The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Finally a Tablet that Replaces Your Laptop

Episode Date: April 28, 2016

When the iPad first came out in 2010 there was chatter that went in two directions: It’s just a big iPhone I’ll never carry a laptop again Both were wrong. The big iPhone comment was quickly dispelled as people (and their kids) fell under the consumption thrall of iPads. But iPads never could meet the needs of most laptop users –- until now. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky offer their reasons why the iPad Pro hits the mark as a machine for all kinds of things, and why it may have shoved their own laptops aside for almost everything. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And I sit here with Stephen Sinovsky and Benedict Evans. And in the room are two brand new tablets. And Stephen, I can't can't help but notice. Yours is the brand spanking new iPad Pro, the smaller version, and you've covered it in stickers. I broke with tradition because there was always this weird thing that on Macs, on laptops, everybody puts stickers. But you never see stickers on an iPad.

No. It has tweeted many times. And so the first thing I did was like, this is a laptop replacement for me. And so I put stickers on it. And so good news, I work with product on it, buildings filled with stickers. So I have a bunch of stickers now. I see yoga stickers. I see product on stickers, of course, and some California joints on there, too. Yeah. And I also, I put the Apple completely upside down because it's a historical reference. It's a historical reference because the Apple is faced sideways. So I put the sticker on it like just completely upside down. How can you say it's a laptop replacement for you already? Well, that's, it is, that's important because normally when Ben and I have these discussions over the course of the hallway.

We wait like a month to really draw a conclusion. But we have a lot of game film on the iPad. Right. But what was missing was actually just a faster one and the Apple keyboard. Right. And so now that we have all of those parts, we're able to – now I'm trying a different keyboard out today, but we're able to really think about it. And it didn't take long before it's – I like – literally this is the only thing I've carried all week. I haven't missed my MacBook.

I haven't missed my PC laptop. I've made slides. I've worked on spreadsheets. I've written a blog post. I've used apps. I've used the browser. Like, it's 100% just replaced my workflow. So it's replaced it.

And Benedict, we talked about this little because I was jealous of your iPad Pro when you got it. It's replaced it, but it's also different, right? So it hasn't supplanted it in the sort of like one for one. It's something else. Well, so there's a layer of difference. So, I mean, just picking up on what Stephen said, there's a observation that the CPU in the new iPad pros has roughly 1,000 times more transistors than a Pentium from back in 1995. And if you're kind of a pedantic semiconductor engineer, you can argue about whether that's comparable or not.

But kind of directionally, that tells you something about what's happened to the computing power. And so you should almost be looking at this and thinking, okay, Windows, Mac, iOS, in terms of it's a different operating system that you use on a large screen, but that you can do lots. of stuff on and there's a bunch of stuff that works differently. And obviously the difference between iOS, Windows and Mac, is bigger than the difference between Windows and Mac. But it still sort of sits somewhere in that way of thinking about things that, okay, there's a bunch of stuff you can do on it that's the same. There's a bunch of stuff that you can do that you do differently. There's a bunch of stuff that was easier to do on that. And there's a bunch of stuff that's easier to do on this one. It's actually almost a little bit like, you know, if you've got a laptop, but then you'll sometimes

you want to go to a computer with a big screen, if you want to like edits and video or do a really big spreadsheet or do something that has an enormous screen. Your laptop is sort of you kind of feel the need to have that just in case. Every now and then there's something that's going to be easier. And it's kind of the same on with a tablet that there's some stuff that's easier to do on an old-fashioned PC. For me, I mean I tweeted that I'm kind of 90% there on this. The gap for me is doing charts in PowerPoint. And so if anyone has seen the presentations I post, I sort of put a lot of effort into making them all carefully formatted, and Microsoft haven't yet built the charting module for Office for iPad.

So you can look at it, but you can't create charts from scratch. It has minimal charting. Yeah, it has a little bit. It's like you can change the numbers and stuff, but you can't, like, create new chart. But that's, you know, the trigonels there. Yeah, that will come. Yeah, we'll get there. And that's a relatively small part of what I do every day.

