The Vergecast - Mac Pro and Pro Display review, TCL's folding phone concepts, and rumors of an iPad keyboard with a trackpad

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Everything you need to know about the coronavirus  The Verge Guide to 2020 Election Congress proposes anti-child abuse rules to punish web platforms — and raises fears about encryption The Verge tech survey 2020 Apple reportedly releasing an iPad keyboard with a trackpad later this year Apple is planning to launch a 14.1-inch MacBook Pro with a ... Mac Pro review: the price of power - The Verge Apple Pro Display XDR review: category of one TCL’s new foldable and rollable concepts imagine a wild future of phones Vivo’s Apex 2020 concept has breakthrough cameras and an ultra-curved screen Get a closer look at the Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha in MKBHD’s hands-on video New Google Pixel features coming this month include more emoji, dark mode scheduling, and Google Pay improvements Samsung launches its 2020 lineup of 4K and 8K QLED TVs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we go over some Apple rumors. We go deep on the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR reviews. We talk about all the folding phone concepts from TCL. And we spend more time than you think talking about obscure Samsung television features. That's it. Coming up with Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data 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 Multicorport Performance. Does that sound pretty good?

Yeah. I'm Eli. I'm your friend. Dieter Bone is here. I'm also your friend. Oh, it's good. usually you're vaguely threatening. Well, it depends what kind of friends you have.

Fair. Paul Miller is here. Hello. How's it going to, Paul? It's going pretty good, actually. All three of us are in different places today. I've gotten really spoiled because Paul and I have been in the same room in the past few shows. I feel like we've really grown closer. Yeah.

I'm like, I pay more attention to you. Like your reactions to things. But now I've got to like, I've got to like really listen. Okay, yeah, yeah. So there's a lot going on this week. We've got some reviews to talk about. We got some floppy phones to talk about. It's just a fact.

But I want to just start by pointing to some things. First of all, the big story in the world is obviously the coronavirus, which is having an effect on lots of people. Lots of tech events are being canceled. Google I.O. was canceled. People are pulling out a stop by Southwest, left and right. We are not going to talk about in this show. Virge deputy editor Liz Lapado, Verge Health Reporter Nicole Wetzman.

They sat down with me for an hour. That's coming out on Tuesday. So all the coronavirus stuff you need to know, wait for that interview on Tuesday. It was really good. We actually found out Google I was being canceled while we were taping it. Like that's how much news is happening. Oh, wow. So that's really good.

Nicole is all over that story, Verge science team, all over that story. Check out the site if you want to know what's going on from that perspective. But Nicole went through the sort of health side of it. And Liz and I talked about the sort of business supply chain aspect of it. So that's coming on Tuesday. Wait for that. We're not going to talk about it today. And then obviously the election is off and running.

it was Super Tuesday. Elizabeth Warren dropped out of the Democratic primary. Today, right before we taped the show, on this past Tuesday, McKenna Kelly and I talked for an hour about the policy issues of the election. Our big election guide went out on Tuesday. And then today, just before we started taping,

the Earnit Act hit, which is sort of wraps all these themes up together. It's a bill that proposes to take away Section 230 unless companies provide an encryption backdoor. So you just take the two big issues and just jam them together. What is Ernett an acronym for? Eliminating abusive and rampant neglect of interactive technologies act.

Earn it. Come on. Yeah. There was another act today called the Kids Act, which would ban all influencer marketing on platforms aimed at children, specifically called out unboxing videos. Wait, I love this idea. This is great. Really something.

McKenna is going to cover that one a little bit later. So the issues are here, the bills are being proposed, you know, that sort of Congress is about to go into election, re-election, campaign mode again. So this is like the last window. So we're covering all this stuff. Listen to that conversation with McKenna. If you're interested in it, we're, we're deep on it. But we just did an hour on it. And I don't want to burn our time on this show talking about that because McKenna was great. It's all on the site. Check it out. That said, we did do something a little related to politics this week. You know, you run a publication. It's an election year. Everyone's doing polls.

Yeah. I wanted to do a poll. Yeah, I felt left out. So we did our tech survey again. Second annual, right? Yeah, it just took two and a half years. The second annual. So we did the first one in 2017. We did another one this year. We will probably do it again now that we kind of figured it out how to do it.

We'll probably do it again closer to the actual election. I think that'll be really interesting to see how all of the stuff affects attitudes in the course of this year because it's always being talked about so much. But I just want to call out some really interesting results from the survey. So we went to our. Revenue Team, which has a market research division. We asked them to help us do the survey. So it's a group of people with like decades of experience in market research did a nationally representative survey of 1,123 people. It has like a 95% level of confidence, 3% margin of error. There are some details on how that works. We're going to, they're all in an offsite this week,

so we didn't publish that part of it. We're going to get those details from them and publish things because I have people are curious. But rest assured, we feel very confident. And the who did the survey for us. Just some top lines. Fifty-six percent of the people to get nationally representing the United States population. So the government should break up tech companies that they control too much of the economy. Seventy-two percent of people, said Facebook has too much power. This one's really interesting. Fifty-one percent of people said Google and YouTube should be split up in separate companies. At the same time, only 40-some percent of people even knew that Google owned YouTube. How can those numbers be larger

than the other number? I don't know. Well, I mean, I imagine like if you embedded in asking the question, should they break up Google and YouTube, is the like dawning awareness that, oh shit, they're the same company. Yeah. So the share of people who knows Google owns YouTube is 47%. The share of people who knew that Facebook owns Instagram is only 38%. That Facebook owns WhatsApp is 29%. And Amazon owns Twitch is 12%. So it's such a good reminder for me, because we're just so deeply in it. Right? My assumption is that everybody knows what we're talking about all the time. And I would say maybe 100% of the people I talk to professionally are aware that Google owns YouTube. Yeah. So just like a fair bet. So this number, where less than 50% of this nationally representative

sample, less than 50% of them knows that Google owes YouTube, it's like, oh, we're not even on the same planet. Yep. Like we're not, we haven't even started from the same underlying, like, that's not like an alternative fact situation, right? It's not like you can spin it one way and I can like, I Wikipedia at some other stuff. Like either they own it if they don't. And yeah, they don't know. And I think that's, it's so interesting to see the heat on our side of the conversation about what, I mean, we talk about it every week. How should these companies you run? Do they have too much power? What is moderate blah, blah, blah. And we're not even at the same place of do you even know that Google is in charge of this? Yeah. Do you think Google's,

And I think that is actually great on balance for Google and Facebook, because whatever happens on those platforms doesn't redound to them and their reputations. And I think they kind of like it that way. The other incredibly fascinating thing to me, having, you know, in like the bubble that I am often in, is looking at the favorable, unfavorable for different companies. So Apple has a favorability rating of 81%. Google is 90 and Amazon's 91, just like much more. beloved than Apple, which is surprising.

And then when you look at, like, how does it impact society? Apple has got, like, 62% positive and 3% negative. Google's, like, 72% positive and 4% negative. There are more people that think Google's had a positive impact on society than think Apple. So, like, to me, what that says is, I don't know, it makes me hear Apple's talk about privacy in a different tenor, you know? Like, it's not them in defending. a lead and making, you know, everybody else.

They're actually like trying to play catch up in people's feelings about whether or not they're helping society in some way. Yeah. I agree with you. I think it also, we have talked about this. Like my iPhone, which is very expensive and I bought it. Yep. Is a window to Google services.

Right. Right? Like it's constantly, I'm using it to use Google services. When I buy things, I'm often using my iPhone to interact with Amazon. So you have this constant relationship. with the service providers that are very, very good at what they do. Right? You, like, want something to show up at your house tomorrow.

You push a button, Amazon exploits a number of people along the way, and then the thing shows up at your house. You want the answer to some question. You ask Google, something happens. Google shows you the answer. You hope it's credible, but it's doing it. It does the work over and over again. The third one on that list, by the way, is YouTube at 90% favorability.

