iPad in bed, face ID on the side could see my face better. Really? That’s surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, it’s not a condemnation of the position of the thing. They put it in the right place. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is better where it is. No one should sit like I’m sitting. I’m just saying as a practical matter. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John the face ID on the side could see my face a little bit better. Uh, sometimes I have to make an adjustment. I certainly block it with
⏹️ ▶️ John my hands a lot less now. That’s, that’s certain, but just, just, it was odd to me to think that like there shouldn’t be any
⏹️ ▶️ John difference. They just moved to the top and back. They should have a better view, but for whatever reason, it’s a little bit crankier about my face.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the final thing is volume controls. Uh, for several years now, there was a thing where Apple introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John like dynamic volume buttons on the iPad, where when you had it in landscape, the volume buttons would switch based on,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, to match essentially the little bar graph that fills on the screen. So when you had it in landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John mode, the right button would make the white part fill the volume bar, basically making the volume go up, and the left
⏹️ ▶️ John volume button would make it go down. And when you made it vertical, you know, the up button would make the thing go up. And anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that was the setting. In settings for years, it was like, do you want it to do that? Or do you just want it to say this is
⏹️ ▶️ John volume up and this is volume down, no matter how you orient the iPad. And so I got my new iPad, I’m watching it in a bed, I go to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John the volume up, instead the volume goes down. And I’m like, oh, I got to change that setting. Guess what? Settings gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John do not give you that setting. It’s almost, it’s not as bad as this, but it’s almost as if they went to
⏹️ ▶️ John natural scrolling and they didn’t give you the option anymore on new Macs. I just have to get
⏹️ ▶️ John used to the new setting. It’s arbitrary, which is volume, which is volume. Now, I see the logic and the dynamic controls, but on
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPads, not just the M4s, I think the most recent two generations of iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ John that dynamic volume control stuff is mandatory. There is no more option for it. So get used to
⏹️ ▶️ John dynamic volume buttons, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I can tell you one thing. Mine have had that for a long time, I guess since the last iPad update I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while, a few years back. I hate not having that option because I got so accustomed to the old way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of doing it and I’m not enough of an iPad power user anymore to have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to the new way. So every time I do it, I do it wrong, every single time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m assuming I’ll just get used to it. I’m already kind of, I mean, it makes sense the way they do it. It’s just jarring because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John so used to the other way, but I use it every day and I think I will, I think I will come around on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that it? That’s all you got? That was quick, I’m surprised. That’s it, I mean, it’s working great. Love
⏹️ ▶️ John the adjustable stand, love watching my stories. It’s just, it’s doing
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly what I wanted from a new iPad. I’m very satisfied with this product. Oh, and I also
⏹️ ▶️ John enabled the 80% battery thing, which I don’t know why I didn’t do it on the other one. Maybe it wasn’t an option back on the M1 iPad, but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, 80% battery is perfect for me because this thing spends all its time on my nightstand plugged in, I never
⏹️ ▶️ John need more than 80% battery. And if I do, I can just switch that off and charge the rest of the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, fair enough. Well, that’s pretty cool. I’m glad you’re liking it. I know you’ve been waiting for it a long time.
Misc. follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have further follow-up and feedback. The MKBHD magnets reel, which I think I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might’ve brought it up, somebody brought it up last week. And apparently I misrepresented it because Odin writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in to say, the reason MKBHD’s magnet diagram doesn’t show any of the rail of magnets in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back of the new iPad Pro is because there aren’t any. The two rails are entirely within the back of the new folio cover itself. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess I fabricated that memory. That is my mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your memory is so bad. Now that was me that made this mistake because I was saying that there was a mistake at the end of the
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube short or reel or whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was where they
⏹️ ▶️ John showed, here’s where all the magnets are. I’m like, they didn’t put in the rails because they were showing the back of the iPad, not the cover. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I regret the error. The
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey video was correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The offending party has been sacked. All right, iPad Pro bending. As
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone expected, you know, we put the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through all sorts of bends and twists and turns because why wouldn’t you do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey destroy a thousand plus dollar device for clicks on YouTube? And a bunch of people have done this, including JerryRigEverything,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and The Verge had some coverage about it. And the conclusion The Verge came to was, even with some aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bending, the central spine helps resist horizontal bends. So that’s if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey holding it in landscape, is that correct? And trying to bend it in towards yourself. Vertical bends, so you’re holding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in portrait and you’re trying to bend it in towards itself or towards you or what have you. Vertical bends don’t do as well though. The Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cracks right at the charging point port, which appears to be the main structural weakness of the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John As as predicted there wasn’t a lot of scientific rigor to the YouTube bending. I saw some people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey trying to their ever meter
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re trying to use like a force meter or weights or whatever But they were doing in such a bad way like the
⏹️ ▶️ John central question is is this more bendy than the press past one? I haven’t seen any videos that have really
⏹️ ▶️ John answered this scientifically. They’ve answered it kind of like well It feels like it’s kind of the same. Maybe it’s better. Maybe it’s good But
⏹️ ▶️ John the upshot is it’s definitely not worse. So if it was if it was catastrophically worse like it was oh
⏹️ ▶️ John This is so much worse That would be in the videos all the videos said it’s either kind of the same a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John better maybe a little bit worse in one particular direction or the other but I think Apple has safely
⏹️ ▶️ John avoided any kind of bend to gauge because None of the videos I saw and I watched so many videos of people
⏹️ ▶️ John bending this thing Came away saying this is so much worse than the past one because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John and so the spine really helps again only one direction but I think that Made a big difference,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think actually the millimeter wave thing people didn’t really mention this but the millimeter wave
⏹️ ▶️ John little cutout side thing is another weak point for bending in that direction and the fact that this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have one I think helps it like when you see them all break at the at the USB C port it’s like yeah because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the the side wall is thin there and that’s the weakest part and that’s where the break begins but you don’t see that happening at the millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ John wave thing because there’s no you know hole for that or whatever so that’s an interesting side effect of them
⏹️ ▶️ John ditching that feature yeah good job Apple making a stiff little iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Quinn Nelson had a genuinely mind-blowing video, or at least it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blew my freaking mind, on threads. I think Quinn has mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey divorced himself from Mastodon, which whatever, that’s fine. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have a Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John link. It’s a Mastodon link to a threads link.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly, it’s Mastodon to threads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just interrupt here and just throw something real quick in for the record? I know we literally just updated our theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco song to Earthlight that we’re all on now and mass on is the place that I am if I’m anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ve recently been spending a lot more time on none of these services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just doing my work and being in my life instead. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing your work. Are you feeling around
⏹️ ▶️ John not mutually exclusive? You can do your work and also read threads or mass it on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, maybe one one can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have a yes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, that’s a better way to put it. Yeah, because I think I have I have shown over the years that I maybe cannot do this combination
⏹️ ▶️ John The person who wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quitter and has deleted Twitter from his phone occasionally. Yes, exactly. But and I think like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco threads I probably should have gotten more into threads but didn’t because I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use like the tweetbot style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John apps with it. Yeah, the client apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I just like I just didn’t get into it and it’s been pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine for my life especially like in an election year oh my god to be not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and not constantly in all the constant dialogue everyone has about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every little thing, every little thing that we are that we’re mad about today that’s going on in tech, every little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that’s like news breaking today like I miss most of it until I just get like the summary version later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s glorious. This is this is the least involved I have been in social media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in probably 10 years and pretty much everything in my life is better and I’m missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing thing of value. So just putting that out there for anybody, you know, if you want, if you’re thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what would it be like to not be constantly involved and have this information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hose like connected directly to my veins? I can tell you that it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice and fine to be less involved with it and it’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that said, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk about… With that said, back on the social network.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s talk about what Quinn put on threads. So I’m going to attempt to describe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. feel free to interrupt and do a better job. But Quinn noticed that when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey using, I forget if it was freeform or something else, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the… No, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Notes. Okay, thank you. It was Apple Notes. You can select different pens and pencils
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. And what Quinn had selected was a fountain pen. And Quinn noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that when you do the little hover thing, and I presume it continues while you’re actually making a stroke,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but one way or another, when you’re doing a hover, you’ll see the little dot where the pen will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey draw. Fine. I have have that in my lowly 2021 or 2020, whatever it is, uh, iPad pro the, the M2 iPad pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What makes the new one interesting though, is that you get a full shadow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the screen of the writing implement the pencil is acting as. So in this example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you see a shadow of the, uh, fountain pen presented
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the screen. It is bananas. It’s worth pausing the podcast and quickly watching this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 90 second video or whatever that he put up. It is absolutely bananas and super,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super cool. Necessary, absolutely not, but super freaking cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John He might be in free form there because the fountain pen might not be in notes, but I tried it in notes to confirm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think it’s in anything that has Apple’s like pencil kit, kind of standard pencil input.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you watch the video, turn the sound on. Like the first, so the first time I watched it, I didn’t have the sound on. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just thought he was showing off like, look, when you turn the pen, the little, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hovering cursor of, like the mark you’re about to make that turns. And I was like, okay, yeah, that’s really nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we saw that in the keynote video, like that wasn’t new. I didn’t really get the appeal. And then I rewatched it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again today with sound, as he pointed at the shadow, I’m like, oh, the shadow of the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pen, like that’s really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah, and so, but doing this, it’s interesting that they spent the CPU resources and time to implement
⏹️ ▶️ John this because the shadow only really appears when you get real close with the tip. Like I was,
⏹️ ▶️ John and also when you’re using the pencil, the pencil kind of blocks your view of the shadow. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s taking like video of it from the side. It’s easier to see it that way. So this probably
⏹️ ▶️ John also explains why a lot of people didn’t notice it, I certainly didn’t. Because when you’re drawing, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t, the pencil blocks it. Like I wanted to see the cool like, you know, tip of the thing when I rotate
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Like the one I was using was like the, like the really pointy markers. You know those markers
⏹️ ▶️ John that have like a really thin metal thing with a little marker-y thing
⏹️ ▶️ John I was using that because it’s so differently shaped than the pencil You can really see that this is obviously not the shadow of the
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil and obviously doesn’t care about light sources and stuff like That like it’s not physically accurate or realistic
⏹️ ▶️ John But it is a fun whimsical thing and it’s so weird that they that they spent it Apparently it’s updating
⏹️ ▶️ John it like 120 frames per second and everything and it’s it’s based on like 3d models of the drawing instruments
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you rotate the pen pencil the shadow also rotates like it’s not just a 2d cutout
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever or very well done for something that it’s actually really difficult to see if you’re the one
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing with the pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, super cool stuff. And so Sebastian DeWitt from Halide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Camera wrote, I love the people were like, well, I never use all the power of my iPad Pro for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Apple designers and engineers went sick. That means we can render high poly 3D tools with this new Apple Pencil Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cast dynamic shadows 120 frames per second. Yeah, apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John someone dug out the 3D model. If you click through on that, that toot, you see the
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever usd file or dot obj file or whatever. You can see how detailed the 3d model is of
⏹️ ▶️ John a fountain pen, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along. Marco, a lot of people wrote in, which apparently you were too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey busy to see because you’re too busy actually getting work done. I’m really I’m really not comfortable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them actually emailed me so I so we actually did. I actually did a bunch of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, a bunch of people wrote in and Steve Stutz was maybe the first or perhaps the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thorough, but Steve writes, I would like to let Marco know that you can in fact opt out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connecting to audio when joining a Zoom meeting. And quick aside, this was relevant because of your town meetings and I guess you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have an iPad, is that right? That’s up by you or wanted to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like my idea, yeah, because like the soundboard is not like where I’m able to sit and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I control it remotely basically. So there’s a laptop at the soundboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hosting the Zoom call and then I can be anywhere else in the room with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is either an iPad or a laptop being a participant and then like I promote myself to co-host
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have full control over like kicking people out who are spamming it and stuff like that. And my problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I wanted to use an iPad for that because it was, you know, it’s a small role, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t get the iPad to not play any volume at all. And because I said like even if you turn the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the way down, the iPad will cap minimum at the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco square of volume. Like it will not let you set zero volume. Apparently somebody wrote in to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is actually a problem with anything that uses the iOS call kit framework. So anything that that provides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VoIP kind of calling, you know, even like you know like the like the audio calls in other apps like you know Slack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or WhatsApp or things like that. Like anything that uses call kit to make calls on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhones. Apparently they all have this problem. But yeah, so basically I couldn’t figure figure out a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have any audio play out of the iPad when in a Zoom call. But apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just join without audio, or you can like disconnect audio, if you quit and rejoin without it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently that gives you that option. So I haven’t had a chance to try that yet, but everyone wrote in to tell me that, so I assume it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so just to finish Steve Stutz’s feedback, this can be done by one, toggling on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the don’t connect to audio option, or two, if you forget to turn on the don’t connect to audio toggle, You can tap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on or click more, which is the ellipsis, and then tap or click on disconnect audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Granted, you will not be able to hear the meeting nor be heard in the meeting with audio not connected. However, you can still make yourself a co-host
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the meeting and either admit or remove people from the meeting. Zoom also has some useful settings on their website. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access to the account you use, you can turn on an option that allows you to request to unmute and mute participants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when they join a Zoom meeting. You can also disable participants from being able to unmute themselves at any time during
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a meeting. And you can also prevent ones who have been removed meetings to be able to rejoin the Zoom meetings, all of which sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like stuff you might be interested in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, most of those I actually use. So thank you for that. Thank you.
