The Vergecast - Inside our MacBook Pro 2021 review

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Dieter Bohn hosts a discussion with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and Verge reviewer Monica Chin about The Verge's approach to reviewing gadgets, focusing specifically on Apple's 2021 MacBook Pro. The crew are still in the process of reviewing the laptop, so the conversation also leads to topics like how battery testing has evolved the past decade, how The Verge scores reviews, and how to find the right angle for writing a review. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Vergecast. I am Dieter Bone, and you are listening to our short run of special episodes that are running on Tuesdays

that are a little bit more focused than the regular chat show. And this week, we are talking about the new MacBook Pros from Apple. And I'm really excited about this episode because it's something

that we haven't really done before. You'll be listening to this after review embargoes go up, but we aren't going to be hitting those review embargoes. We're actually taking more time to make sure that we can get a bunch of stuff right about these MacBook Pros. And you're going to hear about that in the episode. But because we are still in the middle of the review process, I wanted to talk about what it's like to review laptops. And these laptops, in particular, while we are still in the process of figuring out what we think of these things.

So you're probably going to hear a lot of preliminary opinions. you're going to hear a lot of, well, I think it's this, but I don't know. And we just kind of wanted to, like, while we're still in the process, talk about what it's like to be in that process. So, I don't know, it's actually a little scary, a little vulnerable, honestly. It's emotional. It's emotional. And so you just heard the voice of Nilai Patel.

Monica Chin is also here. Hello. You're both very brave for coming. So these two are reviewing the MacBooks. I am just sitting back here and watching the. magic happen. Waiting to be told if he should buy. Pretty much. So I think just to start, we talked about these MacBooks a bunch on the chat show last week, but just in case anybody's not sure, I'm sure everybody knows. But let's get the basics of what is new about these MacBook

pros, why they're interesting, and like what sort of specs there are to pay attention to. Monica. The most exciting thing is the new processors, at least to me. They have new chips. There's the M1 Pro. There's the M1 Max, they are making some pretty lofty claims not only about how powerful they are, but how efficient they are and how powerful they're able to be at lower TGP. There's a notch now, which lots of people have lots of opinions about. The notch has a better camera that still does not support Face ID, but it is better. Entire resolution. Monica hates the notch, by the way.

You want to straight up be vulnerable? She like said it. It was like the reason she said it right away is because it's all she can think about. Yeah, okay. Yeah, think about it 24-7. They added some ports back on, and it's a lot chunkier. It's thicker, I think, in part to accommodate the ports. And there's a new, the keyboard is now all black.

The deck is black, which is, I think, also likely to be polarizing. It's a very different look. I think you've got to get used to. Right. And then there's a screen, which is mini-l-D and also supports their high refresh rate promotion. Yep. So that's a lot. Is that everything?

There are other little things that we can think of it in terms of, like, redesign, keyboard, screen. camera processor, new ports. That's a huge change, especially for Apple, which tends to stick to their designs. Yeah, I would say that having used it now for a few days, we're very excited about the ports. But the reality is, they've only added two ports. So we're like, ports! Yeah. And it's like, well, actually what they did was they took away one Thunderbolt port.

And replaced it with MagSafe. I replaced it with MagSafe to charge it, to get into fast charging. And then they added an HTML port, STCart slot. That's all great, but it's not like the thing is Fistoon. There's not like a VGA port, which I mean, you know, like the reality of these machines is they've been starved for connectivity. Yeah. And they basically just built in the two dongles that you need the most. We've been starving for five years and they gave us a saltine cracker and we're like, thank you.

There's not like USBA ports or whatever. Yeah, right. It's three Thunderbolt four ports, SD cards like HMI. And just in reality when you have it, you're like, oh, they just replaced the dongle that I use. the most. Yeah. And yes, MagSafe is coming back to the MacBook Pro. MagSafe 3 has a new design that supports more power into the system, and you can still charge

via the Thunderbolt ports. So this is actually a really interesting place to start, because when we get a new thing to review, whatever it is, we often start with like a hypothesis, which may eventually become a thesis if it's proven right. And the hypothesis, I'm assuming with this machine was kind of where I thought I was going, which is this is a huge change. And so when you're going to approach this laptop in particular, instead of like another XPS 13 or another version of the old MacBook

that didn't change its design or whatever, what's your approach? What's your tactical strategy for, okay, I need to review this thing, I need to form thoughts on it quickly, and I also need to test the hell out of it. What are you doing that's maybe different than your typical process? For me, it was a lot more benchmarks than I usually run. because I think in this case, I really wanted to have a lot of comparison points.

I think normally I'll run like a couple and I'll see where it fits on the scale. I really ran like everything I could hear. And I think in particular we wanted to test both the CPU performance and the GPU performance because the pro max really the only difference is like the GPU. And I think like generally with the laptop, like you're comparing that laptop to its competition. And here are the biggest question for me, or at least one of the biggest questions for me, was who should buy the Macs versus the pro? Because so many people have already been asking me, like, should I get the Max or the Pro? A bunch of our staffers this weekend asked me.

By the way, the unfortunate thing is when someone says, should I buy the Max or the Pro, it's hard to know what they're referring to in Apple Land. We're referring specifically to the processors, which are... Yeah, the M1 Macs version or the M1 Pro version. Also has a Processor option, or the MacBook Pro has a Max processor option. Right, and this is just me of my life now is mixing up pro and pro. So for me, one of the biggest questions I wanted to look at first was how much of a benefit does the max, the M1 max give you over the M1 Pro and really who is that intended for?

