The Vergecast - Apple announces new iPad Pro and Macbook Air, Sony reveals PS5 specs, and confusion around the coronavirus testing website

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul discuss the new iPad Pro and Macbook Air that Apple announced this week, the confusion around Google's coronavirus testing website, and the specs revealed for the PS5. Stories discussed this week: Comcast modestly raises slow internet speeds for low-income users because of coronavirus AT&T is suspending broadband data caps for home internet customers due to coronavirus AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and others agree not to overcharge customers during coronavirus Verily’s coronavirus screening website launches with very limited access Trump’s Google testing announcement mixed up several real projects The White House still can’t explain what’s going on with the coronavirus screening website Coronavirus testing shouldn’t be this complicated Apple announces online-only WWDC 2020 due to coronavirus spread Apple announces new iPad Pro with trackpad support and a wild keyboard cover iPadOS 13.4 adds full mouse and trackpad support The iPad Pro is ready to supplant the Mac just as the MacBook Air is great again Logitech’s iPad keyboard case with trackpad costs half as much as Apple’s The new iPad Pro’s LIDAR sensor is an AR hardware solution in search of software The new iPad Pro’s LIDAR scanner can turn a living room into an AR game of Hot Lava You can try the iPad’s new trackpad and mouse support right now with Apple’s public beta Apple announces new MacBook Air with improved keyboard, faster performance, and more storage Moog and Korg are offering synth apps for free while we’re all stuck at home PS5 vs. Xbox Series X: a complicated battle of SSD and GPU speeds Sony says the PlayStation 5’s SSD will completely change next-gen level design The Xbox Series X specs look impressive, but that’s not enough Here’s how Xbox Series X removable storage will work Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about that Google website that Trump was talking about. We go into Apple's new iPad Pro and MacBook Air, and we get deep into the weeds of the PS5 and Xbox Series X. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for sure. nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of staying inside. Just staying inside. I'm Nelai. I'm your friend. Deeder Bone is here.

I'm your friend too. But we should all be friends this week. Just distant friends. Distant, distant friends. Paul Miller is. Dieter's in a club. You're in your closet recorded. I am.

Paul, are you also in a closet? I'm in the living room of my sister's apartment. That's nice. I'm in a bedroom that I have somehow arranged into a podcast studio, which is better than my toddler's bedroom with her crib. Because she often likes to be in there. And I don't think we're quite at the point where Max should be on the verge cast. We're getting ever closer to it. Yeah.

Not today. There's actually a lot going on. We have to talk about some coronavirus stuff this week. It's going to be inescapable. You know, The Verge is a site about technology and culture and those things are colliding now because so many people are at home working on broadband. We obviously, McKenac Kelly and I talked to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosen-Worsell on Tuesday in the interview episode.

There's a lot to talk about with broadband. There's a lot to talk about with services like Zoom and Slack. We're going to talk about some of that stuff later. But then there's also just like a lot of news that happened this week. Apple put out some new products. Microsoft and Sony are announcing the details of their next generation consoles. There's still stuff going on. So we're going to try to balance it out.

Let us know if we're getting that balance wrong over time. It's new for everybody. We want your feedback. We want to be here for you. We want to make sure we cover the important news of the virus. We want to make sure we cover the important news that's happening elsewhere. We just need to hear feedback on how do we get that balance right? Because otherwise we're just going to guess every time.

I do want to start by doing something I never do. Okay. I want to offer a compliment to our nation's ISPs. Ooh. Wow. I never do it. Everyone knows we're very critical of ISPs. We're very critical of Ajit Pi, the chairman of the FCC.

But because of the virus, the FCC has put out a pledge for ISPs around the country. Every day they announce that hundreds of more ISPs of every size are taking this pledge. They are waiving payments. They're waiving late fees. They're lowering some prices for lower income folks. They're raising the speeds on some of their base packages. This is all good stuff. So I know it's a hard time.

It's good the FCC pushed ahead on that. And then other bigger ISPs are getting rid of their data caps. So Comcast is not doing data caps. AT&T is not doing data caps. They're also adjusting their prices in certain ways for lower income folks. That stuff is really good. And I know that we are often very, very critical of these companies. And there's ways to be critical of the fact that they're making this moves inside of a crisis.

I assure you, it was my first thought, too. But they are making these moves. I think they're very positive for everybody. So I just wanted to give that compliment in a time of a little bit of chaos in the world. That I think these are solid moves. Dieter, you laughed because the criticism embedded in this is very obvious. Do you want to? Sure.

Well, so I will say that the lowering prices for lowering. can people waving late fees, it's super important. I completely agree that's great. I think that the data cap thing is especially important because so many people are on these big ISPs, but embedded in the data cap is the possibility that maybe those data caps were just kind of bullshit in the first place. You could just get rid of them when things are serious.

Maybe they were arbitrary, you know, to begin with. Maybe. It could be that in addition to getting rid of the data caps, they've had to, like, massively beef up their infrastructure to handle the effects. on their network because there's no more data caps on people. But I don't know. I've never been a fan of data caps.

I'm trying to do a compliment. It's right there for the taking if you want it. I've never experienced the heavy hand of data caps in the U.S. Who does feel that? So I hear about it all the time. You know, if you are an entirely streaming household and you've got a couple of kids who are playing video games and you're streaming a couple of 4K movies, you're going to blast through a one terabyte Comcast data cap every month.

You're just going to get right up to it. When I were talking, I streamed the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl was like 30 gigs of data for three hours, right? It was like just some huge number. Once you start to do things like that and everyone's at home, the entire family is at home, and you're streaming all of your entertainment and you're playing video games and you're downloading video games. You're just going to hit those numbers.

You can't have otters playing on your TV in the background from a live stream. Like, you just can't do that. Right. Or if like us, we're producing this entire podcast now using video conferencing, everyone's video conferencing on Zoom all day long for work, the people who are able to work from home, I should say. That's just going to burn through a lot of data. So I don't think that Comcat, like maybe they made some huge investment. Like maybe they were waiting to buy the most powerful router ever made and put it in the network. I just don't think. I think they just turned it off. I should say Comcast investment in Box Media Apparent Company. Now you know,

information. There is a lot of that criticism embedded here. Did we ever need data caps? In this time of the most increased usage, did this tool that the networks always said they needed to manage overuse. They just took it away. And it seems like it's going to be fine. We're going to keep tracking on it. I don't want to overdo it. I am trying to offer this as a compliment. They are taking the moves or taking the steps. We're usually very critical of these companies. I would like to support their positive moves for consumers. By the way, to pledge specifically. is for the next 60 days, companies cannot terminate services for residential or small business customers, which is huge. You can't get knocked offline if you miss a payment. You waive any late

fees incurred, and all of their public Wi-Fi hotspots will be made open access. Some cases, those public Wi-Fi hotspots are a big deal. Like, Comcast actually has a lot more of those than you think about, because you never log on to them, but like, they are actually kind of everywhere. Yeah. And then another thing that's happening is DISH Network. Dish Network has a bunch of unused spectrum, which we've talked about a lot. And that spectrum, where it is useful for other carriers, where the phones support it, where their network support it, they're actually turning over chunks of that spectrum in certain cities to beef up AT&T Verizon T-Mobile's networks.

That's huge. It's huge. And it's all just sort of happening. These aren't like deals. These are just like, you know, the FCC didn't pass a law, didn't regulate it. It said, here's a pledge. Do you want to take it? And everyone took it.