And then everything else I do every day, I can actually do exactly the same but differently. That's actually the thing that I noticed right away, with what I did is I purposely didn't like when the iPad first came out the reviews were all it's like an iPhone just a little bit bigger right it was like a big iPhone right and so one of the things that's really changed in the course of that and particularly with the the iOS 93 and the changes the split screen multitasking well it's split screen multitasking and the keyboard so now what I did is I didn't just automatically use my backup image from my phone and have all of my phone apps on on here you know the iPad versions that what I did is I picked the apps that

are focused on on productivity and I left all of the the apps like for for doing open table and getting a lift and all of those things are still only on my phone. So it's interesting. So it's not your phone. It's not your MacBook Air either or your MacBook. It's its own thing. Right. It's its own thing.

But it caught up in all of the work I need to. And then it's some of the stuff. It's just better. Like I really use the Slack app a lot. And so now I have this not just the Slack app like I do on my phone, but it's, it's landscape oriented. I see more stuff on the screen. If I wanted to type like a big thing, it's super easy,

and I don't have to kind of go, I can share the link, but I don't feel like writing the note now because I'm standing up and running. And so it totally, I mean, you know, like the moment for me was I wrote a blog post this week, and it was like 40 pictures, you know, pasted from all over the net and some photos of mine. And I wrote the whole thing in the media map. Just it, and that whole flow,

The thing was, it was a little bit different. Like, the normal flow that you would have used is, like, save all the photos to a temp folder and then just drag them all at once into an editor. This, you kind of, you kind of have to invert things. And it reminded me very much of my first transition to Windows because in the DOS world, nobody remembers this, of course. But in the DOS world, you used to say what you wanted to do and then point at the text on the screen that you wanted to do that thing too. Right. So you ended up, like, saying, I want to make bold. and then you go and point to the bold stuff.

And then Windows came out and arbitrarily you selected it with a mouse and then hit bold. And so you had this kind of work conversion that was an arbitrary thing. There's no reason it's sort of like RPN versus after ReCalder. And then in this, you know, you have to kind of think about copy paste a little bit, like which direction because you're using the sharing tools. You know, they're in the apps, which is a little bit different than always assuming you're going to save it to a place on your desktop. Yeah, it's kind of like the classic. Windows model with you would open word and then you'd hit file open and you'd go and get the file. Whereas the Mac was always structured on the idea that you'd double click on the word file and

the Mac and the Mac would then open the application and you can argue about which of those is better. But there's just different ways of doing it. And sometime, and this is to my point, you could argue that that that thing worked better on the Mac, but then there was other stuff that worked better on the PC. And I think this is kind of the thing that there's like, there's a small number of things that I can't do on this. There's a much large, there's a large portion where it's basically the same. And then there's a portion where it's like, this one is different,

better on my Mac, and that one's better on my iPad. I mean, the thing that I found, it's like, there's a whole conversation about, well, can I do what I was doing before? But then there's another layer, which is, I feel like there's a big sort of step change

in the mental load of using it because you're not thinking about all the menus at the top of the screen, and you're not like thinking about, well, where are my windows, and have I maximized the window, and have I saved the file or not, and where is the mouse in particular,

like moving the mouse around, moving your hand and seeing the pointer, which is kind of a weird thing to say after 30 years of it being completely natural, but actually going and just touching the damn thing after about two days makes perfect sense. And actually when I first got the, because I had the large iPad Pro,

so I got it when it came out. I had a tablet, I had an iPad since the iPad came out in whatever it was 2010, and I had never found myself touching the screen of my laptop. and I had my iPad Pro for about two days and I find myself touching the screen of my laptop. So I have to, you know, this is like a very deeply emotional point for me

because that was something I remember. I thought I saw it tear in your eye. Well, I told everybody that because when we were doing Windows 8, we all started touching our regular laptops. And when I said that at the big giant unveiling, like the reporters came up to me afterwards and said, that's the most ridiculous thing. Then we gave them all tablets.

And then like within hours, I'm starting to hear all of them tell me they're touching their screens. And of course, anyone just needs to watch somebody, you know, under 10 years old, and they're touching whatever screen is in front of them.