Emulator updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have some breaking news with regard to Delta. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely good and cool emulator for iOS. Riley Tested, who is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the primary author of Delta, said that, womp, womp, they’re in legal trouble,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not from who you would think. It turns out that Adobe was threatening legal action
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they think their logos are too similar. Delta had to release an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emergency update to change it. It’s a little wonky what they changed it to but I can concede
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they are fairly similar They’re the original logo and the the Adobe logos are pretty similar
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah It’s like an a like a triangle a with like a little Foot on the bottom if you know what the Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John logo looks like and you look at the Delta symbol You’re like, oh, yeah, I see it They’re similar and the new version is just the top chopped off of
⏹️ ▶️ John the a and having you rotate it but I’m pretty sure the little symbol in Delta is from the way they wrote the a
⏹️ ▶️ John and in the Game Boy Advance logo because It was remember was like GBA for iOS originally
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s just a coincidence that Adobe’s A logo is the same as the A in
⏹️ ▶️ John Boy Advance from ages ago. Yeah, anyway, better than getting a legal challenge from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, the Greek letter Delta, which I always used to shorthand for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like change, which is an engineering thing, I thought. So John, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were aware of this. Anyways, that’s a triangle. So, and so I think that that’s also where this kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it’s a combination of everything, right? You know, it’s the GBA stuff and Delta being a triangle.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was definitely not inspired by Adobe, but it is essentially the same logo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I mean, but obviously yeah, like there’s a lot of triangular things in the world like Adobe doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own triangles But they do they do kind of own triangles with this particular kind of notch cut out of them in the computer space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right So let’s talk about speaking of Delta why a GameCube or Wii
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emulator is not possible in the iOS App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John not be possible. You can’t say anything definitive about the app store, of course. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just make it and submit it and we’ll let you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you know that story about Delta, by the way? Did you hear he
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was on a podcast recently? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John He went to like a lab at WWDC and said, hey, I’m thinking of making this emulator. Will the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John allow this? And the lab, they said, yeah, sure. So he spent a year making it and then he submitted it and then like, yeah, no, we’re not accepting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that. Yeah. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large part, that was the motivation to start AltStore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, and And just advice for those of you out there, as we approach WWDC, and presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there will be probably one of those app review lab slack channels that they have had before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those people who are in those channels oftentimes know a lot, they usually mean well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they are not Phil Schiller. And the reality is, with the way the App Store works, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Phil Schiller does not want an app to be approved, it will not be approved. So unless you hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly from Phil Schiller that your app idea is okay, it won’t be, necessarily. taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that risk. And if you’re somewhere, if you’re kind of like, you know, in the, in like a vague
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boundary of the rules, or you’re pushing a little past some, you know, previously established ground, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re going into new territory, and you think your your idea might not make it, it probably won’t make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or at least you shouldn’t depend on it. And no matter what anybody in one of those labs tells you, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be Phil Schiller. And so they really can’t say for sure. Yes, we will definitely allow that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is why Apple has that policy of not telling you whether it will be submitted yet They always just say submit it and find
⏹️ ▶️ John out, which sounds terrible, but it is actually the only reasonable solution given the way Apple runs the App Store, because
⏹️ ▶️ John unless they’re going to sign a contract with you that says, we guarantee, according to these long specifications,
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you submit an app that works exactly like this, we’ll approve it, which obviously they’re never going to do, because that’s a huge amount of legal
⏹️ ▶️ John work, and it’s ridiculous. There’s no way to guarantee, because you could talk to Phil Schiller. He could say, please submit
⏹️ ▶️ John it. But a year later, so much can change in a year. And should you be shocked to see that
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they said, You got the most authoritative person who said yes a year ago things
⏹️ ▶️ John change in a year If you’re on those, you know the fringes or even if you’re not even if you think you’re dead center
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple makes such a strategic change or something in the world changes that’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John weaknesses of a Having a channel that where your thing have to be approved by a company that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t control There’s unless you literally have a legal contract with a lot of detail
⏹️ ▶️ John and it says that says your things that you get through You’re only going to find out when you submit now most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time if you’re making like a to-do list app You’ll probably be fine right. It’s not like it’s just this mystery. We never know what’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be Accepted but there are categories that you know if you’re asking that question in
⏹️ ▶️ John a lab. Hey, would you accept this app? it probably it’s because you already kind of know that your app is close
⏹️ ▶️ John to the edges of what Apple accepts and It’s not like Apple should just tell me and then keep their promises
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not feasible either for a big company or an individual or anything. It just, we can’t predict the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things change, the landscape changes, the laws change, the Apple strategic
⏹️ ▶️ John direction changes. So as painful as it is to think, well, you just have to do the work first and then submit it and
⏹️ ▶️ John cross your fingers. That’s the way it is. But hey, if you’re in the EU and Apple doesn’t accept it, you have other options.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, coming back to GameCube and Wii emulators. So it may, John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not be possible because of just in time compilation. So Dolphin OS developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oatmeal Dome explained how a Dolphin Code fork, which ports the popular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GameCube and Wii emulator to Apple’s smartphone OS, uses just-in-time compilation to translate the PowerPC instructions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from those retro consoles into ARM-compatible iOS code. But Apple’s App Store regulations against apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that quote, install executable code, which is section 3.3.1b, generally prevent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JIT or just-in-time recompilation on iOS with with very limited exceptions such as web browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That restriction may have some validity security reasoning behind it, but it can also get in the way for developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of tools like third-party browser engines, except recently in the EU. So basically, without just-in-time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recompilation, it’s just not fast enough. And in that blog post, Oatmeal Dome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shows a video of the no just-in-time recompilation playing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a flavor of Mario Kart, I forget which one, and it is just achingly slow. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then the same app, well, effectively the same app running on the same device, but this time with just-in-time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recompilation turned on. And it runs easily as well, if not better than it did on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original hardware. So yeah, sad times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, Apple could do some kind of work to try to make a somewhat safer version of this, but just a free-for-all
⏹️ ▶️ John just-in-time compilation, it basically makes it impossible for Apple to validate, for
⏹️ ▶️ John example, that you’re not using private APIs or whatever, because The app that they approved didn’t use private APIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just-in-time compilation means at any time it can download new data and compile
⏹️ ▶️ John that data into executable code and run it. And Apple, the same way that Apple doesn’t allow you to
⏹️ ▶️ John download pieces of your app at runtime and run them, right, that’s against the rules, this is the same
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing of like, well, if you could take, obviously what they’re doing here is they’re taking
⏹️ ▶️ John a GameCube game and using that code as data and just-in-time recompiling
⏹️ ▶️ John it into ARM, and that should be fine. It’s not like you’re using that to get it secret Apple APIs or whatever, but Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. And so that’s why they have this rule, again, possibly for security reasons of like, we don’t want you to be able
⏹️ ▶️ John to conjure up arbitrary code at runtime that does whatever you want to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John we can never prove because that is happening in the future. So in this case, the rule
⏹️ ▶️ John against just time compilation does make some sense, but it’s such an essential part of doing things
⏹️ ▶️ John fast, like say running JavaScript and browser engines that Apple really should work towards getting a properly
⏹️ ▶️ John sandbox confined environment in which it is safe to just-in-time compile code
⏹️ ▶️ John because these things just want to run games. Like they’re not trying to use just-in-time compilation to hack into the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. So this is a situation where there actually are technical barriers to allowing
⏹️ ▶️ John apps to do this if Apple wants to maintain the level of security of the app. Now obviously you can run these on a Mac or on
⏹️ ▶️ John a PC and the same exact quote unquote security problems exist, but everyone’s just okay with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So it could just be a mindset change, but we’ll see how this goes because like, you know, running Delta,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, using Nintendo 64 games, the NES games and you know, super NES stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are super old. You can get away with doing those without just non-compilation, but as you get closer and closer to
⏹️ ▶️ John modern consoles, you kind of start to need this. And so even though we’re all enjoying all, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John look at all these emulators there you can get even in the regular app store, uh, that That party is going to,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not end, then at least get a little bit more tame as time marches on and people want to play their quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote retro Switch games, for example, in five to 10 years.
No Mac Studio/Pro in 2024
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so it’s time for me to have a little laugh at your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expense. And I feel slightly bad doing this. But after all, you’ve put me through not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Mark Gurman, I love you, john. Mark Gurman writes no new Mac Studio. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever. And no Mac Pro until mid 2025. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have avoided this pain or I will avoid this pain for like another year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could not be more excited. So Mark Gurman writes, or excuse me, MacRumors recaps what Gurman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrote. And MacRumors writes, Gurman says that Apple’s current schedule does not include the launch of a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Studio or Mac Pro model until the middle of next year. All other Macs, with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the MacBook Air, should be available with M4 series chips by the end of 2024. But Gurman does not anticipate any new models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being unveiled at WWDC in June, making 2022 and 2023 exceptions for recent mid-year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac releases. You know, I would love I’d love to hear your comments on this, but all kidding aside, this is kind of stinky. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I snark and I joke, I don’t love that the Mac Studio, which I think is a very important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mac for the company, you know, it’s the super, it’s the MacBook Pro of desktops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will. And I’m sure John will correct me in a second, but it’s kind of the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the anyone’s desktop for people who want, who wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something strong and powerful. And the Mac mini is pretty strong, pretty powerful, But if you want more than you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a Mac studio and the Mac pro, like as much as again, I joke, I, I, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of bumps me out the way the Mac pro is now. Cause it’s not, it’s a Mac pro in name and very little else. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I’m sorry. Tell me what’s going on here. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not a change. This was always the rumor. But you know, Hey, rumors that
⏹️ ▶️ John they hadn’t been sort of solidified. Like for example, German and not come flat out and said, this is definitively what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be until recently. But the rumor always was, hey, if you’re looking at the M4 line
⏹️ ▶️ John of chips, the M4 is going to come out and then there’s going to be M4 Pro and Max and maybe a model just for the Mac Pro and those timelines
⏹️ ▶️ John were always into next year, right? But the question always was, okay, well, then what happens to WWDC? Because the
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, especially before the M4 rumor started for the iPad, the expectation was, well, surely at
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC, that’ll be the time for the Mac Studio to get an update and maybe the Mac Pro. Set aside the Mac Pro, but the Mac Studio, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John due for an update, right? because we had the M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max. Where’s the Max Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John with an M3 Max in it, right? And maybe there’ll be an M3 Ultra. And we talked about that before, about the Interposer and was it on the
⏹️ ▶️ John die? And will there be an M3 Ultra? Will there not be? Obviously the M4 threw a monkey wrench into all of that. This is like, well, wait
⏹️ ▶️ John a second. They just introduced an M4 iPad. Are they really gonna introduce a Max Studio with
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that has an M3 in front of the name? Now that the M4 exists, what are they gonna do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there gonna be an M3 Ultra in the Max Studio? or like maybe the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Max and Ultra are ready sooner than we thought and German is here to say no. There will not be
⏹️ ▶️ John an M3 Ultra or M3 Max, Max Studio. There will not be an M4 Max
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio at WWC. There’ll be no Max Studio at WWC and obviously no Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s disappointing because that’s gonna mean the Max Studio and the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John are stuck on the M2, which as soon as the M4 Pro and
⏹️ ▶️ John M4 Max MacBook Pros come out, they’re probably gonna be embarrassing,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro, because we know the M4, M4 already beats it in single core on my freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad with no fan in it. So it’s, I mean, geez. Not that you should feel
⏹️ ▶️ John bad if you had a Mac Studio, if you bought like the M2 Max or M2 Ultra when it was new, fine, but don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy a Mac Studio now, right? You just gotta wait, and the Mac Pro has always been a little bit sad.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I was really curious about what they were gonna do there, but honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they had produced an M3 Ultra Mac Studio, I think that would have been a fine product
⏹️ ▶️ John to hold us over until the M4 ones come. But instead, they’re just gonna let them languish. The Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is used to that. The Mac Pro is used to being constantly in a state of fighting for its life and in limbo.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the Mac Studio, I felt like, they’re really, you know, they updated that to the M1, they updated it to the M2. It’s like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Studio, it’s nice. You know, it’s the Mac Pro for people who don’t want a gargantuan thing on their desk, and especially
⏹️ ▶️ John now with the current Mac Pro, it’s basically a Mac Pro without the card slots. It’s a good little computer, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like they should be as dedicated to it as they are to all their other computers, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not this year. Maybe because of the whole M3B thing, and they really wanted to get off it as fast as
⏹️ ▶️ John possible, and they didn’t want to make an Ultra, and they didn’t want to put out a Mac Studio without an Ultra. Like maybe if
⏹️ ▶️ John it topped out at the M3 Max, that’d be boring, but anyway, But you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I was looking forward to at WWDC. But, you know, I was looking forward to seeing what
⏹️ ▶️ John they would do. And the answer is nothing. So I guess we’ll spend all our time at WWDC talking about AI stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You get nothing. Good day,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what you said a minute ago is correct. Like I they probably didn’t want to do or couldn’t reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco priced do the ultra version of the M three and they wouldn’t update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the Mac Studio to the M3 generation and have just a Macs and not an Ultra. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably like the leading reason they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. Oh, it’s a shame because an M3 Max, Mac Studio is still a great little computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, yeah, like I’m saying this, you know, from my 16 inch M3 Max MacBook Pro that’s in desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mode right now. So, you know, not to make Mac Studio people feel too bad about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, so two things, number one, like if you want to make sure you always have the cutting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco edge chips, use MacBook Pros, because they always get them, because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the higher volume products. And number two- Well, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t get the Ultra. Well, true, and that’s true, that’s fair. But number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Studio, I continue to think that this was a branding mistake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple made. The Mac Studio is just the Mac Pro. Like, that’s the new Mac Pro. That’s the Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Pro. The Mac Studio, just think of it like there’s two Mac Pros. One of them has a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case that has card slots, and the other one has a small case with no card slots. Those are two configurations of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same computer and it’s the Mac Pro. Now, if you use that computer and like that computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great for you. However, you bring to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the burdens that the Mac Pro has always had. It is a high-end, low-volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop that Apple makes. Not a lot of people seem to choose the Mac Studio slash Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their needs. So it’s never really gonna be that high of a priority for Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they’ll get to it when they can reasonably without too much sweat off their back. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s anything competing for those factors, like if they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bend over backwards to try to get some kind of economy, working with low
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip yields of a new process, or if their engineering resources are tight and they have to redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other more high volume computers first, the Mac Pro slash Studio is always going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be kind of lower priority than everything else is they just sell, I think they sell way fewer of them than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other high-end Macs. And so, I think that’s the reality. If you’re going to be a high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac desktop user, you’re gonna have pretty much the same problems that most Mac high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop users have always had, which is you are a small market to them and they still care about you, thank God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you’re a small market to them. And as I’m telling you, as laptops have gotten better at being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used as desktops, I can strongly recommend if you want something that is updated more frequently, And that’s a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if, if you don’t, that’s fine. If you want something that’s updated more frequently and it’s driving you nuts as a Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco owner that like the laptops have been faster than your computer in certain ways for, you know, eight months or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco consider switching to MacBook Pros. It works really well. If you don’t wanna do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that’s great. The Mac Studio is a great computer, but you’re gonna have to deal with a slow update cycle, just like high-end desktops
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what you have to basically do is like, cause you know, not everyone buys a new computer every year, right? So if you buy a new
⏹️ ▶️ John computer every three years, you have to buy on the year that the Mac Studio or Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John is just updated. Because you don’t wanna buy, oh, I buy a new computer every three years for my work,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, do not buy the M2 Mac Studio like two days before the M4 one’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey gonna come, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what I mean? Like you have to sync up your cycle with the not so frequent
⏹️ ▶️ John release cycle. And if you do that, you’re not losing out. Because again, if you don’t buy a new computer every year, it’s not important
⏹️ ▶️ John to you that, oh, this year the MacBook Pros have the new chip sooner. It’s like, you aren’t gonna buy a new computer anyway. you’re gonna buy an M4
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio on the day it comes out and you’re gonna keep it for three years. And then when the M6
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio comes out, then you’re gonna buy that one. Whatever upgrade cycle you’re on, you need to buy on the
⏹️ ▶️ John release of whatever big desktop Mac you want. Same thing with the iMac, obviously. If you, you
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t have bought an M1 iMac two days before the M3 ones came out or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, if you are
⏹️ ▶️ John buying one of the Mac models that Apple is not interested in updating frequently because they’re low volume or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John try to sync up with that. which if you listen to this show, you know when it’s happening, but if you don’t, you just wander into an Apple store,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could end up buying, you know, again, don’t buy an M2 Mac two days before the M4 version 1 comes
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Copilot Plus PCs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so we have an interesting thing to cover. And before you just mash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the chapter skip button, I’d encourage you to give us a chance here. So Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has, is a build that’s going on right now? Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John an event the day before build started.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, that’s right. Yes, it is. Anyways, one way or another, Microsoft is in the midst of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their Build event, which is kind of their WWDC. But like John just said, a day before that they had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of a keynote sort of thing where they announced a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new hardware that Microsoft, amongst others, are making. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to tell you, I watched this when it appeared in the show notes. I didn’t pay that much attention to it before then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a little over an hour. I mean, I watched it at 2x, but it wasn’t particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boring. And in fact, I would go so far as to say it was actually really interesting because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is Microsoft. Yeah, in a lot of ways, they’re aping Apple’s style and whatnot. But in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what they were announcing, it was a lot of stuff that I thought was really interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And some of it looked really compelling. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how we want to go through this. John, if you want to start reading bullets that we have in our show notes, or if you have an opening statement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something, but how do you want to handle this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, let me just read the first line out of a paragraph here because then I’ll have something to say. So this is the
⏹️ ▶️ John kickoff with the Verge story about this and their headline was, Inside Microsoft’s Mission to
⏹️ ▶️ John Take Down the MacBook Air. Straightforward, pretty provocative title there.
