The Vergecast - iPhone 13 review / Microsoft’s Surface event biggest announcements

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Tom Warren discuss the reviews of the iPhone 13/iPhone 13 Pro and the many new devices Microsoft announced at their Surface event this week. Further reading: iPhone 13 review: yep, bigger batteries are better iPhone 13 Pro review: a better display, the best camera, and incredible battery life  iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 review: foundational fixes  iOS 15 is here, but we’re still waiting on a few new features Apple updates macOS Safari with a new look, but you can turn off the big changes EU proposes mandatory USB-C on all devices, including iPhones Apple won’t let Fortnite back on iOS until the Epic v. Apple verdict is final Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo Microsoft’s fall Surface event: the 7 biggest announcements  Microsoft announces Surface Pro 8 with bigger 13-inch 120Hz display and Thunderbolt Surface Laptop Studio is Microsoft’s new powerful flagship laptop Microsoft’s new Surface Duo 2 has all the features that were missing the first time around Microsoft’s new Slim Pen 2 uses haptics to mimic the feeling of using a real pen The Surface Pro X gets a Wi-Fi-only version The Surface Go 3 gets new Intel processors Microsoft’s new mouse has a shell that’s 20 percent recycled ocean plastic Surface Adaptive Kit makes Microsoft’s laptops more accessible Microsoft Surface Pro 8 hands-on: the one we’ve waited for Microsoft Surface Duo 2 hands-on: once more, with cameras Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio hands-on: one weird, powerful computer  The Surface Laptop Studio isn’t as original as Microsoft would have you believe Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM education forever Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Cranz and Tom Warren joined the show. We talk about the iPhone reviews. It's the 13 and the 13 Pro, the iPad mini review, preview, iOS 15, and all of the things Microsoft announced, including a new Surface Pro 8, the Surface Laptop Studio, and the Surface Duo 2. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms 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 Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports. And mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of widgets on the home screen by new Prog Rock Band. Check out our first album. Is that a better band name or album name? My instinct is that it's a band name.

I think that's an album name for sure. I think it's an album name. Okay, self-titled first album. Everyone agrees. I'm your friend, Nelai, Dieterbone is here. I'm too tired to have a good nickname this week. I'm sorry. Dieter's been working hard.

That charming British voice you heard is Brexit himself, Tom Warren. Why, hello there? Alex Grant is here. Hi, Alex. I'm an EMR stylist. An EMR stylist. Is that what you said? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. That's good. I like it. All right. You know that could also mean like you're an electronic medical record stylist. Like, it could go another way. No, I'm not, I'm not into anybody's records today. I just want the smoothest, nicest stylist writing possible.

Smooth. All right. It is, it's fall hardware season. It's here in extreme force. It's iPhone review week, which Dieter did both of the reviews this year. iOS 15. There's an iPad mini. Dieter did that review.

Heim did the iOS. You escaped one. And then there was a Microsoft event. A bunch of new surface devices. Dieter did a bunch of hands-on videos. You can see where this is going. Dieter's a very sleepy man. But we should talk about it all.

We talked about the iPhone kind of at length last week after the event. As always in that conversation, we're like, well, we got to wait for the review. Deeter, I would say the reviews came. They did. I have the pro max. And you have all 25 iPhones. Four. But yes.

Let's start with the, the babies, the regulars. I would say just in the process of trying to figure out a headline for this review, I learned more about the phone. Because we were like,

iPhone 13 review colon, and then we were kind of like another iPhone. The iPhone again. Yep. Here's the iPhone. You know it. Now maybe you'll like it better.

Like it's, it is the smallest of upgrades, except for the camera, which we can talk about, but it is a very familiar. familiar product at this point. It's a very familiar product. The hard time I had with it is to just say, oh, it's an incremental upgrade.

Oh, they updated the camera and they made the battery life better. Like, that's the sort of thing. You hear it and you move right on, right? But no, no, the batteries are better. And the camera is better. And last year it was very good to begin with. So it's this sort of weird thing where if you have an iPhone 12, you should not buy this. Just don't.

You're fine. You're good. You're cool. Unless the battery life is a real problem. I do not recommend the upgrade. It is noticeably better, but I don't think it's like year over year. You should spend the extra money better. If you're a year over year kind of upgrader, one, maybe you don't need to be.

But two, be honest with yourself. Why aren't you getting the pro, right? But for anybody that's earlier than a 12, maybe an 11, definitely at 10R, 10S, 10. You are going to have just a wonderful time if you upgrade to this phone. Yeah. I think we should talk. Do you want to start the batteries? The cameras.

Start the batteries. It's pretty simple. Apple told us many stories about how the new A15 Bion. processor was more power efficient and how they, you know, they rearranged all the parts and whatever inside the phone. The long and the short of it is they made the batteries bigger. I think Mitchell Clark has the article up that, like, actually gives you the percentages, so that's been calculated. But Apple's claim is the iPhone, regular iPhone 13 gets, I believe, two and a half hours more of use, and the smaller iPhone mini gets one and a half hours more

of use. We talked a little bit about the iPhone. this last week, but we're in a weird place with like the way that everybody's talking about batteries. We're like in the slow transition from like everyone knows that millie amps isn't great and we should be talking about watt hours. We're in the slow transition from everyone provides some kind of benchmark number to they'll give you video rundown numbers to now hours better because Apple and both Microsoft, which we'll get into, when you ask about battery life, like, well, we just, we collect telemetry on how long our battery lasts from all of our customers, and then we, like, average it out.

We figure out, like, how long we think the battery lasts. And then when we make a new thing, we make sure that we beat that by a certain amount. And so the claim to test is hours better, but hours better means nothing unless you have the thing that it's hours better than. Right. And so it's tough. And their claim is it's hours better for you. Yeah.

Like, I don't. For, like, an average customer that isn't doing anything too, you know, intense. But doing more than just hanging out and watching movies. Because, like, the video rundown spec is, I don't know, it's like 20 hours or something ridiculous. Well, what I mean by 4U is that, I mean, conceptually, this is difficult, right? But what they're saying is we've collected all of this usage data. We've turned it into a model. That model represents some average customer.

And now we think the average customer is going to get X additional battery life if you run the same usage model. Yeah. And theoretically, you, the individual, is somehow captured in that. So even if you're kind of like at the upper or lower bound of the usage model, you're still getting the benefit. But it is impossible to test this claim. Right. Because we don't have their data. We don't run their models. Yeah, no. The models result in the average iPhone lasts Bezos hours. Yeah. I don't know. When we started the verge, you remember this? We had a battery test. We did. We, like, coded up a thing. God, I remember that thing. This thing did not work. This was Joanna Stern's baby. And it was basically, like, you would go to a web page and click go.

And then it would just, like, load and scroll web pages until a battery died. It would load, like, eBay and CNN and Yahoo for, like, an hour. And eventually, it kept on breaking, especially on phones, because the mobile web kept breaking. And so, like, it would freeze when a pop up demanding you install an app would appear. And so you'd have to, like, sit there and baby. sit it for an hour to clear all the pop-ups so that it would continue running. Yeah. You know, after a while, the thing is supposed to run for like, you know, 10 hours or something.

Right. And so the idea was when the web page was no longer getting click events from the macro, it would stop the clock, right? Like, very clever. And they would, like, spit out a battery test result. Then this never worked. So Joanna ended up watching her, like, dumb robot for 10 hours anyway. I had to do battery tests at one of our former jobs.

And I was like in charge of maintaining those tests. And I'd always have to click through for the Friendster website because they just didn't edit it out. And it had been used that long. And I was like, can we just get like a GoPro and just like point it and like run a video? And so like we went to the video because like these websites were just like at one point I was working with like this developer in Romania who was very nice and told me I was a developer. Aw. Because I was helping her. Oh, that's nice.

And I was like, oh, I'm not. But like, thank you for this. Yeah, I'm there. I appreciate the participation. But like these battery tests all make no sense and do nothing. It's like it really drives you to nihilism sometimes. Well, and the way that modern processors work is now that we're slowing down on Moore's Law, we're getting more and more custom bespoke parts of the processor that do custom bespoke things.

And so there is a piece of hardware on your motherboard that is there to just make video more efficient. And so a video rundown test is a measure of that piece of the processor, not the things overall battery life. Review. Yes, yeah, this one tiny piece works really, really well. So, look, I had four phones to review. The upshot of all this battery stuff is we like to do something that approximates a real-world use case. And there's only so many phones you can do. So my biggest regret is I didn't at embargo time have something definitive, I could say, about the iPhone 13 mini.

because that's the one that everyone really wants to know, is it better enough to go from, man, if I actually use this like a normal phone, it'll die at lunch to if I actually use this like a normal phone, it'll die at something later. Dinner. Yeah, dinner. It's better, but it doesn't change the fundamental rules

of how an iPhone 13 Mini should work or an iPhone 12 Mini should work. If you use an iPhone Mini the way that you use a bigger phone where you're just doom scrolling all day, you actually use it a bunch. It dies. That's just, that's how it is. If you use a mini iPhone, like, not as much and, like, you have a different relationship

with your phone, you could theoretically last all day. Lots of people do. But it's like, it lasts all day if you don't use it, which is like, womp-wom. One of the more challenging things about reviewing stuff, and Dieter, I'm curious how you went about it this time. Last year, I found it was really hard to do battery testing because I was not leaving home. It was just always in a Wi-Fi environment.

And so was I really testing the 5G radio? I was not. I had like one day in New York where I was doing it. Did you manage to get out and push him? Yeah, so the thing about living in the city instead of the woods is you can go out and take pictures of different things

besides more trees. If you're wondering why Dieter did all the reviews this year and I didn't, it was because I found the lack of places to go last year like utterly demoralizing. You could have taken really cool photos of the bears, though. I was about to say the bears. I just wandered the woods looking for bears.

What happened to Eli? Well, if you reviewed the iPhone. Call it out a bear on. So that's the batteries. It seems like Apple is usually doesn't lie about batteries. They say the batteries last long time. Dieter, it appears the batteries last a long time. Batteries lost long time, especially on the 13.