Yeah. Right. And those are just service relationships. Like, I need something you provided it to me. And that is self-reinforcing in a way that, yep, you bought a beautiful computer from Apple. You bought a beautiful phone. It takes great pictures. You don't have that ongoing service relationship.

It's just a thing that you bought. And I think that is Apple cannot push that privacy part of it forward because it's not really a service. They're protecting you from yourself. Right. Or they're protecting you from bad actors. But they can't insert that into all these constant, ongoing. interactions. And I think that that's one of the reasons I think they want a services business is to get that thing. And I do think all of their posturing is why they're, they're unfavorable is high,

because some people are just turned off by it. Yeah. I know. To me, I think that you should go look at this. Like Microsoft ranks really high. People love Microsoft. Casey wrote a whole piece about it. It's like you would not expect Microsoft to come in above Apple on a favorable, unfavorable ranking. This is the second time I did that. It did it in 2017. too. And it's because Microsoft has faded in the background. Casey described it as a cloud services provider that makes video games as a hobby. Yeah. That's what it is. And that means people trust it. They see it in the background. They see Sachin Adela. He's out there. Casey described him as kindly. It's a pretty good phrase. And they're, you know, they're just talking about making you more

productive and doing good job at work and like, we're going to be everywhere. And also, here's the Xbox. And they're not, they're not actively in the middle of this conversation about like, how expensive should your phone be or should we step in the way of your decision to buy a book on the Kindle app because we want to regulate. They're just not in any of those conversations. So just by being sort of neutral. Like of all these companies, Microsoft seems like they use their existing influence to get you to do other things the least. Obviously, they still do it. But you know, like Google feels a deep lack at its soul of a social network. So like, well, what if YouTube was kind of like a social network. We'll put, we'll put stories on YouTube. You know, like, so they're always

kind of like pushing in that direction. Facebook is, is disliked and mistrusted. So, you know, it pushes Instagram sort of stuff. But like Microsoft just has this sort of palette of things that, yeah, are somehow in offensive. Like, they're not aggressive in some way. I still, I still have a deep dislike for, for that. I know it's, maybe I shouldn't hold a grudge, but they, they really tried to kill Linux that pisses me off. But yeah, I mean, like, I use GitHub all day, every day, and it's truly been like a gift to the world. Obviously, they didn't build it, but they bought it, and then they didn't screw it up.

So far. I mean, that's the best you can ask for within your acquisition. Well, no, but, like, you know, that's a thing. It's like Google would try to integrate YouTube with Google Plus or something like that, you know? the only flavor of Microsoft that I can find on GitHub is that below AWS cloud stuff is a button for Azure. Like, Deploy to AWS comes first and then deploy to Azure is the second button. You know that they have a meeting about that every week, right? Like a bunch of VPs in Microsoft fight about that every week for like two hours.

Like, when are we going to put Azure above AWS in this drop down? Sure, but it's their inaction is my, is my blessing. We'll see how it goes over time. By the way, Paul, to your point about Google and the social network thing, we also ask people who was better at what. And Google beat Facebook at every single one of these questions, providing useful services, help you manage your life, giving control over the display of your geographic location, giving control over info provided other businesses, communicating its privacy policy. Google won all of those versus Facebook. You know, providing useful services, 83% of people thought Google is better than that. And Facebook communicating its privacy policy was 6436, right?

So along a spread, but Google's like handily ahead in all of them, except for helping you connect with friends and family. Google only came into 21% and Facebook because it's 79. So like there's one thing, one clear utility for Facebook that everyone sort of agrees on. but in terms of who's communicating with me better, who's more useful Google's ahead. And I think that that usefulness argument, that utility argument for Google and Amazon, as long as it remains high, they actually have a pretty big moat against all this regulation stuff that we're talking about. Because people love them. And they love them because they're useful.

And I think all they have to do is keep saying, we're really useful. People really like the services we provide. Google's like entire line for the past two years has been calls helpful. We're helpful. We help you. We're helpful. Yeah. What do you think Google's 21% connected with friends number would be if they hadn't killed off G-chat?

Just curious. Yeah, that's 21% of people who understand its messaging strategy. They're all Google employees. I don't know, man. The Google messaging, they canceled I.O. We're not going to find out of any messaging product this year. Yeah. Well, no, but we're all going to get to use hangouts and whatever to watch their presentations.

I think Teams is free now Microsoft made Teams free. That's the year of remote work, everybody. Anyway, that's the survey. It's on the website. Go check it out. I think the answers are really interesting. I know some people have some questions about the methodology. We did not anticipate that people want to go deep.

I don't know why we didn't. Who's our audience? Of course we should have anticipated it. But our friends who helped us do it on our revenue side, they were just at their conference this weekend. So they're coming back. We're going to pull out some of those answers and we'll make sure we update them,

probably in the interface because that's the audience that's been asking for it. So subscribe to Casey's Newsletter. We'll give you some more detail about the methodology. But rest assured, it was rigorously done. We just didn't publish all those details because it's only the second time we've done it. And I didn't know that people would want to see it. Next time, we'll make sure we do it all front. And if you have ideas for things we should be asking, let me know.

I'm interested. Okay. That said, some Apple rumors to go through. Deter, you want to go through? Well, there is supposedly supposed to be an event in March. the number of things that could be on in that event is starting to get a little bit out of control. Like, possibly a new iPad Pro, possibly AirTag, maybe a new Apple TV. We're still waiting for a new 13-inch MacBook with a better keyboard.

The big one, obviously, is what everyone is sort of coalescing around calling the iPhone 9, which is like the iPhone SE2, or maybe it's like the iPhone 7, but more modernized, whatever. however you want to think of it, there's, I mean, there's other stuff, over-ear headphones from Apple. It could be any number of things. And so typically when you're in the run-up to an Apple event, there's a bunch of rumors that, like, of what's coming and you can start to see some stuff in code. And one of the things that has sort of popped out is that it seems pretty obvious that sometime this year Apple is going to make a keyboard that has a trackpad on it. The information has this story from, I think it was earlier last week. And I'm currently using a tablet that has a trackpad on it.

It's a surface. And I am positive on this development, but I'm a little bit worried about it. Why are you worried about it? Because there's been a whole lot of discussion about whether or not the iPads interface makes any sense, if it's too complicated, if it's actually useful, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've talked about this ad nauseum where I land is that it's. is very complex, not intuitive at all, but it can be useful once you learn it. I think that Apple could simplify some things and it really needs to make it more learnable or discoverable, but that if they just put a trackpad on it and be like, you know what, whatever, Windows,

then that's going to be a mess. Because like, I'm currently using a surface here. It has a tablet mode and a window mode that are distinct, but also kind of overlapping and sometimes weird. And it's bad. Like, it's not, it doesn't feel cohesive. And so if Apple's going to let you manipulate Windows with a trackpad or whatever the iPad's version of Windows are with a track pad, they better be really, really, really careful how they do that because the whole thing is built on the idea that you're directly interacting with stuff with your finger. And so if you add an abstract layer of input, you've got to do it right. And we've already seen them do it wrong with the keyboard itself. The keyboard is one level removed from a touchscreen.

And you just never really know if you've got a keyboard focus on the app you're using. You just got to start typing and see what happens. Does a trackpad imply windows, though? No, it doesn't imply windows, but what does a trackpad do? It's for clicking. It's for clicking on things. It's for scrolling, precise controls, and text manipulation. No, wait, there's one thing it gets you that is critically important.

