The Vergecast - Bonus: Apple Watch and MacBook Event

Episode Date: March 9, 2015

This is a special bonus Verge Live episode, recorded after Apple's March 9, 2015 event. As Apple wraps up its Spring Forward event — Apple Watch! A new MacBook! HBO Now on Apple TV! — Ross Miller and Chris Ziegler are heading to the studio for The Verge Live. Join us as we break down all the news of the day, and later on, we're joined by Casey Newton, who is live at the event... hopefully stealing us a few $10,000 trinkets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Vergecast Universe. This is Ross Miller, senior editor with The Verge. As you might know, there was an Apple event this week. After the event, we hosted a live show, and we thought you'd like to listen to the audio portion of that. So we're adding it to the feed. Please enjoy, and we will see you later this week for the Vergecast. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Verge live. I'm Ross Miller. I'm Chris Sigler. And today on the show, we're going to be talking about all the things Apple just announced at its Springford event. Later on, Casey Newton will be joining us from San Francisco with first-hand impressions.

Okay, so what all did we actually see today? Well, first, we started with a sort of surprise HBO announcement. They'll be launching HBO now they're calling it next month, exclusive to Apple at launch. Then they went through an all-new MacBook, just MacBook, not Pro, not Air, just MacBook. And then finally, we got into some Apple Watch stuff. Yep, and that's the one I want to talk about the most. but first, let's just really quickly get through Apple TV. Yeah, $69 now.

$69, actually, surprise, price drop, which makes sense because every other set-top box does everything that thing does now. Yeah, they're at the point where the hardware is old enough and the functionality is commoditized enough so that they really had no option but to drop the price. A little surprising that they didn't follow it up with another box that maybe has a little bit more functionality, 4K, whatnot, but I guess they're not ready yet.

Yeah, that's maybe something. later this fall. I mean, the Apple's TV rumors of, be it set-top box or actual set itself, has always been around. But there is something that's been rumored forever, which is content deals, which is Apple is trying to talk to every single content provider to get exclusive deals. This is the first of that. And also it's a big deal because everyone wants standalone HBO. Right. And so this is, I mean, we knew that HBO was unbundling, right? This was in the pipeline. It was going to be a 2015 thing for them. But it is surprising that it's an Apple exclusive to start. That's a big deal.

But what's your take? I think that you're more plugged into the Game of Thrones averse than I am. What is your take? No. I am going back and forth so hard because I don't want to pay for cable. Yeah. But the things are starting to add up where it's like $15 by itself. Like I'm just being kind of a stubborn prick at that point.

Like I did get Sling TV recently. So I used that for everything, basically except HBO and broadcast notes. But, oh, so that doesn't have ABC, CBS. No, but I have rabbit ears. I mean $10 for rabbit ears. Sure. Everyone complains about that. Anyway, but will I pay $15 for HBO?

Maybe, actually. But I know in my head is starting to add out to even be more expensive than just getting a damn cable subscription. Right, right. Well, so one thing that I saw brought up on Twitter that I think is potentially an interesting point is that the existence of this service incentivizes HBO to start cracking down on the distribution of HBO Go logins, right?

That's the other reason why I'm probably going to end up paying because right now I'm enjoying the hell out of it for... Yeah, no, everybody uses somebody else's... 99, yeah. There's like one patient zero that has the Master HBO Go account, and everybody's using that one account. And now, presumably, they're going to crack down on it. They're going to log in, like, the day before the Game of Thrones with Mirrors,

be like, I'm sorry, caution, by the way, this is being used by 1253 people. We're going to have to pair that back. Get a new account, guys. So, yeah, it paired with that, they also showed the trailer for the new season of Game of Thrones. We've seen a bunch of clips of that before, and we won't dawdle on that too much here. But yeah, well, it's exciting. It might be a slight departure from the books, which is kind of interesting.

But also, Game of Thrones is the number one most pirated show. Now there's an option where people are like, you know, you can actually legally pay for it. It's expensive. Right, you can't use, oh, I don't want to be tied to a cable subscription as an excuse anymore. But you do still need an Apple device of some sort, whether it be an Apple TV or an iPhone or an iPad.