⏹️ ▶️ John From the post, Microsoft is confident that it finally nailed the transition to ARM chips. So confident
⏹️ ▶️ John that this time around the company spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against the MacBook Air. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked about it on the show many times in the past about Windows on ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John and PCs on ARM chips. Very often it’s in the context of everyone’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s favorite topic, the Mac Pro, because what I’ll always say about the Mac Pro and ARM-based Mac Pros, and we
⏹️ ▶️ John got a lot of ASKATDP questions about it, or whatever, like, hey, are you gonna game on your Mac Pro when you get a Mac Pro with ARM in it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you care about GPU? What are you gonna use all that GPU for if there’s no games or whatever? And what I have always been saying for years
⏹️ ▶️ John and years is, hey, Windows runs on ARM, like Windows, Microsoft did like Windows RT or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years ago, right? Windows runs on ARM and ARM CPUs are, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, more widespread than they used to be. I have always been rooting for
⏹️ ▶️ John the PC world, the Windows PC world to make a transition to ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly for selfish reasons, because I want all the PC games to be compiled for ARM so that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can run them at native
⏹️ ▶️ John speeds on my future ARM Mac Pro. But even setting that aside, It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer for everybody when Macs and PCs use the same architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we had this beautiful golden period where Macs were x86 and Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John was x86. And as a Mac user, that meant you could run a virtual PC or not
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual PC, a VMware or Parallels or whatever and run Windows at full native
⏹️ ▶️ John speed with really good compatibility.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, just to briefly interrupt here. I don’t think I would be a Mac user right now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it wasn’t for that. Because I had been a PC user my entire life. Granted, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some time with Linux on the desktop. I had my college period, if you will. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I needed a way to ease into the transition. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, like so many other people, had convinced myself, I can’t do everything I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey without, on Mac OS. I need to, or OS X, as it was called at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Be honest, you probably called it OSX.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I did, but I’m not above it. So anyway, I needed a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to ease into it. I needed to be able to walk into the shallow end or wade into the shallow end. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VMware Fusion is what I happened to choose, but that’s what I did. And then that allowed me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use certain apps that, and I don’t even remember what they were now, but that I didn’t think I could live without.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it wasn’t long after I started using a Mac that I realized, oh my God, this is so much better than my PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really kind of want to use this for everything, not just personal stuff. I could just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use VMware fusion and make a draw, make a, uh, a VM. That is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my work computer and I can use my work computer inside my Mac. You know, Hey dog,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear you like computers. Let’s put a computer in your computer. Um, and so that’s what I ended up doing. And for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at work, I was using a personal Mac with a VM, a windows VM, and it ran
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really well. I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but it was really good. And I don’t think I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a Mac user today, and I suspect that’s true of a lot of people, if it wasn’t for that. And this was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my understanding was this was garbage when you were trying to cross a processor architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s kind of where we are right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and so Microsoft did have Windows on ARM from ages ago, but they didn’t really have a good compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ John story of how to run x86 apps or whatever. And Windows RT was not particularly popular.
⏹️ ▶️ John They had, you know, all the PC makers making Windows RT devices, but
⏹️ ▶️ John most PCs were still x86. Certainly most games were x86, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of their second. I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing the counts, but it’s, it’s, it is a subsequent
⏹️ ▶️ John run at the same idea. Now here’s the thing about Microsoft and arm and windows, unlike Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft just can’t say, guess what? We’re transitioning to arm because Microsoft doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make all the PC hardware in the world. They make some PC hardware, which is a change from years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they don’t make most of the PC hardware. Apple makes all the Mac hardware. So if they wanted the Mac to transition to ARM, guess what? They just
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped selling the x86 ones, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the Mac has transitioned to ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft can’t do that. So they have to convince
⏹️ ▶️ John the PC makers to make ARM PCs, which is relatively easy because the PC makers rely on Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then they have to convince the customers to buy them. And their second run at this,
⏹️ ▶️ John their way of convincing them is twofold. One, we’re going to make like good laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know the MacBook Air that everybody loves? We’re gonna make a laptop like that. So, and people like that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So now you wanna buy this, right? And it’s better than the Intel laptops for all the reasons that the MacBook Air is better than
⏹️ ▶️ John the Intel laptops. Better performance, lower, you know, power draw, all this just all these wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ John features, right? So we’re gonna make hardware that you like. And also we’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ John or try to do an Apple style backward compatibility thing. Every time Apple has done a processor transition
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ve done it three times on the Mac, they always have a way for you to essentially run your old applications
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that’s good enough that you don’t care, right? And every single time they’ve done this amazingly.
⏹️ ▶️ John They say, hey, do you have an old 68K application? Your PowerPC Mac will run it faster than a 68K one ever
⏹️ ▶️ John ran before. You have an old PowerPC app and you wanna run an Intel, we can do that for you too. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing with running x86 now on ARM things. It’s not ideal. Eventually you want everyone to port their
⏹️ ▶️ John apps. You wanna support fat binaries, universal binaries, blah, blah, blah, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John you really can’t sell someone a new computer and new architecture and say, yeah, most of your old
⏹️ ▶️ John apps won’t work, sorry about that. You have to provide a smooth ramp and they’re trying to do that this time. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the way they’re doing it is, they’re not saying that this presentation wasn’t, oh, this is what
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft announcing that ARM is the future and all PCs are changed ARM. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the presentation they gave. They can’t give that presentation. They shouldn’t give that presentation. They didn’t give that. Instead,
⏹️ ▶️ John they said, here are some amazing new PCs that we hope you’ll really like. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look, certainly by Microsoft standards, they’re pretty amazing, actually. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, reading from The Verge, Microsoft is confident it finally nailed the transition to ARM chips. So confident that this time around, the company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent an entire day pitting its new hardware against MacBook Air. So let’s start with performance. Over the past two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years, Microsoft has worked in secret with all of its top laptop partners to ready a selection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of ARM-powered Windows machines that will hit the market this summer. So back, a quick aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they launched, I think like a year ago now, they launched something called Copilot, or maybe it was a GitHub that launched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, one way or another, somebody Microsoft related.
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a Microsoft thing. That was their AI branding from years, multiple years ago, I think maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, and I love that. I think it’s great. I really genuinely do. I think, you know, Copilot is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a way to like assist you in getting your work done. I think it’s great. And so kudos to them for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. It’s a surprisingly good name, especially for Microsoft. So coming back,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey machines that will hit the market this summer known as Copilot Plus PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They were doing so well. They were doing so
⏹️ ▶️ John so this name, so you have to read this three times to be like, wait, what? That’s the name.
⏹️ ▶️ John These new kinds of PCs that Microsoft is promoting here, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have a name that’s applied to them that not just Microsoft sells, but anybody who sells one of these things, Dell, Asus,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, they are selling a co-pilot, then a plus symbol, then
⏹️ ▶️ John the PC. Do you have a co-pilot plus PC? Yeah, I have a Dell one of those. I have a Microsoft one of those. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John co-pilot plus PC. Terrible name. But you can see
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason they did it, and it’s also a terrible reason, but you can see why, right? Because what they wanna say
⏹️ ▶️ John about these laptops, there’s a new kind of laptop in the PC world, it’s called a co-pilot plus PC,
⏹️ ▶️ John and what they wanna say about them is, These PCs can do AI stuff, because Copilot
⏹️ ▶️ John is our AI thing. It helps you along with your work, right? Why it’s called Copilot Plus PCs
⏹️ ▶️ John and not just called Copilot PCs, but anyway, they’re gonna say, this is what distinguishes these laptops. They can do AI
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. AI stuff is novel. Lots of people haven’t seen it. And only these can do it, because for reasons that we’ll get into shortly,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I get that AI and Copilot is a popular brand
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but I can almost guarantee you that the main reason people are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy these laptops has nothing to do with Copilot. So by calling them Copilot Plus PCs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, I hope they’re not, I mean, they’ll probably just change their mind, but like, you don’t want to be stuck with that name because as far as I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John concerned, and as far as I think the world’s concerned, it’s like, oh, these are the PCs that are good like Macs
⏹️ ▶️ John are good, right? In terms of laptops, you know, size, weight, performance, battery life, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John These are the PCs that aren’t burdened by Intel falling behind on x86, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what these PCs actually are, but Microsoft is entirely branding them based on
⏹️ ▶️ John AI features that, frankly, I think are of speculative
⏹️ ▶️ John usefulness to customers. I know people are interested in them and there’s buzz around them and they’re novel, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the market has shown that they’re so important that people
⏹️ ▶️ John are willing to buy a different PC with a different architecture just to get
⏹️ ▶️ John access to AI features that they’ve never used before, but that Microsoft tells them will be super useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John bummer on the branding, bummer on the name, but you can see how they got there. It’s like when
⏹️ ▶️ John a company has something like, this is the future, and we should, it’s like if they named, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, it’s like if they named the new line of Macs to be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to think of a good example of like, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They could use their Siri branding, which has been their machine learning brand
⏹️ ▶️ John All our Macs from now on are going to be Siri Macs, because Siri is so important. Siri plus Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, right. Or Macs plus Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I think you’re right that the AI stuff and co-pilot stuff is perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not enough to sell these machines, even though it did look pretty slick to me. But there is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot here that is good, because it turns out that making a full-bore computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of an ARM-based processor has some benefits. Who knew? So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey known as Copilot Plus PCs, they’re meant to kickstart a generation of powerful, battery-efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows laptops and lay the groundwork for an AI-powered future. So, the minimum specs for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Copilot Plus PC, and I think these are the only three things that were ever enumerated, maybe there’s more, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you need 16 gigs of RAM or more, you need a 256-gig hard drive or more, and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need a NPU, or I guess neural processing unit, is that right? Capable of 40 tops. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about tops all the time, all over and over again, tops.
⏹️ ▶️ John So these minimum specs apply to everybody who wants to use the Copilot Plus PC’s branding. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ John how Microsoft is essentially trying to herd the PC market in the direction. Hey, Microsoft’s gonna put a lot of money into
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing this terrible name, right? Do you wanna be able to say that you’re selling a Copilot Plus PC? They went to
⏹️ ▶️ John all their PC hardware vendors and said, we want you all to make Copilot Plus PCs. We’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John market this, you’re gonna sell these things, you’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it together. But
⏹️ ▶️ John to get the Copilot Plus PC branding, you have to meet this minimum spec, 16 gigs of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 256, blah, blah, blah, right? 16 gigs of RAM as a minimum spec for Copilot Plus PC
⏹️ ▶️ John is yet another slap in the face of Apple and their stupid eight gigabyte RAM based on so many
⏹️ ▶️ John of their models. Now you might say, well, it’s because Windows uses so much more memory and the AI stuff uses so much more memory
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple is more memory efficient so they only need eight gigs, yada, yada, yada. The point is Apple puts too little RAM in its
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And so the minimum spec being 16 really is starting to slap
⏹️ ▶️ John around. But 256 gig hard drive is a little small, but whatever. The NPU thing
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about this last week, 40 trillion operations per seconds. What kind of operations?
⏹️ ▶️ John 8-bit integer operations, 64-bit floating point operations, 32-bit integer
⏹️ ▶️ John operations. No one ever wants to specify. But based on the what
⏹️ ▶️ John we saw last week of how Apple’s own numbers change from the M3 being 18 tops to the M4 being 38
⏹️ ▶️ John tops and that be because oh that was 18 16-bit tops but it’s 38 8-bit tops I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John think this 40 number is 8-bit but Microsoft didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John specify so if you’re trying to compare tops it’s a it’s a bad it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John really a unit because you don’t know what they’re operating on right how many one bit operations can you do per second
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do even more like and for people who don’t know about like SIMD instructions and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically like you have a certain amount of space to put a bunch of numbers in and you could put like
⏹️ ▶️ John two 8-bit numbers or one 16-bit number. If you put two 8-bit numbers and you add that value,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I just did two additions. But if you put one 16-bit number, you just did one addition. But in either case you added
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, those things to another set of those things, right? So it’s a little bit fudging of these numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John and what TOPS means and I’m really not happy about about tops being a thing that manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ John are touting because none of them seem interested in telling us what those operations were performed
⏹️ ▶️ John on. Maybe there’s some kind of unification about them always touting the biggest number, which I guess everyone’s decided
⏹️ ▶️ John going smaller than 8-bit seems kind of cheap. So maybe it’s 40
⏹️ ▶️ John trillion 8-bit operations, but we don’t know. But anyway, this is basically saying you gotta have
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of neural engine to use Apple Speak that has decent performance to be a Copile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t seem like this is just a bunch of BS, that they’re actually inferior
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware, that is that they’re just pumping up at the stats. It seems from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tests they’ve shown so far, of course, with all the caveats that these are like, demo tests from a keynote or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, it seems like this is actually likely to be real competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple’s M chips. And that’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the M4 was 38 tops, and this is 40. So yeah, ballpark.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and so far the rest of the performance seems like it’s actually like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretically gonna actually provide a really good competition. And for me, even though I’m a huge Apple fan,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially of the Mac, I hope these are faster than the M chips.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because Apple is at its best when there’s really good competition. And we’ve seen, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are parts of Apple that are extremely complacent recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the thing is, the Mac hardware division really is not among them. You know, the Mac hardware is great, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than it’s ever been, and it’s updated, you know, despite earlier conversations about the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Studio and Mac Pro, the overall Mac hardware lineup is updated pretty well now, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much every model of Mac now is in a really good place for the most part.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I wouldn’t say Mac hardware is being complacent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, slacking off or taking their foot off the gas. I would say Mac’s software is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would say, you know, certainly we’ll see what happens with Apple and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, any of their like modern AI features that may or may not be announced in a few weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll see, that remains to be seen how that goes. But what I love about this announcement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that it looks like Microsoft and all the various, you know, partners therein,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like they’re actually gonna really provide strong competition for the first time in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least in some areas, in the hardware areas. And to attack the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what looks like a pretty strong attack, I think that’s fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s great for the industry. That’s how we get really good change coming. That’s how we get really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements. That’s how we get 16 gigs of fricking RAM. That’s how we get everything getting better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the customers. It happens when Apple is forced not to be complacent, when there’s actually a real competition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this will be a theme, I think, throughout the next few years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I suspect, granted this is, again, we have yet to see what Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to the recent AI mania. I suspect whatever they unveil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at WWDC is going to underwhelm most of us in that area. I think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be way behind. I think they’re gonna take a very, very conservative approach to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any kind of quote AI-based features. And I bet the companies that were there earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have invested more heavily in it, basically at Google and Microsoft, especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet Google and Microsoft are gonna be way ahead of Apple in AI-based features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time, possibly for like a decade. I think this is a direct assault on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core businesses, even the iPhone, and I think that’s fantastic. I think Apple needs that more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than anything because I have not kept quiet that I really do think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot more parallels between Tim Cook and Steve Ballmer than most Apple fans are willing to admit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Steve Ballmer did not make Microsoft unsuccessful. He made Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco miss the next big thing. I think that’s substantially at risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here with Apple. I think Apple may have missed slash be missing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of new tech around these new AI techniques and models that their competition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is investing very heavily into and developing very quickly and very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re iterating quickly, they’re turning things around quickly. A lot of it still, yes, it’s vaporware. A lot of it still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not as good in practice as it demos, but there’s a lot of value there that Apple is so far not capturing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it remains to be seen. What will happen? What will they show us in a few weeks? And how will that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stage out the rest of the year into various products and releases? We’ll find out. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a feeling the most likely outcome of all that is they’re way behind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and dipping their toe in very conservatively while their competitors are pushing really hard. And that’s a threat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the iPhone. That’s a big deal if that’s the case. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is gonna be a really exciting time, not because I want Apple to lose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because they’re gonna, I think, have really strong competition, stronger than they’ve had in a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’re gonna start seeing actual disruption in their core product lines because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their competitors are gonna be doing substantial things that either have matched areas that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s had a lead in for a while, like some of this hardware from Microsoft and Qualcomm and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or their competitors are gonna be doing things that Apple just can’t keep up with in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the areas of AI and AI-based features. That, I think this is gonna be a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting time for computers and for Apple fans, because we’re gonna start actually getting punched here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there, we’re gonna start losing some things, and that’s gonna make Apple wake up in some areas that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they need to be woken up in and actually get them to make some really good stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again in a lot of these complacent areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, so as we continue, Ars Technica writes that, right now, the requirement of 16 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey RAM, 256 gig hard drive, and NPU capable of 40 trillion operations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey per second, or 40 tops, that can only be met by a single chip in the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows PC ecosystem. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Elite, God, I’m fumbling all over my mouth here because these are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco so terrible. Oh, they’re terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, which I’m assuming are Xs, maybe they’re 10s, who even knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But those are the only chips that are capable of doing it. And I think that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only one of these two is out today or something along those lines.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I think they’re both available. So this Qualcomm Snapdragon thing, so we’ve been hearing about this chip for