And it is, it is really true. My Mac has always been filled with fingerprints. Because I always, I keep hitting the screen. I mean, it's the thing Stephen mentioned earlier that you kind of try and,

you need to use it for a while before. You really understand this stuff. You can't just, you can't use it for an hour and go, oh, this sucks. You have to really flow into it. The thing that I found with the iPad Pro is because it doesn't have the touch pad,

the screen is closer to you. Yeah. And therefore the screen is closer. I don't know how you'd measure it, but it's closer to your elbows. Yeah. And it's closer to your shoulders. And therefore, raising your fingers, touch something, and then dropping your hand back onto the keyboard,

makes much more feels much more natural than it does with a surface because the screen is that much further away because it has a touch pad. I still wonder, I mean, and it sounds to me like it's something you just have to do experience, but the form factor, the kind of general bones are the same as, that tablet that we saw when the iPad first came out, but it's a completely different thing. Right. And what's happened is that

the software has changed a huge amount. Like all the apps, you know, Steve Jobs did say the apps would get different. He sat up up on a stage in an interview with Walt Mossberg explaining it's just software and the software will get tuned. It just took a little bit while longer for people to find the different kind of apps. There was no Slack.

There was no medium. There was no quip or other products that people are now associating with that form. of productivity. And the other thing, too, is, like, you know, in fact, he talked about, well, touch won't work on laptops because you'll get gorilla arms. This isn't a laptop. And to Benedict's point, like, you, it's, you don't, my arms aren't tired ever.

And in fact, some of these things are a lot easier. You sit kind of lean on your elbow and you can scroll around. You can use two hands to manipulate the UI. So, like, you can kind of shift left, shift right. And you don't, you don't have that pain in your middle finger that you used to have from scrolling the wheel on your mouse. You just reach off and you just. screen down.

Like, because of my own, I haven't used a mouse in like five years, but I did get a mouse and I used it with my Mac this week just to remind myself. And it truly, like, now I got, I really got the feeling of if, like, you're 10 years old and you get put in front of a computer with a mouse, that's like the weirdest experience in the world. Because it turns out all those things people said in the 80s when mice came out about, like, it's kind of detached from what I'm doing and it's this level of indirect. It turns out it's very true.

And if you didn't force yourself to experience it as your first computing, it doesn't appear natural at all. Name some things that are better. So I actually like the multitasking model, which is similar to the model that, I mean, people have spent like 20 years trying to work out how you do multi-windowing. And to me, the most absurd thing is when I see people who've got 178 tabs open in Chrome. And it's like, didn't we spend 20 years trying to work out a better way of doing it than just having that sort of use across the top of the screen? and so you've got the task bar in Windows you've got the expose on the Mac and then you had the multi-split screen thing in Windows 8

7. Not that I'm petty, but it was 7. I think you would know it too much. And so then I think the thing that Apple, the split screen thing I think works really, really well and it's to my mental load point. Rather than, okay, I'm going to put this window there and I'm going to get the mouse and I'm going to grab the corner

and I'm going to drag it here and then I'm going to get this other window and I'm going to put it there. And I've got two enormous screens on my desk, so that's not an issue, but on a laptop, it's an issue. And whereas here, it's like, okay, I have the mail app. Now I drag from the side, I flip, I want the calendar there. And I've got the mail and the calendar next to each other. And it's like done. And that is like 10 seconds, 100 times a day on my laptop. And for me, like, I'm just, I was writing my blog post and there

is Twitter, right? And that is the demo we did for Windows a long, long time ago. And but the thing is, is that because the apps now have been tuned to not just display like that, but to work like that. Like the feeds coming by, you're hitting, you're hitting like, you know, and it's just, it's all just sort of working. And then I would go another step further on the, you know, part of the brilliance of, of the design that they did is that now, like the stuff that's happening on my phone that is relevant, like SMS messages or incoming phone calls are like completely

seamlessly integrated. And I definitely noticed that because I switched to an Android phone this week later in the week just to experience what's missing. Oh, so, so I want to get to what's missing. missing and what's worse, but I did have that question. Like, would you two be as happy with what's sitting on your knees now if your phones weren't there and if the phone hadn't come as far as it had? Like, did those two things need to go together for this experience to be as good as it is? So if I had this and then in some parallel universe, I had a Nokia feature phone from 2001,

and this had a, I've got, I had an LTE mode in it. Would that matter? Not that much. I mean, that's partly because I make no phone calls. And one of the cool things is you can tap on a phone number on your iPad in your phone dials it and pick up your phone and make the call. Does it make a difference? No. But, you know, I was walking down the stairs and someone emailed me a link and I tapped on it. Or I saw a link in Twitter and I tapped in it.