Comcast didn't get regulated into doing data caps. They just did it. So, you know, I think there's just an element here where a lot of assumptions are getting reset. I think it's useful. And I certainly hope it is helpful to the people who are being most impacted by what's going on in the country. It's almost like a bunch of people suddenly decided that Internet access was a public good and should be treated like a communal utility. And if you are interested in that conversation, we did it for one hour with FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenorsel,

who is also, we really did it for an hour. She's also very focused on the homework gap. That's like the key piece of this puzzle. All the kids are staying home from school. They're doing distance learning. The FCC can now, they may pass the ruling schools can get direct connectivity help from carriers. Commissioner Rosenom herself has a big push to send Wi-Fi hotspots

to schools directly using some authority the FCC has. So listen to that conversation, we're waiting in the weeds on it. I just wanted, we are usually so, so critical of the carriers. I am personally so critical of a Jeep pie and I wanted to focus on that's some good stuff that's happening. Hear me out.

What if Fortnite was school? See, you join a match, five minutes into the match, a bell rings, and then you have to go to a specific zone and sit down and listen to somebody, talk for an hour,

and then you get five minutes of fragging, you know, and then bell rings, repeat. Yeah, no child will ever find a way to game that system. I like it. It's an A-plus in the category of emerging things I would like to call pandemic pitches. But speaking of the pandemic, we should talk about this thing that happened last week. Dieter, I'm going to make you do it.

As for better or worse, this became your story. I just have been calling it the website. Capital T, capital W. I will let Dieter tell the whole story, but I will say, by the story. time this podcast goes out, it will have been one week since the president held a press conference and a flow chart was held up describing a website that you would go on to, you would check your symptoms, it would say either you don't need a test or it would say you do need a test. It would direct you to a drive-through testing center in the parking lot of a major retailer.

They had Target and CVS and Loggins and everybody on stage with them. You would get tested in a drive-through testing center and then, you know, some time would pass. and then you would get results on that website. They literally held up a flowchart saying this was going to be happening. Yep. And for, who knows, I'll let Dieter unpack all the details, but the president said Google was going to do it. Yeah, so there's two ways to tell the story.

The first way is to tell the story as I experienced it, as a journalist and how we, as all of us experienced it as a bunch of journalists, tried to chase down the story. That's too painful for me to go through again. So I'm going to tell the story chronologically based on all of the reporting that has come out a little bit of mine, some great reporting from the New York Times, from Washington Post and from Wired.

And I might be forgetting one other person, but really good reporting. So here's what happened. A bunch of tech companies are talking to administrative officials in the White House saying, all right, here's what we're doing? What do you want us to do? Let's all work together.

And Google mentioned to reportedly Jared Kushner, hey, we're making this website. Verily's going to do it. We think it's going to be able to, you know, like direct people to get some testing. It's a test thing in the Bay Area, very least this weird little startup part of Alphabet, which is a sister company, or it's just the parent company of Google, blah, blah, blah, all this. All this gets explained. So he wanted to tell Donald

Trump some of this. So it has been reported that he overpromised what he was told by Google to Donald Trump. And so Donald Trump had been told or believed that Google was going to make a website that would solve this nationwide, where you could just find out if your symptoms made you, you know, qualify for a test and then where to go get a test. Can we just stop there for one second? second and say that the funniest part of this, absolutely the funniest part of this, is that Alphabet's stupid corporate structure caused like a nationwide testing panic. Yep. Because no one knows how that works.

Yep. Okay. Well, so you have to, you have to like start parsing out. Does he not know what the real answer is? Is he lying or is he just confused by Alphabet's corporate structure because all of us are? It may have been a combination of all three of those things. So the next thing that happens chronologically is Google goes, uh,

why is he saying our name? What's happening? Are we making a website? Where did the 1,700 people number come from? Oh, it came from the fact that 1,700 people inside Google, like, raised their hand and said they'd be willing to help. What do we do?

So they scramble, verily, you know, says we're launching a site. It's only going to be for the Bay Area. Maybe we'll expand it if things go well. Google says, uh, yeah, we're making a website, but it's going to be mostly information. Wait, no, I want to defend ourselves a little bit in the middle of this. Yeah, yeah.

Trump says Google's making a website. Yeah. Okay, everyone prints Google's making a website. Uh-huh. The American media is hard-coded to just put the words any president says in a headline. President says X is why all, everyone is like, well, that's the headline. He's making an announcement. Then we go and ask Google, hey, what's up with your website?

Hours pass. Like a long time passes. I would say that Deeter, you are among the world's best reporters of Google does a thing. I do it. I do it a lot. You're very, very good at. We're like, this is weird. Google tweets a statement that says from Verily.

Yeah. Everyone literally emails when we know Google's press people. Everyone, me, like me, Dieter, other reporters. Hey, this is a statement from Verily. What's up with Google? website and they say this is the work that's being referred to because they cannot say there's no google website right google's in this very difficult position that i have a lot of sympathy for they cannot say we're not helping yep no it's not great for them to contradict this president in particular

or any president but this president in particular and a lot of people google want to help yeah so they cannot say we don't know what they're talking about we're not helping they just say here's what we're doing and very conspicuously limit it to what Verily is doing. Right. So you're right, okay, Google's not making a website. Like, we have it. Yeah. Because they weren't. Correct. It wasn't happening at that time. Yep. Then there's a scramble where they decide they're going to do it, which is the right choice. But they, they just, Google decides they're going to do it, but it's unclear. Like, Google also knows, like straight up, you can't actually just go make a website that collects a bunch of people's health information. nationwide just for the hell of it.

People rag on Google all the time for collecting too much data. Justifiably so. But like HIPAA still exists. It hasn't been completely waived yet in this moment. And so Google doesn't know if it can do it. If it's possible to make this website, it seems silly. Of course, can you make a website with a quiz on it? Yes, that seems doable.

But like there's rules. Maybe this should ask BuzzFeed. Yeah. Do you have a fever and are you coughing? You should get tested. Which coronavirus symptom are you? Well, the other X-factor here is, like, in order to direct people to drive through testing facilities, they need to exist. Yeah, that's the other problem.

Right. So Google makes the call. What we're going to do is we're going to make, like, an informational website. We're going to do as much as we can as Google. We're going to pull information from WHO, from CDC, all the local state authorities. We're going to be an official canonical source of information that you can trust. Meanwhile, on the side, every big tech company is signed. a pledge that they're going to help tamp down misinformation, which is put a pin in that.

We should come back to that. And then they put out like a series of like six tweets from the Google Coms account saying, we are aligned with the administration. We are making this website. Verily is making this other website. This website that Google is making is going to like have information on it. Verily's website, it's going to be limited to the Bay Area. This is what's happening.

And then the president gets up and says, see, see everybody, he holds a printout of the tweets up and says, see, I was right. Can I just, again, pull this out of the, there's nothing funnier than holding up a printout of tweets in claiming you are right in any circumstance. If you find yourself being like, what I should do is print out a series of tweets and then brandish them at someone saying I was right, it doesn't matter who you are. Just reconsider that choice. And Google still is not making the website that the White House with its flowchart and its tweets claimed that Google itself was making. But at this point, we're now in the world of, like, nitpicking of, is Google making it or is Google's sister company Verily, which is another division of Alphabet when they both happen to share the same damn CEO in the first place and who knows making it or what? Verily's website launches.

It lasts for about 12 hours before it shuts down and is full and no one else can subscribe to go see if they can get a test. It's Bay Area only. It's very, very limited. It is reported that they have only conducted 20 tests. Yeah. The Verily Web. 20, 20. Two zero. Somewhere in this process, it had been promised that this website that Google was making was going to be launched on the evening of Monday the 16th. Google let us know that afternoon or that morning that actually we're going to like take a little bit more time to get this right. I personally think one of the things that they were taking more time for is they actually do want to make a more ambitious, more helpful website instead of just like a Wikipedia page of links to information from the WHO and the CDC.