⏹️ ▶️ John a while now, like months now people are saying this is going to be the M first it was going to be the M two killer then it
⏹️ ▶️ John was going to be the M three killer now it’s the M four killer because Apple keeps releasing new chips. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a from Qualcomm, uh, Apple’s friendly neighborhood supplier of
⏹️ ▶️ John cell modems and other things that Apple wants to replace in its hardware. Um, Qualcomm
⏹️ ▶️ John bought Nuvia in 2021 for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was
⏹️ ▶️ John a startup making ARM chips, I think they were making like ARM server chips. Nuvia
⏹️ ▶️ John was started by a bunch of Apple Silicon people that left Apple and formed their own company
⏹️ ▶️ John to make ARM chips that Apple was interested in making. So Qualcomm essentially bought
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of the people who helped Apple make all of its, the M-series chips and the A-series
⏹️ ▶️ John chips or whatever. That was a wise move because Qualcomm’s ARM SoCs
⏹️ ▶️ John were not as good as Apple’s for many, many years. And this seems to be the first fruit of the Nuvia
⏹️ ▶️ John acquisition, which is an ARM chip that is in the conversation
⏹️ ▶️ John with Apple’s ARM chips. And it’s the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, which is not great naming.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Plus has a 10 core CPU and goes up to 3.4 gigahertz. And the Elite has a 12 core
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU that clocks higher. It goes up to 3.8 with a quote dual core boost
⏹️ ▶️ John to 4.2 gigahertz. And they both have 136 gigabits per second memory bandwidth. The M4, remember from past
⏹️ ▶️ John show, the M4 just broke the 100 gigabytes per second barrier because the M1, M2, and M3 were all 100 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second. M4 is 120 gigabytes per second. The Snapdragon X chip is 136 gigabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John per second. So spec wise, clock wise, these are a little bit slower than
⏹️ ▶️ John the M4 as well. But these, if you look at these chips and you’re like, okay, well
⏹️ ▶️ John just Based on this part of the specs I can see how this Potentially could
⏹️ ▶️ John be in the conversation with Apple stuff now when when the rumors were going for the snapdragon
⏹️ ▶️ John X The the main ding against these chips and the rumors was Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the the specs are comparable to an m2 or better than an m2 comparable to an m3 and
⏹️ ▶️ John now Maybe within shouting distance of an m4 But we don’t know how much power they take
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the kind of the the ding on the Intel chips before the arm ones did you get? Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops that had CPUs that could match or beat the CPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple laptops But they use so much more power and their battery life was awful and some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John even like when they weren’t plugged in they would Clock themselves down and get even worse performance. So it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like, okay We can’t just look at whether you can beat a Mac and performance
⏹️ ▶️ John if your battery life is half as long Nobody wants your laptop. So that was always the ding and the rumors against the
⏹️ ▶️ John snap during next things Oh, they’re probably gonna be comparable, but I bet they’re gonna get way worse battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life But this this presentation spent a long time trying to say
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s not the case that these laptops are Not only you know
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air caliber performance or just so weird that they’re like judging us the MacBook Air Which is not Apple’s most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop, but well, it’s their top seller and it’s probably Microsoft’s top competition for anything in this price
⏹️ ▶️ John range. Right, but like if you’re doing it, like you would think what you’d be doing if you’re competing as a MacBook Air is just showing like battery life things or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they wanna show that it has the speed, you know. And it’s a little bit like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously the MacBook Air only has the M3, Apple rolled out the M4, but it’s not in a MacBook Air yet. So this is a time to strike
⏹️ ▶️ John because when the M4 MacBook Air is out, maybe the comparisons won’t be as favorable because the M4 looks pretty darn good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that’s what they were comparing against. Now, the one thing they do have going for them
⏹️ ▶️ John is these are PCs, which you would presume they’re going to be less expensive
⏹️ ▶️ John with better specs than Apple stuff. Now, Microsoft’s PCs, because Microsoft does make hardware, Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs historically have not actually been super cheap, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You could always get cheaper models with similar specs from other PC makers. Microsoft, from the beginning with
⏹️ ▶️ John its whole, you know, self-branded service line of Microsoft PCs,
⏹️ ▶️ John has been trying to be the Apple of PC hardware, right down to their hardware very often looking a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple hardware. And so they have a new laptop, they call the Surface Laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John 7th edition, at least they didn’t call it 7th generation. And so there’s been a lot of Surface laptops before,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the good Surface laptop. Because it comes with this ARM processor
⏹️ ▶️ John that is potentially, you know, M3 or M4 class. So looking at the pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John just at a broad level, because remember this starts at 16 gigs. So what I wanted to see was, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John It starts at 16 gigs. You know you can’t, the base MacBook Air doesn’t start at 16 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you can get it up to that, I think. So what are the price comparison looks like? So the base model 13
⏹️ ▶️ John inch Surface laptop with 16 gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of SSD is $1,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John You cannot buy a MacBook Air with 16 gigs of RAM for $1,000. You haven’t been able to
⏹️ ▶️ John ever. And it’s a shame because that extra eight gigs of RAM is not that big a deal. If you want a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air with that, I think you have to pay an additional $300, which doesn’t sound like a lot extra, but in a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar computer, that’s like a third of the price you just added to go from eight gigs of RAM to 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gig and your SSD is still tiny. So it doesn’t seem like, oh, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re in the same ballpark, $300, $300 is nothing. It’s a big pump on a thousand dollar computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanna go 16, 512, that’s 1400 on the surface. Oh, it looks like Microsoft has learned something about
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD pricing from Apple. because adding 256 gigs of SSD
⏹️ ▶️ John space does not cost $400. But in Microsoft and Apple and it does. And so now the MacBook Air is only $100 more
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. At 1500, if you go 16 gig one terabyte, again, there’s only $100 price difference between the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air and the Surface. The MacBook Air obviously would be $100 more expensive. And if you go 32 gig one terabyte,
⏹️ ▶️ John the MacBook Air is actually cheaper, but you can’t get the MacBook Air with 32, you can only get it with 24. So it’s $100
⏹️ ▶️ John less expensive. So pricing wise,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are similar to MacBook Air. That’s their competition. They undercut it significantly
⏹️ ▶️ John at the low end. Like to be able to get for a thousand dollars a machine with 16 gigs of RAM, that’s the way
⏹️ ▶️ John the world should be. And it’s only not that way because of Apple’s stubbornness about getting off
⏹️ ▶️ John eight gigs. But all the rest of the prices look like, all right, I see what you’re pricing this at. You’re pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John this like a MacBook Air. All the other makers who make these, because I think it’s a whole bunch of PC makers to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John will undercut them. but the Microsoft ones want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the good ones. Again, I think this is fantastic competition. Finally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is great. I mean, the real, I think the problem here, or the challenge here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Microsoft is going to have, which I think we’ll get to in a moment, is Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is clearly trying to sell this to MacBook Air customers. And I think they will do a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good job of giving Apple a run for their money for certain target audiences.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The question is, Microsoft has tried before to sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good next generation ARM hardware, but Microsoft’s customers didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want it. Their customers wanted something that was what we always buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cheap and easy and works with everything. Because it turns out that not every customer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco base is the same and wants the same things and has the same priorities. Microsoft here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making a product line that looks like it will actually be pretty competitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple customers, but whether they can get their customers to buy it is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, their customers just want to be able to run their apps and I think that’s the story they’re telling them here. Cause I don’t think obviously the pricing is out
⏹️ ▶️ John of whack in this. I think people who like Windows PCs and like for example, the corporate world, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of Windows PCs get sold into the corporate world. All those peoples have had to endure now what,
⏹️ ▶️ John three years of going to meetings with their Mac using you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John coworkers, and seeing just how much better battery life the Mac users get,
⏹️ ▶️ John and how much nicer their laptops are. But they don’t want a Mac, they want a PC. They just want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John nice. And, but they don’t want, they say, okay, well we can get you one of these Windows RT laptops. They’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, oh, that’s, they’re slow, and they’re worse, they’re slow, the battery life isn’t even that good,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have compatibility problems. And so Microsoft, I think, is talking to those people and saying, it’s now safe
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to buy a Windows laptop that’s good like the MacBook Air and it will run all your stuff. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that needs to get them over. It’s not so much the pricing because, again, there are cheaper brands to buy from than this.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the safety of saying, this will just work just like your Windows laptop that you have now. There’s no excuses
⏹️ ▶️ John we have to make, no compromise. It’s not, well, it’s, you know, it gets good battery life, but it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John half as slow, but hey, battery life’s like, no, it’s faster. It’s like the M1 pitch. It’s faster, it runs all your
⏹️ ▶️ John old software and the battery life is amazing. It’s an easy sell. And you’re right that Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John is selling to the people who are buying the high end of that, but Dell is gonna sell PCs with
⏹️ ▶️ John similar specs at the low end of that. They’re uglier, cheaper, but more appealing to people.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think they have, I don’t think they’re trying to like, let’s poach all the Mac users or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re just finally trying to give all the Windows users who have been suffering with inferior laptops since the introduction
⏹️ ▶️ John of the M1 to say, now you’re free, now you can have a
⏹️ ▶️ John good laptop again. don’t even tell them that there’s an ARM CPU in there. They won’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John need to know. It just runs all your stuff and you don’t need to know about all you know is my battery
⏹️ ▶️ John life is better and my performance is better. It’s the same pitch as the M1 was over x86. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s talk compatibility because I think that is, that’s key here because like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right that what everybody wants in the Windows world is we want to do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way we’ve always done them. We want to run the software we’ve always run. We want to have it work with all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tools we already use, all the things we already know. We want it to integrate with all of our enterprise systems. We want it to run all of our enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software and have all our enterprise licenses transfer over to it. And we want it to be really cheap and easily dealt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with in a fleet. That’s what Microsoft’s customers want. And so does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this actually deliver that in the compatibility realm, you think?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so their claim is that it’s twice as fast as their previous extremely bad emulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco doesn’t mean anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John They name-checked Rosetta. In the presentation, they literally name check Rosetta. They said it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just as efficient as Apple’s Rosetta. Like, their target is 100% what Apple did with the
⏹️ ▶️ John M1. They’ve got software makers on board, even better than Apple did, because Microsoft actually knows how to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John to third parties, where like, the browser vendors have promised ARM version of their stuff. Photoshop is there,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously Office is there, because Microsoft knows how to port its own apps, unlike Apple. Their compatibility story
⏹️ ▶️ John is good. They put a claim in the presentation that was like, I’ve seen it, they used both 87 and 90, because I think they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John rounding. Then this is 87. Microsoft believes 87% of the total app minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John spent on a Copilot Plus PC will be inside native apps. So they’re not saying that 87% of the apps will have been ported. They’re saying, look, the
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that people use every day, 87% of their time, they’re gonna be using a native app. But as we know from the M1, that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t even matter. If you have Rosetta Kalber emulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John the apps that aren’t native, unless they’re performance critical, people won’t even notice, right? So their
⏹️ ▶️ John claim and their demos essentially say, this is an M1 situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Most of the apps that you care about, most of your day is going to be spent in a native app. We made sure we put it in
⏹️ ▶️ John our apps and the ones that aren’t native, you won’t even notice. Like that’s their pitch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unlike the hardware side, on the software side, they can deliver on that both by porting their software,
⏹️ ▶️ John because honestly, lots of people who use Windows use Microsoft software all the time, and by getting third parties on board,
⏹️ ▶️ John which they seem to have done a pretty good job of. So, you know, we’ll see what the market thinks about it. And there are other
⏹️ ▶️ John wrinkles that we’ll get to a little bit, but that’s what makes this time different. It’s, well, two things.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, they have a good SoC made by ex-Apple people. And two, they actually have a compatibility story that
⏹️ ▶️ John appears to be Apple-caliber. Like, you know they’re confident when they’re literally name-checking, like, Rosetta. They constantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John they said MacBook Air, they said Apple, they said Rosetta. You don’t throw up those names. If you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John invite those comparisons, if you know you’re gonna look terrible. So they are at least confident that they, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. We should probably go back and talk a little bit about specifics. The Surface laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is 13.8 inches. It is a 201 PPI screen at 120 Hertz or-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now let’s just stop
⏹️ ▶️ John there. You know, in the PC world, they’re not shy about giving you technology that
⏹️ ▶️ John is modern. They don’t say, oh, well this is the 13 inch low-end laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re not gonna give them 120 Hertz screen. That’s a pro feature. No, they just give it to you
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a part that they can buy and it doesn’t actually cost that much more than the 60 Hertz part. So it has
⏹️ ▶️ John a slightly bigger screen than the MacBook Air, slightly lower PPI, but it’s 120 Hertz. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John like a MacBook Air with ProMotion in Apple parlance.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, and by the way, they’re all touch screens with pencil support. Yeah, of course they are. Every single one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then there’s the 15 inch, which is also 201 PPI. This is in comparison to the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Air, both of which are 224 points per inch. or is it pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or points in this context? Points. Okay. There are two USB-C ports, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are USB 4, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s one USB-A port, which is USB 3.1 on all
⏹️ ▶️ John it is interesting that they didn’t, I mean, obviously, well, the MacBook Air doesn’t have Thunderbolt, right? There’s USB on the
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBook Air as well? No, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was Thunderbolt. No, it’s Thunderbolt. Everything’s Thunderbolt now. Everything after the first, the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Everything after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12-inch was real Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt is an interesting Apple differentiator because I know this is the whole USB 4
⏹️ ▶️ John thing versus Thunderbolt is not that big a deal, but Thunderbolt still seems to be a thing that only Mac users really care about.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, Microsoft does give you two ports plus that A port with USB 3.1
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed, there’s a headphone jack. They all support three external 4K monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus the laptop screen. Let me tell you, of all the complaints I’ve heard about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern Apple laptops, I think the only one I’ve heard with any regularity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, what do you mean I can’t run a second screen? Which I think that has not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John changed anything. And now you
⏹️ ▶️ John can close the lid. You wanna run it? Just close the lid. And so this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John again, if you don’t wanna watch this presentation, be assured that they weren’t just doing this as like, and Apple users
⏹️ ▶️ John will know what this means. They were calling out the MacBook, like
⏹️ ▶️ John external 4K monitors plus the laptop screen. This is because they know that this is a weakness
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac where we’ve talked about this for multiple generations of the MacBook Air. Is this the one where they’re going to do, you know, they
⏹️ ▶️ John decided not to put the display drivers forward. It actually is a hardware limitation. This is how they’ve chose to apportion,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, for power usage and all these reasons why Apple didn’t do this. And Microsoft is capitalizing by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t just support one external monitor, three 4K monitors plus the laptop screen at the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. There is Wi-Fi 7. There are touchscreens as previously mentioned. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goes up to 600 nits with quote unquote HDR, has Dolby Vision IQ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is no notch.