Because if I remember correctly, they said on stage that this is going to not just, be an Apple TV thing, you'll be able to use any Apple device, basically. Well, I don't remember hearing that, but I hope to God that's true, because that would seem very stupid otherwise. Yeah, I have to believe that they'll have an HBO Now app for iPhone. Right. So that's the first mini, and, like, obviously, like, HBO is one of the biggest

cable channels out there. ESPN, we've the next big one. ESPN was a big deal for Sling that was on there. We'll be interested to see if ESPN kind of follow suit or any other channels, follow suit. Obviously, Apple is hawkish on getting exclusive content deals, whether not they're just a box or just TV. because this is the one thing that really differentiates Apple TV

from your Roku's and your Amazon's. Right, right. Did I hear correctly? Do we have Casey already? I believe we do. Why don't we go live to Casey Newton in San Francisco? Casey, how are you? Oh my God, you're so pretty, Casey Newton.

Hello. Hi, guys. How's it going, man? Hey, guys, how's it going? Good, good. So tell us what's it like out there. What's the scene? So, as you might imagine,

it is rather hectic inside the hands-on air. right now. People are checking out the MacBook that they just unveiled as well as taking a look at the Apple Watch up close. Heading into this event, I think most of us assume that the watch was going to be the most exciting thing to look at afterwards. But, man, people just cannot wait to get their hands on that new MacBook. It looks really, really good. Is it as interesting of a device as it appeared to be from afar? I guess maybe you haven't gotten close to it yet. But from where I was sitting, it looked like really the most interesting announcement of the event. Absolutely.

And a lot of what's interesting is inside of the MacBook. For me, the thing that stood out the most were those contoured batteries, just sort of layers of these very thinly sliced batteries on top of each other. Like most of the interior of that notebook is all battery. So that's pretty cool. The keys feel really interesting. They designed a new system. Of course, the butterfly mechanism instead of the scissor mechanism.

And then there's just that sort of all-metal casing. It looks really, really nice. So, yeah, people seem pretty excited about that here. Casey, did you get a chance to actually go in and try any of this stuff out yet? Have you tried, like, we're really curious about forced touch especially, like how that feels. Did not get a chance to try force touch yet, but I'm looking forward to when I'm finished talking with you guys. What's your favorite buzzword from today? Is it terrorist battery?

Is it forced touch? Is it something else? Please, please tell us. I'm going to be trying to find ways to work butterfly mechanism into all my sentences from here on out. A story comes in, it's missing a little something, maybe it needs a butterfly mechanism. I mean, it's just like, I'm sorry,

this is sizzering too much. We really do need to move to the butterfly at this point. We do. Casey, I mean, this is, what I love is, like, reading your live blog at the events. What was the feel inside the theater, inside the Yerbrook Winner Center? You know, the feeling at an Apple event is sort of this quietly focused intensity.

Most of the people in the room are press. Everybody is staring down at a laptop or their phone or some combination of both. So you don't have a lot of those really human moments except for when there's a bunch of sort of applause, which is usually coming from the Apple employees or maybe some of the VIPs that are there. But, you know, a couple moments stood out. When Tim Cook said that the addition was going to start at $10,000, I heard some pained cries around me.

Like the sort of cries that you might imagine if like a child had been injured in a car accident, it was that sort of just like, oh, like that's sort of a pained cry. So, you know, clearly, at least within the press, people are not really prepared to spend 10K on a watch. And then, you know, the other moment that I would highlight would be just sort of the frosty vibe in the air when Christy Turlington Burns was on stage during that. sort of forced banter part of the presentation, talking about her trip to Africa where she ran a race, and somehow the Apple Watch made that easier. But it was difficult for me to understand

what the watch really had to do with her trip to Africa. And I think it was hard for some of the other members of the press to understand as well. Yeah, that seemed like a bit of a misdirection. I'm not sure why they went there. Were there any moments during the event when you think that they either didn't spend enough time explaining what was going on or spent too long sort of dawdling on a single feature or set of features. In particular, I thought that the Kevin Lynch segment was a bit long, but maybe that's just my opinion. I tend to agree with you. And in fact, I think the event focused too much on features period. We already knew heading into this that the Apple Watch can do a lot of things. But I think what a lot of us were waiting for was that

coherent story, like make the case that I want this and sell it to me at a level above, oh, tap this to text this person and scribble here to send a heart, right? Like, we wanted some sort of like overall message that was going to make us understand how this fit into our lives. And instead, we just got this very lengthy list of, well, it can do this and it can do that. Oh, but if you don't like those two things, try this third thing. And I think it got a little bit overwhelming. And so I do wish that Apple had spent a bit more time up top, sort of setting the stage for how this watch was going to fit into our everyday lives.