So we'll see. We'll see what they can launch the first time around. We'll see, you know, what happens. But to me, like, the moral of this whole story is the most important thing in terms of, like, understanding what's going on is to get accurate information from institutions that you trust. And for all of the shit that Google has taken over the years for data privacy, that, again, has been justified. You look at our tech, you know, survey that we did not too long ago. And people overwhelmingly like and trust. Google. And so if, you know, the administration is trying to like chill people out, it makes sense for them to say Google's doing it because people might go, oh, well, I trust Google to make a website. And the thing of all of this is if you asked me, like, who should make the website, the national website that has to collect a little bit of data, but they keep it safe and they, they, you trust them to like get rid of it if they say they're going to get rid of it, but also has the technical chops to actually pull in a ton of information from a ton of places. On the prime, you know, the private, privacy question, I go, I don't know who.

On the, like, actually make the website question, there's nobody that better than Google making this website. It's like, they're the best ones to do it, but nobody knows if it's being done. What are the pieces of the puzzle, right? They need a bunch of people to show up, identify themselves in their location, tell them some health information and maintain it in a private way, direct them, aggregate that newly created database of users with another database of testing locations, scheduling capacity, direct people there in a way that doesn't overload all those facilities,

return results into another database, and then match those results with people. And then, you know, hopefully do some second order analysis of that data to figure out what, right? It's Google. Yeah. All I really, I just described ways for a virus, right? Like, that's all I described. They could absolutely build it.

They just didn't get asked before they got, this thing got announced. And then, and Dieter, I think this is your misinformation point. They made a lie true, which is a very, difficult position for literally everyone to be in, right? The thing was not true when he said it. And Google, again, for very understandable reasons, and I think from a genuine sense of duty to do the right thing, made the lie true. Well, at least half true. We still don't know what the website is going to do. They made it half true. Once you're brandishing the tweets, you're claiming it's true, right? Like, when you've arrived at that point. The other thing that I think is the most important here is

many people ask us, why do you care about this website so much? We've now talked about the website for 10 minutes. The website, it doesn't matter. I don't care if Google builds it or Apple builds it or Amazon builds it or, I don't know, like a bunch of kids get together and do it on Squarespace, right? Like, it doesn't matter. The number of pitches in my inbox from people claiming that they have already done it is out of control. And I'm not posting a single one of them or tweeting a single one of them because,

you know what? I don't know who you are, friend. So I'm glad you made a website, but I don't, like, who are you? Yeah, and there's one in Canada. A bunch of insurance companies have built something similar. Oscar Health, which is Joshua Kushner's company. Jared Kushner's brother has made one. Like, yes, this idea exists.

People can build it. What doesn't exist is actual testing capacity. And so we're focused on the website because it is step one in the announced plan to roll out massive testing capacity. And so if you can't even get to step one, this is the interface for finding a test, then it kind of seems like maybe that testing capacity isn't there. And that to me is like there's not the right data to manage the crisis. And honestly, we're a tech website. Of course, we're very interested in Google's website.

Like, no one has ever like you overcover Google's messaging strategy. Like, honestly, we probably overcover Google's messaging strategy. But like, this is of far more critical importance. Of course we're going to cover a retwist and turn of it. The last thing I'll say, and I just want, I think this. is the other side of the coin. The ability to manufacture these tests, the ability to get these tests done is the important thing. It is the thing that we are not doing well at. I want to call out Nicole Wetzman, who wrote a piece for this week, about how the testing works. Yeah.

PCR testing, which is the kind of testing we're doing right now. I didn't know this. It requires something called thermocycling, which is incredibly energy inefficient because you have to heat the thing up and cool it down and heat it up again. There is another way of testing. It's an isothermic method. Anyway, she wrote up at this. It's a super interesting piece. It is the other side of the coin. I just want to call out, we're covering the testing side of it as well as the user interface for testing.

It's, I think the sort of Google calamity got all the attention, but the real story. And we have been saying this to ourselves, to our staff on Twitter, whoever will listen. The real story is testing. Right. Whether or not there's a Google website, I hope they make one. I honestly and sincerely do. It will be good. but the real most important thing is if you feel sick, can you get a test?

We should find out. Yeah. By the way, it will have been a week, right? It will have been a week since that happened by the time this podcast goes out. Yep. And hopefully it'll be posted by then. And again, like, if the CDC makes a website, I don't care. As long as people, like, know when they can get a test or how to get a test, that's, that's it.

I mean, the tests have to exist and then, like, know how to get one. It seems really obvious, but it turns out it's very, very complicated right now. Indeed, it is. And there's even further things to talk about beyond the testing, because you could overtest, it turns out. But we're just going to let that go for another time. I feel like we can worry about having noise in the data once there's like a sufficient amount of data. Yeah, that seems about right. All right.

We're going to take a break. We're not going to talk with the virus the next segment. Well, like a little bit. But not in the way that you think because we're going to talk about the iPad and the MacBook. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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and instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, I said we were going to talk about it a little bit. So here's just like a tiny little bit. Apple canceled WWDC. It's online only.

Great. we were long expecting some new products in this time frame. This is a time frame where Apple put out new things. And they put them out. Can I just list the number of products that we're sort of like vaguely expecting from Apple right now? Yeah. So if you're listening to this, you already know we were expecting the iPad Pro and the new MacBook era. Those came.

We're also expecting new MacBooks that have like 14-inch screens and also getting the new switch keyboards across the entire MacBook line. We are expecting air tags so you can locate stuff. We're expecting the iPhone SE2 slash iPhone 9 slash whatever the heck you want to call it. They cannot call it the iPhone 9. We could have that argument when it happens, man. There's a hardware refresh of the Apple TV also rumored out in the world. And I'm probably forgetting something.

So like there's a lot of just Apple hardware stuff just kind of floating around. And it seems like it's enough to hold like a full-on Apple keynote. They don't always do Apple Keynotes in the source. spring, but they often do. But instead, they just, you know, they couldn't because you can't hold, you can't have big groups of people in the same space. So, uh, they did something in between. It was in between just a press release, go get it and, uh, a full on keynote. They had journalists, you know, get on conference calls. Uh, we watched a video that sort of like described what the new products were. Uh, and they're, uh, you know, they're announced. The iPad pro and the

Mac Quick Air. So I, in our little rundown here, I put the iPad pro first. Okay. Uh, because I think it's the most interesting thing. It's because it has a keyboard cover with a trackpad, and there's trackpad and mouse support in iOS 13.4. And then yesterday, you very confidently told me the MacBook Air was more interesting. And I do not understand that, so I'm just going to ask you that from the jump.

So the most interesting thing they announced was not the iPad Pro, and it was not the MacBook Air. It was the new Magic keyboard, which is different, because it's also compatible with last year's iPad Pros and in general, trackpad support is coming to basically every iPad, so any Bluetooth mouse or trackpad should

work with it. So that's the most interesting thing by far. But that magic keyboard, which we should talk about, isn't coming out till May. But right now, just looking at the computers that you can go by, the iPad Pro has a faster processor and a LiDAR camera. And sure, I don't know how I feel about an AR right now. Disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which makes VR, which is sort of like AR, but there's just different letter in front of the R.

I just say it, man. But the MacBook Air, I think that it has, A, the keyboard we've all been waiting for. B, they doubled the storage and brought the price under the magical $1,000 point that the MacBook Air should be at. And C, the new processor on it, granted it's still a Y series, but it seems like it has crossed sort of a invisible threshold where you can say to most people, you will be fine with this. When I reviewed the last MacBook error, I was like, it's got this processor. You'll probably be fine with it. It'll slow you down a little bit, but it's probably not going to bug you as long as you do kind of standard stuff. So it's like fine.