So we run benchmarks on almost everything that we review in one way, shape, or form, be them laptops or anything else. But we don't always publish those results because often they're not interesting or they're not like the thing the thing hinges on. But for this one in particular, you're running not just our standard suite, but like paying a lot more attention to those benchmarks because the processors are like, such a pivotal thing for this laptop. And especially between the models, I think.

This versus that, right. Yeah. What else when, like, and Neely, you too, when you're thinking about approaching or reviewing a thing, what you are paying extra attention to? Like, I need to make sure that I understand X, Y, and Z about this thing I'm reviewing because it is the, it's the thing that will determine whether or not this is, you know, good or bad or whatever. Yeah.

I think for me with this one, a bunch of the stuff is iterative Apple stuff. Apple makes really good laptop speakers. I have the previous generation 16-inch MacQuick Pro. It has great laptop speakers. This one is a slightly better one. So I'm not going to burn my time quantifying the improvement. But I do think the CPU and GPU is really important because it's a new architecture. We've had a year now of M1.

And then I think the most important thing is battery life. And measuring battery life has become an increasingly spiritual process. Okay, so I was maybe going to try and hold off getting into the existential crisis about battery life because we've done it on the Vergecast a handful of times now. Yeah. And I guess first, let's like lay of the land. Why has battery life testing become an emotional journey and a spirit quest and not just like, oh, it lasts this long? In the last decade or so. In the last decade.

But in particular this year, I think that some of the things that companies have been saying about battery life got changed slightly or tweaked slightly. And so we're reacting to that in some way. And actually, I also later on, spoiler, I want to talk about like when a company claims something how that affects the review. But anyway, what's going on with battery life? Let's talk about graphs. So with battery life, I just like the quick version of this is 10 years ago when we started, you'd have a computer with a CPU and a GPU, and you'd have some video codex in the world, right? And nothing was really optimized for each other. So you'd play a video on a computer, and it would just be a very taxing thing to do.

Yep. And it would require, like, the CPU to run at full tilt. And so you could get away with measuring battery life because you had this long, you could just, like, run a video for 30 hours and see where the battery would die. Yeah. And it was like two hours. I was going to say 30 hours 10 years ago. What are you doing? What kind of laptop did you have?

Holy God. Six hours, whatever number it is, right? And it was just, like, tax the whole system. Yeah. You tax memory performance, like the whole thing. And over time, what has happened is the chips have gotten more efficient overall. They've gotten more powerful. They've also gotten more specialized.

Right. And the big companies, particularly Apple and Google and Microsoft, they're now participating in video codec development to optimize them for the hardware of their chips. Right. All over the place this is happening. Yeah. So something like a video rundown test has gone from being an overall measure of battery life, like a taxing thing that you can do for a long time,

that everyone wants to do to like one tiny corner of a highly specialized subset of the chip we'll just do it without drawing any power. Right. And so you look at Apple's battery life numbers

and they're like 21 hours of video playback if you use the Apple TV. Right. And it's like, well, no one does this. I mean, okay, yeah, right. You can fly around the world twice and you're like, I've watched all a foundation. Yeah.

Maybe someone. You learned a lot about people talking about math. Not any actual math in foundation, by the way. But if you're doing that, you are also probably in first class plugged in. Like, whatever. So, like, the things that we think about is battery life testing have now moved to parts the chip that use less power. Yeah.

And I will say that we've been talking about this in terms of video codex and video chips and so on. But this actually applies to other contexts as well. I'm thinking in particular of the web and on phones. It's not just that it's apples and oranges for different web browser engines. there are now like optimizations in the operating systems for certain things like JavaScript and Java and stuff on the web. Yeah. And so it's like it's actually really difficult to compare across platforms, but it's even difficult to compare on the same platform across years because the way that they optimize web pages changes.

So if you got like a, we used to have a fancy tool that would like loop web pages. And it's just like one, that's not consistent over time, but two, like they get more efficient. So like this is a wonderful problem to have. Our computers are more efficient. Yay. Apple's doing the Intel ones. This was like a famous like Walt Mossberg thing that he would remind me of all the time. He'd be like, they use Intel processors. The processors are the same. But Apple, because they control the hardware and the software, they're able to power down more of the entire computer when you're not using it, including some parts of the chip. So it's just like very hard to know what is actually happening inside your computer. And I would compare that to when we do iPhone battery testing, we take their claims a little more seriously. Because Apple, when we've talked about this on the show a lot, Apple in particular, collects a lot of telemetry data from iPhone users, right, when you opt into data collection on your phone. So they kind of have this, like, machine learning model of what iPhone users are doing, and they can apply it to their battery specs and their power consumption of their chip and estimate a battery.

We cannot replicate that estimation. No. Not even a little. There's no way for, like, unless millions of you show up at our office and let us monitor your phones. we can't do it. But in real life, we can see that it matches up slightly. But there's a layer on top of that.

They're doing all of that, and the way that they expressed that number to us is an hour and a half longer use time generally than last year's model. And they're like, okay, well, what was last year's model? Well, last year's model was an hour and a half longer generally in use time than the model before it. Yeah.

And like you have to go back to, I don't know. The iPhone 3GS got four hours a batter off. And there it is. From there. It's iPhones all the way down. But there's no model like that for the Mac, as far as we know. I think part of what makes it such an emotional process, at least for me and I think in the reviewer community in general, is it's somewhat of a different philosophy of who you're

doing these tests for. Like we don't do synthetic battery tests at all, or we haven't, at least since I've been here. And companies get really mad about it. And I get emailed all the time that are like, you should be getting more. What did you do? I'll tell them what I did. And they said, well, we can't replicate that in our lab.