It is a notable difference. And it's a notable difference from the 12, but remember the 12 had relatively disappointing battery life. It was a step down from the previous, you know, generation. the last round of generation, where Apple did the thing that Apple does, where they, every two to three years, are like, oh, yeah, we should make the batteries bigger. People would like that. And then they do, and it's great.

So this is a, oh, yeah, we should make the batteries bigger kind of year. No, when they're going to, when they redesign the case for the iPhone 45 or whatever, they'll make it too thin. Yep. And then the iPhone 46, they'll make it slightly thicker. Like, they're off the S cycle, but maybe it's like odd numbers have bigger batteries. So is this year they've got bigger batteries and they're thicker? Are all of them thicker? Yeah, they're all thicker.

And throughout the body of the phone, the thickness is so minimal. You have to set them down next to each other on a table and feel your finger across and you can maybe feel it. Cases are fine there. Where they're definitely thicker is in the camera bumps. They are thicker. They're wider. They're more Mesa-esque than they've ever been. So we should talk about the camera bumps.

Again, this is one of those things where it's like, did you like the 12? you're going to love the 13, but if you like the 12, you should not buy a 13. Like, there's paradox embedded here. The thing that is absolutely remarkable, now that we have the phones, I was talking to like the haylide folks, like it, yep, the sensor in the 13s is the same sensor that was in the 12 pro max, only in the 12 pro max last year. Right. With sensor shift stabilization, the whole thing.

It is absolutely remarkable that that sensor is in the 13 mini. Yeah, I mean, the camera bump on the mini is huge, but it's, yeah, it's remarkable. They had to, they had to move the cameras diagonally to fit it. Or just to make them look different. I mean, you know, come on. They could have had them diagonally to begin with. There are so many memes about the iPhone 12 to 30. Yeah, the designer meeting.

Well, it's just like when they were designing the 12, they knew the 13 was coming. Right. So it could have been diagonal from the beginning. Anyhow, it's remarkable. that they have that sensor in the 13s, but it also kind of means the 12 to 13 comparison is super straightforward because it's the comparison between the 12 and the 12 Pro Max.

Yeah, which we already did last year. Which we are super familiar with. Is that kind of what you found? That's almost exactly what I found. There are differences in the way that Apple Tunes photos, which we're going to get into if you want to talk about photographic profiles. but they're a little bit less yellow and they're just a little bit less noisy.

I think that they're a little bit less afraid of shadows, just a tiny bit. But otherwise, like, if you had a 12 Pro Max, the photos from the 13 Mini look very, very similar, except at the edges of a little bit of color stuff that I've noticed. They also updated the ultra-wide, but in both cases on the regular and the pro, it's, like, kind of fuzzy about how it is,

for low light improvements. It's there. They did stuff, but what precisely they did is in a dead ahead as like bigger sensor, you know, lower, F stop, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's a little bit, I don't know, subtler. Yeah. I mean, what I recall of last year was there's a big conversation about how the photos were almost indistinguishable. And it was because we were all stuck at home.

All the reviewers were stuck at home, which meant we were all taking still lives. Yep. And it was not clear that like the true improvement here was you were collecting more light at a faster shutter speed. Like the thing could ramp to a higher ISO. Yep. And make a cleaner photo at a higher shutter speed. Yep. And I only figured out, like at the end, when I started taking pictures of my kid who is not a still life.

Yeah. And I was like, oh, I figured, this occurs to me what figured it out. If that's the same here, that's like a meaningful stepwise improvement over the 13. Yeah, it's the same here. I tried to, I tried to do the same thing with my cat, but my cat just. doesn't move anymore, so... I mean, that's all great. Like, I don't know. I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that they made the notch smaller but didn't improve the selfie camera.

Like, keep the notch the same size, make the other stuff smaller, make the front camera better. Why did they reduce the notch size? Why do they put the engineering effort into this particular thing? To fit the bigger camera sensor. But like, but why make the notch smaller? What does that give them? I'm telling you, space is it a premium in these?

So you think because they made it narrower, then they could move a thing over, which gives them more Z space to put the bigger sensor behind where the notch used to be? I mean, I think we got to wait for a tear down, but I think every millimeter of space inside this, especially for the mini counts. Yeah, yeah.

And if you're going to radically increase the size of the main sensor, you've got to make it up somewhere. Right. All of which is like, they made the notch smaller, not because they actually cared what it looks like or care about our experience of the screen, they made the notch smaller because they had to for the cameras, which is amazing.

I have a theory about the notch. So I think they made the notch smaller. But Dave, the guy who's in charge of doing the percentage in where the notch was, it was on vacation or summer. So they just didn't get around to it. So I feel like that's going to come. He's going to get back from my parental leave or whatever and be like, oh, yeah, hold on, let me do this.

Oh, Apple does not want to show you a battery percentage. They are philosophically opposed to putting a battery percentage anywhere. even on a Mac, like a Mac will fight you. But it used to be there. It used to be a toggle. You turned it on and off. Yeah. And then they started doing the battery health thing and they got in trouble for throttle.

Like an iPhone battery indicator is not, is no longer a linear experience. Right? It's like full. It's half full. Uh, it's still half full. Pretty much half full. Going to be at 15% for the rest of the day. Right.

And there's like, there's no shades in between those moments. Yeah. Right. We see the battery percentage now, right? You can look at it in control center, but yeah, it's like what is a battery percentage is in the same category as what is a photo and what is a computer at this point? It's a feeling in our hearts. I mean, we got to talk about the file director's story at some point today.

Okay, so those are the 13s. I feel like we should talk about photo styles and stuff in context of the pros. Okay. And also cinematic mode? And also cinematic. Because those are that, that's the, I think of that as the camera review. Yeah, okay. But the 13s are great.

I think the pricing games that Apple and the carriers are playing are quite frankly gross. We had a very long discussion about how much of this should go into the reviews. And the answer was, I wrote 7,000 words in like two days, so maybe not. But we wanted to. We are following up on it. We've already heard, you know, we are responsive to our audience. We've already heard from a lot of people listening to the show after we talked about last week. Other readers are telling us buying an iPhone is more complicated and confusing.

than ever. There are YouTubers out there that are basically making videos of Excel spreadsheets. If you can push the YouTube economy towards like straight Excel, you know, like versus anything else they'd want to do. They're like, we're going to do Excel on like, you know you've, you've done something. Like that's the rawest id of the tech universe is like tech YouTube. Some tech YouTuber is going to be radicalized by this pricing experience and going to like pivot into giving financial advice full time and it's going to be amazing. Oh, that is already. We're like right on the. that happened anyway. We love our tech YouTuber friends.

Of course. But if you're doing Excel, it's like, it's bad. Anyway, we are doing those stories. We've already written a few about why the subsidies exist. It's really hard to do that story. Like, the only way that I can tell you how much an iPhone cost is if I know what legacy Verizon plan you're already on and they change them every three months. Right.

Yeah. So we're trying to figure ways to do it in a structured and meaningful way. But rest assured, nothing is free. Yeah. Right. Like kind of the basic formula here is there's a lot of people on legacy 4G plans. They want to give you a free iPhone. And to do that, you end up on a 5G plan, which is more expensive.

That's the, and at a 36-month contract. Right. That's the basic shape of it. So we didn't put it in the review, but it's something on our mind. Let's talk about the pro phone stater. These are the ones with maybe the most new things. Do you want to start with the displays or do you want to go camera again? I mean, we can get battery life out of the way.

Same story. Better battery life. The battery life on the 13 Pro Max is like two and a half hours more on the thing that was already really good. It's just bonkers. That's all I have to say is. Have you had to charge it even once? The Pro Max? Like, no.

Like I haven't used it as my full, full-time phone because I wanted to do the worst-case scenario. So I've been using the small one more. Now I'm on the mini, and then I'm going to come back and do the max. And we'll have a full battery feelings thing next week, probably. Anyway, so that's battery there. So, I don't know, yeah, what do you want? Screen or camera? We can do screen quick and then get into cameras.

Let's see the screen. My big question here is when we were after the event and then we were in our various briefings where like you're going to ramp the screen up and down like you should with any sort of variable refresh, are all the apps going to support it and how can we tell? Right. And I don't think we ever, I think we still kind of don't know. The answer is if your app is coded in Swift or is it Coco? Coco's the known or carbon?

I always get them confused. I'm terrible. Coco touch. Yeah. Then you should be getting most of these improvements for free. But you can specifically code your app. There will be an API, apparently. And that it also is trying to watch the screen to watch for what frame rate it thinks it should be running at.

But there's no way for you the user to know that it's stepped down to 24. Well, unless you can see it. It's harder to see in video, I think. But I got into this into the review. But I am the kind of person who sees high refresh rate screens. I just like, I just do. I'm also the kind of person that sees Jelly Scroll. There's Jelly Scroll on the iPad Mini.

Some people don't see it and they don't care and whatever. Some people see it and they don't care and whatever. Some people see it and it's like, ah, I have felt minorly ah about iPhones for the last four years. May I call it three years. And the knock, the claim is like, well, Apple doesn't need to have a high refresh rate screen because iOS is so smooth. And it's like, yes, you are correct. iOS is smooth. It does not have the amount of stutter and jank that you get.

on Android, and Android solved that problem through brute force of high refresh rate screens. Battery be damned, right? That is what they did, and then they've over time figured it out, so now they work pretty well. All that said, it just looks better. Like I see it on the iPhone, I feel it on the iPhone, and I get it if you don't, if you're like whatever about it, that is like good for you. Be whatever about it. I see it. It is better. Apple does not deserve a pass for waiting this long to do it. Is there any experience that really like makes you feel it more. Scrolling.

Just scrolling. That's like scrolling text. Like that's it. You like they stop turning into like blurs. It's just like it's more like paper. And it's ridiculous. But like the fundamental thing that you do on a phone is scroll. And so I see it all the time.