You get to keep your hands down. Right. And I think that's like Apple's religion with a touchscreen on a Mac is you don't want to move your hands. I don't know that anybody buys it anymore. I do not. Right. Like their whole gorilla arms thing, like, where, whatever they called it? Your arms are going to get fatigued by lifting them two inches to jab at the screen. But that is the basis of their ideology there, right? Is keep your hands down here. The mouse is best because the Mac is built around precise controls. You don't want to touch that screen anyway. It follows to me that the reason they're putting, like my iPad Pro, I never,

use it in its tablet configuration. Really? I never flip the keyboard all the way around and just like hold it and swipe around. It is always basically a laptop. The trick is you rip that keyboard off and you go full freedom. The lightweight, I don't know, it feels great. But I see what you're saying in the sense that it's not very productive. No, it's fine.

I buy it. But I think that was the heart of the whole like consumption versus productivity argument with the iPad to begin with. is if you're being productive, it stands to reason that you need to type. If you need to type, you need a keyboard. Now we've just made a surface. Now we might as well go all the way and not make you move your hands.

Right. But like how are you going to manipulate the window? How are they going to get you to not have to touch the screen in order to bring slide over over or deal with split screen? Or, you know, have any multi-window interaction whatsoever. Four finger gestures. I mean, probably.

Yeah. A menu bar? Maybe. A little dock. A dock that appears at the bottom of the screen. They could make every window could have three little buttons at the top that close it and minimize it and maximize it. There's a lot of solutions out here for making Windows. I just think this is so interesting because there's been a lot of rumors for a while that Apple will make an ARM Mac. And so what's the difference between an ARM iPad with a touchpad and an ARM Mac?

battery life. A bunch of apps that aren't optimized for multi-corp processors. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think there is one. That's kind of what I'm getting at. Like, they might as well just have the iPad turn slowly into the Arm Mac that everybody wants and say, we're actually going to emulate your lower stakes productivity applications on Arm. They'll be slower, but fine, this is what you wanted. All the developers are here anyway. Instead of being like, hey, developers make bad catalyst versions of your iPad apps for a Mac audience that is not receptive to them. I think they're not going to give up on that as quickly as we want them to. I'm not saying I want them to.

You see the two paths. Give up on which. Catalysts. Tim Cook has bringing up catalysts on like investor calls to like Wall Street pros. I think Apple thinks of iPad and Mac app development as is slowly morphing into the same thing. Yeah. I will just say the more I try to use my. my iPad Pro is the computer.

The problems with it are not, I need a trackpad, right? The problems are I have to invent some wacky solution that was completely undiscoverable but there in order to do something very simple. Yep. I think the one we were all tweeting about like two weeks ago was I want to upload a bunch of photos from Lightroom to Google Photos. And the way to do that is to export them from Lightroom into files and then do a, and then open Google Photos on the web because the Google Photos app doesn't have a native.

importer and then like hold one with one finger and then like stack them up like none of this makes any sense and you can do it is possible to do but there's no way that anybody to figure it out unless you have a relatively large Twitter audience and you start complaining and then like you crowdsource this a million people tell you're an idiot for not knowing how to do it yeah that's actually the best part of the iPad for me is routinely dozens of people tell me I'm an idiot for not knowing some extremely uninduative thing helps stay humble yeah meanwhile Google photos on Android, you could just tell it to watch whatever folders you want it to, and it'll just automatically import anything that shows up in those folders.

The end. Right. So there's that. There's like the capability of the applications when Apple allows you or doesn't allow you to do. Fine. Then there's just an ergonomics problem, which is that bridge case, BRY, you know what I'm talking about, is like a better solution for the iPad keyboard cover, and it just makes it a laptop. Like the iPad Pro keyboard case, especially if the advanced.

the 11, because the angles are different on the 11 and the 13, I have the 11. The angles are just, like, bad. Like, the thing is too vertical. And it's like, I just want to, I just want this to be a laptop. I would love to use this as my laptop if it would just be in that form factor. And I think Apple's just getting there. Yeah, I maintain that as much fun I made of it, the first smart keyboard was better because it felt more tablet-y when you had it folded up in the back.

You could put it in an easel mode. You could put it in a, like, lay down on the table drawing mode. and it just felt more portable and tablet-y. And so the new smart keyboard isn't so much of a better laptop that it's worth the trade-offs losing all those other things that the old origami keyboard could do. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I'm not saying that, like, that's the problem, to be clear.

There's a part of me that thing's that old, the older iPad Pro was an ergonom, like far ergonomically. It was a little bit thinner. Right, the thing I was most excited about was, like, USBC card readers. and that has just been an emotional journey. So maybe that's just coloring all the rest of it. I can't say that having the new pro, I'm doing anything I was not doing with the old one.

Yeah. Anyhow, there's also some actual laptop rumors, right? Yeah, I was going to say Apple could alleviate some of this pain of trying to make iPads useful pro machines and just release modern non-16-inch laptops with good keyboards. I mean, with good keyboards is a thing. So Ming Chi Kuo, who is the analyst who everybody trusts to have, information about what's coming out

says that there's a bunch of stuff coming this year and top of the list is a 14.1 inch MacBook Pro so in the same way the 15 inch MacBook Pro became a 16 inch because they got the bezels smaller. We are expecting the 13 inch to become a 14.1 inch simply by making the bezels smaller

and it's supposed to have mini LED displays which do we want to discuss mini LED technology? Yes. I do. I see the floor. I'm only here to talk about backlines. Well, no, it's, I spent a lot of time thinking about backlights with the pro display XDR review, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But the basic story here is like, Paul, you're a pixel density enthusiast of some renown.

Yes, some time to time. The new spec is backlight density. Ah, right. I'm telling you, this is real. So if you think about a modern laptop display, it has LEDs along the edges. It's edge lit. So it can never go to True Black because those LEDs just stay lit all the time. even in the black areas, like kind of gray.

TVs have dimming zones. We will talk about this more with the display, but they put LEDs behind the screen and in a grid, that grid is obviously less. Like, the zones are bigger than the pixels on the screen. So the zones turn off. Yeah, I have a cheap Vizio, and it's the most obvious thing.

Their spinner is a black screen with a spinner, and there's like obviously four different LEDs it lights up. Yeah, it looks crazy. It's like, pop, bu, bu, so mini LED is what? if we shrink the backlights, the LEDs in the backlight super small, so they're almost as small as the pixels and illuminate those along with the pixels of the display. Right. Very smart.

It can get you some black levels theoretically close to OLED. That is to differentiate from micro LED, which is very confusing, which is a technology we've seen Samsung come out with it at CS in other places, where the LEDs are actually small and emissive themselves, and they're the pixels of the display. That is a direct competitor at OLED, an OLED pixel is the light source and the color source. Is this Q-L-ED? No. No. That's a whole other kind of LED. Q-L-ED was what Samsung invented so that the Q would look like an O. Ah. So you're confused about whatever you were buying O-led.

I mean, it stands for quantum dots, but they definitely named it Q-led. So it would be as close as possible to O-led. The bottom line here is Apple seems to not think that O-led is a great screen technology for 13-inches or 10-inchers. So, like, there's the rumors that they're going to move the iPads send this 14-inch Mac to mini-l-Ds instead of just going to OLED like some other laptop manufacturers have. There may be good reasons for that, and maybe they're going to have some really great mini-l-D quality.

It's going to be amazing. My feeling is that if moving to a mini-l-D display delays the release of 14-inch MacBook with the right keyboard a week, screw you, just release one with the current. the current technology. Yeah, you know, it's tough. Again, we'll talk about this with the display review, but OLEDs are not great at every screen size. And they're not perfect.

If you get up closer to an OLED TV, you can see, like, the sort of right in between black and, like, very dark gray, like, they get confused all the time, right? Like, they're not color accurate the way you want them to be. I think Apple has been very happy with what they've been able to do with the iPhone 10. you know, that display is kind of here with the iPhone 11. Like they've gotten in a place where they feel okay about the small OLEDs, right, on their phones. They feel obviously okay with the Apple Watch. I think their assumption is no one is doing color correction work on their phone or their Apple Watch.