Can you run an industry standard? Can you do this? Can you do this? Can you run an industry standard battery test? Sure, make one. Yeah. There is not one. It's ultimately a question of like, do you care more about accurately stacking up laptops on the market against each other? Or do you care more about giving readers an approximation of how long they can expect, even if it's only an approximation?

Yeah. And I think our test leans a lot more towards the latter. It does not give us a very, very accurate list of this laptop can do this much and this laptop can do this much. But I think that running an industry standard video playback test does not tell a reader how long they can work on a laptop. And our test might. It may give you some sort of comparative idea. Like, I'm trying to pick between two laptops and this one did better on a video rundown test than that one. But I think what's happened because processing has become heterogeneous is that all you learn from a video rundown test is how long it lasts running down on video.

Like, and you don't actually, it doesn't translate to the general use. But you're also kind of like, you could back into an answer like that much more simply, right? Like the 16-inch MacBook Pro that I'm looking at has a 100-watt-hour battery or 99. Whatever the number is that lets you get on a plane. Like just below that, it's like $199. We know the maximum power envelope of the chip. Yeah. Okay.

We know that we should subtract another 10% for the display. Sure. Great. Now I know how long the battery lasts. It's like I could just do that math and get there without having to like set up foundation to run for 21 hours. Yeah. And it's like, I already know.

That's just how long the first episode feels, by the way, the foundation. But that math is like also not useful. All I've really told you is how big the battery is. Right. Right. What is actually useful is some people are going to buy this machine and it will be total overkill for them because they use Excel all day long. Yeah.

But they want the nicest one. Those people will probably get eight hours of battery life. Some people are buying this thing. By the time this goes up, our hands-on video will be up. Yep. And Alex Deaconis, our video producer, she edited that hands-on on the 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro on battery. It lasted about four hours. And she said it was the nicest laptop.

She did that write it. Yeah. That is a useless piece of information for the Excel jockey with ambition. It is a very useful piece of information for a video editor. Right. So, like, I think when we say we don't do these industry standard tests, it's because all they're really telling you is how big the battery is. And what we're trying to tell you is how long will last for various kinds of tasks. Right.

And like if you read our sections of our battery bit, you know, the paragraph about battery, there'll be like a very boring sentence of like, it lasted this long for me for my typical workday, which by the way happens to consist of Chrome and this app and Slack and blah, blah, blah. And that's because like in the same way that like, I don't know, tech companies are like, this is the video run down test. We need to tell you what we did in some way, shape, or form so that you can, that information can become useful.

in some way, shape, or form. And then complicating that a year ago, when we did that with the M1 Air, M1 MacBook Pro, we were using a bunch of apps that hadn't been released for Apple Silicon yet. Right. We were using Chrome that was in Rosetta, made for Intel. We were using Zoom. We were using Slack. They are all updated now.

So we're going to say that now. It's not just the chip that's been improved. It's not just the larger battery. It's an application ecosystem that is optimized to run of these processors. So, Monica, we had that variable. last year. This year there's another variable that the M1s were amazing for battery life, like mind-blowing. And oftentimes we're like, well, the second generation will be just as good as the first. But it's no guarantee that the M-1 Pro and the M-1 Max are going to have the same

battery life that the regular M-1 did, right? In fact, we would be surprised if they did, just they're more powerful. Right. So it would be shocking to me if they lasted as long as the original M-1 did. Unless they did something special with, you know, cores and what's lit up and what's not, but it's another assumption we can't make about these machines because they're so new. In general, the M1s ran on their efficiency cores more often. They had more of them. And in general, what they have done with both the pro and the max is they have cut the number of efficiency cores down by two, and they've added high performance scores, which necessarily

use more power. So we are expecting some difference because the chips, as Monarch, et cetera, are more powerful in the specific way they're more powerful is they literally have more, more powerful cores. 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. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one.

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Okay. Let's take a look at these things. What was the first thing that struck you when you pulled it out of the box? They're very square. Yeah? Yeah. They're very square. Me too. You know, MacBooks are the 16, they're round.

They're easy to get your fingers around on the side. Okay. These are harder. They're square. It's like you've got to get up under it. So that was, I think, just like the first thing that jumped out to me. I had a number of people walk by my desk when I had these on and be like, oh, is that the new one? Oh, no, that's the 2015.

I'd be like, no, no, no, come back. It is the new one. Your reference point of what it looks like, it's either the 2015's or it's like way back. It's the titanium power book. Yeah. Depending on just like what imprinted on you when you were like a baby duckling. The other thing that I noticed right away is we spent so much time talking about the feet. They've got race feet, and Apple, like, zoomed in.

They showed you the feet on the computer. And, like, are they for cooling? And, like, in practice, they are invisible. Right. They just don't exist to you. Okay. And then the third thing, it's like, here's the divergence point for Monica. And I was like, the screen's beautiful.

And Monica's like, this notch sucks. I do think the screen's beautiful. Okay. But so why does the notch suck? Because I went on this rant. Like, they gave you more screen while you complaining. the notch is in the menu bar. It's not actually killing anything.