And then I get to my desk and I hit Safari and or I get to my, you know, wherever my iPad is. I open my iPad. I hit Safari and the same link is there. Or I'm listening to music and the same music is on the same. is on my iPad. And it's not just like the calendar and stuff where you would expect it to sync. But it's things like that

where you can really can, most of the time, just pick up and put down. It's helpful. I mean, it's not a must have. Right. But it's certainly a nice to have. Well, one of the things that is much better for me is just it gets back to

the fundamentals of the whole hardware and the device is that it is a phone. Like it's from the smartphone ecosystem. And that turns out to matter a lot just for connectivity. And so the part for me that's been so game changer is if I could use any phone and I could use it as a Wi-Fi hotspot, which is what I'm

doing, you know, with my Android phone, it's super cool, but it's always like an extra step. And so now, because this has got its LTE modem and I got the LTE version, and it's a big thing that's changed. Like when the iPad came out, it was $80 a month extra to have it have connectivity. And now it's $10 a month on the family plan and, you know, and the 140 or so for the device. but it's another thing that totally changed you never have to think about it's this mental load point

it's another meant to an abstraction layer it just goes away it's all these little things which yeah you could do that in Windows yeah and you can do that on your PC and you can do that on your Mac yes but the all the thing you've got to do whereas on a smartphone or on a tablet

you don't have to do them they're just sort of there yeah like the window management is it is really a fascinating point because like you don't think about the mental load if you'd been doing it for so long but then you know like all these things that I watch, oh, you know, I had a reboot last night for this update, and these six

apps we use don't remember their screen position or which monitor they were on, and you're back to like this 10 minutes of weird bookkeeping, which is very much like the desktop. So like a friend of mine tweeted a giant picture of his Mac desktop that was filled with stuff, and you just don't have that management metaphor anymore. And so you don't go, oh, I'm overwhelmed by all the stuff on my desktop because it's all sort of in like a Google Drive or a box or whatever cloud thing you're using. And you just kind of keep working and you don't think about like, where are my notes? They're in Evernote.

They're just in Evernote. It doesn't matter. And you search across them with spotlight and it kind of just works. Betidnik, you said that presentations were or slides building was not the best thing on the tablet. Stephen, what have you noticed that, you know, was it hard to do this blog post? I mean, did it take extra effort? Were you kind of cursing yourself? Because I, you know, I have this muscle memory that's super old of having done platform

transitions before, it's no, it was, it was different. And there were things that were like, wow, okay, I got to remember now. That's a little bit backwards. Like, you know, it's, it turns out, ironically, it's like way easier to get a screenshot than in other experiences, but the screenshots all go to your photo library, so it's kind of tricky. There's not like an easy insert picture and crop it all at once. It's not like you can't drag the photo off the web page onto the desktop and then drag it onto the, um, drag it into the CMS from your website. Yeah. So that layer, I mean, that's what, in a sense, that's the flip side of what you give up by not having files and not having water management. You don't have a desktop.

Right. So there were like 40 different vintage computing things in this blog post I did. And now there were this gap of my pictures of like, here's a squirrel and here's the moon. And then here's 40 pictures of like old computers followed by more pictures of yoga studios. And so I'm like, do I move those? Do I delete them? And then, of course, I don't care because it's all just cloud storage and it doesn't really. I don't have to clean it up. I don't have to have that over it.

But, you know, the flip side of it is what is that the writing tools were super good. And I wasn't doing what I would do on a PC because it turns out what I would do on a PC for that experience. I would have started Word. I would have typed the whole blog post, pasted the pictures in. I would have had a file. And then I would have had to paste it into the blogging tool into some. And so you don't, that whole step went away. And so now there's just the medium app.