If you are doing color correction work on your Apple Watch, I would like to talk to you. Yeah. I'm very curious about your workflow. But I think Apple feels like it's not so accurate. they can deliver what they're traditionally known for delivering with their LCDs on their pro machines. And I think you see the other, we don't really evaluate laptops with the OLED screens in this way. But if you just like pay attention to the chatter around it, there are some real tradeoffs with OLED in terms of accuracy all over the place. And TVs have these problems.

You're just sitting far away from them. And you're not expected to do that kind of work on a television. So to do a laptop display, I think Apple is like, it's not there. Right. Right. It's not, we're not happy with the way it looks. We're going to stick with LCD because we can control it much more carefully. But you're right.

If they just use the old display and the better keyboard, people would buy them. Yep. And I can't say, I'm looking at a 16 inch MacBook Pro right now. Yep, it's a little bit bigger than my 15 inch MacBook Pro of the screen. But the thing, the reason I'm using is because it has a better processor and a keyboard that's not going to kill me. Wait, it's not the touch bar? Yeah, the touch bar is obviously the most annoying technology that I just keep, I can't quit it. It's like a bad relationship.

I'm like, I don't know what you're doing today. Why are you mad at me? I just want to pay more attention to you. Can I just tell you? I live in a world where I bounce between Windows 10 that's in dark mode and a Mac, 13-inch MacBook Pro with a touchbar. But I don't use the Mac's touchbar stuff. I use this utility called POC-P-O-C-that basically puts your dock in the touchbar

and then put some like volume utilities and like, you know, other information on the right-hand side. If you look at a MacBook running Pock, it looks exactly, like, almost identical to what a Windows taskbar looks like. You've got little icons on the left for all your running apps. You got some information and, like, controls on the right. And so, like, I just, no matter what computer I'm using, I've just got a little strip of, like, information and icons in the same order all the time. And it's great. That's great. So you're saying you're pro touchbar.

No, I'm saying that the touch bar's only utility is to replace the dock. Otherwise, it's useless. I use Pock for, by the way, Pock is kind of, it's good. If you have a touch form Mac, download it, play with it. It's a little bit crashy. A little bit crashy. Sometimes your brightness goes to zero for no reason. Yeah.

Pock. Fine. I use it for one reason only, which is my resting position of my hands on a keyboard is such that my like second and third finger, if I don't have Pock installed, or right where the volume buttons are on the touch bar. And because they're touch, it's a touchscreen and not buttons, I'm just constantly turning the volume up and down on the computer because that's where my hands go because there's no value to the touchbar except to just drive me insane.

So I have pock and I put it's literally like a Wi-Fi. I just needed to put some information there. So now I'm just constantly caressing a Wi-Fi indicator at all times on the SmackDown. It's great. I love it. It's a real, it's a metaphor for how I feel about computing. All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back.

We're going to talk with these Mac Pro reviews. Support for this show. comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce.

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. 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 be getting lost in the shuffle.

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We're back. It's like the tables have turned. Usually I'm the one that's getting grilled. Oh yeah, it's true. We can do it that way. You start. No, no, no. We were going to include all of this

and now the joke is gone. No, we're going to include it anyway. God damn. You've been waiting to hear us talking about the Mac Pro, but instead we're doing two minutes of meta-commentary on who begins the second segment.

There's like three meta stories that I want to tell about the MacPro review. But I want to start with the sort of the most important one, which is that we actually ended buying this machine. So if you've been listening to us over the past few weeks, you've heard me say a thousand times if a company doesn't do review units, my instinct is that the product is broken. Sure. That's just true. That's just my instinct.

I would say that isn't this one different because they need to configure the review unit differently for every single reviewer to the specific thing they ask for because there's no such thing as one mac pro right yeah um and also these are super expensive they are very it would be very expensive also they're not like they're still just max yeah right like do i think apple can produce one macintosh yeah i do i'm not worried about that uh they're not trying to make it fold in half there's no new like um waterproofing technology like it's just a macintosh it just happens to be using very expensive parts however no no no but there are Apple doesn't necessarily always get this right

because I personally lived through that thermal throttling drama with that MacBook a year and a half ago or whatever it was. It should have been like a no problem sort of thing. Yeah, there's not enough heat dissipation, but okay. And they got it wrong. And they had to like issue an update in the middle of me reviewing it. So you can see how there's two sides of the story. Yeah.

Right? Like here's a fancy new high performance Mac with a new cooling solution. We've lived through some problems with Macs before. The previous Mac Pro had a set of issues. Long story short, we're, you know, we are reasonably friendly with Apple. Dieter and I are on the phone. And we're like, give us your unit. And they're like, we're not doing that.

And I said, well, we'll buy one then. And they said, great, let us know when you buy one and we'll expedite the order. And then we hung up. And I was like, so I guess you have to buy a MacCard? Really, really bluff myself into $17,000. I'm opening up my credit card, my credit limit. looking at his. We're like,

I guess I'm doing this. I'm like texting my wife. I'm like, we're getting some credit card miles. So we, thankfully, we do work at a much bigger company than people think,

and that's by design. We don't need to talk about our corporation at all times, but Boxing is a big company. 1,600 people work here. We make TV shows. So I went to our IT department, and I was like,

hey, can we, can we buy a computer? And they're like, sure. And I was like, okay, it's a Mac Pro. And they're like, great, just send us the spec. And then in Slack, I was like, it's $17,000. And then the typing indicator comes up and it goes away.

So they're like, fine. It turns out they were going to upgrade the computer in our color correction suite, which pretty lucky set of circumstances because we're doing the display as well. And they bought it for us. And this sort of started the whole process of reviewing the computer because now we were talking to Marillo, Marilla Silva in our studio, who's the director of post-production technology,

who specs all the machines, designs, or workflows. And then we were talking to him about it, and I was like, we should actually spread out. Like, yes, the verge makes a lot of stuff. Yes, we have our own art in photography and motion graphics, like, team,

but this company is doing a bunch of pro stuff. So Alex Deaconis, our video director, she somehow got everyone to come talk to her, Estelle Caswell, who works on Explained on Netflix, The Vox Show. She also has earworm on YouTube, which is great. And you should actually go watch the episode she was making in our review about the Bach Chello Suite that it's like really hard to play. It's like just a great episode. So she was working on that.

Stevie Remsberg at New York Magazine. She's their senior art director. She works on the culture pages in the print magazine. She came through. We'll talk about that in a second because people were, there's some questions about how she was working. Noam Hassanfeld, who's a reporter producer on Today, Explained, came. and made an episode to explain. And then Grayson, the Verges senior motion graphics person,

this was actually really cool. So we gave him the Mac Pro, and he was working on an illustration for a story that was going up the next day. And he said, I actually got to do something more ambitious because this computer could render it out to meet the deadline. Oh, interesting. So he knew that it would render twice as fast, so he had, like, the time to get it done. Yeah.

So, like, we just wanted to give it to people and say, like, we're not bench. We did run a bunch of benchmarks, and we can talk about that. But the main thing was we're going to give it to people who are doing their jobs. And they came back and by and large, they're like, this isn't faster than my Mac. And by and large, the answer to that was because we use Creative Cloud

and Adobe has not updated Creative Cloud to use any of Apple's technologies. And that is, I would say, the biggest criticism of our review. And I think it is totally fair. We did not spend, you know, a bunch of time talking about how affinity photo runs in this thing.