I'm very curious to see when we review this new MacBook error, if instead of saying it's like fine, we'll be able to say, yeah, it's fine. Like the difference in tone on those fines, those three things together means that this MacBook error is like Apple finally, after five years has got. back to having a good default laptop for everybody. Like, think how long we have been wandering in the freaking keycap desert. In the touchbar desert, in the USBC Dongle Life Desert. It's been five years of kind of crappy MacBooks. Do you know how I know it's been five years? Because I saw a 2015 MacBook Pro.

the discrete CPU. Fans for not a lot. Just even if you liked everything about the MacBook Air, Apple's like three months behind the mainstream PCs getting like these modern processors. Wait, so let's focus on this processor of a thousand dollar one. Because it is 1.1 gigahertz dual core core I3. Yeah.

Nothing about that says to me, this is an adequate processor for everyone. What has made you think that? The $1,300 or the $1,300 one, which is 1.1 gigahertz quad core I 5. Okay, I buy it. That's probably fine for almost anything. The base model, dual core I3, does not, to me, scream no compromises. I think that dual core I3 of the 10th gen is like a significant difference from the last generation at the MacBook on, whatever it was.

Again, I don't know. I haven't actually used it and benchmarked it. So I could be wrong. But I'm just saying, like, the possibility exists for, I think, the first time in five years of a, like, good default MacBook for everybody. We'll see. It all depends on how fast that default processor is. But I kind of am hopeful. I don't know, Paul, am I crazy?

Is this processor, like, is there any chance that it's good? Am I just, like, naive? I mean, the way I've been following PC, I haven't played extensively with, like, a 10th-gen, like, mobile, like, super mobile processor Windows laptop, but reviews-wise, this has been a huge win. Like Intel, this has been a true generational leap. And Intel, it's been a long time coming to have a generational leap. So yes, the I3 will be relatively slow, but it's going to be way better than a previous low-end MacBook Air.

Like up to like 50% faster. Oh, wow. Well, so we got to get them. We got to review them. We got to do all that. I will say the other thing to call out is obviously the keyboard with scissors switches. And they change the key layout. So it's inverted T arrow keys. The amount of walk back that this computer represents, right? They basically put the MacBook error out to pasture. And then they brought it back because people wouldn't stop buying a non-retna MacBook error with ports. And then now they've walked back a bunch of design decisions they made on the pro computers. Butterfly keyboards. They have basically made the MacBook error that, like, Joanna Stern was asking for in 2016, right? Just give me a MacBook Air with a retina screen. That's what this looks like,

save for the lack of an SD card slot and some USBA ports. If this thing had one USBA port in an SD card slot, I'd be like, no one should ever buy any other computer. This is the only computer that exists in the world. It's still got to live that tongue in the life a little bit. Can I just tell you that I went back and re-read and re-watched my, review of the original MacBook, MacBook, MacBook, the tiny little 12-inch, which I still deeply love. And my whole take there, the ending of that review was the thing that sucks about the future is that it isn't here yet, so hurry the hell up.

Because holding that thing, I was like, this is what the, this is what the future of laptops is going to be. All they need to do is like, make the key, like, I actually thought the keyboard was going to be okay. I didn't know it was going to turn into disaster. I was like, all they need to do is make a little bit faster, maybe out of port, and like things will be great. five years later, I was right. It was the future of laptops. It just turned out that that future was kind of sure. It just went a little sideways.

Okay. Well, so that's the matter. We got to get it. We got to test it. Yep. I mean, are we going to run Premiere on it and say Premiere slow? We're probably not going to do that. We'll find some meaningful way to test this thing. But that leads right into the iPad.

Yeah. It's hard to talk about this iPad without the keyboard. Try. Let's just try. Real quick. There's two things. It's got a new processor. I believe it's the A, is it 13 or 12?

A12 Z. A12 Z. Nelai, why is it a Z instead of an X? I will tell you that a senior Apple executive said confidently because it's better than X. That's the answer that I have. Okay. So it's presumably faster. Not that last year's iPad Pro is slow in any way, shape, or form.

And then there's a light up. So there's a wide angle camera on the back. Good choice. There's a standard on the back. Fine. Standard wide. And then there's a LiDAR camera. Apple wants you to know that it works on the photon level, which that's how lasers work.

Nothing has ever made Dieter this mad. There's some extremely bad marketing copy here. It's like, here is the iPad. It is built with atoms. It works on an atomic level. Come on. This laser goes at the speed. of light. It's like, yep.

Got it. Understood. But it allows you to do AR without having to wave the iPad around to get a sense of the room. It can just get a sense of the room almost instantly. It allows you to put augmented reality objects on like arbitrary objects instead of just the floor or a wall or some other flat surface because it's able to use the processing power of the iPad and the like immediate detection of like depth in a really like granular way. so you can like stick a pillow on a couch

or like a weirdly shaped chair instead of just like on the floor. Can I explain why I'm stoked about LIDAR? Okay. Well, first of all, this is just very exciting that this is becoming a truly consumer level mass-produced sensor

because that's going to be great for like robotics applications and stuff like that. Okay. And that's just been the story of LIDAR over like the past five years. What I'm really stoked about is for content creation.

There's this app called Displayland. I don't know if you've seen it. It's making the rounds. So it's like an iPhone app. And it's for photogrammetry. So you can scan an object. You just walk around an object slowly or walk around a whole room or apartment or whatever. And it creates a detailed 3D scan and the texture to go on to that scan.

And then you can like... 3D print it? No, you could 3D print it, but you could also like put. put it into a VR and now you put it into a game, you know, that something that's become so expensive and something that's so difficult in game development is, is the objects themselves.

You know why I'm laughing right now, Paul? Why are you laughing? Samsung claims to have already done this. They did this on the note 10. You can like rotate the note 10 around like a little model and it'll like give you a model of it. It's terrible, but. So that's the thing.

It's pretty bad right now. Displayland, it's a lot better. But if you had LIDAR, because right now they're just doing it with like cameras and accelerometer and gyroscope information. If you also have LIDAR, you can do some, I believe, very, very good scans of this kind. And then there's just a few more tools that we need to help simplify them so that they run well in games. But I just think game development has gotten so democratized. And like people, people are all hanging out in VR right now. or in like, you know, VR-type spaces or Fortnite or whatever, you know, like a video game is a really cool social space right now.

And it's very easy to do the rudimentary game development of just like a camera that moves around in 3D space. But the assets are very difficult to produce right now. And so if we can democratize the production of game-ready 3D assets, then gamers will be able to rise up. Yeah. Fortnite school, for instance, could be really on the table. That was the longest buildup to the pitch for Fortnite school I've ever heard. I've only ever heard one other pitch for Fortnite school, so it's not a big data set. But I'm going to say that's the longest one. Can I do my irresponsible speculation now?

Yeah. All right. Apple cares a lot about AR of all the companies. It's an area of intense interest, Neelai. It's an area of intense interest. Every time you go to an Apple event now, there's like, there's one. empty table and then just a bunch of confused people walking around it holding iPads in the air because instead of putting the product out, they put the product out in AR. Like, they love it. Like they love it. And there's all these rumors of them building glasses. Well, Apple just told us that

to do AR right, you need a LiDAR sensor. Right. I mean, they, they've made a technology bet on the iPad now that people are going to build to and build around. They're not going to take it away. And so my guess is that whatever Apple's future AR products are are going to involve some sort of LiDAR sensor because they've now made, they've just put it out there that the best AR they offer is the iPad Pro with a LiDAR sensor. And they can't necessarily do it with like 45 cameras or any of the ways other people want to do it. So like in self-driving cars, for example, which is a slightly different space, there's a huge argument over whether you need a LiDar sensor on a car, which is. is the bet that many, many companies are making, or whether you can do it all with cameras, which is the bet that Tesla is making. And Elon Musk has called LiDAR, quote, a local maximum, right? He's like, you get this far, and that's as far as you're ever going to get. We've got to figure

out with cameras because that's the real way to do it that will let us do everything. I'm not saying that's one-to-one with AR. I'm saying it's just a similar kind of conversation. Apple is clearly making the bet right now, at this moment, that to do it right, you need a LiDAR sensor. And I think that's just kind of interesting. Like, you don't see them play their their cards that way very often. But I would bet you that if we're doing that, their glasses, the glasses will have some sort of time of flight, depth sensing system that is not just multiple cameras. Because they've been at multiple cameras depth sensing since the iPhone 7, right?