And I do all the writing in the medium app, which is constantly saving into the background. So there's never a step where I'm going to lose the little. work. And so it was a hugely better experience when you net it all out. Now, it's super early. The medium app has some weird bugs and there were things that were interesting and I, like, that's going to all get fixed. I bet in the next month they're all fixed because the iPad is new, which is certainly my, the big ask of all the founders that are listening, which is like, I think that your iPad app is going to be a real asset if you have one and you're in the productivity space. Like there's just, there's a lot of uses. Or if you're in the social space doing the, the

side view of it so that you can, you know, use it while you do other stuff. But you're saying when you need a large screen, then you fire it up and you fire up the old notebook or something. But, Stephen, are you going to get rid of it completely? Are you going to toss your desktop laptop? You don't have a desktop anymore, man. No, I definitely don't have a desktop. I have like four laptops at home that are all mine that I just cycle between, whether I want to use a really big surface with a high pixel count screen, a small PC or MacBook and others. And they're all just stationed.

There might as well be desktops at this point. Like I'm never, and like other things that are just small abstraction. I don't think about chargers now. Like I, first I don't need one ever in the course of a day. Like you can't drain this. That's, you know, Walt Mossberg said in his review, which he didn't do an official test, but he, he's like, wow, it went all day easily. And so, and even if I do need a charger, there are like charges for this iPad everywhere

you look. Like, everyone has one. the worst cases I'll have to borrow a cable like an airport but then there's even a USB plug and so that's a huge like every hotel the clock is a charger I mean this is something we haven't talked about which is this sort of it's a transition from I mean and it's something that's very interesting when you look at the iPads next to the surface which is because the surface comes from the kind of the windale world the intel world and it's kind of it's almost the same thing but it's not and it's not partly because of Windows. but also because it's coming from the different hardware ecosystem and say you don't have the same battery life, you don't have the 3G modem built in, you don't have the same weight advantage. The charger is different and all of that stuff.

Well, the charges are different, but that's just because they haven't sold 100 million of them. If Microsoft had sold a billion surfaces, there'd be charges everywhere. But no, my point is it's like, it's one of the metaphors I've talked about sometimes is it's like you're looking at a PC, a surface or at the new MacBook,

it's a bit like looking at like the really last and best piston power aircraft from the 50s where like they'd optimized the hell out of everything and they were really good and really smooth and they didn't vibrate and the engines didn't fail and then you look at the jets which are kind of noisy and used twice as much fuel and they belt smoke and they're not as good but like you can see which trajectory those two development paths are on yeah and I think this is kind of the point that there's you could almost say like the iPad pro is like this is seven now the 707 yeah yeah it's the one at which you point okay well the Lockhey constellation is a beautiful aircraft but

Yeah, that's the part that, you know, I'm just so wedded to it, and obviously I have all of that past in history, but like, this is just, it is really where this arm ecosystem and this new kind of OS with apps and security and quality over time and no flakiness and no weird add-ins that are going to screw up the machine, and all of that stuff, it really comes together. Like, this is the most reliable, like, laptop I'm ever going to carry on a trip, not just, like, reliable from the software. It's also, like, physically, it's just not, there's no, it's never going to break. And it occurs to me that, you know, there used to always be the term power user. You guys, if there ever were power users, are power users, except that nobody says that anymore because it doesn't matter. There's more than enough power, it sounds like, to do anything that you want to do. Yeah, like, I did a presentation for the team recently just on, like, the history of

AI and machine learning and stuff. And, like, I didn't even think about it, but I just did the whole thing in slides and just did it. And it was pretty. It had pictures. It had transitions. It had all of these things. I admit, it had no charts.

and graphs. But other things about that abstraction layer, like so much of what, and remember, I worked on all these things. So they're very emotional for me. But like all of these things that I used to do with a mouse, like aligning text boxes and pictures. Like, you don't do those anymore because, A, the audience appreciates them in a different way, but also the tools have changed.

And so, like, if you want things side by side, like long ago, PowerPoint added stuff to make that super easy. And Slides has it and all the presentation packages have it. And so it kind of just works. Then I'd export it to PDF. I could mail it around. And, you know, I'm using Outlook as the mail program, which was updated today that has even more stuff that I can't even do on a PC. Like the Outlook that got updated today that's on my iPad, like has connections to Facebook events and Evernote, which aren't things that exist in the outlook that I would use on my Windows desktop.