Is it just ugly? So I'm going to caveat disappear that I am still rocking an iPhone 8 plus because I don't like the iPhone notch also. So I'm a specific use case. However, I just don't like that my cursor like disappears under it. It just feels like it's covering up content that I would otherwise be seeing, which is true. And I know that it's not like content content. It's just like the bar.

But it just throws me off. It seems like one of those things you get used to as you use it. But it was disconcerting for me to start out. Yeah. I will say that it chips with a very dark wallpaper. And MacOS Monterey, it's ugly, it's an ugly operating system. But the way the wallpaper is expressed in Monterey is that it kind of fades into the menu bar. And so they, like out of the box, they're trying to hide it as much as they can.

Yeah. Well, I mean, this is not new. Apple did it with a notch in their wallpapers. And then every Android phone for a while when they started doing whole punches, the wallpaper just happened to be black in that section of the wallpaper. Yeah. It took a minute from people to realize, oh, wait, we can make a joke about this and, like, have it be a minion and the eye. is the whole punch or whatever. Yeah.

It's surprising me how big the notch is for what it contains. My iPhone 13 Pro Max has a very good camera. It has a face ID system with like an IR light and a dot projector.

It has a speaker. And like this notch is like a camera. Yeah. And it doesn't do face it. And it's still pretty big. And Monica, what struck you first? I think it was definitely the squareness. I think also the black

keyboard was like weirder to see. originally than I thought. Yeah. It looks like this like square of black and an expanse of gray. Like there's a lot of gray around it. But I think that has faded into the background as me for me as well over time. One of the other things I like to do in my reviews is tell the reader some detail about the thing that I learned from using it that isn't necessarily obvious. Like when you're reviewing a laptop, it's like, well, you can't know what the keyboard is unless you have it and you review it.

Right. So that's pretty standard. But often there's like, there's some thing. It's like, oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. I would have thought that would be that way, but it is. And there's something vaguely interesting about it. Was there any detail like that that you've come across and using it? They're like, oh, you know, no one who hadn't spent a week with this would ever have, like, noticed this little thing.

So for me, I do not have the new iPad with a mini LED display. Okay. So these have a mini LED display. And you can see that when you, like, play an HDR video, you can see the display brightness ramp. Okay. Which is you can see it on an iPhone. I'm used to it on an iPhone. But seeing out of Mac and seeing how it ramps and seeing that it ramps because the backlight is able to ramp independently of the rest of the display.

Yeah. It's like watching just like it ramp in the corner is like there's no way to show you that. Right. Because I'm shooting an SDR video. There's just like no way to communicate like, oh, this display is extremely bright. Yeah. And also able to control where it's bright in surprising ways. Right.

Right. For me, and I'm not reviewing them, but when I picked it up, the touch ID button, the one in the upper right, is like a similar size, but it has a much harder click, and it's also lower profile to discourage you from hitting it, accidentally, I think. And so it was just interesting that, like, you would expect it, it looks like a button, but when you actually are up there with it, it's like a different kind of button. I guess I haven't touched ID into this thing very much. For me, I think it's just, I didn't realize how happy it was to have the touch bar gone. Like, I knew it was, I expected it as I got the function keys are back, but actually just like spending a day having keys there instead of a touchbar was just wonderful. Yeah. The first time I reached up and just like turned the volume down, I was like, yeah. I don't have to, yeah, keep doing that.

Hitting the mute button for me is that moment. It's like, oh, net. Yeah. The physical keys replaced the touchbar. The keyboard is set in a double anodized black well that elegantly highlights the backlit glyphs on the keys. Okay, so you're working on the reviews. How do you come to an angle? Like when we're writing the review, we like to have, you know, a point of view on the thing and we want to tell some story and we that often for us boils down to saying what's our angle on this thing. And I'm curious if you have gotten to a place where you think you might have one. So the two things that are in my head that are going to form that angle, and I think we have some testing to go. One, they're expensive. Yeah. And so is it actually worth it over a MacBook Air? Right.

which is a very good computer, and probably the computer most people should get, right? And MacBook Airs are expensive, but they're not. They're expensive compared to, like, mid-range Windows PCs. Right? They're like just above where you... A little bit more. Yeah, it's like a couple hundred bucks, but they're in the pocket. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's a pretty good deal. These computers are just really expensive, right? The 14 base model is $2,000. The 16 I'm looking at right here is $3,500. That's just a lot of money for it. Is that worth it if you're... You just want the nicest one.

I don't know. Like, people got money. I'm watching the crypto market. I'm like, oh, there's a bunch of money floating around. Like, okay, maybe that's worth it. Is it worth it if you're a professional use this for work? Maybe. Like, I just want to figure that out.

Like, I want to put that price in the context. And the second thing, for me anyway, and Dieter knows where I'm going, because I've been whining about this for like five days. Oh, boy. We gave the M1 error in the M1 Pro 9.5 scores. And we said, but for this garbage webcam, these would have been tens. Right.

So this is another thing I was going to try and say to the end, but let's just get into talking about scores here. They're very contentious. We tend to score things, you know, six, seven, eight, nine sometimes. The scores look like they're like an objective measure and what they are is like a very emotional reaction. Yeah, they're emotional is like being a little bit too dismissive. We put more objectivity to it, but they're not, they're not an objective measure. That is true. It is another piece of opinion.

And instead of writing a sentence, we're giving it a number. And that number is an opinion. It's not a, like, objective ranking. And the discussion that we're going to end up having is the 9.5 for the MacBook Air in particular was this laptop that is generally used for this kind of thing at this price point. You know, it's like a 9.5 for, like, your general purpose ultra book style computer. If we, you know, we're talking, for the pros, it's like a video editor. If I'm like, video arc came to me, it's like, oh, you give it a 9.5. I'm going to edit video on them, the MacBook Air.