We didn't spend a bunch of time talking about Final Cut Pro in the after runner card. We gave it to people who were doing their jobs, and this is what they told us. And I think that is, It's the heart of the story. I think it is also why if you look at Apple's benchmarks that they're publishing about this computer,

if you look at the sort of people they've given it to a rat, like it's a large number of people they've given it to. They've gone to scientists. And it's all people who are working inside of their ecosystems. And it's what they talk about, is the software that's optimized as they should. I mean, I'm not saying they shouldn't do it. But the biggest question for any pro customer, especially in a creative field, is how well does Photoshop run? And the answer is, as well as Adobe wants it to.

Yeah. It's just, and there's a conspiracy theories out there over how many cores Photoshop can really address. It's somewhere between zero and ten. Like, a lot of people are like, what if it's zero? Like, what if it's not doing anything? There's conspiracy theories about After Effects and, like, whether it's truly multi-threaded. Those arguments are raging in the comments of our YouTube video. But to me, the real, the big revealing piece of this was Apple's, like, Catalina,

is built around big ideas from Apple. It's built around metal two graphics. It's built around how they want you to use multi-core processing. And Adobe, which is the big monopoly vendor, has not adopted those ideas. And so, like, that's just an impasse for this computer right now. And I don't think Apple can get, they can't make Adobe do it. And I think they've got to prove they've got to market people who want to use computers of this caliber before Adobe's going to shift.

And that's a little bit on Adobe, because obviously Adobe could go above and beyond to please its customers, but also Apple chose to explicitly avoid Vulcan. And Vulcan is on Linux. Like you talk about scientists. Like if you want to accelerate your like machine learning workload or something, it's either going to be through like a Vulcan compute type thing or like OpenCL or NVIDIA's like Kuta or something like that. But it's probably not going to be on metal.

And for Adobe, they have to. you know, write all these shaders twice, write a lot of logic twice, once for metal, for Mac, and then either they can use DirectX for Windows or they can use Vulcan for Windows. But if Apple had adopted Vulcan, Adobe could theoretically write at once.

Yeah, I mean, this is also true of like Kuda, right? Like, you cannot plug an NVIDIA card into this computer with slots. Like, Nvidia's not allowed to write drivers, and Apple certainly, there's no way to, like, address Kuda and have multiple GPUs going in a favor of video cards. Like there's just a lot of that going on here where a bunch of

technologies that are like widespread on the PC and Linux side just don't exist on the Mac. And there are replacements. Apple has built its own replacements for those ideas. But there's the incentives are misaligned for these cross platform vendors. And by all indications, metal two is absolutely amazing. But I was

listening to Jonathan Blow was on this oxide computer, something like that, podcast. And he was explaining, but it's wild. Like, if you think what is an operating system for, it's to abstract across disparate hardware. But now we're in a case where you have, you can buy a computer, run three different operating systems on it, and you'd have to write, you'd write three different programs to successfully address those. So, like, the operating systems are anti-obstractions. Yeah, and this was like,

You know, I'm reading sort of reactions to a review. I'm reading comments. Like, I want to know what people think. I care that we're doing good job and useful. And like, I would say, like, the vast majority of people are like, this is a review I was waiting for because it is true that there are not a lot of like premier benchmarks of the new Mac Pro in the world yet. Right. It's true that there's not a lot of reviews that have focused on Creative Cloud. Great. So I'm happy we're useful about it. And then there's another group of people, it's smaller, it's always more vocal group of people that's like, why don't you test optimize software? And, Paul, I think to your point, it's like the point of this thing is to make your work go faster. It's actually, it's, it's just a faster computer. So you should be able to drop it in to what you're already doing, not even know that the computer is different and be faster. Right? Like, that's another layer of abstraction. Like, it's still a Mac. It just has way faster components in it.

You know, the work that you're doing should automatically benefit. And here's a $17,000 box that should benefit you. and it kind of, it does and it doesn't, depending specifically on what applications you're using. Well, what if the answer is that Apple doesn't expect anybody to use Adobe on this thing? Like, I know that's not actually true, but there's a world in which they release this computer, and they're like, this computer is for people that use Final Cut and Affinity.

It's not for people that use Creative Cloud. If you want to do it, that's on you, whatever. But, like, buy this thing, switch to our tools, switch to the things that are optimized for us, change your workflows because the benefits you will get out of using this computer with the stuff that's actually optimized for it is so vast that it's worth changing your tools over. Yeah, I don't think the benchmarks bear that out.

That's the thing, right? Right, like someone tweeted me that they had built a $6,000 PC with a slightly faster Intel chip in it, liquid cooling. And it was like almost as fast as we're max. Pro. And it was obviously less than half the cost, right? We obviously also bought that Threaderper PC, which was $12,000. It was so loud. But that came from a workstation vendor that we use that comes with a support contract, all the stuff you need when you're running a business and at like enterprise. And that, you know, the thing just blew our Mac away. Like on every benchmark, except Premier playback

benchmarks, which fine. Like, you know, it was close, but like the Macs. was faster. Okay. But like, we can get into that part. But to me, the real question is, is it so much better that you'll switch your workflow over that that could be Apple's argument. But at the same time, like, shouldn't they be trying to capture market share? Like, they haven't had a product in the game for so long that they have actually lost more market share to Linux than anything else. Like, there are lots and lots of production houses now that run Linux. there are lots and lots of production houses that have like rows of Windows computers

that are just sort of like hidden away and they think of them as appliances that happen to run these apps really fast. I think that's that they should be trying to capture that market not trying to convince a bunch of people that they need to switch over their entire workflows. And I think that's, you know,

we had Scott Belski on the Richcast I really like talking to Scott. Like that was a really fun conversation but certainly I was like, one are you updating your software? And he was like, we're always working with Apple. At the same time Adobe's on stage with Apple. being like, here's Photoshop for the iPad.

And it's like, you should work on Photoshop for the Mac a little bit. And I just think that's like, that is a tension that needs to get resolved. These are two gigantic companies that are, we know, we have the benchmarks now. Creative Cloud runs faster on PCs that are cheaper. Our staff wants to work on Macs. So like Apple just has like a moat of familiarity. But these are companies that need to work together to extract the power of this machine. There's one thing I do want to talk about very specifically.

It's very in the weeds. We left this line in our video to be transparent. It was Stevie from New York Magazine. She said I was working off a server on a VPN. This is probably the number one guy. Why do we include that, the VPN? So I think we got, we confused people unnecessarily. So I just want to clarify.

The Mac Pro was in the Verges office connected to our network, which is a brand new network. The office is three years old. We have a sand. So even our video directors, they work off our sand, our storage area work here. It's all fiber. Great. But brand new network here in the office. New York Magazine works in a brand new office.

It opened like the beginning of the year. So another brand new network, but it's like a few blocks away. So the VPN connection was between our corporate networks. So she was just working off of the air file system. So she was doing all of her work here locally on the Mac. Yep. But she was doing her real work. So the file system was over there.

but it's like our fiber networks. She wasn't like VPNing through like, you know, like Nord VPN in Europe to cheat Netflix. Right. Like she was just had a private connection between the two corporate networks. And she was only working in design and Photoshop. So our feeling was, all that's in RAM anyway.

At the same time, is it true that we could not 100% guarantee that weird corporate networking software wasn't getting in the way? We cannot. So we kept it in for transparency. I think we confused people. There were people who thought that she was like controlling a remote desktop. And I was like, that's not what a VPN is.

So I just want to make that really clear. Like we were comfortable with the results. But because we couldn't guarantee it, we want to just like make it clear, like it's possible. And it's not like she had a bad experience, right? She just didn't need a speak. Her stuff was already going fast enough, basically, right? Yeah. And I think in design in particular is not good.

Oh, really? I think it's a particularly chunky experience. So that was the one where it was the number, it was the number one question, question mark concern. But it wasn't that we were like, she wasn't like, we'd have like a dial up modem to the other office, right? It was like, the thing was on our fiber network connected to their fiber network. We just needed a bridge between the two offices. And that is how a lot of people at our company work. Like the today, the Vox.com team is distributed. between here and D.C., New York, here in D.C.