So this is very noticeable to me because I have an iPad Pro, which has a promotion display. Yeah. And I switch back and forth between the two all the time. And I notice it between those two. And then I got the 13. Chrome Max and Dieter is like, do you see it? And I was like, no. I was very mad.

I was just like, wait. And then once you see it again, like, I was so used to looking at a 60 hertz display in my phone. Yeah. And then you see it. And then it's very difficult to go back. Yeah. And the animations like smooth, because Samsung's obviously had the 120

hertz stuff and their animations don't always keep up. So I'm just curious if iOS actually keeps up at 120. Never seen it not keep up. Like I said, they got the pass on not doing this because they had good animations in the first place, and that just continues. Plus, don't forget, like Neil said, they've had this on the iPad for a while, so this isn't a brand new thing to them. Yeah, true. How does it work for games on the iPhone, though? I mean, I've been playing a lot of Fantasian, and it just looks beautiful.

I don't know what else to say. Like, it looks great. I don't know if it's doing the frame-right thing there or not. So, again, it's like, I'm not doing all of my... experience with a high frame rate camera, and it's not like you can just, like, get a little developer mode thing on an iPhone to display what the screen is doing. Imagine that world where Apple let you do that. I mean, they have every other setting.

There used to be an app that would count the frame rate for you years ago. I don't know if it still exists, but you'd have to, like, put your phone into developer mode and, like, hook it up, and it would be like on your computer. It was the worst experience. You were basically a debugger. But that wasn't the frame rate of the display. That was the frame rate of the game. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right. Also, but Tom, to your point about games, you know, Apple's hedge against this for the past like three years is like an unrelated stat. They're like, oh, we run the touch sensor at 120 hertz. And you're like, well, that isn't the screen. Like you're like, does your car go 60 miles an hour? And they're like, we make a motorcycle that goes 30. It's like, well, those aren't. What are you talking?

Everyone does that touch response right thing. Everybody does it. It's funny. Apple didn't bring it up this year. Right, because their screen has the good stack. But part of game's responsiveness is like, yep, how fast is the screen repression? But also how little lag is there? They're already at the right number for the touch response.

I'm fairly sure that Fortnite, back when it used to be on the iPad, that that used to be 120 hertz, I think. Because it's definitely 120 hertz elsewhere. Yeah, I don't know. I don't remember. And now we'll never know. I have a Fortnite icon on my phone. I'm kind of curious about the thing. games because for years the games all capped at 60. And that was just, they were like, yeah,

we're going to cap at 60. That's as high as the refresh rate goes. And so I'm wondering how many of these games are going to have to like go in and unleash the beast, so to speak. There's a beast to unleash the A15 seems great. And there's an extra GPU core in the pro. Yeah. Well, that's what it's four. They call it the 60 Hertz core. Okay. So let's talk about the cameras. Either the cameras are all three are different. Yep. Selfie camera. It's Still stubbornly the same. Yep. No center stage.

But the three in the back are all different. And they all seem much improved as well. Yeah. So like I said, the ultra wide has some vague low light stuff, which I kind of noticed. But it has an autofocus now. And so you can get, once you hit 10 centimeters, the frame shifts to macro mode, but it tries to keep the same framing. So you see the frame shift, but it tries to keep it, you know, the same framing. And so it crops in from the ultra wide instead of just showing you what.

you were getting on the wide. And then you can get up to two centimeters and take the photo. And unbeknownst to me, every other reviewer, not every other reviewer, a bunch of reviewers were very mad about this, about this like experience of the thing shifting. This was like, if there was going to be a controversy. This would be the controversy. And then it was not a controversy. Well, here's the thing.

Have you ever taken a good photo with your iPhone 10 centimeters away from the subject? All the time. Really? Every day. My constant state. I suppose that there are situations where you absolutely want to stay on the wide and you don't want it to switch to macro mode at that distance. But to me, it's like they should have just had some other clearer indicator. It does feel broken.

It feels a little buggy to see like the framing just like change on the screen as you move closer. And it's a little bit worse as you pull away. As you pull away, it's like, are you going to switch? Oh, there you are. So I knew what was happening, so I understood what was going on. But I suppose if you're just thinking about the average user that might feel a little bit broken. So they're going to like the night before the review, they're like, we're going to make a software update so you can like turn that off. Is it more or less?

So like I'm on the 11 Pro. And on the 11 Pro when you switch between the different lenses, there's usually like a noticeable kind of shift in reframing. Is it more or less like pronounced than that? It's different. It's like they're they're cropping. They're trying to keep the same crop on the ultra wide. And so sometimes it's like there's like there's like there's like this. weird like it shifts left or right a little bit.

Sort of like when you're like closing one eye or the other and looking at a point in the distance. Yeah, they should lean into it though. They should just, they should have some like, wow. Yeah. We're going in, y'all.

They should have the Mega Man boss animation. Yeah. Like this is actually, I think we'll end up talking about us with iOS 15 again. Like Apple is the thing is getting more and more complicated. Oh, man. And Apple is like not, they're not celebrating how complicated the thing is.

Yeah. They're like avoiding it in ways that makes it even more. And like this is a great example of that. Yeah. The camera is now very complicated. And we can talk about photo styles and everything else too. But just this thing where they've tried to make it automatic and invisible. And for a thing that you cannot make invisible, just make it super visible.

You will solve the problem instead of adding another setting that no one will understand. And where will that setting go? Will it go on the camera app or in the settings app? Let's just decide. I don't know. The telephoto goes to 3X. I think it's 2.8 now. So it's a little bit longer, but it also takes in a little bit less light.

So the tradeoff is you get night mode on it, so that's cool. But if you don't have night mode engaged, it will take dimmer photos in the dark, which I think some people were a little bit unhappy with. On the whole, I'm very happy with it because I think it takes better photos. It takes better portraits of faces. The 3X is just slightly nicer than the 2X. you get a little bit more, I don't know, grace in your digital zooms there, just that much more. It still looks like digital zoom, but whatever.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just happy because Viren took just the most incredible portrait that anyone has ever taken of me during the course of this review. And so I just think, oh, yeah, the camera's great. There's a good picture of me. That's all I care about. It's all anyone cares about. But no, it's, I like the telephoto camera. I'm willing to do the tradeoff for the, you know, the slightly worse performance in low light on that one in particular.

We'll see if Apple sticks with it. The other interesting thing they're doing in their camera interface is, I'm not sure if Apple did this first or Samsung did it first, but they're now, as you do the little, you bring up the little scroll dial when you move your finger up and down and it shows you the full range. They're showing at their 1x, their 0.5X, their 1x and their 3x, the millimeter equivalents. So they're explicitly saying this is 77 millimeter equivalent. This is, I don't know, 23 or whatever it is. They're showing you those as like a way to feel more, like, photographic, more. like a professional camera. Yeah.

I feel like I would love for them to do what Nokia did back in the Lumia days, which is have just the basic camera mode, which is what they're kind of trying to cram everything into. And then a pro camera mode where you can do all the eyeset, like every saying you want to change. Sony does it, Samsung does it. Everyone's got a pro camera mode.

So I don't see what they don't do it. Yeah. Because you can just buy the app that is that mode. Sure. I think their feeling is that like the people who want that are just going to spend the 30-bubes. on HALI or they're just going to be lightroom users or whoever. But what about the people who don't want that?

They still have Apple's camera app, which I just can I just ask, why is the button that shows more options next to the shutter button on the other side of the frame? Why is there a little arrow on the, like if you're holding shutter button under your right thumb, why is the button to show more stuff on the left side of the frame? Why? What is it? Why? Hold on.

I'm just like, looking at my phone. Tell me why. It's like, I got to pull my phone out now. The little arrow button, the Chiron button that switches to show you all the different options in the mode that you're in, is on the left side if you're holding it in your right hand with the shutter button under your, because it's in photo mode. And if you want to change it to like four by three or go into like the timer or whatever, you had like all those things on the right appear by hitting a button on the left.

Well, it's so you can do it do it two-handed. But you just swipe up though, right? I never press the button. You can also swipe up. Yeah. But what if you don't know about the swipe? I didn't know about the swipe. Oh, wow, that's cool.

That was great. Welcome to Vergecast, where all of us just use our phones. It's like the YouTube app where I only discovered like two weeks ago, you can swipe up and it makes it full screen. Yeah. We literally wrote an article about it. I know. I think that's what I read. It exploded through our Slack.

Like the entire Verge shut down when everyone's like, oh, you can just swipe up on the YouTube video. Did you know that on the Mac OS when in the... menu bar, there are three dots next to a menu item. That is an indicator that it's going to open up another window instead of do an action directly. Yes, I've known that since I was like 10 years old because I read like David Pogue's

first book. Welcome to the Vergecast. Computer tips and tricks, everybody. The regular wide angle. It's so good. But it's so good if you're the kind of person that looks for it.

If you have a 12 or maybe even and 11 and you take a picture, look it on your phone, and put it on Instagram, you might not see it. And that's fine, totally okay. But if you're the kind of person that wants to see how much noise there is in the shadows, and you want to see if, like, your color temperature is right and the thing, the bright thing in the background is not completely blown out. And like you, that is stuff that you see. It's there.

You see it. It is better. It's better even than the 12 Pro Max. So one of the things that I think Apple has been able to do. This is the first year they've branded Smarty. HDR. Really? Yeah.

They were just like, every previous year they're like, we improved it. This year they're like, it's called SmartHDR4. Okay. And I think it's because they added photo styles to it. And so I think one of the things that they've been able to do is get more aggressive with what they think the photo should look like. Yes. Because they're giving you these outs of, well, screw it.

You can just make it look like Samsung if you want. Right. Yep. And I think some of their contrast decisions, some of their, Like, it's harder to make it go into night mode. Yes, it's much harder to make it go into night mode. And part of that's the sensor, but I think part of it is also Apple saying, no, we think that this scene should be dark.

