The Vergecast - How to buy an iPad, hike 2,600 miles, and watch free TV

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of over-the-air interactive television: David Pierce is joined by Alex Cranz and Janko Roettgers to talk about ATSC 3.0, the new standard for over-the-air broadcasting. The future of TV is up in the air Mitchell Clark joins the show to discuss his next endeavor. Mitchell's gear list Dan Seifert explains which iPad you should buy and how to make the iPad work better for writing by hand. The best iPad to buy in 2023 Yes, paper-feel screen protectors for the iPad are good This Apple Pencil clone provides 80 percent of the experience for a quarter of the price Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Over-the-Air interactive television. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm currently on my way to drop off my three-month-old at daycare. We live about a mile from the daycare, which means on nice days, I can walk. But we also live in Washington, D.C., and it's March, which means, really, there are never any nice days. So I'm pretty sure I bought a hybrid just so that I don't feel bad about driving the 0.9 miles to and from daycare every morning. Anyway, we have a great show for you today. We are going to talk about the latest thing in over-the-air television, which is both much cooler and higher tech than you might think,

and coming slower than you'd hope. We're also going to talk about hiking gear, because our own Mitchell Clark has some really cool big plans coming up. And then we're going to get deep into the weeds about iPads again, because Dan Severt has been doing some really cool handwriting experiments, and I want to talk about them. All that's coming in just a sec, but first, I got to drop off the kid, and then drive the 0.9 miles home because I'm too cold and too lazy to walk.

This is the Vergecast. See in a second. 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 and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you've probably heard us, and by us, I mean, Alex Cranz, talk about ATSC 3.0. It's the new standard for over-the-air broadcasting. and it turns your antennas into a much more powerful and interactive TV device.

Well, kind of. It turns out the ATSC 3.0 story is complicated, and so is the rollout. Yanko Rutgers recently wrote a story about ATSC 3.0 for us. So I asked him and Alex to come explain what's going on and what it means for you. Alex, hello. Hey. Yonko, hello. Hey, there.

Yonko, I hope you appreciate what you've come into, which is the segment of the Vergecast that Alex has waited approximately her entire life to do. So if you had plans for the rest of the day, like, this is it. This is your day now. Dreams do come true. Okay, so we have a lot to get into here, but I think the place to start is actually like at the very basic level, because I realized in reading the really good story that you wrote for us, which is in the show notes, and everybody should read it, that I didn't even totally

understand what ATSC 3.0 or really even ATSC at all is. I don't know if you want me to start with the acronym itself. It is kind of weird because it stands, I actually wrote this down, for the Advanced Television Systems Committee, and that sounds like something invented in Soviet Russia or so. But it is basically, that's an organization that comes up with broadcast standards. And ATSC 3.0 is the new standard for broadcast television, so television that you can watch with an antenna, things that get broadcasted over the air. They have been in the US digital for quite some time.

It used to be that TV was analog. You had these weird rabbit ear antennas. It was snowy depending on the reception that you had. They switched that little over a decade ago to ATSC 1.0, which brought HD, freed up a bunch of spectrum which a government loved because they could sell it off. And it also allowed people or broadcast us rather to transmit far more stations. So if you are in a market where you do have some reception, if you're anywhere in the city and you don't have too many obstructions around you, you can nowadays receive anywhere from maybe 20 to 40, sometimes even more stations for free over the air. So that's ATSC 1.0 right now, the current broadcast standard. It's free.

It's out there. You get ABC, CBS, NBC Fox and a bunch of stations you've never heard of. That's literally my experience. and like two-thirds of them are in Spanish, at least where I am. And yeah, it's good times. But then there is now a new standard coming out or is being implemented, which is ATSC 3.0. And that one basically provides better better video quality up to 4K. It supports HDR.

It supports more advanced audio, immersive audio. In theory, also Adobe audio. And you can even transmit because it's IP-based. you can transmit data over it, which can be used for simple applications, for example. So you can have like HTML apps on your screen, which you don't even need internet for it. They just get downloaded to your TV over the air. So broadcasters have been wanting to switch to this new format for a couple of years now. I think in 2017, the FCC said, looks good to us.

Go ahead with this. But here's a couple of conditions for that. And since then, slowly we've seen sort of a move towards ATSC 3.0. it's now available in around 50 markets. So if you are in Los Angeles, if you're in D.C., Portland, a couple other cities, you can already receive some stations in ATSC3. If you're in the Bay Area in San Francisco or so, it's not available yet. And that's true in a bunch of other cities around the States as well.

But the people who are pushing at the broadcast, as I'm saying, by the end of the year, 75% of all households in the U.S. are going to be able to watch their broadcast television in ATSC3. So this is basically what all of this is about. And there's a lot of devil in the details, but I'm sure we're going to get to that. My immediate question when you explain that, and I say this with all love and affection,

is who cares? We exist in a world where the internet exists, where the thing that you do when you cut the cable is you sign up for a bunch of streaming services that come straight through to your TV. You don't need an antenna hanging off your TV or on your window or whatever. Like, haven't we solved this process?

with the internet? What is there about ATSC that would work in a way that isn't yet sort of a solved problem on the Roku TV behind me? Well, first of all, there is the cost issue. Broadcast television is free. And it's great and it's public service. You can get PBS over it. I mean, you and I probably cut the court because cable was just terrible.

Yes. But many people cut the court because of real cost savings that they need or because, you know, we have inflation right now. And then the other part is that broadcast television is inherently local. So there's a lot of stations that are local broadcasters. And especially when it comes to local expert communities, local minority communities, there's a lot of broadcast stations like in the Bay Area. There's like a Vietnamese station, a Japanese.

You can get Japanese feeds. You can get there's actually pretty widely watched Chinese station. Spanish you already mentioned. So all of these people are being catered to with local broadcast stations in their native tongue. And it's harder, if not impossible, to completely substitute that with streaming. Because if you go to Netflix,

obviously, you won't find your local news and Chinese there. If you go to YouTube, you might find some of that, but it could be very inconsistent. And so just having that as an opportunity to turn it on and tune into that, I think, makes a lot of sense. And then also, I mean, there is a digital divide. People, not everybody has fast internet, not everybody has internet at all.

If you think about older generations, that's how they still watch television. They either have cable or maybe they have an antenna and that's how they watch TV. So broadcast still matters. And I think with court cutting, it started to matter more to people who wanted to sort of augment that

because even if you sign up what you just described, you sign up for Netflix, you sign for Hulu, you sign up for Disney Plus. There's more than you could ever want to watch except you don't get certain sports things. You don't get the Oscars live. You don't get breaking news events that easily live.

for all those things, broadcast TV station, especially the big ones, like the ABCs and CBS and so forth, still matter. Okay, Alex, what is it for you? You're in New York, so you don't get the, like, I don't have access to other things. Your internet is bad sometimes, but it seems to work most of the time. Like, what is it about ATSC 3.0 that is so appealing to you? I think it's a quality issue and it's a cost issue. I use Hulu for a long time. I've still got Spectrum. I have cable TV, and that was for the longest time because I would have to watch and review shows. on the CW. And so that was the only way to get the CW in New York City for the longest time. And I just haven't canceled my spectrum since then. But it really was like, it was that idea of like, I get a lot more flexibility with it. And I get flexibility on how I watch it in a way that I don't with streaming

channels. Like Netflix, I watch it in Netflix app. That's the only way to do it. And if I want to watch it local, I better hope that like I managed to download it correctly in time. In broadcast TV, I can just download it. I've got channels. I go a DVR what I want to watch and it's done. And I upload it to my device, whatever. And I don't have to worry about anything. It all just works.

And so that's just very appealing to me. That mix of control plus affordability plus quality. Because typically those streams are higher quality. Just makes sense for me. Fair enough. Yeah, let's talk about the gear behind all of this. Because Yonka, you broke some news in the story you wrote for us about a DVR company thinking about some of this stuff. We're in this interesting place where, like you were saying,

the protocol exists, the standard exists. It kind of works. You can kind of get it in some places if you have like a very specific, specific set of skills. What does it actually take? Like who's building stuff to make this work? How do you have like? What does the setup look like? Who's out there making this stuff? Yeah, before we even get into like adapters and DVRs and boxes and so forth, we have to talk about TVs, I think. Okay. Because when you go out and you buy a, TV and all those TVs have tuners built in and most of those tuners are ATC1 tuners. So you can watch existing broadcast channels, but once they start turning on these new signals, most of these TVs don't actually know what to do with that because it's a completely

different format, it's IP base and so forth, so it needs different tuners. And some TV companies have begun to build those tuners into their devices. Samsung has done it on some higher-end devices. The same is true for LG. Sony was so far, I think, the only team. TV maker who said we're going to put it into all of our TVs, but not that many people buy Sony TVs, to be quite honest. They're expensive.