Our video team is a tribute to San Francisco in New York. I would say that we don't love, like, using the sand, Dieter. Oh, my God. I can't say it's like always the best experience, but it is legitimately a part of our workflow. So we wanted to keep it in to be transparent because that's like a real thing that people do. But I don't think it was the core. Did you get anybody that did light up the after burner card for any reason? We did. We did. I mean, I think Alex moved the project in the Final Cut Pro. She was using 4K files. That's not something she could do on her existing IMac that she uses for work. It works. It does the thing it's supposed to do. There is something really compelling to me. Like it really feels, in a sense, it's like an admission that we're not getting as much performance from our CPUs and GPUs as we'd like to get to make an, like, FPGA, you're.

like halfway to like an application specific chip. But like, you know, if it's, if it works, it works. And I just, I really, I really like the idea. Like, you know, obviously our phones now have a lot of very dedicated hardware for like machine learning and camera processing and stuff like that. I mean, it makes sense that things that you do a ton on your computer that are really demanding would have specialized hardware for. And there's something so compelling about the idea of the after burner card. But yeah, you'd want it to light up for a lot more tasks and be broadly supported somehow. The number of conversations I had is we were doing the review, is I was reporting it out,

going back to Apple. Yeah, because I don't know that everybody knows that we do this, but it is true. When we review things, we, like, review the products. We, like, write everything down that we have issues with. We go back to the company. We report that stuff out. Yep. And Apple just kept on, you know, it's programmable.

And I was like, well, are you going to program it? You're like, well, it is programmable. We've made no announcements about it. But you keep telling me it's programmable. Are you going to program it? Can Adobe program it if they wanted to? Sure. Yeah, anybody can.

Why not? Apple's totally open. We'll let anybody do anything. I think, I don't know this for sure. I think you do have to like use Apple's frameworks to get to it. Okay. Yeah. Right.

But you can program it. I think Red has hinted very strongly that they're going to move their stuff to metal two. And I think somewhere in that there's like a secondary wink-wing hint that it'll light off afterburner. Like there's some stuff there. There's a lot of stuff here that is deeply related to like formats and codex, my favorite subject.

But it is like so outside the realm of what anybody, like any consumer cares about. It's like what formats are we shooting our cameras in today and what does that buy us in the back end? So we don't, we don't shoot in prores. We don't shoot in red rock. Like we don't do those things. So the aftermanner was just not used. to us until we changed that part of our workflow too.

You know, you said that Codex was your favorite subject, and that's a lie. Your favorite subject is actually backlight methods for displays. Do you want to talk about the display? This display ended up being so much more controversial, I guess, but like fascinating and I don't know, it's not even divisive because everyone kind of agrees, but it was not what I expected. It is not what I expected. You know what I, you know, you write a review, and it's a little less positive.

than maybe everyone is expecting, and you sort of just like wait for the wave. And so that's like, here are the criticisms I know about our Mac Pro review. We've talked about them. Like, down the line, we issued some pretty harsh criticism of the display, and there's been no feedback at all.

And I think that is super interesting. I think that is partially true because it's very easy to have an opinion about computing. Like, we do it for hours every week on the show. But it's much harder to, have an opinion about what an expert color grader in a Hollywood film studio should use to do their job, right? And I think that's, there's a little bit of a gap there. The main thing I would say is, so we get the display. This is Apple sent them out to reviewers, to their credit. They're very confident

in this display. We get the display, we get the stand. Morillo, who worked in the color house that did Game of Thrones. He's done this for a long time, like saw it instantly, like zero seconds went by, and he said, there's light fall off to the agent. It was the first thing he saw. It was, It took him seconds to see it. Grayson, who's worked on a lot of, like, literally advertising is our motion graphics director, sought instantly. He's like, there's light fall off to the edges. I watched Marquez's review of this.

He pointed out when he looked off angle. Flat panels test, I think is what it's called. Notice light fall off. Quinn Nelson, it's a snazzy Q channel on YouTube, noticed light fall off to the edges. It's just, it's there. Like, you just see it. The light fall off comes with color shifts. it's there.

It shifts a little blue. So I asked Apple, this is just how LCDs work. And the thing is, it's better than most cheap LCDs. By far, it's obviously a better construct. It costs $6,000. It's better than a cheap TV.

Like, I assure you. But like, I don't know. Like, I've got Max's baby monitor here. Like, you get one degree off axis. The thing washes out to purple. Like, okay, it's not that bad. But if you are, if you are Apple and you stand on stage and you say, this holds up next.

to a $43,000 reference color monitor from Sony, we think it's better. We think it's, of course you are inviting that comparison. I think they actually just like, they shifted everybody's perception of what this thing should do by making that comparison. And they didn't make that comparison shyly.

It was a very aggressive, we think we're better than this $43,000 Sony display. And the first thing that everybody saw was because of that, everyone's looking at it very closely. Just to clarify it, right? So there's off-axis, which could lead, like, at your peripheral vision, it's a big screen, so just the edge of your vision, it's like video. You're always off-axis to this thing in a normal working distance.

But even if you step back a bit, you see the vignetting. No, if you step far enough back, like, those angles sort of flatten out, right? But you have like close up shots of the of the edge like don't you think there's something Especially bad about the edge of this display or or am I off? No I think it's so hard to show this stuff on a video We published that photo that I you know I took a photo on something Apple I just took a photo my iPhone Like you can see it right that was about as good of a demonstration of that as I could show like in a video Which isn't you know like it's like trying to show HDR in a video like you You just can't do it.

You have to go look at it. Like, you should not look at our photos or videos of the display to judge the quality of the display. You should not do it. You should go look at it yourself because no capture technology is going to ever show you what a display really looks like. Just can't be done. So you go look at it. And I think some people are going to grade color on it. And I think the other part of that is Apple did not say, oh, to do all this reference work,

you actually have to shift it into these reference modes, which are only for you, in controlled lighting situations calibrated to certain standards. Very dark rooms with no lights. Basically dark room. Yeah. And the default mode is basically like a consumer mode. And that's when most of the technology displays on. So there's light sensors front and back for True Tone.

That is just for like office worker use. Yeah. Right? You switch it in that like HDR calibrated mode. Like all those light sensors turn off in this thing. Because of course, right? You can't calibrate color if the color of the color of the, the display is changing. So I think there's just this like a mashup of what the technologies can do,

what they're proud of, what the reality of doing that work is. And then the reason that Sony and Flanders Scientific can charge $36,000, $43,000 for calibrated color displays is because those people are very, very picky. And so they, those displays use a ton of power, like ridiculous amounts of power. They, they actually, some of them have themselves horrible off-axis viewing. They are, because they have dual layer LCDs, so you get a weird parallax effect. You would never use Excel on them, right? Like, you just, you wouldn't use that thing as your monitor.

So you have this product that's way more flexible, but they made this comparison to this very small niche. And so now they're being kind of against that niche. And I think that, that's just an error. Like, I think Apple just, they put themselves, you know, like classic disruption theory, right? like why did the PC take off? It's because IBM had like a mainframe business. And like the PC came up and could do some of the work, but it was much cheaper.

And like the mainframe people were like, that's a toy. Like Apple's in that zone. Like they're in that, this hard curve where like very cheap LCD monitors can do the job of showing you stuff. So that that's like that part of the zone. Then very, very expensive color accurate monitors exist for that market. Apple's like, this is better than your $200 LCD. It's not as good as that. And it's just a weird flat part of the curve and they've like stuck this thing right in the middle of it.

Yeah. So like my big question is if it can't be for like professional colorists, it can be the maybe it's for shops for like the last stage is that $43,000 monitor. But like you need the best of the best in like the three stages before that. So maybe it fits in that sort of workflow. But beyond that, other than people that just want to blow money on the nicest thing, like who actually is this for? What person's needs will be filled by this $5,000 monitor that aren't filled by even a $1,000 monitor, $1,500 monitor? People who like fancy things. Yeah.