It's like, well, yeah, you can, but it's not like, you still could do better elsewhere. So it's not a 9.5 for video editors or, I know, CAD files or, you know, whatever the thing is. It's the 9.5 for the thing that we generally understand this thing to exist in. And so for the MacBook pros, going, you know, that score should be in the context of that. It's a price factors indoor score quite a lot, actually. When you see the score and it's like, oh, that seems kind of, often it's because, well, this thing is overpriced. And we don't have a precise metric for it.

It's like, you know, it's a piece of opinion. But the discussion is going to be, you know, in the price point, in the range, what does this thing do for the kind of people we imagine ought to be buying this thing? This is, I'm rehearsing the argument that I'm going to have a new life. We've been like half having it for many days now. The thing we're walking up to is the verge has never, to my knowledge, given anything a 10. Yep. and it's not because we don't believe that perfection exists.

It's not even, I think, and correct me from wrong, that we think giving it a 10 means it's perfect. We do not. Yeah. Like a 10 is, again, it is an editorial statement. Instead of writing a sentence saying, oh, my God, this thing is amazing, blah, blah, blah. The 10, you know, an image is a thousand words, so is a review score. Yeah.

Right. In our case, like 5,000 words. And so that is the interesting thing that we are batting around right now. But so here's what I know. I know that if you took this webcam, this 1080P webcam from the 16 inch or 14 inch pro, and put it in the MacBook Air, I would tell you the MacBook Air is a 10 out of 10. Yeah, well, so here's thing, probably. Yeah, I think we would do that. But I don't know, maybe I would tell you that it's a 9.5 because it doesn't have a notch and the bezel on the top is too big.

Yeah, it's all in there. It's just like, when you're like, what is your angle? Part of where my head's at is, wow, they're expensive. And so just from the jump, it's, are they worth it? Yep. Are they worth all this money? And, you know, that is even in the context of so many people rushed out to buy them right away, then Apple's website slowed down. Yeah.

That's remarkable. Like, I think more people rush to pre-order this than, like, in our little world, than the iPhone. Yeah. Or they were happier to a pre-ordering. Yeah, yeah. Like, pre-ordering the iPhone at this point for, like, our subset of tech and media Twitter is, like, I'm doing this again. like the rush to like post your receipts and be excited about these so clearly a lot of people think it's worth it yeah for sure right without any hesitation but is it really the performance suggests

like these are some of the fastest laptops we have ever tested like leaps in bounds in some cases it depends it depends really yeah well so you're doing all the performance testing what do you mean by it depends so it's a very uh the profile setter seems to be good at very specific things it's very good at our 4K export test. Like very, very good. Very good. Exceptional. The Pro Max is the fastest time I've ever seen on the export test.

The M1 Pro is like one of the fastest. That said, that is a difficult test to do head-to-head comparisons with because Premiere Pro is changing all the time. So for a while, a couple of previous versions of Premier Pro had trouble with our export test and did it kind of slowly. So that's more of sort of a like, that's more intended to be like this is how long you can expect an export. to take. Yeah. On Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it is performing around where we would expect a high-clock RTX 3060 to perform based on recent results that we've had or a lower-clock RTX 3070.

Okay. Which is reasonable. It is much more expensive than you can get like an RTX 3016. Right. Right. Looking at like synthetic graphics benchmarks, they're a little bit, they're like in the mix when you look like gaming and creative laptops, but they are not blowing everyone out of the water.

Right. So, you know, it depends on your use case. Yeah. And I think one thing that might be interesting as you're listening to this is Monica's running all of these tests, we might not publish all of the results. We, in fact, we almost surely won't, like, tell you every single thing we did and what the score was. But it's part of our process anyway, because it helps inform, you know, what we're,

when we're trying to, you know, tell the story of this thing. Yeah. And actually, when we talk about angle, especially in reviews, it's like our point of on the thing. It's our way in. It's the angle. It's like the direction in to the thing. Feel free to steal this. If I were writing this review, like often when I'm writing a review, I have like in my head like an imaginary first sentence and maybe it becomes a first sentence and maybe it's not, but it's like the frame of like how I want to think about telling the story of this thing. And for me, the thing that feels important about this laptop, maybe not the most

important thing, but like the thing that helps you understand why it's interesting and different is just that it's thicker. If you just say, my imaginary starting sentence would be the MacBook pros are thicker and a bunch of stuff falls out of that observation. Apple is willing to change its design philosophy. Apple is thinking about thermal throttling

in a different way than it has for the past five years at least. There's a bunch of stuff in there. They could have made it thinner than the last one with these chips because we know they're more efficient than Intel. So at the same time, are using more efficient ships that they made themselves, they're also giving them a higher thermal headroom. And the philosophy and the thinking and the intention

behind those two things together is very different from what we're used to seeing from Apple. You were asking about, talk about score philosophy, which you asked a bit earlier. I think I do it a little differently from what a lot of people do. I think partially because I just review so many myself.

Generally I, a little secret, Generally, I look at the closest competitor that I've reviewed or that someone on our staff is reviewed, and I very closely compare my impressions of each part of both devices and try to come up with the most objective impression I have of how much better or how much worse the device I'm reviewing is than that close competitor. And sometimes I'll look at multiple. In this case, I think that the competitors that are relevant mostly are the M1 and the Intel MacBooks that we have already.