Yeah. And that's the point again. Like when you go down and you look at the cheaper TVs that people actually buy, so the Bizzios and the TCLs, none of those have ATSC3 tunas built in. And I talked to those companies before writing the article, and they said, well, we don't really see the demand for that yet. It's not quite there yet. You can't receive it everywhere.

So we're going to wait and see. And one of the reasons for that is. that these tunas are a little bit more expensive. And when you only have, I don't know, 5% profit margin on your device or 10% maybe, you're not going to spend extra five bucks because then basically you're going to lose money on your TV set that you set for $300 at Walmart or something like that, right?

So it's a very thin margin business to begin with and then to add component costs, then that's not going to do it until there's overwhelming demand for it. So most people, even if they live in a market where there's ATSC 3.0 turn on and all these stations are available, most people aren't able to watch it these days. Now, one way to solve that would be adapters, right? And the analogy for that is back in 2009 or whatever.

The last transition happened to digital television, there was this whole thing where you could go to Radio Shack and you got coupons for the government, you could buy a converter for 30 bucks or 40 bucks or something. It's really cheap, clunky boxes. I forgot about that, yeah. But it worked, right? So suddenly you could receive digital television

on your old school TV, even if it was like a super old 20-year-old television, you could receive their signals. These converter boxes, none of that really exists yet. There's plans for that. Companies have started to certify some of them, and you hear something about price plans over like $200 for something that converts a signal for you. There's no readily available hardware for that yet that people would be willing to buy. And people have been looking at that and thinking, like, how can we accelerate this and

converters would be the next step. And so you mentioned it in the story. I broke the news a little bit that Tableau, which is a, or the company has a different name, but the devices are called Tableau. It's this DVR software that records broadcast TV for you and then streams it to a bunch of different apps. It's actually kind of a fun device. They got bought by scripts, which is a big broadcaster. They own lots of local broadcast stations.

And they are clearly looking to figure out how can we use this tech to, first of all, get people more comfortable to watch other stuff. antennas, period. But then also, how can we use this and maybe make ATSC 3.0 converters? They didn't explicitly spell that out. They were just kind of like, well, wait and see, we're going to announce more about our plans this summer, but basically this is where all the roads are leading to, I think. Okay. And are we just caught in this kind of horrible chicken and egg game now, where until it's easier to use and devices have it, people won't use it. Because I I suspect most people don't even know this is like a thing that exists that they're missing out on.

And so until they know and are clamoring for it, it's not going to be in the products. And until it's in the products, most people aren't going to find it. And until people know how to find it, the broadcasters have no particular reason to get on board. So there's no, like Alex, who spins this forward? How do we get out of this? Yeah, I keep thinking back to that last time, that transition from analog to digital. And that was a really difficult transition. but it was also everybody put effort into it, right?

Like all of the broadcasters, their local news channels would be like, and don't forget you've got to go get your thing at some point, because otherwise your TV won't work. People were freaking out being like, I got to buy a new TV or get this box. But there was a lot of movement behind it. And that was because people still use broadcast TV. And nowadays, we are few and far between the people who actually like tune in for broadcast TV. So you have that totally tiny market,

primarily of older people, like our parents, who are still on broadcast TV and still enjoy that, and they don't care. Like, what they have is good enough. So they're not driving it forward. The people who want 4K are relatively few. Like, I don't think there's that many people who actually want 4K. I'm probably one of the very few. And that's because it takes up a lot of bandwidth.

It takes up a lot of space. Broadcasters don't want to stream in 4K because it's a lot of work. It's expensive for them. So I think we're kind of stuck because nobody, we have the technology, but nobody actually wants to use it because it's expensive. And nobody wants to foot that bill, right? The last time the government foot a big chunk of that bill because the government recognized that the majority of people were watching TV on broadcast and they needed to make sure they had that available an affordable way. And this time it's like, well, you don't need that. You've got fast TV.

You've got streaming. You can do all these other ways of watching this content. You got YouTube. So why should we pay? we don't need to foot the bill for this. And the government had a real incentive last time, too, because basically the whole transition happened or a big reason for it happening was

that they wanted to free up that spectrum to then auction off for 5G essentially. Right. So analog television took up a lot of bandwidth, essentially, and they figured out, well, if you make it digital, you can have sub-channels, you can stack these things, you can squeeze a lot more TV in a loss-less spectrum and also in a different part of the spectrum.

And then I can sell off this, all this other stuff. And I think these options made the government like $20 billion or something like that. So it's not insignificant. This time around, it doesn't free up any spectrum. The spectrum is the same. And the government instead is kind of like, well, wait a minute. We don't want to lock anyone out this time. So they actually put requirements in that make it a little harder from the broadcasters perspective.

And they said, yeah, you can switch to ATC3. That's all fine with us. It seems to work. But you also need to broadcast the old signal, the ATC1 signal, for at least five. years. And they might even prolong that at some point. And that kind of puts a lot of burden on the broadcat test, because then now they have to have two signals on the same amount of spectrum. And for that to happen, they basically had to backtrack on a lot of those promises of ATTC3. So one of them that Alex just mentioned, 4K, none of the broadcasts in ATSC3 in the US today are

in 4K. And the reason for that is 4K takes up a lot more bandwidth. So you can't stack all these channels together. Instead, it's 1080p at max, so you can have subchannels and all these other things and then still transmit the 80s C1 signal at the same time. And that's, I think, the one thing where I was like, that's going to set people for sure. 4K. You have this big, fancy television. You want the latest thing on there. But no, it's not even broadcasting in 4K. Yeah, I've kind of always been of the mind that 4K is one of those things that, like, sounds good more than people actually care about it, I think. It's like, everybody would, if you suddenly were like, would you like 4K? People could be like, yeah. But if you're like, do a bunch of work to get 4K streaming, I think the number of

people who would do that work are relatively few and far between. But one group of people that seems like they might move on this. And it seems like now is actually an interesting moment for this, is those broadcasters, right? Because I think another thing that you touched on in the piece, and the really sort of sneaky reason I wanted to talk about this is I find free streaming services absolutely fascinating. And I think they're about to have a really, really, really big moment in a way that people don't really realize yet, like the, the Pluto's and the tubis of the world, but there are a million of them out there. And in a world where there's like infinity content available across tons of platforms and everybody's raising their prices and

everybody is more price sensitive than ever, the idea of like going back to watching a few ads an hour in exchange for not having to pay for streaming services is just going to get more and more compelling. And so if I'm one of these broadcasters, I'm thinking, I actually might have a first mover advantage here. If I can start to like push people along, there's now millions of new people who might find me and want to be a part of my street and I can show them ads as opposed to being just another tile on a smart TV that no one is ever going to open because I'm right next to Netflix. Like Alex, am I thinking about this the right way? Like is there, is there an actual turn coming there for some of these free services? I don't know. I think because what we're seeing is

we're also seeing a radical change in how we consume media, right? Like our generation, if you want to, millennials or whatever you want to call them, we'll watch it on a TV, we'll watch it on the phone. Younger generation, younger people are oftentimes watching it on phones or watching it on their iPads. They're not necessarily sitting in front of a TV. And so like how the content is consumed is very different. And we've got this whole generation of people who had access to YouTube as babies and didn't have their content programmed by professional programmers at ABC or Fox or whatever, right? And so they haven't had to deal with that. And I think we're about to see this really interesting shift in do those people as they get older turn into the rest of us buy a house, buy a TV, sit on the couch and watch the TV, or do they keep watching it on their phones? And I don't think we really know yet because it is so new. It is so young. I really want to be hype on fast because I think it's kind of interesting. And there's also potential there for the crossover with ATSC 3.0 because of how it streams. But I just don't know because we've got this whole generation. of people who are watching content in a totally new and different way.

I mean, there's also a lot of old people like us around still. Yeah, we're all still here. Save one for the olds. But people often look to that younger market as their North Star for how they're going to plan these things 20 years down the road. I see your point when it comes to looking into the future and maybe decade or two down the road. But right now, linear television or television still matters.

watching things on TV still matters a lot to people. And actually, these fast channels are having in a moment or these fast services. And one of them, you mentioned Tobe. There was just a number out this week from Nielsen there saying, Tooby now accounts for 1% of all TV viewing in the US. Wow. I mean, 1% does not sound big, but for a service that a couple of years ago was, like, nobody had ever heard of it. It's actually quite noticeable.