⏹️ ▶️ John They said that in the presentation. Literally, they said, hey, our camera is built into the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the frame of the monitor, no notch. And why are they saying no notch? Because Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops have notches. They’re calling out every single thing that is weird or bad or
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong about it. Wi-Fi 6, does it Max have that? No, Max don’t have Wi-Fi 6, we just got 7 rather. We have 6E because Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John not always been on the cutting edge of these
⏹️ ▶️ John standards. This has been true forever for PCs, but now this is like a PC worth paying attention to and it’s got all that PC
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And that PC stuff is, hey, whatever the latest standard is for the stuff, even on the lowest
⏹️ ▶️ John end laptop, of course it’s got Wi-Fi 7 because that’s the current version of Wi-Fi and we’re a PC and PCs have the newest stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and then when you buy a new PC. The screen which they claim is HDR, I’m like, really, they put an HDR screen in this?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s 600 nits. No, don’t get too excited about the HDR like it’s HDR
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same way as the Mac Studios Display is HDR 600 nits is not
⏹️ ▶️ John HDR. And by the way, double vision IQ is the thing where I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John Dolby vision was 600 nits max Anyway, don’t use an IQ is a thing where it just does ambient light sensing
⏹️ ▶️ John to adjust the thing But honestly, this is not a very bright screen, but it is 120 Hertz. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John is the DPI is a little low to a one versus two 24. The resolution
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit lower than the MacBook Air. It’s 2300 instead of 2500 across, right? So this is kind of like a,
⏹️ ▶️ John the pixels are a little chunkier, the screen’s a little bit bigger. But as Marco said, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a touchscreen, it has pen support, 600 nits is not bad, and no notch. And how did they do it with no
⏹️ ▶️ John notch? They just made the bezel a little bit thicker. It’s not that much thicker, look at it, it’s fine. Apple could have done this, but they didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, this next one kills me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s a micro SDXC card reader, but only on the 15 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Look at that. You can put an SD card slot on the MacBook Air. You believe that Apple? Has that ever been done before? Oh, it has
⏹️ ▶️ John been done before on the MacBook Air. On the, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe the, didn’t the 11 inch have it? I know the 13 inch did. I think the 11 might’ve had it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, we celebrated when the SD card came to the MacBook Pro line. And at the time I
⏹️ ▶️ John said, you know, they’re it, like you could put this on the MacBook Air, but like, we’re just so happy to have it on the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. Thank you, Apple. But here is competitive pressure. Hey, in a MacBook Air class machine, can
⏹️ ▶️ John you fit an SD card slot? Yeah, you can. Apple’s done it before, they can do it again. Microsoft just did it
⏹️ ▶️ John only on the 15 inch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There is a fan and there’s a Daring Firewall post about this. There’s a fan, which, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s fine. I’m not near as bothered by this as I think you two are, but it is there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is, so we’ll start getting into this a little bit now. Like the rumor of the Snapdragon X
⏹️ ▶️ John thing was like, okay, it’ll be competitive, but it’ll use more power. It’s like, oh, fans, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s a different power class of chip. Like the direct comparison really should be with the base MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and not the MacBook Air, not the fanless MacBook Air. But as we’ll see, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some conflicting info. Like Microsoft is clearly targeting the MacBook Air. They’re saying this is the MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John class machine. It does have a fan and the MacBook Air doesn’t. So that’s leaning us a little bit in the direction of maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John this is using a little bit more power than the MacBook Air’s SoC. And that’s what led
⏹️ ▶️ John me to say, okay, well, If this thing really is using more power, let’s look at the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John size. Let’s look at the battery capacity because the claims they make about the battery life are MacBook Air caliber,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe it just has a bigger battery. Like maybe this is a more power hungry SoC, they put a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John battery in it and that’s how it can match the MacBook Air in battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the battery sizes are almost exactly MacBook Air. So in the 13 inch, it’s 54
⏹️ ▶️ John watt hours and the MacBook Air is 52.6. In the 15 inch, it’s 66 watt hours in the MacBook Air is 6.5. Like these batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like when car manufacturers produce a car that competes
⏹️ ▶️ John with some other company’s car in the same sort of model category. And you look at the specs and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wow, the wheelbase is one inch different. The rear seat room is like one inch, like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so clear that they target each other and they just match each other’s specs exactly because they don’t wanna be
⏹️ ▶️ John rejected in the market because they fall down in one category. So just, you know, whatever the Toyota Camry
⏹️ ▶️ John does, we’re gonna do, because we’re making, you know, a cord camera or whatever. Like, you look at these specs and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, this is not near the airline limit of like 100 watt hours. So it’s not like they all ended up at 100 because they were at the limit.
⏹️ ▶️ John These specs, like they’re targeting the MacBook Air. They put the same size batteries, the MacBook Air. So that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John once again, arguing towards that this SoC might be MacBook Air Caliber in terms of power efficiency.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is very promising for competition. Again, I’m so excited about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really hope that Windows customers actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start making this transition for lots of reasons. It’s better for so many reasons that they do this. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one for me is this is going to be a really exciting competition.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So, continuing on, I don’t even know what the source of this is anymore. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the Verge. The Verge
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey article, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. For years, the MacBook Air has been able to smoke ARM-powered PC chips and Intel-based ones too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except this time around, the Surface pulled ahead on the first test. at one another test and another
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after that. The results of these tests are why Microsoft believes it’s now in a position to conquer the laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey market. So here we go. Microsoft’s claims for the Snapdragon 10 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey X Elite, see it’s actually X, I think, but I just said 10, it’s Snapdragon X Elite, up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to 23% faster in peak multi threaded performance and up to 58% faster
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in sustained multi-threaded performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John The second spec you read, you know what that spec says? Our laptops have a fan.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s the translation of that thing. Why is
⏹️ ▶️ John it 50% faster in sustained multi-threaded? Because the MacBook Air thermal throttles. This is the,
⏹️ ▶️ John our laptop has a fan spec. Because the 23% faster, we’ll get to that in a little bit. Like it has more cores than
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3. So, okay, well, like I get it. It’s, you know, that’s not, that’s not much of a bragging right. Has more
⏹️ ▶️ John cores, is using more power during that time, I’m sure, right? 58% faster in sustained
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-threaded? What does that mean? It just means we have a fan. They blow air on it, so it doesn’t throttle.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s why it’s crushing the MacBook Air. And which is, again, I don’t blame the MacBook Air for that. I love that it’s fanless.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has other computers with fans that are better competition for this, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that is them literally calling out their fan in a specific slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John So getting numbers on these things, I was trying to look up like the Geekbench. They put some Geekbench numbers up in their presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s hard to find Geekbench numbers for the M4. There’s tons of entries, like what do you mean it’s hard? There’s tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of entries, but they vary so much. So I’m like, well, what is, like, is one of these things sitting on top of a
⏹️ ▶️ John block of ice that’s cooling it? Are these real numbers? So I’m, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing with the Snapdragon thing, we just have preliminary numbers from Microsoft. People don’t have these in their hands. So take all
⏹️ ▶️ John this with a tiny grain of salt, but here’s what the Geekbench things look like. So the Snapdragon X Elite,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a 12 core CPU. It’s 2700 single, 14,000 multi, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The M3 is an eight core CPU. So the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s, oh, we get 23% faster in multi-thread, well, you got a lot more cores there. So that’s not surprising. And
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the M4 isn’t out in the MacBook Air yet. So this is the time to pounce with your comparison, but the M3
⏹️ ▶️ John still beats it in single core, 3100 compared to 2700, and multi-core it’s 11,000 versus 14,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M4-ish modified by this isn’t an iPad, yada, yada, yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M4 just crushes all of this in single core. We talked about this before, last show I think
⏹️ ▶️ John we said it was like 3,700 single core, which would be the champ for any Mac ever. Now the numbers are in the
⏹️ ▶️ John 4,000s if you look at Geekbench. 4,000 single core versus 2,700, the M4
⏹️ ▶️ John is smushing the Snapdragon X Elite.
⏹️ ▶️ John again, the M4 is not in the MacBook Air, so fair comparison. And multi-core, the M4 is a 10 core SoC,
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU part of it. 10 core versus 12 core Snapdragon X Elite,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically matching it. So I think the Snapdragon X Elite is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably M3 performance caliber, not as good in single core, a little bit better in multi-core.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s gotta end up using more power than the M3 because it’s got more cores, so when you crank up all those 12 cores, it’s gonna use more
⏹️ ▶️ John than the eight core. But the M4 essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John bests it with two fewer cores in multi-core and crushes it in single core. So I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like, oh, they’ve made the SOC that’s gonna crush us. But what they have done
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’ve made a competitive SOC. It is competitive. Its specs, its
⏹️ ▶️ John performance look good. Its power envelope, if you are to believe Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ John battery life claims, its power envelope is also competitive. I think when
⏹️ ▶️ John they test this, they’re going to find that the Apple one’s still bested in battery life because the batteries are the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size and it’s clear that the M3 uses less power, if only because it’s eight core versus 12 core. So watch for the benchmarks
⏹️ ▶️ John when people get these in their hands. But I think that essentially that the rumors about the Snapdragon
⏹️ ▶️ John X were true, that it has comparable performance, but it uses a little bit more power. I think that the tests
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to bear that out. And because these laptops don’t have bigger batteries, they’re going to get slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John worse battery life than the MacBook Air. But on the other hand, they will beat them in multi-core because they have a fan and won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. All right, we already talked about compatibility. Then third-party support. Many of the biggest apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now natively support ARM chips. Photoshop, Dropbox, Zoom, Spotify, and other top entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps like Prime and Hulu are all native ARM64 apps now. Google and many other browser makers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are moving to ARM64. Native version of Chrome launched recently, followed by Opera just last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then also Firefox, Vivaldi, Brave, and Microsoft Edge are all ARM64 native.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overall, Microsoft believes, and we talked about this a minute ago, that 87% of total app minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spent on these Copilot Plus PCs will be inside native apps. And then we also should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mention that there’s a Microsoft-approved, it’s not sponsored by Microsoft, but it’s a Microsoft-approved website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that tracks how Windows games, specifically, play on ARM. This is worksonwa.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is WA? Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John on ARM? Windows on ARM. It’s a terrible name.
⏹️ ▶️ John Works on Windows on ARM.
⏹️ ▶️ John the website that I want to be keeping an eye on, because one of the reasons I want RPCs, I want all those PC games
⏹️ ▶️ John to be ported to ARM. Now this is a tough sell, I understand that, because lots of PC games are old, they’re never gonna get ported,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. But like, going forward, I would love it if modern PC games were cross-compiled.
⏹️ ▶️ John For x86 and ARM, and this website is tracking, hey, if you buy one of these ARM PCs,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you can check if this game runs natively on ARM, and if it doesn’t, it might still run fine in emulation
⏹️ ▶️ John as many Mac games did, when Apple made the transition, But yeah, it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ John if game makers are entirely ignoring ARM. We’ll see how that goes as time goes on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And then AI. These Copilot Plus PCs are equipped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a neural processing unit from Qualcomm that hits 45 trillion operations per second of compute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for AI tasks. That results in more AI task operations per watt than a MacBook Air M3 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NVIDIA’s RTX 4060. The M4 is 38 tops, M3 is 18 tops. We already discussed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the 8 versus 16 bid is Topps’s crappy number. Topps is a crappy way to talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. But here we are. They did a few demonstrations. They did a demo of a four-person—I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if it was literally Zoom, it probably was Teams—but a four-person chat or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a conference, if you will, a meeting. And everyone was speaking a different language, and it was translating the—it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was subtitling basically live as they were talking. It was very impressive. And then they also did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a draw along image generation thing where a woman drew like some mountains and some flowers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you could crank how creative the AI got. Like did it stick with basically what she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drew or did it get totally off the wall? And they were the draw along thing. I mean, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an artist. That was like, yeah, whatever. But the multi-language live translation, that was pretty slick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So again, these things are called copilot plus PCs and these are
⏹️ ▶️ John the features they demonstrated. There are obviously way more, there’s way more things that Copilot does and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some other demos of these, but they were leaning heavily on like the live translation and the draw along stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John In Microsoft build, they talked about this more, but the pitch for what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve done with Windows to add AI to it is that there’s an API,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s libraries they can use or whatever, but essentially Apple, or I keep saying Apple, what Microsoft said was that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are running 40 different AI models within Windows to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John all these services. It’s not just like one large language model that they’re running locally. It’s not like they send all requests out to OpenAI.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re running 40 different models locally, plus also sending stuff out to presumably OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And there’s like, there’s a, you know, there’s a software story for application developers to do this type of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is kind of, this kind of sets the bar for Apple because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John adding features to Windows that if you want to make an application on Windows and you want to leverage some of these features that are available
⏹️ ▶️ John to you, And then Windows itself has these things woven throughout it where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve seen so many AI branded things where it’s like, in some random
⏹️ ▶️ John application, there’s a text box where you can send a string and we’ll send the chat GPT and tell you what it sent back
⏹️ ▶️ John or send it to an image generator and tell you what it sent back. There was even that whole thing with like the Logitech mouse drivers adding, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature in the mouse driver, click the mouse button and we’ll open a text box wherever your cursor is
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can send a message to chat GPT that is so sort of bolt on not understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John what the value might be. Microsoft is trying to say, here are the things you could do that you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do before. Now, any audio that plays anywhere on the system, because again, they make Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can make this happen. Any audio anywhere on the system in any app, you can just say,
⏹️ ▶️ John turn on live translation so it’s subtitles this. And it doesn’t do every language. I think it translates everything to English. It supports like 40
⏹️ ▶️ John languages, blah, blah, blah. But like, that’s an OS level feature that apps don’t have to like add support
⏹️ ▶️ John for or whatever. It just exists on the system. That’s the type of thing that we were hoping, that we
⏹️ ▶️ John hope Apple will do with its rolling AI out. And it’s not just like, oh, we
⏹️ ▶️ John just have one model and we run everything through it and it does what it does. They have many models working in tandem. So anything with a draw along
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, you have to give it a prompt and then you start drawing and it copies it and there’s questionable usefulness.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a little bit more like, let’s send something to an image generation. But again, there are APIs for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m sure at Build they had way more story on the AI angle, but for
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops that are, again, branded as AI PCs, the part that at least