Right. So for me, the weight there, at least especially compared to the, the M1 13 is going to be a big part of it. One of the things I really like about the M1 MacBook Pro 13 is how light it is and how easy it is to slip into my bag when I'm walking around with it. And these things are going to be not that advantage. You know, you said efficiency, and we were talking in the context of performance, and you were talking about GPU performance. In RTX 30, 60, 3070, they use a lot more power. So they could be faster, but then what we're saying is, but aren't.

Here, the battery life will be longer. Yeah. And, like, the famous graph for that is the one that Apple made. And a thing that is driving me crazy is that we have no way of recreating that graph. Right. But we just cannot do it. Yeah. Because we don't know what the y-axis of that graph is.

Right. It's just relative performance. I have my suspicions about what it is based on the scores that we have. What do you think it is? So I think it's Geekbench. Yeah. The one that they were, the one where they're diverging like that. But how are they measuring power?

So you want to run a program that's looking at the clock speed that the processor's running at and then run a benchmark and see how high it goes. So you're using the clock speed of the GPU or whatever as a proxy for power draw. Yeah. And presumably Apple actually knows it's power draw. Yeah. They can measure that directly, I'm sure. One hopes.

There's actually some terminal stuff on a Mac you can do. And then on the window side, it's a lot easier. But that to me is like that's the graph that they're showing to make their claims. and it is a graph, because we're only guessing at the y-axis, it's not a graph that we can recreate. Yeah. But it's a very important piece of information in the context of this review. Right. Maybe it's only 70% of the highest performing Windows graphics card in a notebook.

But if the power usage is half, that trade-off starts to look really worth it. Yeah, for sure. If you can get 70% of the best performance you can get for three times as long, that's pretty good. Yeah, you'll take that. But we have to like prove it. Yeah. And because we don't know what Apple is using to make its claim, we can't just like prove it. Right.

We have to prove everything around it and be like, okay, we now, the shape of this puzzle piece is clear. Yeah. So like that to me is like they should just tell us what they're doing so we can just repeat it. And then that's over. But because they won't be clear and we have at Dieter and I have been in a meeting and we have asked and they're like, we are not going to tell you. Yeah. We have to like do all the stuff around it. So the larger context of this discussion about the graph that doesn't have numbers on the axes or whatever, or it has numbers, but we don't know what the units of measurement are, is often with these products, the company will make a set of claims.

This thing is important because of XYZ, or this is the thing that's really good about this laptop or phone or whatever. And so a lot of the review is often a reaction to the company claim. and when something comes in, we don't just have like, all right, standard, you know, objective set of, you know, checklists to go through and then we get to the end of it, and now we have reviewed the thing. We're reacting to the story that the company is telling

about the product, and I sometimes feel weird about that. I sometimes feel like, yeah. But on the other hand, I tell myself, like, look, they're also telling this to customers. And so the thing, the service we're providing is we're like providing a counter-narrative or a confirming narrative or whatever. to the claims that they're seeing in ads and they're hearing from like store reps or whatever,

that we are trying to do the job of putting what the company is saying into a context that's like deeper or richer and confirming or denying or disproving or whatever. I would say our best review, the best reviews period are ones where we completely ignore the company is saying. If we are able to do that, we usually do our absolute best work. And that's challenging, right? Like that whole find an angle conversation, like I'm guessing that the four. 45th mid-range laptop or the 500th mid-range Android phone, we cannot just invent a narrative

out of whole cloth for every one of these things. It's a huge challenge. It's just like it's another phone. So that I think then we tend to do either one more standard thing or we respond to the company. But then there's the times when like I think with this product with a bunch of other stuff with new products and particularly new categories where it's useful to just like step away.

In the case of these, and I think large. with phones, there is a step where we're just like, is this company lying to us? Or are they shading the truth? Or they're exaggerating what it can do. What is coming to mind immediately for me is a cinematic mode of the iPhone 13. That's an exaggeration of the capability of the phone. So, like, I think there's always just this dance between, I need to tell my own story. That is actually more interesting and relevant.

It will be, you know, if there's no shortage of tech reviews in this world, it will be the most different and most useful because I'm not doing whatever else is doing. Right. Then there's the like, well, we got to test the battery. And then there's the, well, every company is making all these claims. And we have to say whether they're true or not. Yeah. And that kind of gets you into their box very quickly.

Yeah. And you want to not be in the box. One, we have this, we don't have a good term for it. I think of them often as like occasion reviews. And what I mean by that is the review of the thing. You're reviewing the thing. You're doing the benchmarks. You're saying what's good, what's bad, whatever.

But you're actually using it as an occasion. to say something that you want to say about the tech industry at large or whatever. I think the one that I, for me, that was like the biggest one was, I reviewed the Avagant Glyph, which shoots lasers in your eyes or whatever. And it was like,

if these things become popular and VR headsets were also coming, what will it mean if like our displays all become personal and like we're not looking at each other and it's like literally on our head? And like that was more interesting to me than the product, which, you know, lasted.

It turns out of the correct instance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't, like, for a hundred. high profile review like the MacBook, it's probably not like one of those occasion reviews. There's enough interest that you just got to talk about the thing itself. Is it worth the money? Yeah. But there's like still, especially for us at the verge, even if it's not like the main thing you're doing is like this, I'm just using this thing as an excuse to talk about another thing.