Now, Casey, going into this, have you been convinced that a smart watch is the future? Do you even care about this going into it? And now having come out of the Apple Watch event, how are you feeling? What's your takeaway on just the whole category of wearables? Well, you know, I'm very open to being convinced. I want to believe that, you know, a few years from now, the sort of default posture of humanity is not going to be staring down at this device as we, you know, walk through busy intersections. So I want there to be something that means I'm staring at my phone less. But what I worry about with these wearables, Apple Watch included, is that they've essentially just put another inbox on our wrist.

They've given us another set of distractions, another series of things that's going to take us out of the moment and into the world of whatever app developer, We've decided to, you know, install their apps on our device. So, you know, when I think about something that's going to be buzzing me many, many times a day telling me to stand up, to sit down, to respond to this text, to read this email, to check out my Instagram likes, to reply to these tweets, it sounds exhausting. And one problem with the way that the watch was presented today was that it was sort of this endless series of like, and your watch is going to tell you this and it's going to tell you that. You know, Tim Cook repeatedly referred to.

it as a coach on your wrist. I think that could all be very overwhelming. You know, there was a great piece on our sister site racked about what the tech industry doesn't understand about fashion. And I think Apple probably underscilled the fashion piece today and that maybe if they had made it feel like something that was just going to look really freaking cool on your wrist, that could have sold it more than any feature that they announced. So I'm still sort of on the fence.

I'm probably going to wait to read the reviews on the verge to decide whether I buy one of these myself. I'm very open to it. But what I've seen so far, I have to tell you, I'm still rather skeptical. Well, you have to buy one, Casey, because otherwise I'm going to send you my heartbeat. That you know what? I would easily pay $350 or more just to get the Z-power heartbeat on my wrist. Yeah, to your point, Casey, it does feel like. they're taking the same tack with this thing

that they have been with the iPad for the past several years where they're sort of throwing it to the wolves and saying, hey, developers, you figure out what this thing is good for. And in fact, I think Kevin Lynch literally said we can't wait to see what developers do with this. So, you know, it's entirely possible that in a year this device is going to seem

much more coherently organized than it does right now. But I'm skeptical because if they're leaving it in the hands of third-party devices, developers, then that sort of scatters it. It doesn't focus it, right? Yeah, I think that's very true. And the one thing I would say in response to that is that when iPad came out, I knew exactly what I wanted to use it for. When Jobs sort of reclined in a chair and showed himself reading and browsing the web and watching a video, I thought, my gosh, I would love to do that. That feels like a real improvement on me holding some like laptop that's getting

overheated and like, you know, has a battery that's rapidly draining. So like in the moment that iPad was shown on stage, like I preordered it in my mind. And Apple Watch just didn't get there for me yet. Like because again, so many of those features are just that thing you could, that thing you can do on your phone now, you can do it on your wrist tomorrow. It's just they've got to get beyond that. Right. So let's go back to the MacBook for a second. Are you buying one and what color are you getting? because the gold was out of nowhere. Nobody saw that coming, right? Right.

Well, so, you know, Chris, as you know, at The Verge, we get to replace our laptops every two years, and I'm excited to announce that my two-year anniversary at the Verge is next month. Congratulations. So this really could not be timed better from a personal standpoint. I would love to get one of these new MacBooks.

My one question is, you know, how am I going to be able to keep it and plug it into an external monitor and get photos off my SD card onto my laptop, right? So these are three things that I do every day. Maybe there will be some new set of dongles. I'm sure that somebody on the verge will explain to me how I'm going to do this. But the short answer is, yes, I would like to get one of these things. And I would absolutely get the gold model because I'm a trashy person,

and I want to find a new way to signal that to the world. Just look at this gold thing that I have, that you don't have. Like, that's how I like to live my life. Just going to walk around the coffee shop to coffee shop holding it out going, look at this. Do you even see it? It's so thin. Well, I mean, so Casey, but there is a concern of like... I fully intend to wear it as a necklace.