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone on this show is most excited about has nothing to do with the AI and everything to do with, these look like they’re good laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Finally, after, you know, since the M1 came out, PC laptops have been not good compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to everything that Apple makes. And now, this line of laptops appear to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, they really do look impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m excited about both aspects, though. Like, you know, when I look at AI features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of various platforms so far, you know, Google had their Vaporware keynote where they demoed a whole bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t use. I’m sure Apple’s gonna give us a similarly Vapor-y keynote in a couple of weeks.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple will ship the stuff that it shows, probably. Maybe in spring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a feeling a lot of Apple’s announcements are probably gonna be like, later this year and coming next year, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of that, you know. But I have not seen a ton of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, AI features that actually hold up in practice and reality that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really compelling. But I have seen some, and for every person, it’s only gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take like, you know, one or two of those really killer features before they’re like, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have that. Like, I will buy new hardware or possibly even change platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to get that one thing that is very high value to me. And that’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really hope Apple’s taking this seriously, because this is gonna have a lot of disruption.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It already is doing some level of disruption and it’s only going to get more so as the platform integrate this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, here’s what’s gonna happen. Google is going to go all in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on LLM based and generative based features in Android system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wide. Microsoft is going all in on AI things in Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system wide. Apple is going to face a lot of pressure do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same thing in their OS’s because, you know, the system integration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is where so much of this value can get unlocked. There’s a lot of amazing functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people will not only really enjoy and will very highly value,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’ll come to expect it. You know, imagine if you had a phone today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted to make a phone platform today that didn’t have a basic voice assistant functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every platform has had voice assistants now for so long, people take it for granted. People assume, of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can, you know, talk to my phone and it’ll try to make sense of what I said and do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That same expectation is going to arise in phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and PC operating systems whether Apple makes it there or not with theirs. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they don’t start matching some of those features in compelling ways, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall behind and they’re gonna they’re gonna start losing people and they’re gonna have a hard time attracting new people. That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is disruptive, even though I think we can all look at a lot of these features that are out there today and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that kind of sucks, or that thing they did, that failed, or that gave them a wrong answer. Yeah, that’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen, it’s gonna keep happening. But not everything fails, and not everything sucks, and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is wrong. Some of those things, everyone is throwing so much spaghetti at the wall right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there is so much value you to be had. And yeah, most of it’s not going to turn into anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most of it’s going to flop. Most of it is going to suck or fail or be better done with simpler tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there are going to be some of those things that stick. It’s going to happen. It’s already starting to happen. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, like what is exciting is seeing Google and Microsoft go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight for OS integration. Go right for the jugular. Go right like make Apple do this at OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level. Make Apple integrate all this good stuff into Siri. The crown jewel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, get this into Siri. Whether Apple is doing that, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think remains a huge open question. I don’t think anybody has any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solid rumors or intel either direction on that. We’ve only heard little bits and pieces, like, oh, they might be improving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. There is, we’ll get to it in overtime. Oh, good, okay. Because that to me is like, all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants to be OS level integrated, And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the phone especially, it all wants to be integrated into the system voice assistant and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri is just dying for this. And I hope Apple knows that and has already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco started taking lots of action in that direction. But until then, we’re gonna see some really exciting stuff for Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Google. And that’s awesome. Like as Apple fans, again, that’s great for us. Not only because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna do stuff that Apple won’t and can’t for a long time, but then that’ll force Apple to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better on their end. That’ll make for great stuff for everybody. So again, if you’re looking at this AI stuff and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ah, nobody needs any of that, trust me, that’s gonna be a short-sighted view. This is not cryptocurrency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is real. This actually has real value to more people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s similarly inefficient in terms of energy resource usage which we should get to, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is real value here that is being created whether you’re on this train or not. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just be ready for it and I hope Apple is.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, obviously we don’t know what Apple’s gonna put out because WC hasn’t come yet, but I think the rumored Apple approach
⏹️ ▶️ John here and what I expect them to do is a comfortable position for Apple, because as you noted, like Google and Microsoft are throwing
⏹️ ▶️ John everything against the wall. I think the quote unquote AI features
⏹️ ▶️ John that will be compelling, that will stick, that will become the new normal, are essentially the ones
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you showed them to somebody they would have no idea that it’s AI branded at all. So to give an example that essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody has now, background removal in photos. Apple’s had that on the last two versions of its
⏹️ ▶️ John OS, right? That’s touted as an AI feature powered by Neural Engine blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But from a practical perspective, people using it don’t have to know or care anything about AI. They just know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and this will be a differentiator for these Copilot Plus PCs, I’m just used to the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John any time I see an image, I can tear the person off of the background. That just becomes a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that I expect to exist. And if somebody buys a Copilot Plus PC, they’ve never used this ability before,
⏹️ ▶️ John And now they have the ability to easily separate people from the background or remove objects from the images, which are some other things that people
⏹️ ▶️ John have demoed, like Adobe’s new Lightroom has, you know, everyone has that now. And yeah, they brand it
⏹️ ▶️ John with AI or whatever, but users are just like, oh, this is now a thing I can do with my computer. So if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John Copilot Plus PC and you’re used to any time system-wide that you see an image, you can pull the person off the background.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you try to use your co-workers’ Intel-powered Windows laptop that they
⏹️ ▶️ John bought at the same time you got the Copilot Plus PC. And you literally can’t do that because I believe Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John is gating some of these features Apple style on the presence of the NPU. Like, oh, we could
⏹️ ▶️ John do it with the Intel things and it would be slower and yada yada, but let’s artificially, semi, not really artificially
⏹️ ▶️ John gate this on the NPU. You’re gonna be like, well, your PC is broken. It’s gonna feel like I do on my Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John when there’s some feature that, Intel Mac when there’s some feature that comes out that’s only available on Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs, you know what I mean? Some of it’s legit, some of it’s not legit, but it’s a way to get people to say
⏹️ ▶️ John like, If I want a PC, they can do that because they just expect it to be done. The multi-language translation,
⏹️ ▶️ John is that AI, large line, you don’t need to know how that’s implemented. You just know, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the new version of Windows, anywhere there’s audio, I can see it subtitled in any app with no support
⏹️ ▶️ John from it. That doesn’t look like an AI feature. That’s not you drawing a picture and AI completing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. That’s not you chatting with a large language model like it’s your friend. That is just a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John of the operating system. And you don’t have to know that they’re using a large language model or if they’re doing it on device,
⏹️ ▶️ John or if they’re sending it out, like you don’t have to know any of that. It just becomes like the status quo, like kind of how we all,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, give examples from Apple’s operating system. Oh, now anywhere there’s text and an image
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Mac, you can pull it out, because that’s a feature Apple added. What did they use to implement
⏹️ ▶️ John that? We don’t care. You just eventually get used to the idea that in the system-wide image viewer, if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John text and an image, you can select it and it will try to OCR it, right? You know, and there have been third-party products that have done
⏹️ ▶️ John it before, but you just get used to that being a feature. I think that’s where Apple is going to concentrate.
⏹️ ▶️ John My big question is, and we’ll get to, again, maybe in overtime is, what about the things that clearly are AI, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you describe a picture and it draws it for you, you’re chatting with a chatbot or whatever, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ John utility of those? Will Apple feel like it has to compete in that area? But like, to your point, Marco, about these things
⏹️ ▶️ John being useful, these are just gonna be features of an operating system that we just assume that every
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac and PC can do. And it’s already happening. We just don’t notice because the branding isn’t as in your
⏹️ ▶️ John face. but under the covers, a lot of these translation, you know, for example, I think their translation is using
⏹️ ▶️ John LLMs to do translation and the background image processing is using the AI powered image,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever stuff, like those are the features that I think will stick. I have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John questions about the, you know, chat GPT type things, even though they get all the press, like, oh, that’s what AI means.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not the most slam dunk, sure thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John AI powered features. And Microsoft and Google probably, they’re just gonna do them all. And you know, the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John ones will fade away and the good ones will stick. Apple thus far has only been doing the features that
⏹️ ▶️ John are clearly useful and will stick. Like the ones they’ve already implemented that I mentioned already, they called
⏹️ ▶️ John them ML, but like the branding wasn’t that big of a deal. But the bottom line is they’re useful features that are maxed that we all
⏹️ ▶️ John just get used to existing and if they went away, we would be sad about them. And there is some, you know, quote unquote
⏹️ ▶️ John AI ML tech behind them. So it’s legit. So I think that’s what Apple’s going to end up doing is
⏹️ ▶️ John just do the features that stick and let everyone else throw the spaghetti at the wall and they’ll just pay attention
⏹️ ▶️ John to what actually does stick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and again, like you can look all over the system. You can see so many features that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already there now, but that could be done better with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John an LLM-based approach.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what we said when we were talking about the AI sauce. There’s many things that Apple’s trying to do not well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And look, they already mentioned, like last summer in the, we won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say AI WWDC keynote, where they mentioned things like that they’re using a transformer-based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John autocorrect for the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And some of the dictation features and stuff like that. Yeah, autocorrect for the keyboard. That is a great application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for LLM-based algorithms. Dictation, recognizing what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re saying just through the dictation microphone thing on the keyboard. Again, huge opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, which some of which are already doing for improvements using modern AI techniques and modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI models. Translation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But Apple has a translation API, right? That could be better, use LLMs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Translation is huge. Like that’s a massive, you know, possible application there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then again, like think of Siri. Like even if all they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the LLMs is get, like is make Siri. Make Siri do what it’s already supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like make Siri have like an LLM front end maybe that like have, and forgive me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not an LLM expert yet. I swear I’m gonna get to it one of these days. But like, suppose they can have a model in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco front. First of all, there’s gonna be some modern AI techniques involved in figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out what you say. But Siri’s actually pretty good at figuring out what you say a lot of the time. It’s what it does with it that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oftentimes the problem. Well, what if you can use a model to help parse what you say and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choose what other backend service or model should answer this question that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said? You know, there’s opportunities there. What if they can, if you ask it a factual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, And right now they just say, I found these results on the web, you can view them on your iPhone or whatever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if in the background it says one moment and it actually fetches those three webpages that it found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it uses AI summarization to roughly try to tell you the answer to your question via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco voice, like you asked it for. Like, there are so many opportunities there where existing features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like transcribing the contents of voicemails, like basic stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have already in the system, that could be made better here. And then of course, as we talked about a month ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea of replacing a lot of the like Siri intent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcut kind of API surface with let the app just say what this thing does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have Siri be able to see that. And then if somebody asks, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me a list of the chapters of the current podcast in Overcast. Without ever having created a shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that, it can look and see, okay, Overcast Vens, this action, this action, and this action, This one says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get list of chapters. To be able to map that and then give a response without ever having created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a shortcut or set anything up, there is so much opportunity for things like that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not anything like generate me an image that won’t offend anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or ask me an arbitrary question that’ll answer you with some weird chat thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or write me a paper for my fifth grade homework. There’s so many opportunities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for modern AI-based you know, approaches and models to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco existing and only slightly advanced features better on the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that already exists that we use all the time. And again, as John was saying a few minutes ago, like, you don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of that as AI. You think of it as I’m typing on my phone or I’m dictating to my phone or my phone is telling me what this voicemail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco message said or whatever. Like that, you think of that or you think I just asked Siri a thing and it worked somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, you know, a rare thing sometimes. You don’t think of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you You don’t care if that’s AI, you just want this to work better and every year, or every few years, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does usually like revamp some of these systems. Hey, we found a new ML based approach to, you know, to do this better or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. This is just the next step of that. This is a big step. This has really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big gains when used well. And that’s what we’re hoping Apple’s going to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is use this well. And I don’t care if they don’t match every feature that everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else is trying. That’s not their style. They never have, they never will. I just want them to match the good ones or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get there before, maybe be first to some of the good ones. And that’s the part like, I really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not sleeping on this because there is so much opportunity for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stuff they’ve already decided is important to them to just get better or work more reliably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I want at least to start. And then we can start getting more exciting stuff down the road.
⏹️ ▶️ John One brief little bit of hardware before we move on to this final thing. I know we’re running along here. As we said,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of PC makers They’re making co-pilot plus PCs, which is good. They also announced the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Surface Pro, which is their name for their sort of convertible tablet thing. It’s like an iPad, but with a keyboard or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got an OLED, it’s 13 inch, it’s 267 PPI, which is close to the iPad Pro’s 264 PPI.
⏹️ ▶️ John The screen is a little bit higher res. It’s got two USB-C ports on an iPad, on a tablet? Are you allowed
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that? Microsoft did it. Wi-Fi 7, are you allowed to do that on an iPad? Yes, you are. Bluetooth 5.4,
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Pro just has 5.3, because this is a PC. It has the latest version of everything. Detachable keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John with trackpad, integrated haptic pen, let me know if this sounds familiar to you. They use carbon fiber
⏹️ ▶️ John in their keyboard. They have something they call a bold key set, which makes the text on the key caps bolder
⏹️ ▶️ John so they’re easier to see. Imagine that, Apple does everything fine in low contrast because it looks beautiful and elegant. And unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the software where you can turn on increased contrast, you can’t turn that on in the hardware. Microsoft will turn
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the hardware for you by putting bold on the key sets. Kudos to Microsoft.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Very quickly, maybe this has been a thing for a while and I just didn’t realize it, but I was not aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the detachable part of the detachable keyboard for their tablets. And that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very slick. So because they believe in kickstands, which I’m not a big kickstand person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I don’t love that, but here’s the advantage of it. You can stand up the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quote unquote iPad, the Surface Pro on its own, and then you can have the keyboard somewhere that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more ergonomic and or convenient. And it has a little like tray in it for the pencil or whatever they call their
⏹️ ▶️ John that yeah, they put their pencil is flat, which is not a great idea, but the advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John is hey Where am I supposed to put the pencil instead of magnetically connecting the pencil to the side of their tablet? They have a little
⏹️ ▶️ John little slot for it in the detachable keyboard I think this is not the right choice because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’d rather have a round pencil while drawing Rather than you know
⏹️ ▶️ John and stow it somewhere else rather than because I feel like you spend more of your time drawing with if you actually use the pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ John The drawing time is the important time, not the storage time. And so this pencil seems optimized for storage, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is convenient, especially if you don’t plan on using the pencil a lot, that there is a place to put it where it is
⏹️ ▶️ John securely kept. And this is the keyboard that Marco wanted. It just unplugs. It doesn’t have a weird flappy thing around the back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why? Because as Casey said, it doesn’t need to hold up the iPad. It doesn’t need to hold up the tablet part. The tablet
⏹️ ▶️ John part holds itself up with the kickstand, which I’m also not a big kickstand fan, but this is the advantage. The kickstand and lets the
⏹️ ▶️ John tablet part stand on its own and the keyboard can just detach and attach
⏹️ ▶️ John very easily. It even has a little foldable triangle thing to prop up the keyboard, right? So, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you may be wondering, what operating system does this thing run? It just runs Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John works with touch, Windows works with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pen. This can just be your laptop and it can be both a tablet and a laptop because it has a touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen and it runs a PCOS and everything. Like it can just be your one thing as long as that one thing is Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is, yeah, this is not like a separate product from like, oh, you said the Surface laptop but the Surface Pro must run a different OS
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s more limited. No, it just runs Windows. Yeah, that’s it. And this has been Microsoft’s thing since forever, since like Windows 8 or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. Like the whole idea is, hey, we have an OS that works with touch, it works with this, it works with that, you know. They don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John a separate mobile operating system for phones, they used to. Poor Microsoft. They don’t have a phone operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system. And their tablet operating system is just Windows, right? So this is a convert, think of
⏹️ ▶️ John it as a convertible Mac laptop with a 13-inch OLED screen. It’s not a dual, is it a dual?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I didn’t see the specs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on it. I don’t think so. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s a dual-arrow, but anyway, just FYI, like in the PC world, they make different,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, and this runs a Snapdragon, you know, the whole nine yards that we were talking about, but like they
⏹️ ▶️ John have an iPad Pro competitor as well, and it is pretty strong hardware-wise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like what I like about Microsoft’s hardware is that, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of, a lot of Apple’s designs, they’re very opinionated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, And a lot of that comes with the priority of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design purity over practicality. We’ve talked a lot about this before. It was much worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, in the end of the Johnny Ive era. But a lot of times, the design purity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple is more important, and they are willing to sacrifice usefulness in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco achieve it if necessary. And so examples of that are getting rid of old ports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they just feel dirty, or they can’t make it quite as thin with the old port or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The notch is a huge compromise in that way because they don’t want the top of the screen bezel to be thicker than the side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bezels. Like all these new Microsoft displays.