A lot of that is driven by these linear channels, which are sort of, I always say it's like basic cable, essentially, right? because, okay, the quality maybe is not always that great, but it's sort of reliable. You can tune in. You can run it in the background. It's 24-7. You don't have to think about it a whole lot. And add to that more live programming, news programming and stuff like that, it becomes

a thing where you can channel surf and all those things. And it is having a moment to where it's starting to find significant audiences. Sure, whether that's still going to be true in 10 or 20 years is hard to say. But for now, I think there's definitely quite a bit of momentum behind it and maybe more than behind broadcast TV. As a dedicated To Be viewer, I just want to say, if you want to watch random house renovation shows that you've never heard of and are almost all British and are extremely wonderful, To Bee is the dream.

There's a show called The House 100K built where it's just a bunch of people building houses that they don't have enough money to build. It's just delightful. I love it. Yeah, also streamed the World Cup, which was quite amazing. But again, I come back to the Tooby question of like, does Tube need ATSC? like is the future to be or is the future a bunch of sort of old local broadcasters figuring out how to reach new people? And it just seems everybody's sort of running in different speeds in

different directions on stuff like this. And I do think to Alex's point, the sit down on the couch and watch TV behavior is not dying. But I think the sit down on the couch and flip channels behavior is dying much more quickly. And so one of the things I'm curious about, and I admit they have no experience with some of the like interactive stuff on ATSC 3.0 is like how good can those experiences actually be and how seamless and like Alex I know you're a big fan of channels for messing with that stuff but it's like can you build a sort of truly modern streaming world out of an ATSC 3.0 system yeah so I use channels and I can feed in all of my broadcast channels and then I can go and free to be and I can have all of it in one place and I can flip around and I can

DVR, and I can do that whole experience there. And that lets me feel like I'm living in the future. That lets me feel like I'm getting that choice that I kept being promised with cutting the cord and never actually got to the point where I'm like, okay, how do I figure out to like, can I filter Netflix in here? Can I filter other apps in here? Because I'm tired of like going to all the different garbage apps and I just won't want to trust. And so I think there is a potential for it. but I think you're also going to continue to have that difference between like the big streamers, Disney Plus and the HBO Maxes or whatever it ends up being called and the Netflix's. And then the fast guys and the broadcast guys. I think they're like two different sets of groups.

And you might want to think of one side as like the replacement for premium cable paying for your $15 extra each month just to watch the Sopranos or nowadays succession. And the other side where you get your Graze Anatomy and you get your regional sports and regional. news and all the reruns of old British house repair shows you could ask for. Yanko, what about you? Do you see a UI success story in all of this that actually like works for people the way they want to watch TV going forward? That's a really tough question. I don't know if I have a good answer for that. Just while Alex was talking about it, I was thinking about that because channels is one of these solutions that are sort of DIY DVR solution essentially, which is a very small market for that of dedicated people who are like.

It's the listeners of the Vergecast. Yes. We're at the market. Maybe half of them. No one else. I have a DVR in theory through Plex, where I have a HD home run up in the attic or somewhere and I can stream to it. There were a lot of people, by the way, in the comments of your story, extolling the virtues

of the HD home run. A lot of fans of the HD Home Run. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's like the primary competitor for Tableau, right? Like, Tableau is like an easy version of HD Home Run. Right, right, right, because it has the DVR build in, essentially. But to that point. DVRs were really popular in the early cable days,

and we all had the TiVo at some point, more or less. And then we sort of moved on to streaming. And people have been trying to reinvent the DVR or revive the DVR or figure out things to make it better for a long time. And nobody has quite cracked that nut yet. So Amazon had its own over the DVR, and they just discontinued the last year. There is Tableau.

As part of my story, I found out that they sold like 200,000 devices. in 10 years. That's not a lot. This brutal number when I read that. Yes. It turns out the guy who headed on his LinkedIn profile took it down after the story got published. But that happens. Yeah, and then there's a couple

of other ones. There was a company called Simple TV that went out of business really early on. And Boxy, which a couple of people on the Vergecast may remember as well. They tried that too. And then Cloud TV Heroes, people tried doing all those things. And it's always really hard.

theory, it's a great idea. You can sort of accumulate your own personal media library and then you can watch it on demand on any device. You can stream it wherever you want. But making it work in practice is pretty hard. And it always just goes to a certain point because then now you're in the broadcast universe. Again, you don't have all the streaming channels anymore. So unifying all of that is really hard. Making it work is really hard and really only for technically minded people. So I don't have a good answer. I think there is some potential. to make lightweight, maybe, experiences. Like, forget all about DVRs,

forget all about building this TV server in the sky or whatever TV server of your dreams. Just think about somebody who just wants to watch football match or something, and it happens to air on CBS or wherever. And now in the future, he may be able to pre-select his favorite teams who are playing on a different channel at that time, and he can get a ticker on the bottom that shows him how they're doing at that point. So there's things to make TV better,

but I think they're more incremental and they're not like this dream solution we all been hoping for. Okay. So last thing before we go, is there a sort of next possible move we're waiting for? Obviously, Yonko, you talked a bunch about scripts, which seems like the kind of company

that if it decided to push really hard on this could potentially make some moves here. It doesn't sound like there's any particularly like regulatory thing in the way. So are we all just sort of twiddling our thumbs waiting for something to happen? Or is there like a move in the works that we might see at some point soon. So there's a few things. So the broadcasters are warning the FCC to eventually get rid of this mandate that they have to keep carrying the old standard. They don't haven't quite put it like that. They're just like, oh, we would like to have clarity on the timeline, please.

Maybe we can do a working group. It's kind of a very polite way of saying, just we don't want to do this anymore. Well, the good news is the FCC is really functional right now and doing super good, fast work. So that should go just fine. Put it stuffed and everything, exactly. But that's, I think, one of the, pieces of the puzzle potentially. The other one is if adapters really came about or if these tuners itself became a lot cheaper. And when I talk to the people pushing the standard, they were saying, oh, we have now media tech, which makes a lot of the chips and smart TVs. They're starting to support it. So in like 24, you're going to see all these devices come out. And we're going to have

adapters for 40 bucks. I feel like they've been saying similar things for a long time. Yeah, Alex has been saying similar things on the Vergecast for a long time. Yeah. It's always been almost the year of ATSC 3.0. But in theory, in theory, like if it was just a feature that was in any chip you built under smart TV and it was just enabled just out of the box essentially, yeah, there could be something there. But as long as we're still in this waiting period, it's hard for the industry and it's becoming harder because people are losing interest.

Yeah, I think somebody has to front the bill, right? Somebody has to either pay for the boxes so that people can watch it at home or pay to get all of the broadcasters who haven't adopted it yet to go out and adopt it. I'm looking at you every broadcaster in New York City besides a single Korean channel. If somebody pays for that, does kind of what they did back in 2009. I think ATSC has a chance. I think there are a lot of people who are really interested in wanting to get away from paying all of their money to all of these different streaming companies just to watch content. And there's cable companies. So I think there's like a market. People are interested. But the messaging has been garages.

garbage. The rollout has been garbage. And the cost is, frankly, at this point, kind of garbage for most people. Well, on that, uplifting note, everything's garbage. But as soon as the FCC gets into attack together, it's all going to be fine. Yeah, they got this. This is a good idea we had. I'm so sorry, it's not going to work. All right, we need to take a break. Yanko, Alex. Thank you both. Appreciate it. We'll do this again sometime in the next 40 years when we're all watching ATSC 3.0. I'm really looking for it. 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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percent off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back. Our next segment is about hiking gear, but actually it starts with a bit of a spoiler, so I probably shouldn't give anything away. Let's just get into it. Mitchell Clark is here. Hi, Mitchell. Hello. Pleasure to be here. So you have news, and I didn't spoil the news for you in your intro because I feel like, you know, no one should steal hashtag personal news from anybody else. So tell us your news. So yes. So yes. This summer, I am planning on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which basically goes from the Mexican border in California to the Canadian border in Washington. And that's roughly 2,600 miles of walking.

Okay, so my first question, and really the only thing we're here to talk about is why. What's wrong with you? Surprisingly, I haven't gotten this question a lot. I think people hear that, and they're like, yeah, that just tracks. Like, knowing you, yeah, that sounds right. My answer is that I like walking. I don't really have a great answer to it. That's fair.