I mean, there is a concern of power that. I mean, this is not a powerful laptop, and it's on par with most MacBook airs. But this isn't something you're going to get a lot of photo processing out or, you know, definitely going to watch 4K video smoothly on something like this. Is that going to be a concern? I mean, I'm not saying what you're doing for work. I'm saying, is that going to be a concern? be concerned, though. It definitely seems like it is aimed at that market of people who use their laptops, mostly for surfing the web, writing emails, basically documents plus Netflix. And that seems

like a huge market category, and I think they're going to sell a lot of them to those people. But what you've just mentioned, Ross, is exactly why I do feel like, I have to wait. You know, I don't have very specialized needs working at The Verge, but I do take photos for my job. So they're going to have to resolve a few of those questions, I think, before somebody who works in a kind of professional or semi-professional role is going to want to pre-order the thing. You know, Nelai posited before, and I think that's absolutely true after I've seen today's announcements, that this device is designed sort of to replace the concept of an iPad plus an external keyboard. A little more expensive than that, but not much. And so my question to you is, well, first of all, do you currently have an iPad? And secondly, could you see this device or something like it replacing an iPad for you?

Because it seems like they're trying to bite into that market to some degree here, right? Yeah, I mean, I think there's two kinds of iPad users. There are people who absolutely want to work, who absolutely want to use it for a work device. And then there are people who use it more as a leisure device. I sort of fall into the ladder camp. Like when I pick up my iPad, it's because I'm not planning to type anything. And it's fact, one of the things that I like about it is that, you know, sure, I could fire off a short email if I had to. But for the most part, I'm playing games, I'm reading, I'm watching a video.

So, you know, maybe the fact that they are coming after this more professional market with an actual laptop indicates that, you know, an iPad really isn't a great work device. Like, you can make it work if you need to. there was a time when I had an external keyboard for my iPad and I used it for work and, you know, it worked just great. But fundamentally you're forcing it, right? People who work need keyboards and physical keyboards are better than virtual ones. So I do expect that you will see people using that MacBook for work and, you know, maybe the iPad does start feeling more like a leisure device or other kind of like specialty device over time. Yeah, honestly, I think of the iPad more as like a gaming device than anything else. That's something that you're going to

be doing with this MacBook for sure. Right. But again, it goes into the whole idea of Apple Watch being like a fashion device. This is a fashion accessory. Yeah, that's kind of true. I mean, that's underscored by the fact that it comes in three colors, right? Including gold. Yeah, including gold.

Casey, I don't know. Let me ask you, did you hear the biggest price for Apple Watch? They just put the prices online. Do you know how much they actually go to? No, how much do they go to? Just take a wild guess. What is the most expensive Apple Watch you can buy right now? Or you will be able to?

Like, $15,000? A little higher. A little higher. 20? No. Split the difference. $17,000. For $38,000.

Yellow gold or rose gold with the modern buckle. But here's the weird thing, is that the most expensive watch, the pricing is just kind of like, it gets a little scatter shot, the higher you go in the spectrum, because the most expensive model is not a 42 millimeter. No, so small one. Right. even though on the lower end, the 42 millimeters are more expensive for obvious reasons. There's more materials. It's, you know, whatever.

So who actually knows what's going on in this end of the market? But I think that Apple is appealing to this group of people who write a check for $17,000 or however you pay for something that costs that much without thinking about it. I think a check still works. Maybe, I don't know, maybe they have a special, I don't know, maybe I have one of those metal. I don't have that much on a credit limit either. I have no idea. Yeah, it's impossible for anyone at the verge to really say how you pay for something that costs $17,000. We can only guess.

Just bring your own gold. Yeah, bring your own bar of gold. Yeah, so anyway, obviously the spectrum of pricing for this device is huge on a percentage basis, and definitely larger than anything else Apple has ever made, right? You can make the argument. And Casey, I think that you put in the live blog that someone pointed out that if you cost adjusted the Apple Lisa for inflation, it would be more expensive than the most expensive Apple Watch Edition. But we're kind of splitting hairs at that point. Yeah, it would be interesting to do a customer satisfaction survey with Apple Lisa customers and then Apple Watch Edition customers a year after the fact and see who is happier with their $17,000 investment.