Yep. Right? I think I think that the system is more aggressively tuned this year. And I think all that is related to the fact that they, A, have other styles and B, they're, they're more confident in night mode. And that just comes through having used the phone for as much as I've used the phone. Like the camera on the 12, the 13 Pro Max is, last year I called the 12 for Max really confident. This camera is, it's not just confident in that it can take a picture.

It's confident in what the pictures should look like in a way that I think the push and pull between the pixel look and the Samsung look and the Apple look kind of made everything look the same. This one is like, no, this is what it's going to look like. And if you don't like it, here are some ways to make it look different. When I started writing this review, I had to like get up. and walk around the room for a minute, and then I had to slackney and I had to yell at him for using the word confident last year, because that was what I was like, yep,

like this thing just knows what it wants to do, much more so than in like a lot of other cameras. Even like the iPhone 12, like sometimes the camera panics, right? It's like it just goes haywire. It's like, I don't know what to do here, sure, bright and everything, ah! This thing almost never panics. Yeah, and I think it's because they, you know, most people take smartphone photos,

and the look for every smartphone photo, has been totally flat for about three years. The highlights are as bright as the shadow. Like, everything is just as bright as it can be, which makes things look weird. Like, I think it was the 10S that I was like, this camera just looks insane to me because it was just so aggressive. And I was like, this isn't how photos should look.

And they've walked it back. And now they're at this very, like, you know, artful look. But the photo styles are really interesting to me because what, I mean, like, we were joking, but it is just super true that one of them is pixel and the other one is Samsung. Yep.

There's just no way around it. And you can call them rich contrast and was it vibrant? It's, yeah, rich contrast and yeah, vibrant. Yeah, yeah. And then there's warm and cool. And then my favorite mode

is if you can tweak the sliders and so you can land on rich cool, which is what you have to be to buy an iPhone. Yeah, I don't know what warm and cool are. I think they're just there so Apple can say there's more modes other than pixel and Samsung.

But it's just like super interesting. Like when we do the pixel review, like our ability to say we prefer the look of the pixel is now severely undercut by the fact that the iPhone can generate something that looks very much like the existing pixel. Greg Jaws, we ask, secret plan. I'm pretty sure it's a secret plan. I'm pretty sure you did it just to just to irritate me personally. But that is really neat.

The thing that is befuddling to me is just based on how we understand how it works, there's no reason that shouldn't be a feature of iOS 15 that hit every other phone. Yeah, I mean, part of the explanation is that requires the 815. Okay, well, why does it require the 815? And then, like, you end up in, like, spinning it out, trying to figure it out for your else land. And the best devil's advocate argument I could make is that Apple really cares about making the live view be as close to what. the final photo is going to be as possible. They did it with portrait mode. They are now doing it here. And so I think that they must believe, or they say they believe, that the extra processing power

they've got in the A15 bionic is what allows them to make the viewfinder look like Rich Kool, because they want you to know what your final result is going to be. They don't want the thing after all the little processing happens to look especially different from what you see live. I don't know if I buy that argument, but that I think is the argument. I buy it 20%. Okay. Yeah. Just because here's what's happening.

You buy it? Oh, you buy it? That's like, you know, four out of five GPU course. You buy it four or five GPU course. No, I'm buying one out of five GPU course. No, like if you just think about that argument, what's the fun doing? You hold the phone up. It starts, it's already taking photos.

You hit the shutter button and takes its burst of however many seven photos, it varying exposures. iPhone 12 was already doing that. then it starts stacking the photos semantically. It's like, this is the sky. We want this sky. It's under-exposed. You want this one, blah, blah, blah.

I guess it's an open question if you think that they're semantically doing that in the live view in real time. I pout it. I don't know. Then it's just basically applying like an exposure table to that. And that changing the exposure table is what gets you the different look. It's not quite doing. I know it's not literally an exposure table, but that's what it's doing.

They have some set of values. that were like, make the sky this bright or this vibrant. Do faces this way, do that the other way. Privacy is a human right is another one of the values. Take risks. That's one of Fox Media's values. That's my joke. It's true, by the way.

It's printed in giant letters. It's all in our office, I think about it often. But they could just send that set of exposure values to the older phones. And whatever that is would be just as fine in the live view, because the older phones are producing a live exposure to. I think this is gated. I think this is gated to make you want to buy a new phone. Like they have to gate some feature and they gated this one.

And the point of a devil's advocate argument is that it's the devil. Fair enough. Okay, but it's a great camera. The styles are neat. They're on both phones, the regulars and this one and the pros. Very cool. We should talk about cinematic mode, which is not, I would say, success on the level of these cameras and photographic styles. I believe that Apple was disingenuous with its ads.

They are showing ads with this mode that is portrait mode for video with some cool little auto-reframing options for you, working in light that I would never be able to get it to work well in. I have not gotten it to work in anything with the brightest of light. Some people have. Yeah. I can get it working in like medium light. I got it working in a couple like brightly lit, you know, alleys, but it can fall down pretty fast. and it looks really green screeny. Like one of the things like the, you know, not a TikTok I posted,

everyone's like, this is a green screen. This looks completely superimposed and fake. It wasn't like obviously. But yeah, I think that it's difficult to get this to look as cinematic as they say it is. If they had presented this as something much more playful or much less like self-serious, we might be having a different conversation about it. But the way it's the way that they are marketing it is the problem I have with. The feature itself works meh, and I don't have a problem with a me feature the first time around.

I have a little bit of a problem, but whatever. I have a problem with people buying this thing on the promise that it does more than it actually can do. Is it worse than like when portrait mode came out? Because portrait mode we all thought was going to work in a lot of different lights and distances and stuff and quickly learn, no, that's not true. No, but that's, compare how they roll that portrait mode to this. Yeah. You roll that portrait mode, not at first with the seven. Right.

right? The seven came out. It wasn't even enabled. Then they rolled it out in beta and they were like, we don't, right? They were just like, you know, this is the future of photography. Right? And then it's gotten, and we were like, it's a gimmick. And then last year we were like, oh, this got really good. And that was a long time. Yeah. This one, they're like, here's Catherine Bigelow. And this is the future of cinematography. Yeah. And it's like, no, it isn't. Like, first of all, it only runs in 1080p 30. So, like, no, it's not. And then it just doesn't, like, their little Knives Out video is, like, very moodily lit. I'm confident that there were more lights in that room than we can see. Yeah. Well, so, yeah, to be clear, I'm not saying Apple faked it. Like, the way that Huawei or even, I think Nokia has been caught, like, using a different camera and passing it off as their camera, I don't believe they're doing that. Like, these are actual cinematic mode videos that have a lot more stuff behind the iPhone than you.

you will have behind yours. I think that's fair. Catherine Bigelow was like a cinematographer before she was like, yeah, it makes sense. Like they got real. She's got a lighting assistant. Yeah, they have like Oscar winning cinematographers working on this. They're going to definitely turn out, I would hope, a better video. And then I, so there's that, which is just even when you have the best of light, it's kind of me.

Yeah. And then as the light falls off, it just stops working. Like it just puts up a thing that says you need more light. Yep. And that's the end of that story. Then there's the file format disaster. And like, I'll just point you to Joanna's video. And she was like very frustrated by all this. But when you turn off H. So HDR and the iPhone is already a file format disaster if you want to get into another app. Yeah. Yeah. If you want to edit and premiere, if you want to edit anything but Apple's apps, HDR video on the iPhone is already fighting you. And the button, when you're in cinematic mode and you turn off. HDR, the button is broken, so it doesn't turn off HDR. So, Jan, I made her whole video in cinematic mode. It's in her video. You should just go watch it.

And she was like, Apple tells me they'll fix the button. But on top of that, you cannot re-edit the video. So it bakes it. Oh, no. So whatever your depth decision is is baked into your video and export, the way that most people export the video files off their iPhones is to air drop them to a Mac. Right. Yep.

If your iPhone sees that your Mac is not running MacOS Monterey, which I would note at the time of this review was not out. It's air dropping a baked video file with no depth map. Yeah. So that's like problem one. Dieter, I think you did it over USB, right? It doesn't fight you in USB. So I did it just, it syncs over to Photos, the Photos app. And so you could just go to the export option in Photos apps.

And there's two export options. There's export, and they'll let you export in 480 or 720 or 1080 or 4K, apparently, even though it's a 1080. And then the other one is like export original unmodified, unmodified something, something. If you export original unmodified something, something, you get the file, and then you get a extra sidecar file that has all of the depth map information, maybe the HDR information. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my know. If you have an app that knows that there's a sidecar file, then you're fine.

If you just try and take the original file and throw it into a video editing app, all of the blur is just gone because none of it. that thing is there in the file. So you either bake it into the file on export in one way, shape, or you need an app that knows that there's an extra file that goes along with this thing. And right now, the only apps that can do that are made by Apple. You know, we talk about how Apple and Microsoft, everybody is working towards like teaching us less and like kind of having, doing all the hard work for us. I really respect that here they're like, no, all of this hard work you're going to have to be very thoughtful of and have read like listen to every podcast watched every YouTube video read everything to know how to hell to like get this

onto your computer like I respect that I love it something for the experts well I mean you know I read all the reviews and all the reviews had the same sort of you can just tell that people who read iPhone interviews are not TikTokers like successful TikTokers like they all have the same little thing it's like oh this would be great for TikTok And it's like, well, TikTok can't use this feature. Right. And TikTok can't read these video files. So unless you are this exact sort of person who shoots and edits a video in the tools Apple provides you, then exports that and then imports that in the TikTok and uploads it, that's your process for getting to use cinematic mode in TikTok.