And this is like a known hike. I'm from the East Coast where like the Appalachian Trail is a thing people do. It's kind of the equivalent. Yeah. There's sort of these triple crown, these three really popular ones. The AT, as you mentioned, the PCT and the Continental Divide Trail. There's a whole movie about it called Wild with Reese Witherspoon, which is based on a book. So yeah, a lot of people are at least passingly familiar with it.

So let's talk just sort of philessalism. philosophically here. Because I feel like there are a bunch of ways you can approach a trip like this, right? You're like, I'm going to be walking a lot. You can either say, I want to try all the new tech. I want to do cool stuff. Or you can go all the other way and say I want to unplug completely. Like no modern technology.

I'm going to hike as our forefathers did. Where have you landed? Like, kind of how do you want to approach this hike? My general idea is that I don't want to sort of, there's a lot of people out there that are turning their hikes into content, which I deeply appreciate. because it gives me a lot of ways to prepare. But I don't want to do that. I'm not interested in it.

So hike talk is not your thing. No hike talk, no hike tube, not even a blog. Okay. That doesn't mean that I'm going to be just 100% disconnected. I'm not throwing my phone in the lake like Laura L.S. I'm bringing the modern stuff that helps keep me safe, but I'm not going to be using it for the modern uses of watching Netflix in bed at night. Okay.

So nothing that's not directly related to the hike? Pretty much, yeah. I am bringing a camera, like a digital camera, just because I don't think my phone's sufficient. This is a once-in-lifetime thing, potentially, and I want to make sure that I have the best pictures of the people that I'm hiking with as I possibly can. That's fair. So, okay, you actually brought up one of the things I was going to ask you about, which is the camera, because you wrote this big story about all the gear you're bringing, and I want to talk about a bunch of it. But the thing that jumped out to me the most actually was the thing.

camera because it's the one place where you're actually bringing what I would say like an unnecessarily large amount of gear everything else you seem to be at sort of the bare minimum like you've stripped all the way down and then you're like but also I'm just bringing a bunch of like camera specific stuff a why and B tell me about the gear you picked and why you picked it yeah so in hiking this is like known as a luxury item like something that you don't need to bring but that you want to and I've I've just always been sort of a photographer. I got my first DSLR when I was like 12. I've loved using it. And I've always been sort of a very focused on image quality. And so I do want to make sure that I have something that can take good pictures in low light because you're out in the wilderness.

Like there's no artificial lighting. And also it has zoom. It has a zoom lens on it. And that is just something that I don't think modern phones really do well. There's a lot of digital zoom. And even, you know, the 10x zoom on some of these very high-end Android phones, it doesn't, it's not a physical zoom lens. So I think that's the main thing. I'm going to be walking through mountains. I might see an elk 200 feet away or a bear or a cougar, and I want to take a picture of it. I want to be sure that I'm able to do that. That's fair. I mentioned the zoom lens. I'm bringing a Canon G5x and it has a 8.8 to 44 millimeter lens, which is roughly, I think, 18 to 120, something like that in the full range.

Yeah, and it's 1.8 to 2.8. So it's going to be pretty decent in low light. And it's got a flip-up screen so I can see myself when I'm taking pictures, like the group selfie, which is always nice. That's something that you don't always get on these sort of compact cameras. And while it is like, you know, it's not light. It's not even as heavy as like a mirrorless camera or anything like that. It is a compact point shoot. So I'm not giving up too much in terms of weight savings to bring it along.

So I also saw it looked like you're bringing one of those like adjustable Joby tripods. Is that coming with you too? No, it's not an adjustable Joby tripod, not the gorilla pod. It is basically just like, I don't know, two inches tall. It's basically so I don't have to put the camera on a rock is essentially what that is. So it will so have to be like up on something. And that's just so I can take pictures of myself, basically. Yeah, the wide lens actually seems like it's going to come in handy.

Like, you think about Zoom a lot, but it's also like you're going to be in these sort of small spaces where you need to get a picture of you in a cool place without falling off of a cliff. And having an 18mm lens at that point is actually more useful than it gets credit for. Very much so, yeah. And that is something that my phone could probably do fine, but I have it on the camera, so why not? Not the phone that I'm bringing. We don't need to talk about that. No, no, we absolutely need to talk about that, Mitchell. That's what we're going next.

Let's talk about that right now. What phone are you bringing? So I have an iPhone mini 12. That is the phone that I use in everyday life. It is sufficient. It is not the phone I'm bringing. Because the battery only lasts like two and a half hours. Well, yeah, it's like three years old now and two.

Like I'm bringing this phone called a Uniherts Titan pocket, which is imagine a Blackberry. I was going to say that's a knockoff blackberry. Yeah. It does have a touchscreen. It does run Android 11. It's got USBC. Oh, so it's better than a BlackBerry. Yes, yeah.

But it is, it's got a keyboard. The reason why I'm bringing this is one that I plan on sending very long emails home. And just typing on this is I find it to be a very nice experience. Also, it's not particularly expensive. It's like $300 phone. So if it gets ruined, then it's like, whatever. Okay. It also has features, which is something that my iPhone does not necessarily have.

it has an SD card reader, which means that I can take the pictures from my camera and just load it and not have to worry about the internal storage of this. I've got a 512 gigabyte micro-SD card in here, along with the 128 gigabytes of internal storage. Whereas with my iPhone, I'd just be limited to that 128 gigabytes of internal storage.

It's also got a headphone jack, so I don't have to worry about an adapter breaking, so that's nice because those adapters are pretty fiddly. I had a lot of times when I was backpacking that it just wouldn't work. And I literally cannot imagine anything sort of less in the spirit of the hike than having to go like hunt for a USBC to 3.5 millimeter headphone jack in the middle of the- No, no, it's a lightning one if I was using my iPhone. Well, yeah, that's true too.

That'd be horrible. I don't think there have that many best buys on the trail. I don't know. I was just thinking as you were talking about lighting. Like when you do this hike, what is the furthest you're ever going to be away from somebody with a ring light in the woods taking a picture? And I feel like the answer is like upsettingly not that far most of the time. That's a fair point. I know the Cierras.

There's a couple places in there that you do have to have a permit to be at. So I would assume that those sorts of places are not going to attract sort of the casual wildlife Instagram crowd. But I could be wrong. So is the only reason not to bring your iPhone, like the sort of storage and battery stuff you're talking about? Because I think the upside of the iPhone is it just does all the things. Like you can use it for navigation. You can use it for taking pictures. You can use it to like find stuff.

And now one thing I was curious about was like the satellite connectivity. Like they're starting to build emergency stuff into these things that I would think would be really useful on an adventure like this. Like why leave the iPhone behind when it seems like it's kind of a good backup to everything? That's a totally fair point. One, as I mentioned before, I have an iPhone 12. So it doesn't have that satellite connectivity. I also am carrying a dedicated satellite messenger. It's called the Garmin.

reach mini and that thing has a couple of advantages to it. One, it's got a really long battery life. Like it lasts for four days between charges. The iPhone does not. It also lets sort of people at home, specifically my mom and wife, track me. It'll take my GPS location every, I think, five minutes. It's just setting so I can change it and then send it up to satellites and they will be able to see where I am basically at any given time. It also, unlike the iPhones, even they, even the iPhone 14's SR via satellite feature lets me just send text messages. It uses like an obscenely expensive plan. I think it's like $40 a month. But I can send unlimited text messages even if I don't have cell coverage. And that is going to be a very frequent occurrence. I know

a lot of people have said, yeah, in the CERAs, it's like a week where you don't have cell coverage. And given that that is going to be the most dangerous part of the trail this year, I definitely want to be able to check in with my friends and family as often as possible to let them know that I'm okay. Okay. That is actually really interesting because I was sort of thinking about it as if you were going to have service, you know, in spots, right? You might go like a few hours with it, a few hours without it.