There's a lot of those. I think, you know, Apple's argument is it's better if you have calibrated displays throughout your entire production chain. So sure. I think a lot of, like, photo editors are going to be super interested in this thing. You know, that light fall off to the edges is like, is it the worst thing in the world that you could ever see? see like no if you just back it up a little bit does it slowly go away maybe that's what i mean like you have to go look at it like maybe you will love it but it is not the thing they said it was and that's the thing that dings them right and that's what i mean it's like so hard to there it doesn't

have any competitors so you can only review it based on the claims they've made about it whereas like you get a phone and like Samsung's marketing materials about the phone like you're kind of throw you just discard them does you have this entire because we have this all this context like Yeah. Right? There's competitors. There's other companies. You know how other phones work.

Like there are just very, very few competitive products one to one with this display. The other thing I'll say is they promise these black levels. Now this is local dimming. I would say I got to publish like 2,000 words on local dimming on Theverge.com. I'm like very happy. Like why did we find the verge. com so I could just like geek out about local dimming and like four people would read it. And like great.

Like mission accomplished. But they're like, you know, 576 local dimming zones, blue LEDs, these custom layers, blah, blah, blah. It's still local dimming. Paul, that thing you're talking about with a spinner, and you can just see the zones light up? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it does that. It does it more granularly,

but it definitely just like blooms. You're saying they should have held out for many LED? You know, their argument is, OLED is inaccurate. Dual layer LCD sucks power and has poor viewing angles. Like, this is the future. Like, full array local dimming like this is the future. And I, you know,

I can't say that I build these displays and I can evaluate their claims that way. It sounds like a reasonable argument. it's in their white paper. You can go read that argument. It's the pro display XDR white paper makes that argument in some detail. But yeah, maybe they should have had a lot from any LED. Maybe they should have done something different with the zones.

Like, there's a number of ways that have done it. Or they could have just not made this claim. Right? It keeps coming back to this. It has a million to one contrast ratio if you use a very specific test pattern that doesn't light up the zones in a way that makes it look gray instead of black. Right. Okay.

Like, sure. Is it cool? They built a timing controller that runs at 10X, the refresh speed of the main LCD, so the zones move really fast? Yeah. Is it some of the best local dimming I've ever seen ever? Yes. Is it a local dimming? Sure it is.

And I think this is the thing about these two products for Apple in particular. Most of the products Apple makes, you know, there's like a billion users using them. Yeah. They cannot hide, right? Like they say something about the iPhone. Lots of people are going to get iPhones and their iPhone. hand, we're going to find out if that thing is true or not. We just are. Five people are going to buy this display so they can say whatever they want about it. And I think that's like it's a little

bit risky to make these claims because when it, when people do test it, they're the most picky people who are spending the most money. So they're going to be loudest about the gap. The good news is it's such a professional display, which means that you can get it and then you'll be able to configure it to the settings that you want to match your workflow, right? Only if you use MacOS Catalina. Okay. And only when there's a further software update. Oh.

That's true. Okay. I didn't get into Catalina with either one of these reviews because it's just like too much on top of everything else. I feel like, Dieter, you have spent more time thinking about Catalina as a version of MacOS that is a huge inflection point. But it's like to use a monitor, you got to throw away all of your 32 apps. It's like a lot.

Like, it's just a lot to put on. people. Right. To use a monitor, you have to upgrade your entire software suite because Catalina broke so much stuff is a lot. And I didn't want to like over-emphasize it because, you know, who knows? Maybe four people are going to buy this thing. That is remarkable for a display. Did Catalina pop up? Like, is it okay if this display, the ambient looks at the light in your... You can't use it on Windows unless you can use it on boot camp. Okay. They sort of hint, again, in the swipe paper, if you plug it into Windows or Linux, maybe the appropriate display information will get transmitted

if you have the right Thunderbolt 3, whatever. They're like, don't do it. And I was like, what about older version of the Mac OS? And they're like, it supports Catalina. So like it's made for one operating system. MacOS Catalina. Like that's what you should use it with. Catalina is getting upgraded to let you make custom reference profiles sometime.

They promised it. It's on the website. They're definitely going to do it. Should you buy anything based on promise? You should not, but they say they're going to do it. Catalina is an operating system that's like a race car that tried to make a hairpin turn and it like spun out into the dirt. And the car isn't broken. But there are some things that are a little bit just weird now when it gets back on the road.

And it is heading in the right direction. But you definitely know that the thing went off went off the road there for a minute. It's a little dinged up. So when I was a, do you want to hear a story from my youth? Absolutely. So I had a, I was a teenager with a Mustang. It was a true story. This is very embarrassing.

As a teenager of the Mustang and some irresponsible friends. And we, we... Your friends were irresponsible. Well, I would say we riled each other up. Okay. Long story short, one time I crashed the Mustang into a bank. Like you do. Like a money bank, not like a snow bank?

That bank, like a physical... We were drag racing and there was a corner and I... This car did not... Were you tried to pull off a heist? No, we were just... We were literally racing home from the SAT. It's like this is a very dumb story. He was trying to credit a very elaborate analogy for an operating system.

He sounds like such a badass. But we were racing our like V6 cars. Like it wasn't, we weren't even going that bad. Anyway, the car understeered, I popped the curb, rolled into a bank and I, uh, the front end was messed up. And there was like grass stuck in it. And so I drive it to the body shop and like, I'm trying to hide it from my parents. I'm like, can you fix it? And he's like, what happened?

I was like, I don't know. I came into a parking lot and it's all dented up. And he was like looking at it. He's like, well, the front of it's covered in mud and grass. Are you sure you didn't drive it into a ditch? And I was like, I got to go. I'll see you later, man. Don't talk to my dad.

If you made that argument, if you thought that would work, literally hours after you just taken the SAT. Obviously, the SAT broke your brain. Yeah, it was not great. If you looked at me, he was like, I don't know. The front end is like, great. Pretty screwed up. That's Catalina.

That's all I'm saying is that's Catalina. Okay. Catalina is a teenager lying to the local body shop about why the front of the car is messed up. Yeah. They had good intentions. It was going to be a great Saturday. Yeah. And then they hit a bank like you do.

Anyway, look, all this is to say is like, go. I had a lot of fun making these reviews. This is the worst segue in the world. Yeah. We had a lot of fun making their reviews. I'm very thankful to the people around Vox Media who helped us. Alex, our director, did just incredible. Like, this thing was such a puzzle.

She had to get all those people to come use the computer. They had to tell her what they thought. She helped them structure those thoughts in a way that would make sense on video. Like, these are not people who look at cameras and talk a lot. It was great. She did a great job. And I'm very pleased with the feedback we've gotten to it. I think the big question for Apple is, like, you saw that result.

Actually, Paul, I want to talk to you about this. We raced it against that threadwipper PC, which was much cheaper. And it got destroyed. And it's like that's the question. And there's like rumors of AMD support and some leaked builds of MacOS. Like is that coming? Could they make that shift? At the same time they're trying to like put a trackpad on the iPad.

Like it seems like a lot of change is brewing for Apple. Yeah. Yeah. They're holding themselves back right now. And this is a very recent development. But now AMD is king of the castle. So they're holding themselves back by not having AMD CPU option. But then they're also holding themselves back.

by not having a Nvidia GPU option. So they're double hamstringing themselves. And it sounds like the cooling is awesome. Like if Apple wasn't being so Apple about everything, they seem to have engineered, done a lot of good engineering. It's really, it's more their software support that holds this back. Like if this ran Linux had A&D inside it and an Nvidia card, It would be amazing.