Yeah. And maybe some people will do that. I would just expect that most people do not. Right? Like, it's just a long road to get to what you want. And then TikTok will be like, whatever,

here's a software blur and a filter anyway. It doesn't matter. This to me is like, you know, again, Apple rolled it out, I agree with theater. Apple rolled it out in a way

that makes it seem ready. Yeah. And if they'd rolled it out in beta or is an early version or like the next step in video, I think we'd be having a much different reaction to it. But I think hiding the ball on how much light it needs, like it created a context for me to look at this thing is like,

yeah, they kind of like set themselves up to just get this criticism. Like, just be honest. They could have done like Panos and like gone back around and be like, and look, here's everything happening behind the screen. Oh, that's such a, such a sincere. Anyhow, it's like, you know, Deeter, you had the line that it was,

gimmick adjacent. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm at with it. Like, when we were scoring the review and we were talking about it, you can't knock the phones for bad cinematic mode. Because if it wasn't there, we wouldn't be like, no cinematic mode. Right. Do we think they'll fix it, though?

They fixed portrait. Yeah, it sounds like it should have been a point release, right? Maybe. Or, you know, or they should have done it in beta and let the beta run for a long time, and the iPhone 14 will have a slightly better one in the 50. Like, that's been the run with portrait mode photos. Maybe they'll get there with videos. But doing with Catherine, like, they just, they just set expectations for this thing that

even at the level of what if I want to get the file off my phone, or it's just complicated and hard. That said, it's fun to mess with. It's not not fun to mess with. All right, either, anything else on these phones? We've done 50 minutes on these phones. I think we're good. There are phones.

I started by saying the headlines are hard to write, and we landed at iPhone 13 review. Yep, bigger batteries are better. Somehow we still did 50 minutes. What is a photo? All right, we're going to take a break. We come back. We still got to talk about that iPad Mini, iOS 15, and then we do have a lot of Microsoft stuff to talk about. We'll be right back.

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from grammar. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can mean getting lost in the shuffle. Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Grammally's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft,

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And then Deeter said, I can talk about the iPad Mini for as long as you'd like. Yep. How's the iPad Mini, Deer? It's an iPad Mini, and what that means is take a big iPad and then shrink it down a little bit. And it has all the same software interfaces, all, like, there's like tiny subtle differences, like Command Tab shows fewer icons or whatever. And the widgets are scaled differently. And you think that'd be the end, but it turns out that when you take a big iPad and shrink it down, you end up using it differently.

So, for example, the keyboard is still like human-sized. So if you're in landscape mode and you bring up the keyboard, it covers the screen. Just like the whole thing. So it's different. And so don't assume that, oh, I would like to have a smaller iPad. That sounds cool that you're going to have the same experience you have with the big iPads. It's interesting. I think they missed a trick that Microsoft actually does very.

well, which is when you go from landscape to portrait, you should have the option to have the split screen be top to bottom instead of left to right. And they just can't. I wish it did that. Battery life is, it's weird. It's fine. And that's a weird thing for me to say about iPad battery life. Because normally with an iPad battery, especially when you use primarily for consumption, you're like, yeah, the thing will last like a week if you don't pay attention to it. It's great. It's wonderful. And this one, you'll see the battery tick down. Like I'm at 28% on. on this thing right now, and I've been using it off and on, you know, all day, and it's 2 o'clock as of this speaking time.

So, you know, like, it will, you can run it down just like you can run down an iPad Pro if if you use it, like, all day, like a computer. But it's just, it's not quite as good as a bigger iPads. You know, you're listening to this before my full review will go up next week, but that's kind of where I'm landing on it. To me, it's interesting, and it's good for, like, a certain, I'm not type of person, but it's good for a certain kind of way of using a device. that is not the same as an iPhone and not the same as an iPad.

Yeah. So for the pilots. For the pilots. Exactly. I think the iPad Mini is the one where you basically run one app. Like you're buying this thing to run one app. Whether that app is Kindle, I am a nerd and I use two apps. But yeah, if you think of this as a big-ass iPhone and you run one app, you'll love it.

Here's what I mean by it, it's different than a phone. Think of, like, you're looking at your phone right now, or you're looking at somebody who's looking at their phone. And there's a certain hunch, there's a certain closeness that there's a certain closeness to them in the screen, and they're closed off in a certain way. Like, it's them in their phone, and you need to break that, you know, bubble that they're in. This thing, you can, you are just like, you're holding it a little bit further away, and it's just a little bit more open. It's just a little bit bigger.

And so the reason I like this thing is when I go home, I've got this thing where I'm, like, still open to the world around me to talk to, you know, my spouse, and it's, like, not quite big enough for me to like really want to do work. I'll like, I have to struggle through it on this thing or go to another computer. So for a thing to like do iPhone stuff or iPad stuff when I'm not working, when I'm hanging out at home, it's great because I feel more available to the world around me and I'm less likely to work. But I still get the benefits of a big ass screen, you know, relative to a phone. Yeah. All right.

Well, we'll talk about your review when it comes out next week. I'm sure. Okay. I'll just say the same things again. Yeah. Well, and then I just want to touch on iOS 15. Which parts? The parts that shipped or the parts that didn't? Yeah, well, there's that.

Let's talk about the parts that shipped. This is an operating system that is now reaching, like, fractal levels of complication. Just, I'll make another TikTok reference. It is hilarious to me how many TikTok people have successful TikTok careers just telling people about features of iOS. Yeah. Right. Like, there's, like, lots of them. They're like, here's some shit.

didn't know you could do, and they're like successful TikTokers. iOS 15 is going to revolutionize their lives. Like the richest people in America are going to be iOS power user TikTok guys because it is so complicated. I think Dieter probably the place to start is focus mode, which, you know, it's like one of the highlight features and is impenetrable. Yeah, I would say it's impenetrable. The whole situation of when you first set it up, when you go through the flow, it's like, well, which people do you want to be able to contact you? It's like, well, how will they, is this just I message? I guess.

Well, am I locked into I message? Well, I don't know about that. Let me make some choices here. Okay, let's go to the next screen. And then there's yet more choices about what apps are allowed to get in and not get in. And it's just, it's a series, it's a wizard of steps, of set up steps. And each successive step, you're still wondering if you made the right choices on the previous step. And by the end of it, you maybe get to a place where, like, you've got this wonderland where you can, like, hit a button and

you're in work mode and like it works exactly the way you want. It like rearranges your home screen and like the apps can pop in the way you want to. The apps that you don't want to have notifications get all bundled, which is like bundles is a really interesting idea. I actually think they could go further with that idea. But I got to be honest, it's like the setup process is such that it's, it's, it asks a lot of the user in a way that I don't, it doesn't make clear that the payoff is worth what it's asking. And that's the problem I have with it is It's asking a lot It's not providing the entire full context

Of what the value is of all these choices That you're making and how easy it is to undo those choices And it's just like ah That's how I feel about it You know what it kind of reminds me of Did you guys ever play Mass Effect The first Mass Effect? I tried

You know you have to make your character And you're in this like room And you're making your character And then like the first time you really get to see your character and know how all those choices will affect it. It's like after that, and it's a big dramatic pan, and your character looks like a potato. That's kind of what I think this mode is like.

I got to the part where, I mean, it's just like, I don't even know if Apple thought anyone to look at the screen, but you like do the setup wizard, and then you like go to settings. Yeah. Because like, oh, I made a mistake. Yeah. And then you see the profiles you have.

Yeah. And the first one that's listed there is personal. Yeah, you click on it. And literally the first setting on that screen is a toggle switch labeled personal that you can turn on or off under the word personal. And I'm like, I don't know what this means. Like, I'm reasonably good at computers. And this, this is just utterly befuddling to me.

What am I turning on and off? Yourself. You just blink out of existence. And so you like, you like, back off and you like, oh, the next one. And the next one's labeled to work. And you click into it and says work at the top of the screen. And then there's an on off toggle labeled work. Yeah.

And it's like, am I, can I turn them all on? If I turn this one off to have I turned personal off? Yeah. I don't know. Like, at the end of this, can I just turn off my iPhone? Like, we'll just stop work. It's called a work life balance. That's.

And I was like, I'm just not whatever. Like, give me the do not disturb mode. And my choices are. Everything or nothing, and these gradations in between are not useful to me. And that is the opposite of what Apple wants you to do. They want you to create all these fine gradations. And I'm like, well, you know what I usually do in meetings? I just turn my phone over.

Like I just put it screen down. I'm like, do not disturb. And that's the answer. It's kind of a dick move on Apple's part. Because think of how long Apple has gone around removing customization. And I think especially of like MacOS back when I'm still thinking like upset about 10.3. when they got rid of like text customization. And like they've gone out of their way to be like, no, no, no, no.

Like there's a general use case and that's the use case. And like anything outside of that is like kind of weird. And then here they're like now get customized. And I'm like that's, I want like rain meter on my computer. I don't want like 40,000 personal versus workplace notification modes. I mean, again, I think part of this is Apple is they're focused on a vision of Dieter has talked about this a million times. They are focused on a vision of simplicity that is not realistic.

Yeah. Sometimes the way to make things simple is to actually let them be complicated. Yeah. So that you know what's happening as opposed to trying to... I mean, this is like... I feel like they're doing that. They definitely let this be complicated. And there's a good end goal.

Like, there's a way states or way messages. There's a bunch of good ideas that I want to work. And maybe they won't work. Maybe this is like tiny computers or like the web as a app platform. It's a thing that I want to exist that it's fundamentally never going to get there because the execution is impossible. But they definitely, I definitely feel like they didn't nail the execution on this one. No, what I mean specifically, like, I mean, we're about to talk about Microsoft.

So this is like a great. This is great. Like they made Clippy for notifications. Right? It's like it looks like you don't want to be disturbed. And then it's in the background, it's going to mess with 50 settings. Yeah. and you don't know how you got from one thing to another one,

and then you go and you're not onboarded again. Like that wizard isn't there again for you. So you're like, what do all these settings do? And that's what I mean. Like the interface is not teaching you what it does in that kind of complication. Yeah. It's not making you smarter. Yeah.

It's just presenting endless options. Yeah, it should learn. That's what it should do. Like it should learn your calendar entry for meetings and then not disturb you, apart from a certain amount of context that you want to break. through, it should learn that you dismiss that notification all the time. So just dismiss it and put it somewhere else. You know, all these things, it needs to just do all magically. Meanwhile, try and place an icon on the lower right-hand portion of your iPhone screen. Not allowed. See if that can work.