Like they've been cranking away at sensing depth with two different cameras for a long time now. And they've decided, all right, we need to add a liner sensor. If you guys had to guess when Apple glasses. I still think it's like three or four years out. Like, that is still, I mean, they're not even at the place where the watch can keep its face on all the time. Right. Like, that's, that's really hard.

I could imagine along what you're saying with LIDAR that theoretically, LIDAR is going to be a lot. If the sensor can gather all this depth information and you don't have to synthesize it from like three cameras, right? You're doing way less GPU work, basically. Yeah. Because you just have straight up 3D data. So, like, maybe that's going to be more efficient in that sense. But Paul, the A12Z is the world's most powerful processor. It's unparalleled.

It offers both the performance of a high-end workstation, a rack-mounted server, and 45 different generations of Xboxes. Right. But your glasses aren't going to be able to hold an iPad-sized battery. Right. And this is, like, one of those things where, you know, they can do almost anything with an iPad. They've got a giant battery. They've got a big processor.

They've got a lot of surface area so that processor gets really hot. You know, like, that's true. The iPad is the place where they can push their sort of arm ambitions faster than anything,

harder than anything, and this is kind of where we are. I just think it's like, it's a very interesting piece of hardware to reveal because there still isn't a killer app for AR at all, as near as I can tell.

And they're desperately trying to get there and they're adding more and more tools to it. They're more committed to it than anybody else. It's hot lava. You could, like, you can put, Lava in your living room.

I can't wait for that. It's going to be super fun. Yeah. I think three years on glasses. It's still my guess. Okay. On the processor front, though, I want to bake off of this versus the MacBook error so bad.

But it's like impossible to do. It's kind of, it's not truly impossible. Like math. Math is math. Paul, do you know how many emails I got from people who are mad at me that I baked off Premiere on a Mac versus PC and the premiere wasn't optimized? It's like, there's no way to do this right. I didn't know.

Yeah. If you can figure it out, tweet at us, Paul's at Future Paul. He's, we've got nothing but time on our hands. The reason that you can't bake off the iPad Pro to the MacBook Air is that the iPad Pro is not a computer.

Oh my God. According to Apple. All right. Let's, let's turn the page to this keyboard. This keyboard made, made of gold. It's made of platinum.

Like in Dungeons and there's gold and then there's platinum, you know? Three? $300,000 for a keyboard. $300 or $350, $300 for the $1, $350 for the $12.9. I still think they should just call it $13. I don't know why they don't. It's super annoying.

So here's what it does. It's a backlit. It's a scissor switch. It has this fancy hinge where you open it up with one hand, apparently, or in one motion, and then it kind of breaks about a third of the way up on the back of the iPad, so it floats a little bit over the keyboard or over the deck. And it has a little, bitty trackpad on it.

We haven't seen one in person. The looking at it, there's like, you know, some space behind the keyboard where the iPad floats over it. My hunch is that trackpad is actually pretty small, which is interesting. Yeah, it seems very small. You look at the trackpad on a MacBook,

and it, like, might as well be the whole deck. Like, the whole palm rest is basically a trackpad, right? And this is very small. Like, there's no palm rest on this thing. There's a palm area. There's like a knuckle, like a thumb knuckle joint rest area. And there's a lot of dead space behind a keyboard deck where the display hangs over. Yeah.

And we don't know how much it weighs. We do not know how much it weighs. Right. So we're going to do the thing where we try to describe a 3D object to you in audio. And I would normally say if you're in your car, pull over, but I suspect most of you are not in your cars this week. But metaphorically pull over. The profile reminds me a little bit of the IMA. G3 lamp or was that G4?

The lamp iMac. Yeah, that was a G4. Okay. All right. Here's what's going to happen. You're at home. You're not in your car. Go to your bathroom.

Turn on the faucet. And Neli is going to describe this thing to you in 20 seconds the perfect amount of time for hand washing in three. I'm going to draw this out to 20 seconds. One. Go. All right. Imagine a book. You unfold the book.

But vertically. So you're unfolding the book side. I'm just, I really am just stretching the side. So turn the book sideways so that the spine is pacing is pacing away from you. And then you open the book like that. And then magically, the bottom of the first half pulls towards you so that the bottom of the book is flat to the ground. But then you can change the angle of the top part independently of the hinge. Okay. You got a two hinge situation. Yeah. You got a first hinge that opens out away from you. And then the bottom of the top pulls towards

you. And then you can adjust the angle there. Another choice you have, now that you've finished washing your hands, is to just look at a picture on the internet because you are almost certainly. They did this because they did not want to build a traditional laptop shape and capitulate to the fact that they're very close, right, with a track pad now to just making a laptop. They're also very close to a surface, right? If they had just done the traditional, you know, like laptop deck, it would have looked exactly like. like a surface. They would have had to have figured out a kickstand solution. You know, the surface kickstand, some people love it, some people don't. It definitely stops the, oh, crap, my iPad flipped over in my lap problem. Yeah. Right? Which if you have a current iPad Pro and you just try

to use it in a bunch of places, it just like flops over way more than you would expect. It also solves the, I would like to look at my big, beautiful iPad screen without a keyboard in front of it problem. Yeah. So they've got this keyboard and a trackpad. Do you do you Would you like to discuss its single USBC port? It has a single USBC port that is on the left-hand side of the keyboard. And it only does USBC pass-through power. One thing we don't know, actually, is how, like, what the wattage is that USBC pass-through, because often USB-P-C pass-through is not as powerful or, you know, as many watts as you want.

So that's interesting. Wait, so it's definitely lower, because think about what it is passing through to. You got to clarify, what do you mean pass-past-through? So you can, it doesn't do like full USB, right? You can't plug an accessory into it. But if you plug a power source into it, it will pass that power source through. And USB pass through, it's like, you know how you can like, you can buy like a USB cable that like doesn't do data? It just has the wires for power and that's it.

That's what USB pass through is. So this thing will not transfer data. Maybe that's a security thing. I don't know. Maybe the Pogo pins can't handle it. I don't know. But it will transfer power. But it's transferring power through like a physical Pogo pin, you know,

connection. So the idea that it would be able to do that at, you know, 30, 45 watts is like, I don't know. It seems a very sketchy idea to me. Yeah. So when I sit down at my iPad to play Fortnite school and I want to plug in my gaming mouse, I will plug that into the bottom of the iPad where you would normally charge it. Right, which is halfway up the iPad on the right hand side. So you'll have it USB pass-through at the corner of the deck on the left-hand side, and then you'll have a USB cable. And that's where I'll charge it because Fortnite School is incredibly power-hungry. So I'll charge it on the bottom left with pass-through,

and my gaming mouse will be plugging on the top right, or right-ish. Yes. Okay. And those, so those pogo pins are the smart connector. So this thing clips into a frame, basically, a flat surface with the pogo pins, and that has wires down to the USBC port on the side of basically in the hinge. Yeah. And there's just no way that those Pogo Pins are doing, they will probably do as much power

as the iPad needs. Yeah. There's no way Apple's going to let it not charge and it's sort of standard spec. But I doubt if you plugged in an 85 watt MacBook Pro adapter, it's going to give the iPad the full 85 watts. Yeah, there's no way. So we'll see. Then there's the sort of larger question.