But the idea of going for a full week and unfamiliar terrain without service makes me think there's some like, like to me that means I have to spend eight hours like furiously downloading every map and podcast and, you know, episode of Ted Lasso that I can possibly get on. to my device. What is, do you have, like, I'm about to go offline procedures baked into this whole thing? Yeah, it's every week or two you will stop in a town. And that's basically my ideas. I'll download my podcasts for the week, audiobooks, music, all that sort of thing. And to be realistic with myself, I will be listening to music on the trail, but I don't think it's going to be like a constant thing, right? I don't think that I will be sort of always with my earbuds in. For one,

for safety reasons in the desert, there's rattlesnakes. So you don't want to come up on one of those and not hear their warning signal. And then just the spatial awareness of traveling through very snowy areas in the Sierra, which, by the way, is a pretty short section of the trail. I think it's only two to 300 miles. So it's not like I'm going to be going months without cell service. It's only a pretty short period of time. Yeah, it does seem like rocking the noise cancelling, you know,

the Bose QC-35s on the PCT kind of defeats the purpose. the thing you're trying to do. Yes, probably not a great idea. And then as for maps, I have this app called Far Out, which used to be known as Got Hooked if anyone's hiked these trails in sort of the past 10 years. Basically, you just download 700-mile sections of the trail all the time, and it's got the maps and a bunch of waypoints. So like, hey, here's a good campsite, here's where you can get water, that sort of information. So yeah, I will have that downloaded on my phone as well. Okay. Is there a, you know, you talk about like hiking, TikTok and hiking YouTube and stuff. Is there like a place people who do hikes like this gather to hang out and talk

about it? Like I'm sure there are people out there who are like recommending all the best views and side hikes and things like that. Like where does the PCT community like hang out and talk about this stuff? Yeah. So there's a couple of places. One is the people who are actually on the trail fur out does have comments on these sorts of locations. So you can read what people say like, oh, there was, you know, there was water here. No, there wasn't water here. This campsite has ants stay away. stuff like that. So that is one sort of thing. It's not really a place where you would talk with other people, though, because this is a very, like, sort of, it's more like a bulletin board. Right. That is like, like, as a much less ambitious hiker than you, that's what I use, like, all trails for. Where you can just see, it's like somebody three days ago said, this is really muddy and overrun. And so it's like, okay, we won't do that hike today. And so it's like, it's not quite, like, talking about it in real time, but you sort of get a sense of the place. And it sounds like that's a little bit of what you're talking about.

Yeah, for sure. So in terms of, like, talking about. walking in real time. There's a Pacific Cross Trail subreddit, which I've been hanging out on a ton. But really, I think most of the activity is going to be in a Facebook group, as everything that used to be in a forum nowadays is going to be in a Facebook group. It's deeply upsetting. Yeah, it does mean that I will have Facebook on my phone for this hike, which I'm not happy about, but it is what it is. Your goal is between the beginning of the hike and the end of the hike, you have to get them to switch to Discord. You have 2,600 miles to get them to switch to Discord. That's the job.

So the benefit of the Facebook group is that you can see what people are experiencing ahead of you. So like, oh, this river crossing is super dangerous. We almost died. Okay, you want to know that you'll have to be like pretty careful around that. And then also there are these people who will just help hikers along the way. So they'll give them rides to town. They'll bring them food sometimes.

Give them places to stay. They're called trail angels. And a lot of those, you'll contact them through Facebook groups as well. So that's if you need help. you may be able to find it in that group as well. Got it. Okay. That makes sense. Talk to me about power. Because you mentioned you hit a town once a week or so.

I'm assuming that's a moment you just plug in everything you can think of. But like how many cables are you bringing? What are you going to charge with? Like, what's the plan? I think I'm bringing three cables. I'm bringing two USB cables and then a micro USB cable for my Garmin and my flashlight. Listen, Garmin. Garmin, get it together. USBC.

Okay, the new version of both my Garmin and my flashlight. have USBC. So if I had bought this stuff this year instead of like two years ago, I would be fine. There's legitimately like a commercial to be made in the fact that someday you could do this hike and just bring one cable with you. It's like that's the tree. 100%. That's the EU's whole marketing campaign should be hikers with USBC cables. Yes, absolutely. So yeah, and then I'm carrying a battery bank that charges via USBC. It's about 20,000 milliamp hours. My phone won't be on all day or at the very least it will be in airplane mode. So I should be able to get away with it, charging it every two or three days. So it's not going to be an every night

thing like I do at home. That to me is like a perfect, it's such a like linear thing because it's like you can, they make them that are much bigger than 20, but like holy God, are they heavy? Or you could get a much smaller one that's like 10 and those are, you know, sort of way for thin now. And you strike me as somebody who has probably done some math on the exact correct ampere hours to weight ratio for this hike. It's not even doing the math. It's having lived it. I did a, hike that was around 180 miles in August last year and I had a 10,000 million amp hour battery. And it didn't last enough. Oh, interesting. Okay. I ran out of power about two days out of a town. And trying to communicate with my family saying like, hey, I'm all right, but I can't talk to you

anymore. That was stressful for me and them. So that's why I'm bringing a 20,000 million amp hour one. I buy that. But no like wacky solar chargers or anything like that? No. Generally, the wisdom is that solar charges are not particularly useful. They just don't provide enough juice for the amount of weight that they take up. Okay. And in a lot of trails, you know, you won't be out that much in the sun. The PCT, I think, is a pretty big exception to that. It's not so much tree cover, but yeah.

Tell me about your bag, because I am what I would describe as like a reformed bag sicko, in that I have several times more bags than I will ever need to use in my life. And so I love a good bag. Yeah, so podcast lessons can't see this, but there are literally two bags in the background of my video right now. And what looks like a hard hat. Yeah, that's for when I do trail work, basically building trails. When you're swinging a peckax, you know, you've got to be careful. But neither of those are the bags that I'm bringing.

The bag that I'm bringing is one that you can't actually buy anymore. It's by a company called Waymark. A big thing in hiking now is these sort of smaller cottage brands. So there are plenty of people who will still bring things like an Osprey or Gregory pack. Sure. But there's a million brands making sort of these very specific pieces of gear. And this is one of them. It's made out of a fabric called EcoPack, and it's bright red, which is great for the search

and rescue crews. But this fabric is made of, it's recycled, so made out of recycled water bottles. And it's also a laminated plastic fabric thing. So it's water resistant. Nothing's waterproof, especially not in hiking. But it is water resistant. So when I am hiking through the rain or snow or going through a river, It should keep most of the stuff I have in it dry, at least dry enough.

It's about 40 liters, which if you've shopped for like day packs, you'll know is pretty small. A lot of people will carry something more in the 50 to 60 liter range. Yeah, you see 40 as like a, that counts as like a big day-to-day backpack for a lot of people rather than like a hiking bag. Yeah, I've worked pretty hard to get like relatively compact gear. And it also helps that it has sort of this roll top enclosure, which you can roll. down basically there's no zipper on the top you just roll it and then clip it with some buckles to get it to close but that also means that it's expandable so like I've got the main body and then I can also sort of push up some stuff towards the top sure it also has a Y strap so if I need to

put something on the top of that I can do that too and that's going to become really important when I need to carry a bear can so my bear can's going to go on the top of it because it won't really fit in this. It's just too big and too wide. Mitchell, I have a really important question. What's your question? The hell's a bear can. A bear can is this, it is kind of what it sounds like. It is a very large canister.

Okay. And you just give it to a bear so it goes away. Yeah, it's a tribute. No. So it is this massive plastic thing. This looks like a company-sized water jug that you would have in your water fountain at work. Yeah. And the theory behind

these is that bears can't get into them. The International or the North American Grizzly Association or whatever they're called has put this in a thing with a bear and to make sure that the bears can't get into it. And what you do is that you put your food in this and anything else that might smell like food, chapstick sunscreen, toothpaste, you put it in here and then you put it away from your campsite. The bear can still smell it, but when they come to sort of investigate it, they can't get in and they'll leave. You don't want bear that. You don't want bears. eating your food, that's bad for you because you need that food. And it's bad for the bear because then animals learn. This is where I can get food. They might start molesting hikers.

And that usually ends up in the forest service having to go out and kill that bear, which is not great. You don't want to be responsible for that. There's not enough of them as there is. We're not really worried about grizzlies on the PCT. This is just for black bears. And there's only certain sections that you have to carry this. There aren't desert bears in Southern California that you have to worry about. So this will just be for a few hundred miles. Got it. Okay. What are you going to miss most? What technology are you like looking wistfully at being like, I'm not going to have you for months. What am I, whatever am I going to do? Very specifically, Breath of the Wild too. It is coming out like a few days after I leave.

I'm not bringing a switch with me. I've joked about it. I'm not going to do it. You've thought about it. I have 100% thought about it. I googled like, how much do is the switchlight really way? And how long would it be able to play this? Like, in terms of battery power. But I'm not going to get a switchlight and bring it. I think video games I'm going to miss a lot.

And then two things that aren't high tech, air conditioning and running water. You do not know how much you take running water for granted. Like when you go to wash your hands or like, oh, I spilled something on myself. I want to wash it off until you have like a very specific amount of water and no way to get more until you get to like a way somewhere that's five miles away. Right. Yeah, that's very fair. Well, and that is good because it brings me to my last question for you, which is as you were leaving the verge, I just want to know, did you ever imagine writing the sentence? Pooping, however, requires a bit more planning as part of like your journalism career.