And the Lisa wasn't even gold. I just want to point that out. Nor was it available in thousands of combinations. Nor was it designed by Johnny Ive. Nor can you wear it on your wrist. Nor can you wear it on your wrist. These are all very good points. So Casey, let's turn briefly to the one other announcement of the event, which was where we started the HBO and Apple TV news. the HBO Now, it's called, which is debuting exclusively on Apple products, $15 a month, right? $14.99? Something like that. And, of course, they reduce the price of the Apple TV to $69. Casey, what do you think?

Do you think this is going to encourage people, A, to buy an Apple TV if they haven't already, and B, cut the cord? Is this the turning point? I think it's a great partnership. You know, when you look at HBO and Apple, both of these are companies that works, so hard to develop premium brands. And I think each one of them gets something out of this arrangement, right? HBO gets to tell its customers, hey, we're on the coolest hardware. Apple gets to say, we've got the best content. So I think it's a huge win for both companies. Like, when they

announced it, I thought that's a solid move. You know, I heard you guys talking a little bit before I came on. Ross was saying all these subscriptions are starting to add up. I'm sort of in that camp. I've got, you know, Hulu Plus and I've got Netflop. and I may have the WWE network. So it is also a add-up. But at the same time, $15 does not seem at all unreasonable for me. And if I'm ever no longer able to use my roommates,

parents, HBO Go password, I'm going to have to take a serious look at that. Yeah, well, this, I was kind of seriously suggesting that this gives HBO an incentive to finally start cracking down on the sort of lackadaisical spreading of, of these account logins. Right. Right.

As far as we can tell, there are only four known HBO Go logins on Earth. There are four subscribers who are collectively paying for the cost of production for Game of Thrones. In here we have,

Case of Noon, who's only three degrees from one of the sources, actually. Roommate's cousins, something like that. Anyway, but... And I've heard that

Game of Thrones is one of the most expensive shows ever in terms of, you know, how much it costs to make each episode. so obviously they have some incentive to start dialing up the heat on these people. Casey Newton.

Anyway. Hey too. So important, Ross, and I'm glad you bring that up. You know, you watch some of these hands-on videos and you just see these thick forests of hair and you think, my God, what sort of man-ape is making this video? And, you know, we here at The Verge are going to use our platform to speak out against this appalling trend and, you know, hope we can stop the madness. All right. Well, get in there and tell me, I said hi and mention none of that. There is a new Apple Watch hands-on on on Theverge.com. You guys want to check it out. Casey Noon, is there anything else you

want to say before we let you go? I love you guys. I love you too. Love you as well, Casey. All right, Casey, you and everybody. All right, before we start wrapping up, though, I do want to actually make a case for Apple Watch. Okay. Not a spirited case, because then I think about the price and go, no. But the thing I've heard for the last couple days is the Apple Watch will be the thing that means you look at your phone less.

And then the counterpoint is everyone's mad that people are looking at their phone in the first place. Right. I don't think it's a bad reason. I really don't. I really like the idea of not pulling up my phone all the time. I'm obsessed with doing that. I check notifications every five minutes anyway. I don't mind that idea. I do think there's Apple Pay interest. The pastbook stuff makes sense here. And as ridiculous as it is, the idea of like doodling, you know, obnoxious cartoons to someone. Sending your heartbeat. You're sending your heartbeat. Making another watch vibrate and whatever cyber dildonic thing you want to do with that. Sketching dirty pictures or clean pictures to your loved ones. I mean, there's a lot of. I mean, there's a lot of. I mean, there's a lot of. I mean, there's a lot of it. I mean, There are little mini communication things that it's not worth 350 necessarily, but when you start thinking how much you spend for a fitness band anyway and fashion products like that, it starts to be