I want to talk about how the mouse works a lot, actually. But then there's my just sort of all-time question of the smart connector on the back of an iPad. We have been told over and over again is an open connector. It's not in a made-for-I-pad program. Anybody can do whatever they want with it. And yet, only Apple and Logitech have ever made devices to plug into this connector. It is one of the all-time mysteries of the iPad. And now you're in a position where this thing supports track pads.

So like the opportunities for hardware innovators. to turn your iPad into a cooler laptop-y thing or sky-high, I would really like to understand why there's so little investment into the smart connector ecosystem. And Apple itself is like any USB or Bluetooth trackpad or mouse will work.

They're not like many people will build smart connector products. It is by far like, Heim Gartenberg and I sit around talking about MFI, you know, like a bunch of cool kids. Who doesn't talk about Apple's licensing restrictions all the long.

And the smart connector is like, they have said it's not an MFI. And yet there's not this rush to make stuff so forth. So hopefully we'll see. But there is a Logitech one for the previous generations of iPads. I am, you know, I'm a hopeful guy. Despite being beaten down and broken and lied to my entire life, I still believe that good things can happen. And I believe that someone is going to make a keyboard accessory with a trackpad

that uses a smart connector because the competition, is $300. So there's a market opportunity there. It's a very obvious one. Okay, let's talk about this trackman. So it's coming out in iOS 13.4. You can try it right now in the public beta. And then that's going to hit on the 24th.

Yep. So they're not waiting until iOS 14, which is itself interesting. And then there's like how it works. So let's talk about how it works first because the vagaries of Apple's feature politics or whatever. it's pretty interesting. You dove into it

more closely than anybody yesterday. Yeah, and I finally got a chance to play with it on the public beta today so I can talk about it. So there's no pointer. There's a little dot. That's your pointer.

So it's like your finger. It's like a pointer. And it does the things that you would expect a track pad to do. You can right click, which is the thing I forgot to mention in my story.

You can scroll defaults to natural scrolling, which is the right kind of scrolling. Can you change it? You can, unfortunately, change it. Yes. You, and then you can also do like, it works well with like the standard sort of mouse actions on a website, for example. So we have a back end thing on our website where like you want to drag and drop stuff and you could never do that on an iPad because the drag and drop web thing didn't work.

And now it does. So they did a lot of super traditional not whack ado mouse stuff with it when it starts interacting with things that expect a mouse. So good job. Second, they did something interesting. So it looks like a little dot. When you hover over a UI element that you would normally tap with your finger, the shape of the like shaded little mouse area thing changes to match the shape of the button that you're hovering over. Does it snap?

And it snaps a little bit too. There's a little bit of acceleration where it sort of like like goes over the thing. If you've ever used a touch, this is going to sound so bad. I'm going to say a thing so that you understand what I'm talking about. and you're going to get super mad, but I promise you it is way better than the thing I'm about to say. Are you ready?

This is such a promise. It feels like when you like bouse over to one of these little icons and it like hits the thing and like it sort of like snaps to it just a little tiny bit. It feels just a little bit like using the touchpad

to go to an icon on the Apple TV with the Apple remote. No. No. Wait, back up, back up. The thing I said before. Go back. I told you it's okay.

I promise you it's okay. You can turn it off. So you can totally turn off the capture thing? Yes, you can turn off to change the shape of the thing to match the thing. Okay, my worry is that I'm going to, I've got this little gray circle.

It's going around. That's my mouse cursor. It's a little hard to find. Would prefer maybe an arrow, but whatever. I'll live with it. And then I'll lose it. It will be absorbed into a button.

And I'm like, uh-oh, where'd my cursor go? Does that the sensation or is it better than that? No, it's just there. It's just, it's like when you're playing a first-person shooter in easy mode and it just like handles a little bit of extra aiming for you so you can get that headshot, even though you actually suck at it. It's just like that. It doesn't actually like go flying around where you don't expect it or get locked on something or whatever.

It's just like a little bit of assistance to like hit the target. Aim assist. I mean, I like when I first saw, I was like, is this the true great compromise? between mouse and touch. And this is the table stakes idea that was there all along, or is there a reason that mice don't work like this? And I obviously need to try it to find out. Well, Paul, so it turns out that you want to do more than select text

and scroll and click on buttons of the mouse. You want to like navigate your operating system, right? Yeah, three finger swipe. No problem. So three finger swipe up goes home, Three-finger swipe up and hold takes you to multitasking. Three-finger swipe to the left or the right switches apps. But if you happen to have a slide-over app open,

three-finger swipe, as long as the mouse is inside the slide-over app, will switch between slide-over apps. Similarly, three-finger swipe up will open up the slide-over deck. If you want to open up those slide-overs in the first place, you throw the mouse all the way to the right-hand side of the screen. It sort of stops, and then you, like, keep scrolling or keep, you know, dragging your finger. and then the slide over as you slide to the right jumps in moving left. That disconnect between the direction of the mouse and the direction of the thing that happens,

that is where things get weird between the touch interface and the mouse interface. Because with the dock coming up from the bottom or notification center coming down from the top or the slide over coming in from the right, the motion of your hand becomes the opposite of the motion of the thing on the screen. You know what I mean? So to get the dock, you throw the mouse at the bottom. And then you sort of keep dragging your finger and then the dock slides up. It's like you're, you're digging for the dock. Yeah, it feels a little weird.

You'll probably get used to it. It's probably fine. But that is like one odd element to like you, like what your mouse does and where it is, like is a little bit contextually dependent. And that could theoretically get a little bit like. Okay, here's what I've heard so far. Just to back this up. Okay. It works a lot like the Apple TV interface.

And it doubles down on the insanity of, the iPad multitasking. Why would I want this in my life? Because you could actually, like, highlight text without having to learn finger gymnastics. Sure. I just... Because you don't have to lift your arm up off the deck of the table to, like, get gorilla arm to tap the thing on the screen.

Okay. I mean, I buy all that. It just seems like the amount of reinventing the wheel to avoid just doing it like the Mac is at an all-time high. Yeah, but there's like, there are things that are. better than the Mac for sure. So, for example, you slide up to the top, it highlights the time if you're in the upper right, and that brings down

control center. You're just like, continue your slide up. You don't even have to click on it. Control center comes down. You bring your mouse over to the brightness scale, and you want to adjust the brightness. Well, what do you do? It's a Mac. You like, click down and then drag it. On the touchpad on the iPad, you just hover your mouse over that slider, and then

you just use two fingers to scroll it, and it changes. Okay. It's cool, right? Like, basically, like, The metaphorical equivalent is like one finger taps, two fingers basically acts like a drag all the time, like scroll, basically. And then three fingers is for like universal iPad OS system level stuff. Right. And like if you have that sort of framework in your head, everything makes sense, except I still think that like edge bring elements in is a little bit weird. And you like, you got to trust me on the snapping thing. When I think of the people who most often buy iPads, I think of people who instinctively and intuitively build a framework for how many fingers operate at which level of abstraction in the interface. Well, the idea, Nelai, is that you learn it intuitively through just playing around with him, not having to watch how-to videos. That's the problem with the iPad's overall interface is to understand how the shit works.

You have to watch how-to videos for a split screen and slide over. Yeah. So how much of this are they going to throw away with 14? That is an excellent question. I have no idea. If they give you a window mode in 14, then they have completely capitulated to the surface. Do you have any idea if I can't imagine Apple allowing this, but let's say a developers been sitting on the fence like, hey, we can make a, what's that word when you make a Mac app,

but you use iOS to make it? We can make a Catalyst app, no problem. but we have a truly mouse-driven UI. And we would love to put this on the iPad, but it really does not work without a mouse. Could someone put an app in the store, and there's a big warning, this is a mouse preferred experience?