Like how does it feel that that is the Mitchell Clark Verge legacy? The sentence pooping, however, requires a bit more planning. I never expected that. It does track. It's not shocking, I don't think. I mean, you're not wrong. All right, Mitchell, I hope the hike is awesome. I hope you come back and tell us about it.

Thank you so much. This is really fun. Yeah, absolutely. It's been a pleasure. All right, we need to take one more break. And then, as we'd like to do here on the Vergecast, we're going to come back and talk about iPads. We'll be right back.

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Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. As you know, we here on the Vergecast are forever fascinated by the iPad. Because like, what is the iPad? Is it a tablet? Is it a computer? What is a computer? Does the difference matter?

Does anyone care about any of this? I don't know. But it's fun to talk about. The Virges Dan Seafurt has been on something of an iPad journey recently. He's been trying to figure out both which iPad you should buy and how to make the iPad work better for writing by hand, which is a thing a lot of people really want. So I brought him here to help us with all of those questions and some other stuff too. Hi, Dan.

Hello. I feel like I haven't talked to you on the show in forever. This is very exciting. It's been a minute. Yeah. We haven't had feelings about iPads in too long. I've missed having feelings about iPads. Well, let's fix that.

So my immediate reason for wanting to have you on, and you've actually written a bunch of interesting stuff about iPads over the last few weeks, and we're going to get to that. But the thing I knew I wanted to have you on to talk about was the thing you wrote about screen protectors, these like paper-feeling screen protectors. And my immediate reaction to reading this story was I have spent, I don't know, 15 years telling everyone I know to not use a screen protector because they don't actually protect your screen. They make everything look worse.

They're a scam. Nobody puts them on correctly. they're a scam, don't buy them. Like, just don't do it. And now I'm kind of like, I read your piece and I'm like, okay, maybe this is at least in one very specific case, maybe this is no longer good advice. Your advice was not wrong. I personally am anti-screen protector for the most part too.

Like, I don't put one on my phone. I typically don't put one on anything else. But if you've ever tried to write on an iPad with a pencil, it is a hard plastic stylus on a glass screen and it's noisy and it slips around all the time. and it's really hard to get used to. And, like, as a result, I would have really terrible handwriting. Like, worse than normal handwriting, I should say. It's not like my handwriting ever is good, but worse than normal.

Yeah. It was just, like, not an enjoyable experience. And one of the things that I like to do with my iPad, I wanted to be able to use my iPad for is be able to take notes while I'm in a meeting or thinking of something or whatever, just kind of like as a notepad at my desk. And so a few years ago, I actually bought one of these matte screen protectors. Some people call them paper feel. There's a brand called Paper Like.

All kind of the same. thing. And the idea is this matte surface provides a little bit of texture to the top of the iPad. And then when you're writing with the stylus, it provides just enough resistance where you have more control. It feels a little bit closer to writing on pen and paper. It's not exactly the same, but it's closer than the bare glass. And it's not as loud. You don't hear the tapping on the glass nearly as much. It's just a more enjoyable experience if you're using it a lot. So I've actually been really happy with it. And now, like, I don't use an iPad without it. I just put it on there.

And then when I'm writing, I'm happier. There's, like, other side benefits and other side tradeoffs. The other side benefits are, like, because it's a matte screen, if you've ever looked at a matte screen versus a glossy screen, you know that, like, a matte screen has much fewer reflections and much less glare. So if I'm looking at my iPad and I'm reading on it, which is like the other thing that I really use an iPad for, I'm not staring back at my reflection half the time. Oh, that's interesting.

Because the glare is cut down a lot. I can sit next to it. reading lamp and not have to like position the iPad just right so that the light isn't like reflecting in my eyes. So that's kind of a nice benefit. And then the last benefit is iPads for whatever reason don't have great oleophobic coatings on them. So they get really fingerprinty and greasy really quickly. And the screen protector actually helps mitigate that. It doesn't remove it entirely, but it helps make that less obvious. And they're really easy to clean. You just wipe it off and stuff like that. So it helps like in the areas that I care most about using my iPad, which is like

reading and writing and doing work on and stuff like that, it helps me enjoy the experience better. If I was like watching movies all the time, I might not love it that much. I want to get to the tradeoffs in one sec, because I think that was the thing. In reading the comments to your story, there were a bunch of people who were like, Dan, you're an idiot because it makes looking at the screen worse. And I think that's a valid point, but I want to come back to that in a second. But I think there's this interesting thing that's like, I was trying to piece out in reading your story where there's screen protectors that ostensibly are there to protect them from

scratches, right? And those are the ones, I think, are just a scam. Like, don't buy those. And then there's the ones that are, like, the privacy screen protectors that sort of you put over to sort of keep it so that people in your peripheral vision can't see. Which I find hilarious, because the amount of engineering that goes into a modern display to give it, like, very wide viewing angles is like, like, years of development went into that so that you can see it the same, whether you're looking at it from like a 45 degree angle or dead on. And then someone puts a privacy screen screen. protector and undoes all of that engineering. Every time I see somebody doing that, I'm like, buddy, we're in row 27 on this plane.

Like, there's no chance you're doing anything on that that I can't see. Like, it's fine. But anyway, and so then these paper-like ones, both, you know, lowercase paper-like and uppercase paper-like in the case of the brand seem to be sort of like those, but also different. And I guess part of what I'm trying to figure out is like when they say they make it feel more like paper, what are they doing other than just putting a matte coating on top of the screen?

Like, is it just that simple that it provides that resistance? Like, what else is there? It really is. That's all that is to it. Okay. You know, I think paper like the brand has a lot of marketing materials around what their specific screen protector does. And it's got like these micro abrasions on it.

And it's kind of like just, it is like basically texture that you can't see, but it is so small that you can feel it when you drag a stylus across it. And so like that is just providing a little bit of resistance. And that is all it is. to it. The texture that they build into the plastic is actually created by like removing plastic. So they start with a thicker screen protector and then they remove bits to like create the texture to make it happen. But that's all it is. I think it is basically largely a clear screen protector that they sand it down, probably in a more technical way. But like that's the gist.

They sanded it down and now it has a slight texture on it that you can't really see but you can feel. And it provides that matte finish on it. And it kind of disperses the light. so that helps illuminate the glare some, and it gives it that textured feeling when you're writing on it. Got it. Okay. Okay, so back to the trade-offs.

The two things that I saw in the comments and I've heard before about the screen protectors are, A, it sort of destroys the light color vibrancy of the screen, so when I'm watching a movie, it doesn't look as good. And B, I've heard some people, and this seems to be sort of less universally believed, but some people say it actually makes the screen feel less interactive in the sense that it's like, do you remember when we used to use those devices where you could sort of tell that the screen was like three panes of glass away? And it didn't feel like you were touching a thing.

It was like you were touching glass on top of a thing that then clicked the thing. And it just didn't feel nearly as direct. I've heard some people say they get that feeling with these screen protectors too, that it just like adds this extra sort of abstraction between you and the thing you're trying to mess with. Are either of those valid points in your use? As far as like the abstraction thing, you know, maybe if you're really sensitive to it, maybe it's a thing. I'm not going to deny their experience. For me, it's not really an issue. I'm able to tap and swipe and type on the screen and all that kind of stuff without any like complaints or whatever. I know that paper light touts how thin their screen protector is, I think, to kind of like address that criticism somewhat. But like it's never really been a problem for me. And I've like I said, I've used this for years now on iPads and I've crossed multiple iPads. The thing about the vibrancy and the contrast, that is a real thing. And like when you put it on, it does reduce the contrast of the screen a bit. And And just like the difference between a glossy screen and a matte screen is that you have more glare and reflections in the glossy screen, you also have a much more contrasty kind of vibrant look on that glossy screen versus the matte screen. And that's exactly what happens here. So like if you buy an iPad specifically to watch TV and watch video and watch movies on most of the time, maybe you don't want one of these. And you can like deal with the glare and the reflections and you can be happy. And especially if you got like the 12.9 inch iPad with a micro LED screen, you bought it specifically because of how great that screen is, that And yeah, maybe this isn't the right thing for you.

But for me, I watch the occasional YouTube video and maybe if I'm on a plane, I'll watch a movie on it. It's still a better experience than watching the seatback movie. We're talking about like differences among good, right? Yeah, that's fair. For what I use my iPad for and like for what I spend most of the time on it for, it's more beneficial than it is detrimental for me. Other people have different use cases. Maybe their idea of what they want to use an iPad for is different. And like it's not the right thing for them.