We do try to have some sort of commentary in the state of computing or the design direction of the company or, you know, some other trend that's happening in tech. do you see anything in this MacBook yet where you're like, oh, I'm definitely going to have a paragraph about blah, blah, blah. I think the webcam for sure. Oh, yeah? For me. Just because it was such a downside of the last one. And there was so I think that that's clearly a thing that should have eyes on it. It's like, did they achieve what everyone was yelled?

Did they fix what everyone was yelling about? Right. Do they actually make a thing that is more functional or were they just trying to like throw the bone that people were yelling for? So there's two sides to. right? They have to make better webcams because we're all working remotely more and more. And so it's like a thing that was always bad, but now we're like, we care now, way more. It's like to do it. So that's one side of it. The other side of it is the meta narrative for this entire laptop, which is Apple has responded to all of the negative feedback they've gotten over the last years over this thing. And so is this a Apple is being responsive to feedback again story?

I saw an Apple engineer, you know, very excitedly tweeting that this thing I've been working on is finally out today. And they had a timeline in the tweet. It was like, I started working on this first component of this computer in 2019. I spent all of 2020, like doing some other stuff and obviously a huge part of 2021. And it's like, yeah, they're responsive to criticism, but they're responsive to criticism way ahead of when we think. Right. They were responding to our criticism from the 2018. machines. Right. And now they're here. And that to me, it's just, we know it. We intellectually

know this information. Yeah. But like, sometimes you see it and you're like, oh, in 2019, they internalize the feedback. Right. And we have spent however many years with however many new machines being like, what's up? And they know they're going to change it. Yeah. And that's just like a weird dynamic that every now and again it hits you. And you're like, oh, that was really weird. Yeah. Well, I guess to me it gets more at like, I think that reviewers sometimes get caught up and like, did the company do what the reviewers wanted? And I care a little less about that and a little is more about like, did the company make the machine more functional?

And I think in a lot of cases, reviewers are able to guess somewhat correctly at what is most functional for customers on the ground. But I think what's interesting about the webcam is they can say it's 1080 and we can go, oh, good, we asked for that. But those webcams with that spec can still vary widely and how much better they actually are than bad webcams. So it's, it means like, is this actually going to like make meetings better? people.

It's still an open question. I'll just connect the dots there, maybe one step too far. Apple as a company does not want to work remotely. Right. Like Apple's management and its employees are like in a lot of controversy right now because they want them back. And so it's like at the same time there's a product manager at Apple.

It's like, well, everyone's working from home except us. And we like we need to make the web kit. And like that's, you can just, some of those things like surface and products some weird ways. I think the webcam is a really interesting one. The processor is here is, you know, it's related to the iPhone webcam. They're making this big claim about the image signal processing from their A-series chips that have now moved into the M-1s, etc. This thing is not as good as an iPhone 13 front cam. No. It's good. It's way better than the old ones. Yeah. But back to, in the frame of their claims, if we just like live it, their claim is like, look at what we were

able to bring over from the iPhone. And I'm like, well, look what everyone else is. been able to do for years without technology by just giving a shit about it. And it's like, we'll see. I think we do have to spend some time here. We also have to spend a lot of time on this spot. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited.

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Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code.

Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Another thing we often will have an occasion where we're using the review as an occasion to do something is to have a moment where we explain or care about some spec or like, new kind of tech or like we just need to explain the way some piece of technology works and

this review is a really good opportunity to do it. We've done it with HDR, for example. There's a chance that we're going to be doing it with USBC and power delivery on this one because of the way the cables work and I don't know if you want to get into that. But I also think that the screen is an excellent opportunity to like get into some occasion to explain the spec because we can talk about blooming and we can talk about refresh rates and we can talk about brightness and HDR. and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you're looking at this screen and you're finally done being angry at the notch,

what are you thinking about in terms of judging it, but also like making, you know, having something to explain or needing to convey something to potential buyers? So the screening technology, mini-L-D, now slightly more familiar because it is in the iPad Pro, it's some other computers,

even some TVs. It's a complicated thing. It's a complicated system. So, you know, the history of backlights is like original LCDs, had literal florescent tubes up and down the side of the screen. They would light up. That's all you got.

That's why blacks were kind of gray. Now you've got a grid of thousands of tiny LEDs that create white light, and they can turn them off on and off really fast as things happen on the screen. This lets you get really dark blacks. It also leads to just, you know, on the iPad, I think you noticed in your review, weird stuff happening. In very specific situations, weird stuff happens. Yeah. And so we have to test that.

I've already seen on some of the same. I mean, like, when I say you have to do specific things, it's like you find YouTube videos specifically designed to make weird things happen. Right, right. And like, yep, the weird stuff happens again. Yeah, yeah. In practice, like, you know, we got to use it more. But I think Apple's figured a bunch of it out. Yeah.

Okay. We'll see. The other thing is because they are HDR displays or XDR displays, the brightness modes of this thing are so complicated. The main mode runs up to 1,600 nits of brightness. Okay. But that is not a, that's like a general use. usage mode. Right.

Then it has a bunch of reference modes, which actually dropped the brightness way down. Oh, interesting. Your color accurate. Right. So like, I think about how am I going to explain this display? It's like, there's a drop-down menu and a system preference that you have never looked at before in your life. Yeah.

And like, going to explain this to you. And that, you know, I think some people really need that information, but for most people, what that is designed to convey is out of the box this thing is designed to look good, maybe not designed to be perfectly accurate. Right. So it's... So it's a Samsung. It's not that bad. Okay.