No. That's like, if you're going to capitulate to Microsoft, do not capitulate to your software having mouse preferred logos on it. Like, that is some truly 90s Microsoft stuff. What about mouse enhanced? Oh my God. You don't want any of that.

Works with Microsoft Bob. Like you don't want those logos on your software at all. And you don't want your like how you navigate around the operating system to change depending on if you're in tablet mode or not. This is the problem with the surface is I bet you 90% of people never bother with tablet mode. And if you get stuck in tablet mode or not and you don't know exactly what's going on, it's super confusing and annoying. I would argue that this is the problem with the iPad. It's with the iPad pro. I have one.

Yeah. I like using it. It lives in its case all of the time. It never take it out of that case. And I never, that case, even this one's much lighter, right? The current keyboard folio thing is probably much lighter than the one that's coming out. It's still like a little bit heavy. Even the 11 is a little bit heavy.

And the keys are on the back of the case when you have it open in tablet mode. So I never want to sit around using that thing in portrait as a tablet unless I take it out of the case. and I never do it. And I think that this is like Apple's just quickly getting to the point where the utility of being able to just make it a pure tablet is kind of, it's getting overshadowed, but by what its aspirations for the product are with pro apps and keyboard support and 15 finger multitasking. So like that's the, that's the leads right into one of they just going to turn it into a Mac

conversation, which I will say to Apple's credit, they absolutely. do not care about. What did they do this week? They put out a MacBook Air and an iPad Pro at basically the same price point right on top of each other. And they're like, they're like, who cares? Like,

people are going to buy whatever one they want to buy. That's fine as long as they're buying them from us. That is a remarkable amount of confidence for any company. But it does make for, you know, people like us, people listen to this, being like, which one's which? Like, they just don't care. It's amazing that they don't care, but they clearly. do not care. Well, and they think the customers don't care. They don't think any, like,

the, the thing I put in the newsletter Thursday morning is, uh, they, like, nobody is confused when they go to, to the Apple store to buy something. They know what they want. It's not, it, there's no existential crisis here. Yeah. I think the existential crisis is like, they're going to put an arm processor on a Mac. Then these things are going to feel way closer than they ever have before. And now it comes down to which Apple operating system do you like better. And one of them is, one of them is still more complete than the other and the other. And the other one is more innovative and has all the energy behind it. Yep.

Well, so this is like, if you have siblings, I want you to know that even though your parents say that they love you all equally, they love your sibling more than you. And this is the problem with having two directly competitive products is deep in their heart, Apple loves one of them more. And if you are like a fan of the Mac, you're a little bit worried about that. Yeah, I would say that has edged off a little bit for me just because they have put out the 16th track with Pro. they put out this Mac Pro.

Like they have made very loud statements that they're still investing these products. Yeah, and the hardware. How about the software, Nealai? How's that going on the Mac right now? Have you heard of Metal 2? Once everyone else supports Metal 2, they'll be great. But as long as there's still hardware and people can do it, it's fun. Okay, let's take a break.

There is yet more hardware to talk about in this world. Some fancy game consoles. The next generation are coming at us. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that.

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MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, Paul. Mm-hmm. Hold this country together, man. Do your best with astonishing consistency. I got you, man.

My segment that I do every week has always and will always be called, I'm a Moog man now. Or so I would say Moog. So Moog and Korg are, You guys know, I've talked about this so many times, that I love to put synthesizers and all sorts of music creation apps on my iPad. And it's a very expensive habit because most of these cost $5, $10, $20 for some of them. Well, just as a fun, a musical way to occupy your mind is the quote. Moog has come out with, is made its mini-mug model.

the iOS app for free. Corg is making Kiosolator, which is a $20 app free. And it's just wonderful. I've been meaning to buy the Minimuk, but I just never got around to it. I downloaded it.

It's making great sounds. I just, I'll say this until I die. It feels so cool to download an app onto your iPad and feel like you've got new hardware. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like that's just such a, it feels like you downloaded more RAM. You know, you feel like you downloaded a gadget.

And it's, I mean, Corg calls its main iPad music app. It calls it gadget. That's, I don't know. Anyways, I was just, thank you to Corg and Moog. I'm going to really enjoy it. And I already have enjoyed it. And yeah, yeah, go download those apps because they're free and they make beautiful. What's your sound cloud, Paul? Beautiful noise. It's probably, it's probably future, Paul. All right. So Xbox Series X, PS5, again, strange times. No big events, no E3.

Yeah. They rolled out specs for these things in strange ways, but we know a lot about them now. Paul, walk us through it. It is so exciting. Sony did the greatest live stream that I've really seen in years. Basically, Sony had planned to do a talk at GDC where it would do a technical deep dive on the decisions that they were making for the PlayStation 5. Obviously, GDC has been canceled, so they just did it as a live stream. And they didn't try to pivot to something that was like consumer-facing or, or let's say, consumer-friendly.

but it was wonderful for someone like me who really wanted to nerd out about it and so now we know the specs of both of the consoles in the least in the abstract so like we've been hearing for a while they're both based on like am d's zintu architecture both have AMD RDNA 2 GPUs the Xbox series series X is rated at 12 terraflops right, with 52 compute units, while PlayStation 5 is going to be 10.28 terraflops with only 36 compute units. But, so that's the big distinction. So which one is more powerful, Paul? You have to answer right now.

You have to go on the record right now, which one is more powerful so that everyone can tweet at you that they disagree at Future Paul? Go. Can I give you a gut reaction? Yeah. I think it's going to be the PlayStation 5. Well, let me tell you what. More flops is more flops, right? I love me some flops.

Flops or flops. If you are just doing math, right? Flops are floating point operations per second, something like that. If you're just multiplying a lot of numbers and you have a problem where you can do all of that multiplication completely in parallel, the Xbox wins, right? Oh, that's a really down-to-earth explanation of how processing works. It's a real, real terraflop. Wow. Imagine you need to do a bunch of dishes, right?

Uh-huh. You only have one sink, right? Yeah. So it doesn't matter how, well, now you don't have flops anymore in this scenario. Nothing makes me happier than like trying to explain like CPUs versus GPUs in this way. Let me go. Okay, go. One sync is the compute unit, right?

How fast you do the dishes is. is the clock speed, right? Okay. So if your work can't be perfectly split up into all 52 or whatever compute units of the Xbox, it will benefit from having just a raw clock speed because you're just doing work faster on the PlayStation. Let me try to pull this metaphor

into something slightly less understandable, but more visually hilarious. What's faster? one extremely fast dishwasher or four slower dishwashers right because what's important to know is that four slower dishwashers are faster theoretically but when the game developer who's the guy who's holding the stack of dishes right is the game developer he's got to distribute work to all of the four dishwashers if he can't manage to to evenly distribute the work to the four, then the single will actually end up winning. That's why my gut instinct is that the PlayStation 5 might outperform the Xbox in an average case

because it's hard to always light up everything at once in parallel. But I don't know, actually, for sure, obviously. Is there anything architecturally that makes it hard to light up everything in parallel on the Xbox, or is it just that, like, it's just harder? You just got to figure shit out. No, it's like doing things in parallel is like a computer science problem. Yeah, yeah. It's just that sort of synchronization.

Paul, tell me if this metaphor is accurate. They're both basically using like the same like platform, the same chassis, you might say, like the same basic parts. But Microsoft made a Camero and Sony made a Corvette. I have no idea what the difference of those. That makes just not enough sense. Okay. The other big difference between these, and this one is, looks like it's looking like an obvious total win for Sony, is that Sony went SSD crazy. And so the PlayStation 5 is going to have an 825 gigabyte SSD.