But yeah, it will diminish the contrast a bit, and it maybe might diminish the sharpness a tad too. But today's iPad screens are so high resolution that like the sharpness is, they're still very sharp. Okay. So it's the equivalent of going from like the current iPad screen to like maybe a generation or two ago iPad screen, not like going from like a high res TV to a low res TV. No, no, not at all.

It's like, you know, today's iPad screens are all considered retina level resolution. It's not even like going back to pre-retina. Like it doesn't make it that work. bad. It's just like, it's just not quite as punchy as it could be without the screen protector. Okay. What about the pencil, which is another, obviously, part of the drawing process. And I want to get to your specific setup here because one of the things, it seems like you have discovered and seems to be true with all Apple products is there's this like set of high-end accessories by like brands you've often heard of. Usually somehow like $60 is the minimum

price for any of these things, no matter what it is. And then there is just an infinity of crappy Amazon versions of them for $6. And I say this as somebody who just bought a bunch of no-name Apple watch bands for $4 a piece. No, I'm sorry, $6 a piece. And they're amazing. And I'm never buying an Apple-branded watch band again. Yeah, never buy a branded Apple Watch band ever. Unbelievable.

I can't believe how much money I have wasted not buying crappy Apple Watch bands on Amazon. But the other part of this equation is the pencil, which is also very expensive. And I know you've spent some time goofing around with both the pencil and the the knockoff pencils. Yeah. How does that fit into this equation? I didn't even know knockoff puzzles existed until a few months ago. Yeah, there was just like the Logitech one and that was the only other one I knew about.

Exactly, the same. Logitech made the crayon, which was marketed towards like kids and for education and stuff like that. And then there was like the Apple Pencil, which is regularly like $130. Maybe you can get it for $100 on sale or whatever. I was like, that's it. That's the market. I don't need to know anything more.

And I don't know what I was doing on Amazon a few months ago, browsing for something. And I saw that like there's actually a whole. industry of knock off Apple pencils. And when I say knockoff, I don't mean like the Logitec crayon where they made a different looking device that works with Apple's technology. I mean, these things look exactly like an Apple pencil too. Like you cannot visually tell them apart. So I saw all of these. I saw one that was like, I don't know, one of the lesser expensive ones and it had the ability to stick to the side of a modern iPad, like the iPad pencil too, and charge itself that way. And it looks exactly the same. And you can change.

a tip and I was like, what the hell? It's like $25. I will just buy it and see if it works. I do not believe this will work. I bought this with one of those assumptions of like, this is not going to work. Yeah. And I get it and I open the box and everything. I can't tell them apart visually, except for the fact that the Apple one says Apple Pencil on it or pencil and the Apple logo on it. And when I'm holding it, the materials feel exactly the same. Wow. So I started like using it. And it's a little weird because the Apple Pencil obviously is very tightly integrated. with the iPad. Like, they were developed together.

It's Apple's first party thing. It has a little bit of, like, really nice at ease. Like, you pair it by just sticking it on the side of the iPad. The iPad talks to it. It pairs it's connected. When you put it on there, the little pop-up with a battery icon tells you when it's charging, stuff like that. It's like the AirPods thing, right?

Like, you can do things other ways, but Apple's own products always get these, like, little extra affordances that nobody else gets. Little extra bonus. Yeah. This one doesn't work quite that seamlessly. When you first get it, you have to go into your Bluetooth menu and connect to it. it like you would any other Bluetooth device. So it's like got an initial pairing process.

And then when you put it on the side of the iPad, it will charge the battery, but you don't get the little pop-up window saying how the battery is charging. So their workaround is, because it's a Bluetooth device, it integrates into Apple's batteries widget. So you can put the batteries widget on your iPad's home screen. And then you can see if your knockoff ample pencils charging. Good enough, yeah. I never use a pencil long enough to deplete the battery.

Basically when I take my note and then I put it back on the iPad and it's charging. I never know what the battery life of my pencil is, but it does allow you to do that. So like some of the other ones out there have USBC ports and things like that where you would have to plug in a cable. I was like, that's obviously a pretty diminished experience. But this sticks to the side of my iPad Mini. It charges off the side of my iPad Mini.

All great and wonderful there. And then the other weird thing is because it's a Bluetooth device, it goes to sleep. And so if you pick it up after a while and start writing with it, it won't be immediately responsive, but you just like stick it back on the side of the iPad and pull it back off. and it immediately wakes up, and then you can write again.

And then once you're writing with it, it feels just like the other, the Apple Pencil. It's a little bit lighter, like a gram and a half or two grams lighter, according to my kitchen scale, which you notice if you hold both of them together, but you never notice if you didn't do that. Sure. And like the tracking and the responsiveness and all that kind of stuff is just as responsive as the Apple Pencil. It supports tilting, so you can, like, tilt to get a different thickness on your brush,

but it doesn't support pressure sensitivity. So, like, I think the Logitechreon has the same limitation. It supports tilt, but not pressure. So for whatever reason, that is like a first-party Apple thing. But for me, for what I do with an Apple pencil and my iPad, is taking handwritten notes. I don't need pressure sensitivity. In fact, pressure sensitivity makes it mean like sometimes my letters are stupid, goofy, thick when I push too hard or whatever. Yeah, I always find the first letter of every word I write is like much larger and thicker than the rest of the letters.

Exactly. If you're an artist, if you're serious about it, like, yeah, you might want pressure sensitivity and stuff like that. you might want these extra features. But for someone who's just like, I've got an iPad, I don't really know if I'm going to use the pencil or not. I don't know if I'm even going to like writing on my iPad a lot. And I don't want to spend 100 to $130 to find out. Like, I'm just shocked at how well this works for its cost.

And so for like $25 to $30,000, you can get a knockoff pencil that basically gives you 80% of the experience. Yeah, I'm actually with you on the fact that it sticks to the side of the iPad is everything. because like even the Apple Pencil one always annoyed me and I didn't use it enough because I just didn't have it with me and charged most of the time. I would just forget about it for weeks at a time. But now the fact that it just lives there, I'll take most other issues to save, you know, whatever 80% of the price as long as it has that one. That's pretty exciting. Okay.

So you're using that. Is that your, that's your go-to pencil now? Yeah. I mean, I own an Apple Pencil, too, that I got back in like 2018 or something like that. And so, like, I bought this one to compare against it and see what it's like. But when I got it stuck to my iPad mini right now and, like, really, it doesn't matter to me which one I pick up. So, like, they both get the job done. So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

Like I said, if you're just kind of like pencil curious, you know, you're going to be doing some, like, casual stuff with it, maybe just handwriting, then it's, like, totally, totally fine. Is the same true for the screen protectors where you can either buy the nice fancy brand name ones or the piece of junk ones on Amazon and they're all close enough? I will caveat with that I only have experience with the nicer ones. I haven't like explored the world of Randos. It's a deep, deep well. Yeah, it's a really deep well. I think with that with there, you will, at least this is based on like what other experiences that I've read with the cheaper ones is that they do have more impact on the screen quality

than some of the nicer brand name ones. So if you spend 30 to 40 or 45 bucks for one, that's from paper like or Moshe or I think Pent Tips is the other brand that makes a pretty higher end one, they will. look pretty good on the iPad, but some of the cheaper ones will have more and like kind of like weird color refraction on them and stuff like that. That is like going to mar your experience more. If it doesn't matter to you and you're just really curious to spend like eight to 10 bucks to just see if it is, then like sure, it's only eight to 10 bucks. But you will get a better experience probably with one of the more expensive ones. I want to talk about your iPad buying guide before I let you go

because the what iPad should I buy is like my eternally favorite complicated question. It should not be so complicated. No, it should. It's such a wild place for us to be in now where if you go to Apple's own website and you click iPad, you are presented with four categories and six discrete iPad options. That's too many. It's just too many. The buying guide is very good and we'll link to it in the show notes.

But the thing that jumped out to me, and I feel like you had two conclusions, and I want you to tell me if you agree with my reading of your conclusions. Conclusion number one was if you don't know what to buy, buy the iPad air. It's pretty good at everything. I would say it's great at everything. Yeah, right. Like, it's not the best screen. It's not the smallest, but it is it is right in the middle in a really good way. Like, great. But the real answer is if you want the full iPad experience, you probably need to own multiple iPads. Yeah. And it makes me so happy that that's where you landed because that's also where I've landed and I feel ridiculous about it. You know, I didn't put that line in there. You suss that out.