It's optimized to be really bright. Yeah. And if you actually want to do the serious work on it, you got to fiddle with it to make it way less bright. Right, right. And it's actually the same as the pro display XDR that Apple made, which is optimized for like office work out of the box. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is like surprising. It makes sense to this would be optimized. But like all of that is just like, ah, I'm like, I'm in spec land. Yeah. To just get to like a very simple idea, which is, it's. complicated. But to Apple's great credit, this, I would have, I did not expect this to work, but I opened Chrome. I went to YouTube, I typed an HDR, I played an HDR video, and it all just

worked. Bam. And that is surprising for Apple. Very, actually. You brought up the pro display XDR, which whenever I think about, I just have emotions that they don't just make a good Apple monitor that cost less. And I, maybe this is a place to end that these costs a lot. It's really fascinating to me that, like, the reason people are like, oh my God, thank you is it's a computer that has ports and, you know, no touchbar. You can get a good computer without the touchbar now for relatively cheap. But it's interesting that there's like this middle zone between like pretty good and great. There's like, you want like good good. I would love to have this computer with its ports, but I don't need the mini LED display, you know, and I don't need the M1 Max or Pro. I'd be

actually okay with an M1. If they would just put the ports on the air or like the base level MacBook Pro, that would be really interesting. And it seems like Apple, you know, famously had like the good, better best, they had the product grid. You know, I don't subscribe to the idea that Apple needs, like, a perfectly coherent product lineup. But it does seem like there is a gap. I can't decide if that gap is there because there's not enough customers or if that gap is there to convince me to buy the thing that's more expensive than what I actually need. I think that gap is there in the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a touchbar. And if they have any sense, they will get rid of that computer.

Yeah. They will use the 14-inch MacBook Pro design language, cut down on some of the features, maybe even just put an M1 in it. Yeah. And like, we're off to the races. I think they've chosen not to because then nobody would buy the MacBook Air. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but yeah. Well, maybe you put the M1 Pro in it, and it's way more expensive.

Right. Right. Like the MacBook Air is, what, $1,200? Give a take. MacBook Air starts at $999. Yeah. Yeah. But when you spec it to...

You had an appropriate amount of memory in storage. you get to 12. Yeah. There's a lot of space between that kind of good, better, best configuration the MacBook Air. Yeah.

And $2,000. Right. We know this actually about the MacBook Air specifically. They have tried to kill it and people won't stop buying it. Yep. Like, they're like,

this computer sucks. This is the, it doesn't have a retina display. Yeah, this is the old, old MacBook Air. Not old. Yeah, the old old one. And they just, like, didn't rev it for like three years.

Longer. Like forever. And like Apple, like, we would be told we can't get people to stop buying this computer. And they're like, fine. Like, all right, we're just going to, here it is.

Like, here's the thing you want. Yeah. And so I think that, like, idea that Apple can get, like, we know conclusively that they cannot kill the MacBook there. So, like, I think there's a lot of room there. And that 13-inch pro looks, it's, it's looking not long for this world. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Last question. You're going to go away from here on Sunday. Thank you for coming in on a Sunday to record this. Deeter's being too nice. We had our 10-year birthday party this weekend. Yeah. We've all been together.

It's been great to see everybody. The real thing you should be thanking us for is doing this as hungover as we are. You're going off to do more review work. What is like, what's the next thing you're going to do in your review process and to get ready to write the thing, write the VO, get on camera later, blah, blah, blah. Like what's the next step for you in these reviews? Running down the battery. Running down the battery? Yeah.

It's the main main thing. I've been able to do it yet because it takes like 10 hours, and I haven't had to, hopefully, and I haven't had that much time. Yeah, it's use it for a workday to try to kill the battery. And then for me, it's spending a lot of time unpacking the display modes. Right. Which are, they're just, it's just, you can go, if you're listening to this, go and read the Pro Display XDR review. Mm-hmm. A version of that review has to get embedded into this review because it's just very complicated.

Right. And I'd like to do some more graphic testing as well, I think my current thought is like, the M1 Max is clearly like very, very, it's insanely impressive for integrated graphics. It also is like a CPU with a GPU stapled onto it. So it's sort of unclear like whether that is really the comparison we should be using. So I'm going to be doing some more. I think digging into that and thought on like who the comparison is to in the case. Saying that it's a CPU with a GPU stapled onto it is not inaccurate,

but it's also like you definitely have made a bunch of Apple chip engineers just just, just, ugh. Johnny Shurj is just turned off the podcast. Come back. Johnny, but that's a good point. Like, it's calling them integrated graphics is totally unfair. Yep. Right? But also just, like, technically true.

Also, like, they're, you know, I will end where Monica started. Everyone's asking us, which one should they get? And the only real difference is a number of GPU cores. Yeah, and we don't know how to judge that. Because processor-wise, they're the same. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, well,

I don't, how many GPU cores do you think you need? Yeah. I don't know. And like, if you have twice as many is the GPU twice as fast. Yeah. Which does not actually appear to be the case, surprisingly. So, like, we'll just see. I think we're going to have to invent a language to talk about Apple's approach to GPU size.

Yep. Well, stay tuned for that. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. We will be back on Friday with the regular chat show and back again next week on Tuesday with another focused episode of the Vergecast, which is a contradiction, but we're going to keep trying to do it. If you want to follow us on Twitter, you absolutely can. I am Backlon.

Nelai is reckless. Monica is MC squared 96. All right, that's it. Thanks for listening.