a justifiable cost at the low end. At least I'm telling myself that now. Well, and to be very clear, $350 is the very smallest amount of money you can spend on this watch. For someone who's not fashionable at all. Right. And so going into this event, I was hopeful, if not outright, expecting that the steel version of the watch with a steel band would cost 500, 550 at most. But no, if I'm not mistaken, the steel 42 millimeter with the steel band is $9.99, I think. And if you get the black version in steel with the steel band, it's $10.99. which, I mean, to be very clear, that's like, that's, in the world of luxury watches,

you're starting to brush up against the low end of that segment. It is no longer a commodity device. It is a luxury timepiece. And the problem that we've been sort of bantering about for a few months now is that this isn't a, this isn't sort of an heirloom, it isn't a legacy device, It isn't something you can pass down to your children. It's something that goes bad after a couple years. And to drive that point home, I was just looking at the change log notes for iOS 8.2, which is out today.

And the Apple Watch isn't supported on iPhones older than iPhone 5, which is, what, three years old? So you think about the fact that this device that you're spending as much as $1,100 on, and that's not even getting into addition territory just goes bad in three years or less is kind of out of control. Yeah, there are two things I've seen. One that's pro that, one that's conned that. And the one thing that kind of like gave me a little bit

I was a little okay with it was the API. I was looking through the API when it first came out a couple months ago. And there is so much processing power done on the phone itself that in many ways it's just a receiver. So as long as the screen is okay. Sure. It should last a little more than a couple years.

Like an iPad, the urge to upgrade isn't probably going to be a strong every cycle. That being said, you hear interviews, especially like I think the profile with Johnny Ive, where he's like, there was a thousand and one things we wanted to add to this. We wanted senses. I did not mean for my voice to go that way.

It just does whenever you say Johnny Ive. But there are so many things harder-wise that they actually wanted to do with this or didn't. And that's where I'm like, should I wait for the second one? Where they actually figured that shit out? Right. Or, you know, do you want a circular display? Maybe that's an Apple's future. Who knows?

Right. So, and, you know, with an analysis. addition, at the very least, you have, you know, assuming Apple doesn't offer a trade-in program, you at least have the gold value, the raw gold value. With the stainless steel model, you have nothing. You have a piece of, you know, you have a few dollars worth of metal that can't reasonably be recycled. To be absolutely fair, though, we're talking a thousand versus 10,000. No, we are, but still, you know, do you want to put yourself in a position where you're spending $1,000 every two to three years on a watch. I mean, if you're a watch collector,

that's reasonable, but you're still expecting to add a watch to your collection every few years as opposed to replacing it. So it's a tricky question for Apple to answer, and they didn't attempt to answer it today. Tim Cook didn't mention squat. Not to say I expected to, but he didn't say a single thing about what happens next year when they announce the Apple Watch 2. you have a $15,000 watch on your hands. What do you do? But also, like, there's so many things to do. Like, when the iPod first came out, it was a niche market

because it had to, you had required using a Mac, which very people had at the time. Right. The iPad, it was like, ugly, ugly piece of shit first product. I'm sorry, it was. It really was a big iPhone. The second one, they kind of figured it out. The Apple Watch, you need an iPhone 5,

which is not as ubiquitous as they wanted to be, and it won't be for a couple years. This is the early adopter kind of test market. If you're going to spend that much money now, I think you kind of know that this is like, this is kind of a test case for them. Maybe? Well, yeah, we'll see. So that's the million-dollar, billion-dollar question for Apple is,

does this become a mainstream product? Are people going to line up around the blog the same way they do for an iPhone? Is it going to be a niche product? Is it going to be somewhere in between? What are they expecting and what is the public going to do? We don't know. This is kind of untested territory for them and for us. So we'll see.

Yeah. Is there anything else we don't really tackle in here? Or should we, like, look to the future? What MacBook are you buying? Oh, hell no. I'm happy with this right here. So that's a 13-inch retina? It's the 13-inch retina.

So my computer anniversary was recent, too. So I got a 13-inch right-not. It's doing fine. They obviously announced a spec boost today, but I don't care. This does just everything I needed to do. Oh, one thing that I was expecting today with a new MacBook that wasn't announced, and it makes me very, very sad, is I expected them to integrate touch ID into the touchpad. Oh, yeah.

And that didn't happen. It seems like such an obvious fit and such an obvious thing that they would want to expand from the iPhone over to MacBook, especially considering how many features from iOS they've adopted into OS 10 over the years. That was just a disappointment.