Like, I mean, you might have projected a little bit, but I feel you. I'm willing to admit that this might be a me problem more than anybody else. There's a very real thing where there are so many different iPads in the lineup now, and there are enough differences between them that certain iPads are very good at certain things and other iPads are very good at other things, and they don't really do both. And I think the most extreme example of this is you've got the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and the iPad Mini. And the 12.9 inch iPad Pro, if you're going to try to be productive on an iPad and use it as a computer, connected to an external display, attach a keyboard, all that kind of stuff, that is the iPad to think about and to like consider,

even though it is really expensive, especially when you add on all the accessories. But as an iPad, it's not great because it's so big and it's heavy. And like, so my experience when I had a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, and I've heard this from a lot of owners of them, is it just never. leaves its keyboard case. Yeah, it's, it's functionally a laptop. It's functionally a laptop with a touchscreen. Exactly. And so like if you're lounging on the couch, you're lying in bed, you want to read, you want to browse a website, whatever. It's not the iPad. That's great at that. Then on the other end of the spectrum is the iPad Mini, which is really great for just lounging around and reading. You can, like, slip it into a bag easily. It might fit into you into a jacket pocket. You can take it with you. It's a great

personal reading device. You can watch some video on it, whatever. It's terrible for getting worked on because it's like you can't type on the screen. Apple doesn't even make a first-party keyboard for it for obvious reasons, even though you can pair a Bluetooth keyboard to it. But it's like not the productive iPad. So like they serve very different needs. And there's a real scenario where if you like you're using iPads, you could own both of them or you could own an 11-inch and an iPad mini

and use them in very different ways. And like personally, I hate admitting this publicly, but that's what I do. Same. I use my 11-inch iPad Pro with its keyboard case. and like that's my travel work computer. And then my iPad mini is like my personal reading device. And I use that at night when I'm reading a book or reading articles or catching up on news or what have you. That is my setup exactly.

I have never felt more seen than when you described that just now. No, I'll tell you, the thing for me, and I've noticed this even more after reading your buying guide, is that the two most common things I do with an iPad are one sit either on the couch or in bed and read. right and it's like i have the kindle app i have i have i have matter which i use for like reading stuff later i have all the news apps it is like exclusively like a consumption device and then the other thing i do and i do this way more often than i realized is i i'm in the kitchen and i'm i have the ipad up and i'm watching a video full screen and then in slide over i have the recipe app that i'm using and so it just sort of sits on top of whatever i'm watching it's on the stand it has

plenty of screen it works perfectly like it's an excellent setup while i'm running around cooking Those two things, I cannot do the other one on the other device. Like, the 11-inch one is too big to sit, like, lie in bed and read one-handed. And the mini, and it's such a stupid thing about the mini. Like, it doesn't have a stand that's good enough to sort of sit propped up in my kitchen for an hour and have me sort of bash at it with my flowery fingers. It just has the dumb, foldy case that... And, like, if you're, if you're like four or five feet away from it, like, it's harder to see. Like, it's just not the right device for that use case.

Yeah. It's a very cute example of like how that dynamic works out. Yeah. So this sucks and I think is sort of an unsolvable problem. But I guess the good news is I'm going to propose a solve. Oh, please. I'm ready. Hit me. A foldable iPad. I mean, fair. Fair. It starts as an iPad mini. You fold it again. It turns into an iPhone. Unfold it twice. iPad Pro. Unfold it again. MacBook. One more time, Mac Pro. Done. It's the future, man. I just did it. No, I honestly think you're right. As I was thinking about this, like, the only solution I can think of to this sort of fractalization of the iPad is a foldable one. Because I don't know how Apple pushes all that stuff back together over time otherwise.

Yeah. I sincerely hope that's coming. But the air struck me as what you're kind of what you were saying earlier. It's gone from being kind of the like solid middle ground to it's just great. Like it's very good at everything now. And there used to be stuff that it was missing and, you know, you're making price sacrifices on one end or you're making processor sacrifices on the other end. And now it's kind of like if I just want to buy an iPad and know that it's going to work really well for five years and support roughly all the accessories I need, the air, the air seems like a slam dunk kind of easy choice, right? Yeah, I fully agree.

There are like a handful of, I think I call them like nice quality of life features that you get on the iPad Pro that you don't get on the air. Face ID is a nice quality of life feature. it's not available on the air. It has touch ID, which works very quickly and very well, but face ID is very convenient. You get a faster refresh screen, which is nice to have. You will never notice it if you don't have it. So, like, you won't miss it on the air if you don't compare it against the pro. And then, like, the speakers go from, like, two to four. And so, like, the really good air speakers sound really great. The pro has really great speakers. But it's, like, a minor difference. And then I guess the current pros have an M2 processor and the air has the M1 processor. But, yeah, nobody can

tell the difference between the two. Like, the iPad software cannot tell you the difference between the two. Yeah, ironically, I would argue the most noticeable difference of all the ones you just described is the speakers. I'm consistently surprised at how good the iPad Pro sounds and how much sound it can actually put out. And the air is fine, but it is noticeably not as good in a way that I totally agree. Like, for my workflow, I think it's going to be a very long time before I notice the

difference between the M1 and whatever else comes next. Like, is the M-Sat? is going to make my life meaningfully better than the M1? Like, I don't know, but I sort of doubt it at this point. But the flip side is the air gets all of the other benefits of the pro. So, like, you can use it with an external display and get all the features. You can use it with the same keyboard and the same stylus accessories. You can add 5G to it.

You can, you know, it's the same weight and size as the 11 inch pro. So, like, it is basically a pro light. And, like, for most people, mass majority of people buying an iPad for thinking what they want, like you said, I wanted to work for five years and get all the features or whatever, the error is just a slam-dunk no-brainer. The only rub there, the only thing that makes this consideration a little more difficult, and I had a paragraph about this in the intro, is that I suggest people look at prior year model iPads because the development of the iPad is so slow, and the differences between model years is so minor that you can buy last year's iPad Pro, or the one from two years ago now, I guess it's a

2021 model and still get basically the same experience at like 40% less price. And if you're able to find a refurbish model or an open box or clearance or whatever iPad 11 inch iPad Pro and your only other option is like a new iPad Air, you might end up spending less on the pro and get those extra bonus features. So like you do have to do a little bit of homework and like do your own due diligence or whatever. But if we're comparing like regular prices and like you're just at apple.com clicking around to buy one, then the air.

is just a slam dunk, no-burner. Do you think, like, I'm trying to think of sort of how far back I would tell people to feel good about buying. And it seems to me, like, anything with an M-chip, you should feel very good about buying. Is that a good cutoff? Like, don't even worry about it as long as it has an M-chip? You know, I think, actually, you could probably go a little bit further back than that. Even, you know, the 2018 iPad Pro was when they introduced that new design that had the second-generation

pencil, and then they introduced the magic keyboard in 2020 that works with that design and stuff like that, that is still extremely capable iPad. The one thing that you don't get is you don't get the ability to use stage manner on an external display. And that is like one feature. Don't care. And not a great feature. So, like, if you can find a refurbish 2018 iPad Pro, you could probably get that for like a really great price. The only thing I would say to look for is because it is four or five years old at this point, see if the battery has been serviced, see if the battery has been replaced or conditioned or whatever. But like, otherwise, like its processor is extremely capable.

The 2020 model processor is extremely capable. And then once you get into the M1, like, yeah, you have no concerns whatsoever. Okay. All right. Well, we need to take a break. So I'm going to let you go. But last question and tell me the honest truth, Dan. The iPad mini is your favorite iPad.

I do like the iPad mini. Yeah, I do too. I have better and more powerful ones. And I use all kinds of things. And then I just pick up my mini and I'm like, you are the size that I want. It's like the part of me that really understands people. tiny iPhones. Yeah.

I'm just like, I look at the iPad and I'm like, yes, you fit me. You complete me. This is what I need. All right. Dan, thank you. Appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you.

And now that we've talked about iPads, we can be done with the Vergecast for today. Thanks to Yonko, Alex, Mitchell, and Dan for being here. And thank you so much for listening. There's a whole lot more from everything we talked about at theverge.com. We put a bunch of links in the show notes. And Mitchell's whole gear list is particularly great. So make sure you check that out. As always, if you have thoughts,

feedback feelings or tips for how to survive bears on long hikes. You can always email us at Virgcast at theverge.com or even better call the hotline. 866 Verge 1-1. We're actually going to do a whole hotline episode really soon and we might answer a question you have in a future episode. We love the hotline. We love using your questions. Please keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll be back on Friday with Alex and Neli and and more of the Verge crew to talk about Google Bard, the TikTok hearing, and all the other big news in tech this week. See you then. Rock and roll.