Xbox Series X is going to have a one terabyte SSD. But it sounds like Sony's is going to be about twice as fast. Sony is doing a bunch of, like they made their own custom control. And this is why this, oh my gosh, this talk was so much fun. He's talking about like algorithms for moving data from the SSD to RAM and stuff. One thing I think both of these consoles are really going to benefit from that he was, is Mark Surny, I believe is his name, the Sony guy who's explaining all the stuff. Both of the, because SSDs are so much faster.

than hard drives. Game developers have been doing a ton of tricks with hard drives to put data all like together so that it can be read sequentially so it can be accessed in fast enough times to load something. And that's what game developers have had to do is duplicate a lot of data. So one of the things he mentioned was that like Spider-Man, there's like 400 copies of the same like mailbox in Spider-Man. Just to have data local. for where it's put on the physical hard drive. So now with SSDs, they're not going to have to do that. So games will be smaller, but also the amount of data that needs to stream from the

disk to the RAM is small. It's like everything's getting faster all at once. So did he say like maybe a hundred times speed up as far as disk usage over the PlayStation 4. So here's the thing that I latched on to from this presentation. You know, load time, load time, right? Like, the load time is faster. You have to spend less time looking at a screen with a tip on it. Great.

That's very exciting for me. But what the Sony presentation was saying is, like, look, if you've got faster load time, you can do stuff with, like, the level design that you couldn't do before. Because lots of games want to have no loading screen at all. And so you move from, like, one big, you know, set piece area to the next one. and in between those two set piece areas, the old one needs to go away and the new one needs to get loaded.

And so they have you walk through a long-ass tunnel, right? How many times have you done this? I'm doing this right now because I'm replaying Tomb Raider, right? Like, you all of a sudden are like walking through a cave for some reason and then you go to the next place, right?

But with a faster load time in the background, you don't have to go through a weird long-ass tunnel so that the next set-piece area has time to load. You could just go to the next one. So it will change the design, the design of levels because it will give game developers they'll have to do less

weird hacky things to work around the limitations of the disc speed. Yeah, it will change how especially open world games are developed in that sense, but I also think it's just like game developers will always do wild hacky things to get the most out of the hardware, but in some sense, like they've made it just, they've made it easier to make a game,

which is like really exciting. This games can be slightly less effort to create. Okay. So what is the big takeaway other than specs? Or game developers excited or which one should I buy? Who's going to buy? So here's a Darth on Twitter. If you know who Darth is, the Red Panda, actually asked me this question.

And I told him I don't give out advice on Twitter. I only give out Sark. But I actually said, here's how I see it. Microsoft has said that they are not going to have game exclusives at launch. And it is possible that we're, one of these is technically faster and has better specs, et cetera. But I think that for most people, you don't have an AK TV, you don't have a TV that supports variable refresh rate, you will benefit from like the improved thing, but it takes everybody,

you know, a year or so to figure out how to optimize for a console anyway most of the time. And so set aside, if you can, like the spec war, the like, oh my God, who's got the better, faster thing? Like, assume they're both like way faster and way better and in each other's range. then traditionally the next thing is who has the best games well that doesn't apply so what are we actually looking at here I think for Sony it's we have these games

and for Microsoft it's we have this ecosystem and actually replying to me and Darth the Red Panda was a guy who works for Microsoft Frank Shaw had a comm and he just replied with Microsoft answer which was I'm going to get this wrong now it was I believe

content, community, cloud, console. The classic four Cs of a console generation. So content, we have good games, community, like all your friends are on Xbox, cloud. That's not true though. Your stuff is like on Windows 10 and it's on X cloud and it's on your console and like everything's all working together and you don't have to use Steam because you can just use Microsoft services and whatever. And then lastly the console, the console, the

console is good. Like, if you look at Microsoft's thinking about how to build a gaming ecosystem. Wait, is that an order of priority? I don't know. The most important is content. And then there's community. And then there's cloud, which I'm still not sure what that means. And then it's console.

I think so. I just, I'm just proud of a Microsoft employee for tweeting out an entire tweet without using the word Azure. Because that doesn't happen very often. Well, it's done, Frank. You know, what they did not say was a cable box control, which is a real. thesis for the last time. The cable box control decision, right?

Microsoft screwing up the last generation so badly gave Sony a huge lead, right? And I think that's one of the most important things on the console is that your buddies are playing on the same console as you are so that you can easily party together and like play multiplayer games with your friends. So, you know, if your friends are still on a PS4 and you're getting a PS4, and you're getting a PS5, or you're looking at which next gen do I want. Well, all my friends are on PS4 still. I think I want a PS5. So that's going to be like a big decision. Obviously, if one of these consoles is obviously better for some reason, maybe it'll get an edge. But I feel like Sony has a lot

of momentum going into this. So if they launch at a very similar price at a very similar time as Microsoft, I would think they'd be doing fine. There is a question, like ray tracing is interesting on these because Microsoft can lean in to the fact that it has DirectX, and it has like DirectX ray tracing stuff kind of all set up. So Microsoft can get more benefits from optimizations that people do for PC games can more directly, I think, translate to the Xbox. I don't think that's like completely out of the realm of possibility for, you know, obviously people are still going to do these optimizations or similar optimizations for PlayStation games. But I think Microsoft has a little bit of edge there.

They also have Ray traced Minecraft, which is awesome. But like Sony, like Dieter was saying, like Sony is the only console that has exclusive games now. All right. What are dates? What are dates people need to know next? What happens next? Nobody knows. Holiday.

Yeah, they're saying, as far as I know, they're still saying end of 2020, but that obviously could get pushed. Oh, one fun note that you guys will love is that the Xbox has a proprietary NVME expansion. Remember I was talking about that little slot looks like an express card slot? It is for proprietary. So far, just Seagate will be making these NVME drives that you can expand storage. Sony is basically saying you will be able to expand the storage, but wait, don't buy, because this is going to be a not only it's going to be a PCI E 4.0 NVME drive. So like a next gen NVME drive, which most right now are PCI3.

But also we did some crazy stuff that's like custom for and we can't promise that we'll work with all PCIE4 NVME drives. So that's going to be fun. Yeah. There's nothing like a console-based proprietary storage war. You could still plug it a classic like HDD or whatever to play legacy games. But the new games that use the hot shit fast loading time stuff require these new proprietary cards. Okay.

Can I... Okay. Are they going to call the memory sticks? That's all I really want to know. I know. I want memory sticks too, me like, don't worry. Sony has also developed a new 3D audio format. You do this at the end?

We're like an hour and a half of this thing. that's about all I know. But Sony can't do anything. Sony can't go to the bathroom without doing a proprietary 3D audio format. That's all they know how to do. It's like when they spin up the new canband board for making a new thing, like it auto-populates the proprietary 3D audio format. It's just like built into the development template at Sony. It's great.

Well, I'm very excited to listen to the one like Santana song that they ever release in a store. Matt. It will sound amazing, I'm sure. That's great. All right, we got to wrap this up. Thank you, everybody, for listening. I'm confident that maybe listeners have heard my child screaming and running around in the background because that's been happening. Thank you for putting up with the little difference in audio quality as we're going through this at this time. I appreciate it. I appreciate you sticking with us. I hope that we were able to provide you some entertainment at home. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter is at Backlon. Paul's at Future Paul. We're available.

We're not going anywhere. Just hit us up. Let us know what you want to talk about, who you want us to have on the interview shows. Speaking of the interview show on Tuesday, we have a CEO of Impossible Foods, Patrick Brown. That was actually a great conversation. He's a really interesting dude.

And we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. We're going to power right through this. So yeah, let us know. Talk to us. Tweet at us. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.

Paul. Promocode.