Right. But that being said, the new MacBook, I had the same reaction to the MacBook today that I had to the original MacBook Air, which is both good and bad, because in retrospect, the original MacBook Air was not a good product. in many ways. It ran hot. The port situation was terrible. And actually, we should talk about the port situation.

And it ended up kind of being an afterthought in history compared to the second generation, which was a very good product. So, you know, we'll see if they've learned their lessons. We'll see if the new MacBook is a fantastic product or if it's one of those things where you want to wait for the second generation. But let's talk about the port situation. Let's talk about the port situation. Let's do it. Two ports. There's a USBC on one side, and then on the other there's a headphone jack. I think that's it. That's it. I mean, that matches up with the rumors that we heard.

I think Mark German from 9 to 5 Mac broke this, and there's a graphic designer that kind of went in modeled based on what the rumor was, and that was pretty damn spot on. I'll give credit to it. That was damn spot on. But yeah, USBC reversible. It's very pretty. You're going to need an adapter for every single thing. And those days where you bought like the giant,

USB hubs, that's back. That's happening again. It's in vogue. What can you say? MegSafe is gone. Yes. Which is not awesome. If you have kids or pets, you might want to... Oh, right. It's just going to ink. Yeah, you might want to make sure that this particular computer is off in a different area of the house.

And yeah, you're going to be looking at spending... I just pulled up some of the units here. dramatic movement. If you want the VGA multi-port adapter for USBC, Apple's listing it now for $79. If you want the digital AV adapter, it's also $79. Wait, wait, and I know no one else is looking at this, so this is really compelling, but click on the front view. Like, what, is it just? Okay.

You have HTML, you have another USBC, so you can do pass-through, and you have, oh, a regular USB. But can I just say, this is ugly as hell? No, it is. It looks like. This is super ugly. So these ports look like the same white, like, last generation Apple ID ports that they've been using for 10 years. I hear that we have a hands-on to throw to for the MacBook. So let's check that.

That's what I heard. Okay. We're here at Apple's event in California, and we are just getting our hands on with the all-new MacBook. It is just the MacBook. It is ridiculously thin. It's 13.1 millimeters thin. And you can see one of the headline features here, this USB type C port. This gets used for power, for display, for USB, for everything.

It's a fast little port. It is kind of going to be the future of laptops. It's been around here, and we also, of course, got a headphone jack and a couple of microphones. But the big story here is the technology. The screen is 2304 by 1440. Somewhere in that neighborhood, it's high retina display. It looks really good. There's a speaker grill across the top.

And Apple is really playing up the new keyboard. They've got a new butterfly mechanism so that the keys are really flat and whichever corner you push on, they all feel the same. There's not much key trouble to it actually. It feels pretty shallow, but it doesn't feel terrible. It just takes a little bit of getting used to. What is weird though is the track pad. They've got an entirely new mechanism, so it also feels the same no matter where you click on it.

And Apple has created this new thing called Force Click, where you sort of like push through the track pad, and you can see I just failed to get it done there. I'll try it one more time. You push it until you see a something. until you see a second click and then it gives you like a third action. So there's a single click, double click, and now there's force click. So you can do different things. And you can configure the strength of it. There's a little bit of tactile feedback when you do it there. So this is the new MacBook. It comes out on April 10th for 1299. Again, it is just stupid

life, crazy thing. It has an Intel core end processor, so it should be pretty fast. And I can't wait to give it some more time. So one thing that I want to note in that video that I found very interesting is that all three of the colors available for the new MacBook are similar enough so that they just look like the same MacBook cast in different lighting, which is a little bit like the dress. Right. Oh God. Just throwing that out there. No. No.

But no, seriously, like the gold looked like a silver MacBook sitting in incandescent light. The silver looked like the silver, and the space gray just looked like it was in a dark room. So not very extreme colors. I think that they were probably careful to make sure that they weren't doing anything too wild with this new MacBook. They were just sort of like adding a little bit of hue to each one, which I guess is okay.