⏹️ ▶️ John Asymmetry makes Johnny Ive cry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these new Microsoft displays that have no notch, it’s because the top bezel is thicker than the side bezels. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they used to be on Apple laptops. Right, like they’ve done everything for that reason, to fit a webcam.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Microsoft is willing to say, you know what? we will sacrifice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the visual design purity to give our customers what they want. Like the bold key caps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, like that Microsoft is willing to do that. Like Apple will not sacrifice design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purity or say economics in a lot of cases that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really would benefit their customers. But Apple said, no, we don’t wanna make that. So we just won’t. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft is willing to let customers drive the design a little more. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s bad and sometimes that’s good. And, you know, and I, again, I think that that that forms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the basis for great competition. If the, if so many people are saying just over the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few weeks with the new iPad release, so many people are saying, hey, we would love if the iPad was pushed a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more towards the Mac in terms of certain capabilities or whatever else. Microsoft is saying, we’ll give you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both here. It’s one thing that runs our full PCOS. You can do everything with this one thing. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, people want Apple to make touch screen Macs. Microsoft has been making touchscreen PCs for what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 12, 15 years at least, more than that. Like there’s, Microsoft is willing to, and the PC world in general, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I think Microsoft does a good job of it. They’re willing to meet customer needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they are. Like if a customer says, hey, we want this thing to do everything and be everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and as a result it has to look just a little bit like the Homer Simpson car, Microsoft will say, fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, this is what you want. We will give you what you want. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John PC vendors, even if Microsoft not, right? Because they’re not the only ones who make the hardware. Yeah, exactly. Although
⏹️ ▶️ John what you were saying about competition, though, you said this multiple times, that you’re so excited for competition. But you also just,
⏹️ ▶️ John what you just said now should sort of dampen your hopes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, so like, I also agree that this is good competition and I hope it wakes Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John up and makes them do things that they otherwise wouldn’t do, like with the RAM and stuff like that. But here’s the thing. Historically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, back when both Windows and the Mac operating system on x86. During that golden
⏹️ ▶️ John period, when the performance, battery life, everything of the laptops was
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially comparable because they were all using the same Intel chips, right? During that time,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple removed so much stuff from their laptops and made them so bad. And there was tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John PC competition that was exactly comparable power-wise because they were literally using the same Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. And that did not motivate Apple to change. Like, we were like, oh, if we get to a period
⏹️ ▶️ John where the PC laptops are competitive, that’ll make Apple change its ways and do better with its laptops. They were being
⏹️ ▶️ John crushed in terms of feature set. Like when they went to all USB, all Thunderbolt ports or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, no SD card slot, no HDMI or whatever. You could buy a million PC laptops that had exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same performance that had all the ports you ever wanted, that had higher resolution screens, that had
⏹️ ▶️ John faster versions of the same CPU, that were cheaper, that had more RAM, that had more SSDs, and it
⏹️ ▶️ John was just like Apple’s to Apple’s comparison, they were all on Intel, and that did not motivate Apple to change.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I wanna believe that they’re gonna see this and feel motivated to like, oh, we gotta keep up
⏹️ ▶️ John with Microsoft here. But I’ve just lived through a period in which Apple did
⏹️ ▶️ John not feel compelled to compete. And in fact, continued to make its laptops worse and worse and more and more
⏹️ ▶️ John limited while the exactly comparable or better PC laptops were not
⏹️ ▶️ John so constrained. So I don’t, now that was a different Apple. Johnny Ive was there at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John different regime, right? Before Apple’s recommitment to the Mac, which we applaud, before Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Silicon, like it’s not, you know, I know today’s Apple is different, but I’m not 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John confident that Apple will see this and say, we need to keep up with the Joneses.
⏹️ ▶️ John If, you know, we should rethink the base RAM on, not the M4 MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air, but on the M5 MacBook Air, let’s think about 16 gigs. Like, are they gonna do that because of these,
⏹️ ▶️ John or were they gonna do that anyway? And it’s, you know, like, we’ll see. Like they’ve never felt
⏹️ ▶️ John compelled to be like, oh, we gotta have Wi-Fi 7 because PCs do. No, Apple has never done that. They’re like, eh, you know, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John always a little bit behind, but it’s fine, right? That is more of the Apple way. I hope
⏹️ ▶️ John these laptops and Lightify are under their butt. But again, Surface Pro has existed for ages. It’s just now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way better because of the Snapdragon, you know, SoC. But convertible PCs with touchscreens and pens,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, that’s been, this is not a new product. And has that improved the iPad Pro? Maybe, maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why the iPad Pro has gotten better in the ways that it has, but it almost seems like, I mean, from our
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of insular Apple world perspective, and maybe also from Apple’s insular perspective, being Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John that the only thing that seems to motivate Apple to change are its own customers. Like, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John do feel like the reason Apple’s laptops got better is because
⏹️ ▶️ John of the sadness of Apple’s laptop customers, you know what I mean? Like, it was because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple customers were saying, Mac laptops used to be good, but now I’m unhappy with this one. And it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John matter what was going on in the PC laptop world. Almost. It’s like the only thing that can change Apple is our
⏹️ ▶️ John own customers. It’s the sadness of its own customers. They’re saying, we feel like the Mac has been abandoned.
⏹️ ▶️ John We think the laptop should have an HDMI port and I’m not saying like we on this podcast, but I think like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s customers writ large. I think that’s what has motivated Apple to come around
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac to make all the improvements that they have made to rededicate themselves to the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it wasn’t the fact that the PC laptops that existed for years and years that were better in all
⏹️ ▶️ John the ways that both laptops were bad during the Intel era.
MS Recall
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, before we go, we should bring up Microsoft recall, because this has been kind of a pet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing for the three of us over the last few months. John, what is Microsoft recall?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s been longer than a few months. So you may be familiar with this feature, because we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about it on the show many times. We talked about it, we called it live streams, which is a feature that I’ve wanted for years. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John there was a feature for the Mac called rewind, that would form a similar function. Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John calls it recall. If you heard our past shows about Rewind on the Mac, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what this is. If you know what Timeline was in Windows 10, if you happen to be a Windows user, you know the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John here. Keeps track of stuff that happens on your computer so you can retrieve
⏹️ ▶️ John it later. The Rewind approach on the Mac was that it would essentially take a screenshot of your screen
⏹️ ▶️ John every few seconds and OCR it and store it in a big database so that you can ask questions later and it
⏹️ ▶️ John could look it up in your timeline and, you know, do translation, not translation,
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that happen in voice calls and you know, the rewind feature, right? Microsoft is
⏹️ ▶️ John building this into their operating system. Again, they tried to build a feature like this into Windows 10 called
⏹️ ▶️ John Timeline. That one didn’t work out as well because it required application developers to integrate with it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft does have a little bit of a tough time getting its application developers to integrate new APIs in a timely manner.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that one didn’t catch on, but they’re taking another run at it and they are essentially using the rewind approach. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna screenshot the screen, they’re gonna OCR it, They’re gonna throw large language models at it. They’re gonna get,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have a cool interface scrubbing through your timeline. And they’ve even got one better than Rewind because guess what? They’re Microsoft,
⏹️ ▶️ John they make Windows. So not only can you see stuff from your past and search for it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but also like they give an example of like, oh, there was some text that’s like, oh, it turns out that text was in a PowerPoint slide.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can click on it in the recall timeline and it will jump you right into PowerPoint to
⏹️ ▶️ John that slide. Application level integration, which Rewind can’t do because they don’t make the operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system and they don’t make PowerPoint. but Microsoft can do it and they did. Surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John to me anyway, PC users and people who have no, don’t listen to the show and have no idea what Rewind
⏹️ ▶️ John is and don’t know what a live stream is, are flipping out about this for privacy reasons. I feel like on this show, we’ve had
⏹️ ▶️ John the privacy discussion before many times. It’s the same privacy story as Rewind essentially. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all local, it’s encrypted, you can turn it off, you can exclude applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no smarts in it to automatically exclude like passwords and stuff, which is flipping people out. I’m assuming you can just turn this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John off. This is one of those features that, obviously I love the utility of, I love the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea of, I see the privacy implications. I do not have Rewind installed on my system
⏹️ ▶️ John for multiple reasons. One, I feel like I don’t want the performance at two, I’m not sure about the privacy
⏹️ ▶️ John angle of it as well. And three, I’ve always imagined that it would be better if implemented by the
⏹️ ▶️ John platform owner. So Microsoft is the platform owner, they’re implementing this. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this features like this are essentially inevitable and will
⏹️ ▶️ John be useful, but there will be a growing pains period when people freak out about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, when there actually are privacy concerns because Microsoft hasn’t thought through all the bad things that can be done with
⏹️ ▶️ John this, right? We’re in that period now. So while I’m excited about this technology
⏹️ ▶️ John and this feature, I agree with the caution of like, essentially it’s basically impossible
⏹️ ▶️ John that Microsoft or Rewind or any of these companies have gotten this right on the first try. There are going to be trials
⏹️ ▶️ John and tribulations. There are going to be problems with it, but the utility, the utility of being able to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this, of being able to say, where was that thing that I saw earlier today or yesterday?
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially throwing large language models at it so you can ask plain English questions
⏹️ ▶️ John and get reasonable answers from your history that it has saved securely, and being able to find
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing and click on it and jump into the application that had that file open to the exact part that you,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Microsoft is taking a step in that direction. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is a great example of what Marco was saying before of like, Microsoft being willing to do something that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, we can’t imagine Apple doing this. Rewind did it, it’s great that it was a third party thing that they did, it’s really, really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I was excited about that product. But do you think at WWDC, Apple is going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a system wide screen, screen recording and cataloging thing? I don’t think they
⏹️ ▶️ John will. For the privacy reasons alone, Apple is not ready to try to do a feature like this in a
⏹️ ▶️ John privacy preserving way, I think. Prove me wrong, Apple. Show me the Apple Rewind built into all of your operating
⏹️ ▶️ John give you the big thumbs up. But this is such a hard problem that right now, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, third parties are taking a run at it and so is Microsoft. Apple will, I think, have to do this eventually, but
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually it could be decades. Or it could be two years from now. We’ll see how much this catches on, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John again, Microsoft tried this in Windows 10, didn’t work out. This is their second run at it. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft takes three tries to get something right. So we’ll see how it goes. But this is all part of the co-pilot
⏹️ ▶️ John plus PC. You need the MPU to do the recognition and the LLM and the blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is another way to try to sell these new PCs to
⏹️ ▶️ John people because they can do things that your PC can’t do. And
⏹️ ▶️ John is it an artificial gate? Is it a marketing gate or is it real because of the MPU or it would kill your battery otherwise?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I think is Rewind Apple Silicon only? I think it is because it uses all the SOC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there are legitimate reasons to gate this, right? And also it eats up your disk space.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, there’s lots of caveats about this, but links in the show notes where you can read more about it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think features like this have utility that is undeniable if and when we can figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to do them in a secure, tractable way that everybody understands and is okay with.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re not there yet, clearly. Because again, I’ve seen so much outcry about this. So people are like, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John believe this. What spyware? Microsoft’s taking screenshots of my screen. Like people who have not internalized,
⏹️ ▶️ John have not had months to internalize the idea, have not had years since livestream to internalize the idea of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John are flabbergasted. In the same way that if you took someone from 1982 and explained you’re gonna carry
⏹️ ▶️ John a rectangle in your pocket that keeps track of your location and transmits it to Google headquarters, they’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John what? It’s tracking you everywhere you go with satellites? We’re all okay with that
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Like it’s been, it’s been worked out to the degree that humanity is comfortable with
⏹️ ▶️ John having GPS in our phones. Yes, there are still security concerns with GPS. Yes. A lot of people don’t like it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John sent to Google and only trust Apple with it or whatever. And some people may disable GPS, right? But like in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John something that would be inconceivably privacy invasive to someone in the seventies
⏹️ ▶️ John or eighties is now something that the world just accepts. You are going to have a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John in your pocket that tracks your location. And by the way, sends that location usually over
⏹️ ▶️ John the network somewhere, you know, if only so your family can find you with find my friends or whatever. Right, to either one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the world’s biggest corporations or one of the world’s biggest advertising corporations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, that the government can spy on you like. Oh yeah, easily. Yeah, so there’s an Overton window
⏹️ ▶️ John situation here with these rewind technologies, but the utility is there. I just think the
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation is gonna take a little bit more work. And so I think Apple will have to have an answer for this, but I really
⏹️ ▶️ John doubt this is the year that Apple’s going to have an answer to this. And like I said, I think Apple has to be the one to
⏹️ ▶️ John answer this because to do this feature well and correctly, it has to be in the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John And ideally it would be in the platform and in a way that third parties could augment it, but that’s not the Apple way. And even Microsoft’s not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So we’ll see how it goes. But yeah, that’s, yeah. By the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John Copilot Plus PCs can also do this. And the final note, I know we are running on here, but the final note on Copilot Plus
⏹️ ▶️ John PCs, I will just add that you may have been surprised if you just heard us talk about this event.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’d be surprised to hear that the Intel CEO and the AMD CEO were
⏹️ ▶️ John on video talking during this. What did they have to say? And what they had to say was,
⏹️ ▶️ John we still make PC stuff. It’s good. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John but here’s the thing. And here’s the big sad for me because I want PCs to go
⏹️ ▶️ John to ARM. This is one SoC, the Snapdragon X Elite N Plus. I mean, it’s two
⏹️ ▶️ John variants of the same SoC, right? It’s a MacBook Air class SoC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Other PCs exist that are not MacBook Air class, faster ones, more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, right? There is no ARM answer to that. Microsoft does not
⏹️ ▶️ John have a Snapdragon X Elite Pro, Snapdragon X Elite Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John X Elite Ultra. They don’t have that. It’s as if Apple went to ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John and introduced the M1 and there were no other M chips, just the M1.
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD and Intel are still an incredibly important part of the PC market because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no, like all the more powerful AMD, there’s nothing for them. There’s no, I mean, right
⏹️ ▶️ John now there isn’t, right? So there’s no denying, there’s no getting around
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And I don’t know how Apple’s, I keep doing it. I don’t know how Microsoft’s gonna deal with this because all these great features
⏹️ ▶️ John they rolled out, these require copilot plus, And I’m sure next generation Intel and AMD chips
⏹️ ▶️ John will have 40 tops and will be able to qualify and so on and so forth. I don’t want that though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like we can’t go on with the some PCs have ARM and some PCs have Intel and some PCs have
⏹️ ▶️ John AMD. Microsoft, just pick a horse and get your whole, get the whole PC market.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it, I believe in you. Get the whole PC market onto something. And ARM is good
⏹️ ▶️ John because ARM doesn’t necessarily just mean Qualcomm because other people can make ARM chips too. So it’s not like you’re stuck with one vendor. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John still have an AMD Intel, right? Intel can make ARM chips, AMD can make ARM chips. Let’s all make ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John chips. Can we all do that? Can we all get on the same platform again? The answer right now is we can’t because
⏹️ ▶️ John they just have one MacBook Air Caliber slash low-end MacBook Pro Caliber
⏹️ ▶️ John SoC. Every other processor in the entire PC market is Intel or AMD. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not there yet, but I can see in the distance a way to get there. And I really hope this time
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft is able to get everybody onto the ARM bandwagon?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think this is fine for now. First of all, just volume-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone buys this MacBook Air class laptop. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna pick one, it’s the right one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. It’s important to have that one covered. And at the high end, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of serious nerds and gamers who are going to, they are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to crap all over this kind of thing. So there is like, it’s almost like, don’t even try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the gamers. They’re going to hate you no matter what you do. So don’t even bother trying. Let the gamers keep having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their giant hot PCs.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, don’t. Make a good ARM CPU for gamers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, eventually that’s possible, but that is so far, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far beyond the horizon right now because gamers will just be so incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resistant to any of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the good thing is the gamers can continue to use their Nvidia GPUs. You’re not taking that away from them like Apple did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Yeah, hopefully. So yeah, and that certainly, that obviously helps, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gamers are gonna be the last people to move off of Intel and AMD. So let them have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. They are ultimately a fairly small part of the PC market. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big part of the PC market is this stuff. It’s the 13-inch laptops. And the cheap desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for businesses, that’s most of the PC laptops, or most PC market, rather. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Microsoft and Qualcomm and everybody else, If they can work out the 13 to 15 inch laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco category, everything else is secondary to that. Let them do this first. And then, you know, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco establish a big footprint with these, like if they actually are able to sell a bunch of these, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows software makers will have to have, you know, dual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco architecture support. Like they’ll, you know, whatever they call universal binaries or however they work that out over there. Like they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to all do this over the coming years. And then eventually when the gamers start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grumbling and slowly coming around when something is, when an ARM chip is released that actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is faster than what they need, then there will be a lot of software there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, the Kingsman will have been worked out and things like that. I think things will be more mature. So they’ll come in time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is totally right for Microsoft to completely ignore gamers right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if it’s like, part of the reason we loved it so much when Apple went to ARM is because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole, Like, can you believe I now have a laptop that performs like a desktop? And they don’t have that unless they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the equivalent of the Pro Max and Ultra things. You know what I mean? Like, they don’t, that part of the transition that
⏹️ ▶️ John we enjoyed, they are not going to be able to enjoy until they have some chips. And again, I’m sure there are chips coming. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not an impossibility. It’s just straightforward. Just make a bigger one of those. Like, obviously their cores are pretty good. The tech is
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Like, they just don’t have it yet, right? But that was part of our transition was the glee of like, of you having your
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop laptop and being like, there’s no more compromise. This is desktop caliber. and a MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John SoC is not desktop Cal. I know you used the MacBook Air as your desktop laptop and you enjoyed it, but like when you could get a better
⏹️ ▶️ John one, you did. And it’s way faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, man, the MacBook Air is so good also. I mean, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right. It is wonderful to have the additional resources of the bigger chips. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost everybody can do almost everything they need to do just as well on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M3 or M2 or M4 than they could on the Max chips. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that good for so many
⏹️ ▶️ John things. I think, despite this terrible name, that PC users and companies will learn
⏹️ ▶️ John through the grapevine, when you ask for your next PC, make sure you ask for a CoPilot Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll be like, what am I supposed to ask for? Just trust me. I know it sounds stupid, but just make sure whatever laptop you get
⏹️ ▶️ John next time, say it has to be a CoPilot Plus PC. Here, I’ll paste it to you. You know, with a plus sign, like yeah, just
⏹️ ▶️ John ask for that. Because you don’t have to know I need an ARM PC. Don’t ask for an ARM PC. you might get a Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John RT one, you don’t want that, right? You want one of these, right? And it’s so weird
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’ve bundled that. I was like, but I don’t wanna do that AI thing where I talk to, you know, chat GP.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like, no, that’s not why you want it. It’s just a good laptop, right? Just get that one. I think that will
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. I really hope that happens. And then yeah, eventually they need to make new chips.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem is AMD and Intel are also, you know, in the mix here. They also, they all
⏹️ ▶️ John have CPUs and SoC type things that will eventually qualify, but I don’t want them to qualify.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want, just, you can’t, I don’t think it’s tenable, put it this way, I don’t think it’s tenable to have a
⏹️ ▶️ John dual CPU architecture Windows strategy like in perpetuity, like the Windows runs an x86 and ARM,
⏹️ ▶️ John and forever and ever, you just, you buy one PC and the laptops come with ARM and the desktops come with
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel. Like, I don’t, it doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason it has to be that way. ARM SoCs can
⏹️ ▶️ John be just as fast as the Intel. Like, there’s no reason for it. And it just adds confusion to the market. And obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re Intel and AMD, you think there is a very big reason for it because you sell those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re Microsoft, I really hope Microsoft, despite having those friendly relationships with AMD and Intel and
⏹️ ▶️ John putting them in their keynote, I hope Microsoft is talking to Qualcomm and saying, or other people who make ARM things
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, when are you gonna get those desktop ARM?