Computer says no. To Deeter's earlier point, most of the good stuff in iOS 15 is not shift, so SharePlay isn't there yet. Find my support for AirPods isn't there yet. This like universal control feature where you can just like slide your mouse back and forth between your iPad, like not there yet. I'm so excited. Like all this stuff we're excited for. Yeah. It's funny because we have this whole article and we have all that stuff.

And at the end it's like also the app store's in-app events feature is not there. And it's like, yeah, I don't know. Devastated. Leave it. It's like, I don't know, maybe focus on the other stuff guys. Last few Apple things. Dieter, I know you have feelings about this. But Tom, I want you, is somebody who's personally left the European Union.

Sorry, what? I was the 50% that didn't want to. Yeah, but now you live in that reality. The EU USBC mandate. So the EU has not passed this yet. They are well on their way to saying every device needs to be powered over USBC, no exceptions. Apple came out and said, this will harm innovation, which is hilarious because it's not like Apple's innovating on lightning.

And also they are the reason for USBC, which is, it's like they're really. fault, you know? They have some pretty innovative licensing on the online. It's just like very funny to me that they're like this. It's like, well, those connectors have been the same. Also, you invented USBC. Exactly. They made it for that MacBook.

And anyway, you, anyway. They use the same connector for USBC and Thunderbolt. Like that's your innovation is two different standards that require literally different cables that all use the same connector. It's your fault. But they seem very unhappy about it. We could see one of like three things. We could see an iPhone with a lightning port and a USBC port.

Amazing. That's not going to happen. We could see an iPhone with a USBC port or just an iPhone with no ports. This is true. And there was a statement from the EU, one of the commissioners who said, this does not affect wireless. There's still plenty of room for innovation in wireless. Yeah.

And it goes deeper than that. So if you have a device that can only, be charged or like just exclusively charges wireless let's say like the Apple Watch which also has a radio so I think it is actually covered by this technically then you don't they're not going to force manufacturers to then

add you know USBC to it it's only it's only for devices that will be charged over a wired connection so there's a massive like loophole there and I know everyone's going to say yeah but wireless charging sucks and all this sort of stuff but it's it does but it's also progressing just the way

that every technology does so like Jami's got like a phone that charges in 20 minutes, like a full charge, which I think is 80 watts. So we're getting close. And I'm sure that Apple, after air power and everything else, I'm sure that they will have something a little bit later than the Android competition, as always. But it wouldn't surprise me if they do go portless in the next sort of couple of years, two, three years. Because this is a proposal. It has to go through. And then they have two years until they have to, you know, implement it. Is this the EU saying that USBC is endgame?

Like, is this the end of other charging ports? Yeah, they do say that if there's innovation in other ports, then we'll obviously, you know, look at that and stuff. But obviously, that innovation has happened to USBC, even though USBC is like a can of worms, isn't it? Like, there's so many. There's not some single USBC. But they have caveats where,

That sound you're hearing is Heim Gartenberg wailing in despair. What is that noise? But yeah, the portless iPhone just seems, especially after, I think it was a story about the Apple Watch, operating in some sort of dev mode over 60 hertz or something, which sounds super interesting for like data transfers and stuff. So there's stuff going on. I feel like a portless iPhone, the rumors have been there for like, what? Well, the rumors have been there since they basically got rid of the headphone track, right?

Yeah, but then they also got rid of Johnny Hive. Like the products became much more, like we are expecting a MacBook Pro with ports. Yeah. Like there's a real push and pull here. Deere, I know you, I mean, you tweeted, I have many thoughts about this. So this process, I believe, began in 2009 with them starting to look at it when micro USB was the hot shit. So there is a little bit of, do I actually think this is going to happen? or is it going to take another five years of delay tactics from Apple?

Well, they did mandate. Yeah, I mean, they forced everybody. There's a reason that we don't have 40,000. We just have 20,000 dongles in our drawer. Right, but Apple got away with shipping adapter, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it'll be, once we're all through this, another loophole.

The other makes the feeling I have is, like, honestly, the particular shape of USBC might not hold up over time, right? It might be better to go to the way that the lightning port works where it's just like a hunk of metal with some, you know, contacts on the outside. And it's like it's much sturdier, stronger, and thinner. So I like the idea of enforcing a standard, honestly. I just like the idea of Apple putting USBC on an iPhone. I don't like the idea of – I'm a little bit sympathetic to Apple's argument about hampering innovation. Just a little.

I'm not sympathetic to their environmental argument because, look, like people buy new phones. and then eventually the port changes. So that's going to happen at one point or another, so whatever. So that's my two minds is I do think that at some point we're going to want to change the shape of the USBC port. And will we be able to do that if there's this big mandate in the EU, question mark? I would prefer if Apple had just like done the right thing on the iPhone, but they didn't. And so here we are. This proposal does not have the adapter carve out.

Correct. That's like one of the reasons this is a big deal. Yet. Yeah, Apple hasn't begun lobbying. Yeah, that comes later this year. So this proposal is strictly the port on device. And then the charger section is late this year. That's the second proposal.

I do appreciate the EU for doing stuff. I mean, they're like, they saved all of us the first time they did this with the original like the stuff they did. Because I think they announced it like MWC in like 2009. They're like, yeah, we're going to kill all of these stupid like extra port things. And yeah, yeah. It's good. Like, thank you. We appreciate it.

But it's just very funny that like right on the, they did the right thing right before it became irrelevant. For Tom. Hubble's just going to take the ports off the oven. Lastly, last two little things. One, I need to commend Zoe Schiffer for the best headline we published this week at The Verge. Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong in Apple, according to leak memo. A classic in the genre. Just like, yep, it's, there are some greatest hits.

Like sometimes you just, you just play Don't Stop Believe in, you know? This is like, that's what, this headline is like, if you write the memo about not leaking, the memo always gets leaked. Yep. I promise you. It's always doing an amazing job, not covering Apple right now. And then lastly, this fight, I'm just going to take my little victory lap. Apple won't let Fortnite back on iOS. And there's, you know, Tim Sweeney's out there tweeting all the emails and whatever.

But he's like, we'll put Fortnite back in iOS when you comply with the judge's orders to allow buttons and external links to alternative payment processors. There it is. I'm telling you this is the fight. Everyone yelled at me, I get it. But they're going to end up back in front of that judge. And they're going to say, what do you mean by buttons and links? I'm so excited.

And Apple's going to have to make some argument that buttons and links are the same thing. Buttons and links are a thing on a computer. What's a computer Apple? And then the whole case gets blown wide open. Then the commercials come out. She's done enough. What's a video game? She's not.

But that is the heart of this fight right now. The judge said Apple is well within their rights to kick out Fortnite. They broke the contract. Apple has always said, we're willing to let you back if you play by the rules. Epic is saying, we're happy to comply by the rules. But here's this thing that you're not allowed to do anymore. And neither side is going to bend until this case gets all the way appealed or they get back in front of the judge. What I love most on the Rochcast is when we talk about the minutia of legal orders.

All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We've got to get into all this service stuff. 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. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Okay, we're back. Tom, big, surface event, PANOS pumped. Mega pumped. Screens folding. Cameras improved. Walk us through it.

Yeah, so there was eight devices in total. An update to the surface. So basically the context for this is Microsoft has a bunch of new surface devices for Windows 11. So they're all dropping on October 5th. And they also have an Android successor, you know, for the Surface Duo, the Surface Duo, too. So you got the Surface Pro 8, which I think, I mean, I wrote before they sort of announced it, but this is the kind of one we've been waiting for for a few years.

kind of minor sort of redesign, but some really important screen changes and internal changes, Funderbolt, all that sort of stuff. So that was kind of expected. And then a really minor change to the Surface ProX as a Wi-Fi model. So that was kind of like, okay, cool, that's happening. Then the Surface go free. Again, minor changes, processor upgrades, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, okay, cool. We're kind of expecting that as well. And then, again, again, guess the surprise, or not so surprise, we were expecting a new Surface book, but it's the Surface Laptop Studio. So I don't think we were quite expecting that sort of name and like the way they did it. But basically it's a complete redesign of the Surface book. So gone as the detachable

display, which I guess I didn't like personally. And I think everyone always sort of questioned who is it for. I don't think the Surface laptop studio necessarily has a good answer to who is it for either. But the actual design is essentially, if you remember the old ACA laptops where the screen folds forwards or almost or like pulls forward or the HP folio, they've both done it. It's kind of that design. So it's not really like the unique sort of design that you would expect from a surface device. I think that's kind of like where Microsoft really, you know, focused and previously. It's always been very unique hinges and stuff. It is like a kind of unique hinge in that sense, but the actual overall designers.

It's like one of those crazy Windows 8 laptops that we saw many years ago. Just looks a lot better and a bit more refined. But the actual device is very similar. And then obviously the Surface Duo too, successor to the original. Bigger displays, obviously triple camera system. Like that's all good. The hardware's really upgraded. The processor 5G support.

All the sort of stuff that really should have been there perhaps, or at least a more modern processor as well. All that sort of stuff's good. but I don't think it really matters like this is the software right it's the experience of using that device and the software that matters and from what I can tell

it hasn't been majorly upgraded or fixed it might be obviously a lot smoother but data can probably talk more of that but I still feel like that device is a little it feels like you wouldn't buy it until it's the third version so yeah I mean let's just do it out of the way real quick

I mean there's a lot of little things like the camera bump is like angled so that the thing can close over it which is clever the only software update that I think I mean, smoothness or whatever, but they now default to assuming the right screen is the primary screen. So when you close it up, it just shows the right screen. And that way, because before the accelerometer could never guess which screen you were supposed to look at, and it was always wrong.

So they're just like, it's the right screen, problem solved. You'd like flip, wouldn't that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think a lot of the stuff is just going to have to be answered by the review. Are the cameras any good? Is it actually, as fast as you say, is the bigger screen nicer? There is the peak display. I forget what they called.