This is certainly the hope both on the part of Apple and also, you know, Microsoft. But do you start to see, are we going to start to see these, you know, populating? everyone's office, everyone's bag. I mean, do you think we're now at a point where, you know, this becomes for everyone a replacement? I think it does. I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's those questions about which office you're talking about. So, you know, the call center with 500, um, rabbit hatch cubicles running a computer that's connected to a SaaS service. Um, is that going to be a tablet? Maybe, but, you know, it does it, it doesn't really matter what it is. Um, but I think there's a huge portion.

of other people where, I mean, this kind of comes to a point we've talked about it for other things, which is you have to think about what the tool is that you're using as opposed to the underlying task. So if your task every two weeks is to make a 35 slides sales report in PowerPoint, full of information that you've pulled from SAP, dropped into Excel, made charts, put the charts into PowerPoint, write bullet points in the PowerPoint, email it at that around. It's kind of always going to be easier to do that on a PC with a keyboard and a mouse. Is your job to make a PowerPoint or is your job to on field sales or marketing or support or engineering or something and would that be better off as a live SaaS dashboard or would you be better off doing that in Slack? And so I think you have to

layer that question of how much of the thing of those like for me or my 10% use cases of the things I need a PC for I need a PC or a Mac for how many people have those two use cases and at to what extent will they not have those use cases in five years time. I mean whenever I talk about this stuff on Twitter I always get people saying oh you're an idiot I can't write code on an iPad. It's like, okay, that's 25 to 50 million people. There's one and a half billion PCs on Earth. There's three billion iOS and Android devices on Earth will go to five billion. So they're always going to be like a portion of people where, for whatever reason, you're going to be using a different device. You're going to be, just as there's always

a portion of people who didn't go from desktops to laptops. Yeah. You know, you could have said laptops of the future. No one's ever going to have a desktop. Well, guess what? Half of sales, half of the base is still a desktop because there's a bunch of people who either their IT department only want to spend $300 on a computer or they want to be a computer or they want to screen or they want the performance or whatever it is. But there's a whole other portion of the population where, I mean, sort of look at it in another way. If you've asked somebody, somebody asked you 20 years ago, should I buy a laptop or a desktop, you would say it depends. You know, what are you going to do with it? Because laptops are slow and they're kind of crappy and

they're heavy and they're really expensive. But if you're spending all your day walking around, then you should get one. And over time, the laptop's got better and better and better such to the point that today there's very few people who do something that you can't do on a laptop. And really very few people who need a desktop. And so desktop sales are either, a, as I say, the Cube Farm, where they want $5,200 computers, or people are doing video editing or compiling code or something. And I think the same, you need to slot tablets into that same kind of calculation, which is, well, what are you doing?

Are you actually doing something that needs Windows and Mac? Will you still be doing that in five years' time? Are you sure? I think the important thing, though, from both of you is that the notion of what you can do with a tablet has changed. with these devices. And also, and...

Well, just as what you could do with a laptop. Right. That is actually a super key analogy for, I think, to come across, which is, you know, as a reminder, it is really the case, as Benedict said, when laptops came out,

they had black and white screens. They were ridiculed. They had black and white screens. They had small resolution. I had them all. And like, everybody, you'd travel, and people would be mesmerized by it. And then they'd say,

hey, I have this thing that needs a serial port. Can I connect it? And you'd be like, no. And they're like, oh, I can't use it. And then pretty soon, they got all the ports. and then they became the replacement for the desktop for people who actually never needed a desktop. And what's happening with the iPad, and there was a brief moment where people were only traveling with their iPads and they were constantly, oh, it's on my desktop.

Or when I get to the hotel, I'll print it or any of these things. And what happened is all of those use cases sort of changed. And then there's a period of time where people are like, God, TSA, all the stuff. I'm not even bringing my laptop. I'm just going to use my phone for this day trip or this overnighter. And now with the pro, it's going to. You're going to find people who are going to travel with it. It's easy.

It weighs nothing. Like it really is like lighter than my paper notebook that I take notes in and stuff. And like it fits in every conceivable kind of bag. And so then you'll just, it will travel with it and you'll never have the moment. I have to go do that at my desktop for a huge set of people in use cases. And that's certainly what it just took like five days for me to happen to me. Well, the very big question is, Benedict, are you going to put stickers on your time? tablet. Well, I never put stickers on my laptop. Oh, go figure. Oh, boy, Mr. Kramudgeon.

Stephen Benedict. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Thank you.