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s ready for us because we’re ready to ditch these Intel guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsor this week, Squarespace. Thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, a bonus topic segment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we do every week. This week’s Overtime is about Apple and OpenAI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s been some reports recently about Apple possibly, very possibly, partnering with OpenAI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for some of their upcoming features. So we’re gonna talk about that in ATP Overtime. You can join and listen at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Thank you everybody and we’ll talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, check podcast
Parental Vision Pro demos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So over Mother’s Day weekend, I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been to my parents’ house for an overnight for the first time in a while. The whole family went.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I brought the Vision Pro even though they didn’t ask me to and I thought maybe one or both of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them would want to try it because my mom is interested in like pop-cultury things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and my dad is super interested in technology and that sort of stuff. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we stayed, I think it was Friday into Saturday, or maybe it was Saturday into Sunday, it doesn’t matter. But on the first day,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mom tried the Vision Pro. And my parents are 70-ish, give or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take a little bit, and they don’t have stellar vision, and I don’t have any lenses in my Vision Pro, because as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey garbage as my vision is without contact lenses in, with contact lenses, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty good. And so I do the whole guest thing. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was at their kitchen table. I set up my iPad pro as the, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen mirroring and strapped, you know, the thing on mom’s head. And,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I had her try, like, I think I forget exactly what I did and in what order, but basically I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her look at panoramas that I had taken, like, I think I showed her, um, one of Cape Charles.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I showed her one at the top of the pyramid in Memphis from a couple of weeks back. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had her try a couple of spatial videos. I had taken one at Hanukkah and one, I think of McHale on a swing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and I had her watch a little bit of the Alicia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Keys thing, do the dinosaur thing, uh, and so on and so forth. And actually quick aside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, there’s some new stuff developing, uh, coming up in the next week or two, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Marvel app, uh, called what if that’s, um, debuting, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Friday, tomorrow, sometimes we record something like that, or maybe it’s next week. I forget exactly when it is, but soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then apparently in Apple’s adventure series, they have a new video coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a bunch of dudes. I think it’s dudes, maybe it’s people, just people in general, a bunch of people doing parkour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere. And that’s going to be in the same series as the woman who was doing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey high wire, tight rope, whatever, walking at the fjord. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyways. Yes, isn’t that great? After five months, we get episode two of that series. Excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four months. Thank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey very much. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mistake. only four months we could episode two. Things are going fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re doing the opposite of what Netflix drops the whole season and once
⏹️ ▶️ John episode every four week. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Four months.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, so uh mom tries it out and at first, you know, with the panoramic,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she was like a panorama. She was like, wow, that’s really cool. And then I think it was the dinosaur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing and I’m not gonna put a picture in the show notes because you know, it’s, it’s a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of mom and I don’t know if she wants it on the internet or whatever, but I looked up her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was so funny to me. And again, I’m pretty sure it was during the experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dinosaurs, whatever it’s called, um, thing where, you know, like T-Rex or what have you. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t remember exactly what dinosaur it is, this walking up to you and whatever the case may be. Um, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, it’s approaching her and I can tell she’s not scared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the dinosaur, but it’s the funniest picture that I took of her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because like, take your hands and like, bring them up to like your collarbone, you know, like kind of clutch them to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey chest, you know what I mean? That like, ah, feeling that, that, you know, she wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, again, I’m almost sure she wasn’t scared of the dinosaur. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just, it was like such a striking weird experience for her that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she like her, her natural, like visceral reactions, like to bring her hands in close to her chest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and kind of be like, ah, what’s going on. And it was so funny to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching her do this. And she was surprisingly into it. She doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want one. She just she seemed super duper into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, a couple of problems. Number one, for the love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fing bh, can we please get mirroring for DRM content?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, preach. It is so frustrating. It is so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I intellectually get why it is they, this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work. But Apple controls everything. They make it work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for their own iPad minis in the store. Why? They know if there’s another monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugged into an iPad or into an Apple TV or whatever the case may be, you can’t plug one into an Apple TV, you know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or if there’s anything plugged into an Apple TV, tell me I can only do it with an iPad, so they have control.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. or black it out on HDMI, but don’t black it out on the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I figure it out Apple, cause it’s so frustrating. It’s so frustrating. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are 800 different ways that they can make this work better and they have chosen none of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So frustrating. Also, I don’t watch a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of Apple TV plus the stuff that I watch. I really enjoy, but I generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t watch a lot of Apple TV plus. And to me, thus, to me, the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app basically does not exist for me. You know, not, not the device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app on your like phone or, or Vision Pro or what have you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean the TV app on your Apple TV where you watch Apple TV plus? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so frustrating. It’s so bad. Um, that app basically does not exist for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And because of that, I am not used to it. and I’m giving you the world’s biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air quotes, information architecture, which is to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, it is such a f***ing mess in there. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is such a mess. And so I’m trying to explain to mom, and I’m no longer mirroring to my iPad because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want her to see the stuff, the DRM stuff like the dinosaurs, which why that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DRM’d, whatever, but I’m no longer able to follow along. And I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describe to her, well, there’s this stuff on the left on the toolbar. Try in there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and go to this and go to that and then scroll down and scroll over and this and that. All I wanted to do was find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the immersive demo, which I think she might have like come across and just not realize,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I wasn’t doing a good job describing what she needed to look for. But it should be, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Vision Pro, it should be front and center, right big as day, or there should be a specific
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tab for like Apple’s immersive junk. There’s a tab for 3D,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s no tab for Apple’s immersive
⏹️ ▶️ John junk. It’s the same way you can’t find the square that lets you resume watching the show that you were watching last night. They hide it, they
⏹️ ▶️ John hide the thing you wanna get to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t understand. Apple is so good at design, and the design of the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like visual design, it’s pretty good. It’s fine. But the information architecture is trash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s straight up trash. Oh my gosh, it makes me so angry. It’s very hard to find what
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s impossible. Sometimes intentionally for finding the next episode, but sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like the immersive
⏹️ ▶️ John thing is not them being intentional. It’s just, well, they get sideswiped by the whole, like we have to show you new stuff all the time. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John they know you’re using a Vision Pro. It’s not like they can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s so frustrating. You know, we’ve gotten this question a couple of times. If you could go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and be king for a day, what would you do? Honestly, today I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might fix all this junk with the Vision Pro. Let me see DRM content, even if it’s with humongous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restrictions. Another example, actually, which I didn’t think of, and again, intellectually, I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how they landed here. I have mom do an immersive environment. I think I might’ve been the desert.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It might’ve been Mount Hood. I don’t really recall. It doesn’t really matter, but whatever immersive environment she, you know, cranks a little digital crown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get into. She is in a place and it has some sort of ambient sound.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s say it was like the crickets or what have you at Mount Hood. I’m saying to her, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you hear anything? She says, no. All right, well, look up and then look to the right and spin and then, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you try to turn the volume, and she’s like, no, I still don’t hear anything. Come to realize I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still mirroring to my iPad. And when you’re mirroring to your iPad, what are you mirroring? You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mirroring the video and the audio. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want that. I want the audio to stay in the Vision Pro. I want the video to be mirrored so I can see what the hell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she’s doing. But I want the audio to stay in the damn Vision Pro. Again, in the Apple store, they do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? It’s just, it’s so frustrating. And by the way, looking at these pictures of your mom here,
⏹️ ▶️ John KC, the bottom part of her face is your face. Oh yeah. 100%. Look at that picture.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m like, is that KC wearing a wig?
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally believe you.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey She’s wearing a
⏹️ ▶️ John Vision Pro, but there is no doubt this is your mother.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not offended. I totally believe you. I can’t say that I see it, but I’m-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh my God, 100%.
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the smile at the top one. Holy, holy Casey. And the second thing is the forced perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John in this picture, because the battery pack for the Vision Pro is in the foreground, it looks so big.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I mean, it’s not small.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It looks like a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, I’m sorry for those of you who are listening, because I would rather not share these publicly, but I obviously shared them with the
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice that also that your mom has EZE as a decorator.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is huge. So funnily enough, Marco, of all people, might recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that clock, not from Virginia, but because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that used to be- That’s from the lake.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is, it is from the lake. And my grandmother is still around, but in body and not really in mind, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they unloaded their lake house many years ago. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, we did our origin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stories as an ATP members episode time before most recent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Marco and I talk about how we met, among other things. Well, anyways, that clock was my dad’s mom’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up at the lake where Marco and I had met, spoiler alert, and it eventually made its way down to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my parents’ house. But yeah, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John thing weighs apparently-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a three-foot diameter clock, people.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, and allegedly it weighs like 7,000 pounds, not literally, of course, but a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It looks like the back is solid wood, so yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey gonna be heavy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in any case, so mom tries it, and she is blown away by it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as much as I’m grumbling about the experience, And as much as I’m grumbling about the fact that the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DRM stuff, the mirroring, et cetera, et cetera, the information architecture, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of my favorite things to do with the vision pro, no hyperbole. I am not messing about. I’m being deadly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serious. One of my favorite things to do with vision pro is to have other people try it because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unreal. And as much as I’ll whine and moan about certain aspects of the vision pro, I cannot stress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough how incredible this hardware is and how you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are looking at the future today. So mom was overwhelmed by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And my mom is the boisterous one of my parents, you know, any, any gregariousness. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. Uh, that I get, I get from her or that I have that I get from her. Um, and so she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was blown away. And then, um, the following morning I had my dad try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and he was much quieter about it, but it blew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his damned mind. And he was like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I told him that he could buy concerts, cause my dad is hugely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into music, whatever I get that I get from my dad, like my mom likes music, but my dad always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has music playing. That’s where I get it from constantly finding new stuff to listen to. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he, if I had told him that he could get Alicia Keys style concerts on the regular, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, if, if he could go somewhere and buy them. And yes, there’s an app whose name I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Amaze VR or something like that. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago that does this sort of thing. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if, if he could watch concerts in there, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he would have bought one already because that’s just his jam and watching the Celicia Keys thing. Like he likes Celicia Keys.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think she’s his favorite by any stretch of the imagination, but being able to look around and, you know, if the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bass player is just going nuts, you can look over at the bass player who may be across the room from you, but at least you can look over there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and watch him, you’re not at the mercy of the director. He was flabbergasted by the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole thing. And I did a little better prepping the Vision Pro before handing it to him. And I made sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the Apple TV app was right before the immersive thing. That’s the other frustrating thing actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when you’re on the main Apple TV app screen or wherever screen it is that brings you into the immersive demo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s no like landing page. So I couldn’t queue up a landing page that’s explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the immersive demo. It’s just, you have to get it tweaked, all the scroll views, you have to tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just right so that it’s ready to rock, because the moment you tap on that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little rectangle, you’re in the immersive demo. Does that make sense? There’s no like-
⏹️ ▶️ John But how are you preparing it? Because did you put on the Vision Pro to prepare it? And then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey how- No, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, because that’s how you enable guest mode.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then when you take it off, doesn’t it go into guest mode and lose everything that you did?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it, I haven’t been on the receiving end of guest mode ever, I don’t think, but my recollection is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watching them you know, when mirrored is that it, the apps are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resident, even if they’re not open, you know, in apps stay open in the Vision Pro, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually that force quit menu, you know, that you can get to and they actually stay apps in general, just during general use stay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open the Vision Pro much longer than you would expect. So, when he opens it up, it’s right there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly where I left it. But all this to say, they were both and again, these are 70
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year old people, my dad is very into technology, really good with technology. Mom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is capable for sure, but is not an enthusiast in the way that dad or, you know, we are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But both of them were just blown away by it. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a healthy reminder for me how incredible this tech is, how cool this tech is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if it isn’t being realized the way we want, even though all three of us were just a few minutes ago, snarking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, you know, four months later, we get episode two. And I think that snark is reasonable. I think Apple deserves
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. it. But what cool tech and I am glad that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exists. And I think I’m glad I bought one. I’m not so sure, but I’m definitely glad it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You can rent one to show your family.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s an important real-time follow-up. Flavor Flav was the guy with the big clock around his neck. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John Eazy-E. I regret the error. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John people sent feedback about that before
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I sent this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, gosh. I know. I should have corrected you. I knew exactly what you meant. I loved flavor of love back in the day. And if you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m talking about, congratulations, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John better off for it. Most people know I’m from but okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nope, nope, nope, but I loved it. But anyways, yeah, it’s the vision pro is just so much fun to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do a demo. And, you know, if Apple is still doing demos, which I think they are, I know we said it several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times, I’m gonna bring it back up, go do a demo at Apple, it costs you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 30 minutes. That’s what it costs you. And gosh, is it so cool, it’s worth it to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do the demo. And if you live overseas, when the time comes that you that you’re up, which honestly I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have been by now and clearly isn’t, but presumably shortly after WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go do a demo because it is worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think the the demo of the Vision Pro is actually better than owning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Vision Pro for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like a lot of luxury goods actually. Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you can buy an amusement park ride and keep it in your house, but you’re probably better off just riding it a couple times