You see the notifications in the hinge? Clever. Oh, the glance. right. Yeah, but it's a very small amount of things you can fit in there. It shows like volume changing and whatever. But you can't really read it. You can like see two.

There's two notifications and the icon is yellow, so it's whatever app. But they didn't make it tap to wake. You have to like hit the power button to see it or wait for the notification to come in. What are you doing? And by that point, you're basically, you've got your phone. You're just going to look at this place. Yeah. I think the question for me, because we've seen, you know,

Microsoft and Google have taken some shots that he tries. other recently around Chrome and Windows and preloading and all this stuff, defaults. How much does Microsoft care about making an Android phone? Right? And the fact that they made another one indicates they care somewhat, but the first one is still only an Android 10. Yeah. Well, they just, they made an announcement today about that, didn't they? Oh, did they finally announce it? They announced that Android 11 was coming. I mean, that's like, but you have to. He knows. Like Android 12 is going to tomorrow. Yeah, they announced Android 11's coming, but they didn't say anything about Android 12.

They were just like, you know, we're doing three years of updates. I think they care a lot about having one pinky toe in the mobile device world. Yep. They need to care. They need to have a point of view. You know, Sacha Nadella will tell you all day long he loves his Surface Duo. Great. Maybe they're just making this because the CEO likes it.

What does he use? Is that his daily driver? I've literally been in events where he's like in the corner. Like, you're like, oh, what's actually using? It's like a Surface Duo. Like, I guess he doesn't care about taking photos of his children. But like he's at events. Like, he might, you know, there's like a theatrical element to it.

He gets in his car and pulls out his iPhone. Yeah. By the way, you would be surprised at how often. But they need to keep trying at this. Yeah. To your point about like, Android and how much do they care about having an Android phone. I think that speaks to a broader point about Microsoft relationship with Android at the moment. They obviously said that Android apps

are going to ship with Windows 11. We haven't even really seen that in preview. And I don't think it even really makes sense. They've tried this thing of like bringing Android apps to their devices and obviously the Surface Geo is like a, you know, it's Android full, full, fat Android. But like they had this weird relationship with it where they obviously want the apps. apps because Windows is lacking in apps, but like nobody wants Android apps, right? Like is there, do you really need that on your PC? Like, I think there's a place for Android games on your PC, but like not Android apps. So they definitely have a weird relationship there. And I do question whether there will be a long-term commitment to this particular device or whether

they're just sort of like testing the waters somewhere. But I mean, there's a lot of serious hardware work that's gone into this device. So I'd, I'd, I'd, I'd, I don't know. Like, you can see it. You can feel it. It's like the glass is rounded. The edges are nicer. The magnets have a little clacky things.

You can still use the surface pen. Oh, no. I believe that Panos Penae and his team care a lot about making great hardware. Yeah. I've known, like, there's no room for doubt with that dude about whether he thinks making cool hardware is cool. Yeah. It's the core of his personality in many ways.

But do they care about making an Android phone? Yeah. is the end goal like if if they do get this Android and Android apps on Windows stuff working well which I mean who knows like the Blue Stacks obviously been doing it for like 10 years now right um yeah they've basically pivoted towards games because people just don't use apps so and and like is Microsoft plan to then use that as a way to then you know get their apps on windows and then transform this thing back into a Windows device like that sounds a bit wild but like I'm just I don't get where it all, like, ties in together, you know?

I have the answer to all these questions. It says it costs $1,500. Yeah, my theory, like, I'm saying, they need to keep trying. So they've made an improvement. They're keeping up. They're learning where they need to improve. We've spent too much time talking about this thing that no one's going to buy. We should talk about the thing that a lot of people are going to buy, which is the Surface Pro 8, which it seems like a long awaited refinement.

Dieter, you played with this one, too. Yeah, it is exactly what you. hope it is. It's a surface with slightly rounded edges and a bigger screen and a better screen and Thunderbolt and an amazing keyboard. It's basically the ProX, right, with a better keyboard, a better display and a better

processor, really. Yep. Better camera by a little bit. Qualcomm's just like kicking dirt as they watch this thing. Well, Qualcomm just doesn't have the chips already, does it? For like whatever the success would be. Which is coming to something we were discussing the other is like everything in this event was Intel right with the obviously with the obvious

exception the Surface Duo but there was no AMD there was no Qualcomm like I mean there was the Wi-Fi only Surface ProX but like when Microsoft were sort of like diversifying their their products to AMD in Qualcomm a couple of years ago that was like a big deal for them because they you know they were upset with what happened with the surface Pro 4 on the surface book with Intel on Skylake, like that, that hurt them. So they won't just diversify it. But like, I don't understand where that's gone now.

Like, I thought they had some special relationship with AMD, because they certainly do on the export side. So I don't know. Why is there no AMD? Like, that's, that seemed strange. They got to play both sides. Intel's got a new CEO. They want new Intel to be successful.

She's very supportive of Pat. Everyone likes Pat. Pat, come on Decoder. If you're listening, Pat. But when you put it side by side, like new surface devices just with Intel and then there's a Windows 11 upgrade that

it could easily work on older devices but only seems to work on 8th gen and newer for some security reason that they haven't really properly explained it's like Wintel's back baby it's what it feels like

even though that that sounds a bit you know conspiracy for you but like it does yeah I don't know with the whole Windows 11 launch is strange. Does AMD really operating that well and that much in like the space that you, like the wattage and stuff that Intel is operating in for something like the Surface Pro? Like is AMD even in that space to that degree?

Yeah, I guess for the pro perhaps not. But for the studio, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The studio, it's like, it feels a lot more glaring to be like that wimpy, wimpy, what is it? the 30-50 TI. Yeah, but this is like, if Microsoft makes a product word studio in the name, you're like, ah, they bifted on the GPU. Yeah.

You just prepare yourself as soon as you see Studio. You're like, oh, it's going to be a bad GPU. Actually, I have an open question about GPU stuff. Well, the screen. So it's 120 hertz display, parentheses, 60 hertz default. Someone explain that to me. It's basically like Pro Motion, essentially. It's their equivalent.

So they're using something called, I think it's called Dynamic Refresh Rate, is the, the official name of the, which isn't the same as like what would happen on your PC, because obviously that's fully powered. Like you'd have 120 hertz display and that would just run 120 hertz all the time. You'd have the option to change it manually. So what it will do is it'll run at 60 hertz for most stuff. You start scrolling, like touch scrolling, particularly 120 hertz. It ramps it up to inking, same 120 hertz.

So I don't think, I don't, I haven't tested it because obviously we don't have the devices. But I don't think you can just be like, I'm going to go run games. at 120 hertz because then I think that means you'd have to actually run the display at 120 hertz and I'm not sure if you can do that and this isn't like variable refresh rate either right like this is a totally different thing it's totally it's slightly different because obviously variable refresh rate your your display is running 120 and then you're matching the frame rate to hit that so it's like this is slightly different because it's actually ramping up the the actual refresh rate of the display.

Okay. So rather than trying to match the frames. So it is slightly different. But I don't know whether you can do the same thing where you're like, you tell the display, I want you to run 120 hertz, you know? I was honestly getting a little, like, excited thinking of like conspiracies of like, oh, is this Intel like kind of doing their version of VRR on, like with an integrated graphics card?

Like, that's neat. That's fun. But sounds like no. No. I don't think so, but we have to test it once. We can actually review them and stuff. But yeah, I don't think you're going to be able to stick it straight in like 120 hertz mode and play games at like 120 hertz.

I don't think so. But we'll see. Fingers crossed. The little port integrated GPU would just be crying, though. You're trying to do 120 hertz. It's more interesting on the studio. Yeah. Well, you're talking about the studio, but Alex, one thing that occurs to me with all this is

like Microsoft also notes that AMD can't make enough chips. Yeah, oh yeah. Like their Xbox team is like, don't, they don't, they can't do it. Yeah, like, and they just call them like, don't do it. Don't get it out, get it out. Pan us, we need the chips, dude. Like, don't talk to Pat. And AMD's probably fine with that.

Yeah, hopefully they've got like some AMD APUs hanging around for like some Xbox handheld or something to like compute with the steam deck or something. I don't know. I like this optimism, Tom. That's where you got to be in this time. All right. Adeter, I want to hear about the, laptop studio, which got to play with, which is one of the most oddly, as Thomas Seng, the basics of the design are familiar. But then you look at this execution.

Yeah. And you're like, oh, man, this is literally a laptop with levels. Behold the plinth. It has a base underneath. It looks like a Mac. I'm sorry, it looks like a Mac. I know that everything that is going to be made out of aluminum with black keys and a screen is going to end up looking like a MacBook. And so it's a little bit unfair.

But yeah, it looks a lot like a MacBook. And then underneath the MacBook part, there's another part, which is the bottom part, which is the, you know, the 360 fan rectangle thing. It looks like a MacBook until it absolutely does not look like a MacBook. And I've just been, I've taken to calling it the Plinth, which is another word for pedestal. And I love it. I love it. I don't know if this is going to be one of those things that turns out to be iconic.

Like, oh, yeah, this looks weird now. but in two years it'll be like, oh, yeah, no, that's actually cool. It's like part of the ethos of the thing and we've accepted it. I'm not there yet. I'm still in the denial and a little bit of the anger stage. We'll get to acceptance later. You know what it looks like? It looks like, you know, you know those air conditioning units that are like integrated into the ceilings or restaurants?

It looks like they've like slapped one of those on the bottom. I mean, Alex, to your questions about like Intel, like thermal envelopes of these? This thing looks like what you need when you don't have an arm strategy for your computers. There's an honesty to it. It's like honest and dishonest at the same time. It's honest, like, screw it. We made it thick and we put big fans on the bottom. And then it's dishonest because they don't let you see that it's thick when you look at it.

It's like floating. So to be fair, Intel laptops, Apple's included, have fans in them. Apple's M1, like the MacBook Pro M1 is faster than the air, only, by dint of having a fan. They can just run the processor hotter and then turn on a fan and blow air over it and keep running it hot. Fine.