For years, I've been wanting just a black aluminum-anodized MacBook, but Apple won't give it to me. Give it time. Give it time. Maybe. I mean, we're seeing more and more MacBooks, so there's filling in the little holes. Like there was that famous, the iPad one presentation where Steve Jobs is like,

we're going to make a case between this product and this product, and it became the iPad. And now we're just seeing Apple fill in every single home. Which is a thing we've seen to do for years. And, of course, the bigger iPhones were indicative of that. You'll get what you want. You'll get everything you want. Just give it time.

Well, one important distinction, though, I think, and this is just my theory. But I feel like this, and we mentioned this with Casey, it feels like this new MacBook is filling in a hole that is partially, being filled right now by the iPad for work use with, you know, when you put it in a keyboard case, right? Right. And to that end, it makes sense that this MacBook would be available in colors the same way an iPad is. Whereas the higher-end, more powerful MacBooks are still effectively PCs. They don't have this level of portability, this thing is ridiculously thin.

One thing that I think makes it look more like an iPad than a MacBook is the fact that the glowing Apple on the back of the display is not glowing, but it's shiny like it would be on an iPad. Right. So that's a consideration. The fact that this is, in many ways, an iPad with a keyboard, except, of course, for the fact that it runs OS10. Right. And the only thing I also know is this is considerably more expensive than the MacBook Air. Not considerably. It starts at $1299, right?

So yes, if you compare that with an 11-inch MacBook Air, yes, it is a more expensive device. But, you know, if you go back through history, going back to what was the Powerbrook Duo, I think, was a famously expensive and very small Apple laptop in the 90s. And I'm probably bushing my Apple history here. I don't have Wikipedia open, so I apologize. But the point is it is certainly not without precedent to have the smallest, lightest version of Apple's PC lineup. be a step above in terms of pricing. Makes sense.

No, I agree. And again, the second generation will be a lot cleaner, be a lot cheaper. You might be dreaming. I like the way you think, but yes, I like where you head's up. Or they'll get rid of the MacBook Ares entirely, so this is the cheap model. Yeah, could be.

One or the other. Could be. Cool. I mean, there's other things that happen, of course, Health Kit and Research Kit. We've seen Health Kit a lot. Research Kit is intriguing, but I don't know if there's really much to say at this point.

I'm just really curious to see what happens. The next big event for them is going to be WWDC, the big developer companies? Assuming they don't announce anything before then, presumably they're going to have iOS 9 to show. But, you know, there have been rumors of a public beta for iOS 8.3, which isn't even now. Yet 8.2 is released today, mostly to add Apple Watch support for your other bug fixes. But they're kind of getting compressed in terms of how much more they can do with 8.x before 9 comes out. So I don't know how that fits. Maybe 8.3 carries them through the summer and then they stay on the same release schedule as usual.

So I guess I'm talking myself into the likelihood that iOS 9 will be a WDC thing and not have a special event beforehand. But they have done that before. They have done iOS-only events early in the year. So that's an outside possibility. True. I mean, we're just running out of months in between at this point. So we'll see. We'll see.

Cool. Final thoughts. Final thoughts? I want it all. I want the $17,000 Apple Watch. I don't even There is nothing in my possession that I could sell that would enable me to buy that

So I'm just going to have to dream And the MacBook looks nice But I need to know whether the keyboard feels As good as they claim it does I need to know how these force touch pads really work And I need to know that it's fast enough for me To get my job done on a daily basis So those questions won't be answered until April

What about you? I just need to bleach my arm hair I'm feeling really self-conscious about it now. So for all of that, let's just wrap it up at this point on that lovely note. For all things Apple, including, you know, more coverage, more hot takes, more impressions, more analysis, more video. And not just Apple, everything in the intersection of art, culture, science, technology that is The Verge. Check out theverge.com on Twitter at The Verge. Sorry, at Verge.

I'm mad how to do that. I am Ross. We're on YouTube as well. We're on YouTube as well. Yes, The Verge. Instagram, Snapchat, for the millennials and the team. If you want to see what Sam Schiffers doing, if he thinks things are beef, bust, or whatever other words he's using these days. The Real Verge on Snapchat.

For Twitter, I am Ono Rosco with no E. This is E-Power. Special thanks to at Casey Newton, who's just out there having the time of his life now. Thank you guys for watching.