What is super interesting to me about this is like part of the design of this thing prevents it from hiding the fan. Right? So you say it looks like a MacBook Pro. Like I have a 16 inch MacBook Pro with an Intel processor. I mean at least one Google meeting a week.

Yeah. The fan comes on. And the fans are oriented at the screen. So right where the hinge is is the exhaust for the fan. And the mic. Yeah, that's true. This, you can't quite do that with this. I mean, the air blows out the sides. And they specifically designed the internals of it so that the heat stays away from the palm rests. Okay. And beyond that, we need to review it to tell you more about how it performs underload. Yeah, I'm just saying that because they picked a very familiar design, but change the hinge,

they can't vent the fans the way that the MacBook Pro vents the fans. So they ended up with this plinth. Or even can the surface, because the Surface laptop also vents out the back, doesn't it? Yeah, but the easiest way to vent the Surface laptop is just take the screen off. The new one, yeah. I think this thing is utterly fascinating. The Surface book is gone, right? Well, yeah, I mean, they called it the successor, so yeah.

it's gone. So the interesting thing, though, is the surface book had all the components in the screen. Yeah. And now that's been flipped to the bottom. So it's like a, that was one of the things of the surface book. It was always a bit top heavy and a bit wobbly on the screen because it obviously had a lot of the components up there. So it's interesting that they've put that down the bottom like, you know, where it should be. Oh, Alex, I just got this wrong.

You were talking about the service laptop and I was thinking of the surface book. Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. I apologize. All right. We'll see. Dieter, like, did you walk away in love? I mean, you are the person that I trust to impulse buy Microsoft Surface products faster than anyone else.

Like, do I know who bought a Surface ProX? Deerbone. Yeah, I did. Yep. Which one of these are you going to impulse by? Man, I mean, look, it's going to be the Pro 8 because it's like, it's the thing. It's the thing that I know will do the things that I want, and it's very good. I hope.

We'll review it, but it doesn't look like they screwed anything up, and I really like the keyboard. My big question with the laptop studio is the same question as this is why it's a surface book competitor because the question of who did they make this for is like creators and coders and YouTubers, right? I guess and people who draw. Well, this is like part of Microsoft just has an obsession with the two and one, right? Like every single thing they do is about kind of the two in one. And, you know, they say they like, okay, we aspire to like Apple's customers on this. But they've always just really seemed to be like, we want to see how we can make like a perfect two and one. And we're going to try it in all these different ways.

And we're going to make a really, really skinny one that's underpowered. And we're going to make this really, really, really wobbly one that's like top heavy, but has a cool hinge. And we're going to make this like, and we're going to make the Surface Pro, which is effectively like the best thing they've done so far. And this like addresses a lot of the concerns people have about the Surface Pro, mainly like, you've got to pay extra for a keyboard. you've got to then like worry about the keyboard falling off or something, although I haven't had that happen in years. Like, this kind of addresses all of that and gives you more ports and more power, which you're never going to get from a Surface Pro. So it just feels like them like taking a big hit and being like, let's like just go max out what a two and one can do. And also we're really good at hinges.

So like let's hinge it up. Yeah. And like the way that I always saw like the Surface Book going and the differentiation between that and the Surface Pro is thin and light and, you know, it's powerful enough to do what you need to do. But the Surface Book was always supposed to be this monster powerful MacBook Pro compared to sort of thing. But it never really quite was.

It was and then, you know, it got leapfrogged and then it's now the Surface Labs studio. And that's in the same sort of like territory essentially because it shipped with this 30-50 Ti GPU. They just made it at 30-60 or a 30-70 or 38. Then it would be like a gaming laptop. Then it has like another more useful, you know, thing for people to buy it for. But it's just like they skimped on the GPU and it's just strange.

Like, why don't they just go all in and make like a super powerful laptop? Why does it have to have the flipping display and? Because then they'd have to update it every six months to a year. Like they would have to keep up. You can't have the thing be out of date. And so if they commit to making a gaming laptop, they can't stop. They can't like take a break. Yeah, that's true.

They just wanted a little nap, a little rest. I just feel like they did the surface laptop and that was like the most sort of normal surface they've done, right? So, but they've never done like a fully powerful surface laptop. Well, they only did the surface laptop because everybody kept saying we want a surface product, but not all of these weird, like, gimmicks. We just want a laptop from Microsoft. So they did it.

And this is them saying, okay, no, but we got to do the gimmick guys. Because, like, that's the whole thing of the surface brand is like, it's a cool, like the cool gimmick. Well, I mean, the reason they made it and Panos has been on in this show to tell us about it before is they want to make sure that there are premium Windows products in all the categories. nobody else says two and ones. Right. Like there are endless, infinite $300 15-inch Windows laptops to buy, but they want to make sure Windows is still premium. And the second you go towards ultra-powered gaming laptop, there's lots of premium stuff. Like, Razor is happy to tell you that it makes premium laptops.

But in this like middle zone, there's not a lot of innovation from the other makers. It is all just copies of stuff Microsoft has already done, which they're happy to distribute. They hand off their engineering. Or it's bad executions of ideas that Microsoft is like, well, actually, here's how to do flippy screens. We're very sorry, Lenovo, you didn't do a good job. I get kind of excited looking at this thing, thinking about like, we keep talking about how Apple may one day merge iOS or, you know, iPad OS and Mac OS. or give us those touch features. And like, if they're going to do that,

maybe absent the plinth, something like this is probably more likely what we're going to see from them in like a touch-based MacBook Pro. And it's like, like, I look at the thing I'm like, okay, Microsoft like managed to make it not janky like ACER and HP did. It looks really cool.

I'm honestly like stoked about this thing. It just looks neat. It looks fun. Alex, I just, I don't know why you're praising. this thing so much. You don't need to put it on a pedestal. It does it on its own. It's got its own. It brought it. I'm still just a bit confused by it. I don't know. Yeah. It's baffling, but like delightful baffling. Yes. More tech companies should make utterly baffling products. Right. Apple's like, we're the dominant player. Like, it's a, it's got a slightly better iPhone.

We added more 5G bands. Like, whatever. No, baffle and confuse your customers. Put a plinth on it. It's like it's designed for like this handful of people who are like, I don't know, they're drawing, they're maybe gaming, they're just using a laptop normally, they're an architect. It's digital jazz, man. These are these are the principle that PR invents when like when two in ones first became a big thing. Anytime you talk to PR, they'd be like, oh, you know how you're always like drawing and wishing you could draw better on your laptop? I'm like, no. They're like, yeah, you're an artist. I'm like, I am not.

Yeah. Microsoft spent like two years circling things in commercials on the socialists. Yes. No, I'm saying. Alex was not here during the most important verge story of all, which is Microsoft can't stop circling things. They're obsessed. That was a classic. No, look, this is a computer for architects who are YouTubers, a large and growing market. Honestly, I don't know how Apple is going to survive unless it directly makes a product for that. Please, Apple, get on it.

All right, we've dunked on this thing enough. We're going to get it. We're going to review all this stuff soon. And then Dieter's going to buy a service, go three. That's just my prediction. And a pro, right? Yeah. Okay.

There's other little stuff going on. But actually the story, I do want to call out, which I mentioned in the top of show. Monica Chin wrote a story this week about kids these days, college students who are in classes like astrophysics, even some programming classes, who, because they grew up without file systems are not ready to encounter file systems in their college classes. And it's not their fault.

They grew up with file systems they were just hidden from them. Right. They grew up with Chromebooks and iPhones to platforms that absolutely abstract the file system away from you. And it is just a wild story. I will tell you this story

passes no moral judgment at all. None. We absolutely tried. to just be like, here's what it's like in college right now. Here's what the professors are telling us. Here's what the students are telling us. And the reaction to the story is an enormous title wave of moral judgment. But I highly recommend reading it.

It's super fascinating. It is like the verge-iest verge story we've ever done because it is literally about what mental model you have for how things on computers are stored. And I, like, mine is still files and folders. It's just how I came up. And that is not the mental model that all people share. And, like, you got to meet people where they are. I will say the one tweet, because everyone's tweeting, like, oh, this made me feel old.

And I was like, I don't feel old. Like, whatever. I searched for everything, too. The one that made me feel old was somebody, quote, tweeted me and was like, this made me feel old. I didn't even get a smartphone until high school. And I was like, who, like, I didn't get Wi-Fi until I was 23. Oh, I mean, shit. You just took your metamusal after reading it.

I was like laughing at all the people who were like, I saw that one and I was like, yeah. The iPhone came out when I was almost 30. Whoops. Anyhow, go read that story. Monica did. She's done actually a number of incredible stories about the intersection of technology in education, and this is just one of my favorites.

Okay. That's it. You can tweet at us. we'd love to hear from you. Tom is Tom Warren. Alex is Alex H. Cran. Steater is Spackalone. I'm at Reckless.

Decoder exists. It's the other podcast we make. This week we had the CEO of an app called Fuck You Pay Me, which is just a great name for an app, which, by the way, is a good fellow's reference. I understand there's a very famous talk by Mike Monterey, which is great. And you should go watch it. It's like 10 years old. It is very famous. But that actual phrase is from Goodfellas.

And you can go watch Goodfellas, too, which is also. also good. It's funny because, you know, the last episode of Decoder is all about owning the building blocks of ideas in music. Right. And now there's like, anyway, Lindsay's great. Go listen to it. It's an app that's glass store for influencers. It's like very interesting. Next week on Decoder, we're going to run. I'm on the code conferences next week. I'm interviewing the CEO of Waymo, the co-CEO of Waymo at Code Conference, Takedra at Myalcona. So that's going to run in Decoder next week. We've actually got pretty good Decoder lineup coming up. We're also running Ashley's AI series. in the Vergecast feed. Last week was AI and video. Next week is, it's here. It's the GPT3 episode. Yay.

It's going to be nuts. And then Dieter's got some fun Vergecast stuff coming up to you. That's true. Rock and roll. Get the shot. EUSBC.