Paul, imagine if you could just render bitcoins on this thing. I would love that. Yeah, we have not given this thing enough compliments on the show. It is a beautifully engineered computer. It is incredibly quiet for the amount of power it contains. It is incredibly thoughtful. I love that there's a USB slot inside for dongles. Like, it is the, no one is thinking about this stuff in that way, right?

I love that you can disassemble it by hand, basically, one or two screws, but the screws are spring-mounted, and so they don't fall out, right? Like, just deeply thoughtful. The double-height MPX cards, so you don't need additional power tables and all the stuff, and Thunderbolt still works all the way it's put. That's like Apple stuff. Like, you control the whole stack and the entire integration. You can invent things that are clever or by half than anybody else can do. Then you hamstring yourself by saying you have to use metal. Yeah.

And I think that those instincts here are colliding in a way that I think is particularly for this market, very challenging. But it's true. It's a beautiful computer. Yeah, it's interesting. It's almost like, you know, Apple, and people who've listened to the Vergecast know that this has been a big narrative. And Apple stated, they said they were sorry and then they were going to work on a pro computer again. But, like, you know, maybe their hardware, you know, spun up before their software side really spun up. Like, maybe their whole company hasn't really embraced this move yet.

I don't see it that way. This isn't like their software needs more time to catch up. This is a policy decision, right? This is we choose not to work with Nvidia and AMD. And it's not that they're choosing not to do it because, like, they're not good enough to make the software do it. They've chosen not to. for various reasons, which may or may not be rational, especially if you live in Apple world.

But this isn't the hardware is great the software needs to catch up. The hardware is great, and Apple needs to look into its soul and decide whether or not it wants to try and continue to force people to use its products like metal or play nice with others. Yeah, and I think if you sort of walk around the Apple campus talking about Adobe, you'll just hear like hissing sounds. You know, like they don't like it.

They're not in love with them. That's a relationship where, like, it has always been tense. It's always been weird. Steve Job used to write, like, open letters called Thoughts on Flash, just dunking on Adobe for caring about Flash at all as a technology. And then Adobe's CTO now runs the Apple Watch. Like, there is just no love lost with these companies. I was always baffled that they shut down Aperture, the Lightroom competitor, because I figured they just keep that going out of spite. Yeah.

And, you know, it's like why Final Cut used to work a lot like Premiere. And then they changed it to work a lot like Imovie. That's what it looks like. And that's one of those things where it's like, if you, what is it Opo that put out a direct clone of the Apple Watch this week? Right. One of the reasons that those products are just direct clones is because they figure, if you don't have to learn anything,

your switching costs goes down and you'll buy the cheaper one. Like it's pretty cynical. Right. Why did Google just adopt all of Apple's swiping gesture nav? Because they want you to switch. Yeah. They want to lower the cost of you switching to their platform. So you just pick up all the gestures and go along. Well, to switch from Premiere to Final Cut, you have to relearn how to edit video. Like, who's going to... Why? Because your computer's faster? Like, because it has holes in the front of it? Like, that's a thing where, like, Apple has to really decide how much of that market they want back. I'm not saying you have to, like, actually relearn how to edit video. I'm saying, like, you have to learn a new interface. face for a complicated task.

And people, some people just don't want to do that. And I think that's why Premiere persists. Like it is, it has lock in a way. Photoshop has lock in a way. Like a lot of people like affinity better. But there are many, many more people who just sort of show up at working at a creative crowd license. And we just had to sort that out.

We've talked about a computer that six people are going to buy for like 45 minutes. But it is a very interesting moment, I think, for Apple as a company, because they have, they did forget out this market for a long time. They have been trying to move people to the iPad for work. The iPad Pro and the Mac Pro are actually radically different things, but they both have the word pro in the name. And I think the future of their platforms and what people can do with them and how they work is at much more of an inflection point than I think we are paying that much attention to. Deter, would you agree with that? Yeah.

Well, they're making the turn, right? And then some of them have spun off the road a little bit. the iPad is due for a huge inflection point that trackpad is coming. They tried to do that with iPad OS, and I think they didn't, now mixing metaphors, stick to landing, you know. They didn't miss the bank. Yeah. iPhone, I don't know, man. I think that the iPhone is just going to keep on, keeping on with tiny changes in perpetuity.

Yeah. I think that one's fair. And what's the most important one for them? Yeah. And I think that you can see it, right? It's like, there's a reason to not change it because it's successful. And all the other ones are monkey around the edges. Yeah.

Okay. Let's take a break. We'll come back. We'll wrap some things up with some foldy, floppy phones. 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

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slash vergecast. Paul Miller. Every week, you do a thing. And it always has the same name. It's called, take a picture of your ear. Do it. Such a demanding name.

I can't believe we say that out loud every week. I know, I know, right? So Logitech is partnered with or releasing this app called Immers, made by Emboddy, a spatial audio company. And the way the app works is you take a picture of your right ear and then they use AI, which stands for artificial intelligence, as I've just read in their copy, and machine learning to create a custom head-related transfer function profile, an H-R-T-F. So somehow, by looking at your ear, they can do better spatial audio. That is the claim.

It sounds a little snake-oily, but I want to believe. You know what I mean? What kind of input? Like, it's just a photo, right? It's a photo of your right ear. Will it accept a wide-angle photo? Because otherwise I can't submit a photo of my ear. Oh, you have large ears?

Oh, interesting. I don't know. I guess, you know, ears are used for spatial stuff, right? Yeah. I don't understand very much about ears. Obviously, these people are claiming to know a lot about ears. And like, because the thing is, it's so hard to test something like this because if you just make things louder, they sound better to humans. So if you just have an algorithm that turns the volume up, like spatial stuff is becoming more and more important with games. the new Xbox is supposed to have audio ray tracing. Oh, God. No.

You tell, come on, man. Like hardware, no, hardware accelerated audio ray tracing is the claim. Yeah, that's how audio works. I also hear that the PlayStation, in order to fight that, it's going to have audio local dimming. I'm telling you. I hope this works. It sounds cool. Sounds fun.

Good on you, Logitech. Keep on innovating out there. Oh, it's a subscription plan. Of course it is. That's it. That's the Vergeass. Your ears change shape over time. That's right.

We can't be a part of this. It's pods for your ears. They're called ear pods. All right. Dieter. What? There is a folding phone explosion. TCL.

We saw them show off a folding phone prototype at CES. They hinted very strongly that they had more. that they were thinking about. And since they couldn't go to Mobile World Congress, they had Haim and a bunch of other people go visit them in New York. And, yeah, they've got a trifold folding phone, which is one is the, you know how like there's this debate

with like should a folding phone have the hinge on the inside and it folds out to a tablet or have the hinge on the outside, you know, like Huawei does? So TCL thought, well, people think the hinge on the outside is not very durable. So we should have a hinge on the inside. but there are some people who think the hinge in the outside makes more sense.

What if we just did both? Yeah, why not both? They've got an inside hinge and an outside hinge in one device and it folds out to, you know, a tablet-y thing. It's a trifold. It's ridiculous. It's a 10-inch tablet that folds into the footprint of a phone, but something that's also three times as thick as a phone. Yeah, three times thick. And then they have a paper-based prototype of their sliding phone that we talked about.

And the way it works is like the screen. kind of like rolls underneath like it's a pirate map, right? Like it kind of, you, you shove the thing closed and the screen like rolls up as you close it and then it unrolls as you pull it out. But it doesn't, it doesn't furl. It's not a full furl. It just it tucks into the back. It's sliding around the back.

Yeah. Oh, this is more or less what you guessed, right? Yes, this was my guess. As people have noted on Twitter and I'm really grateful for that, I was right. Although I actually thought that the way this would work, is that the screen would be visible on the back. It seems like it could be. I don't know really why.

But it goes inside like a pocket. Yeah. Yeah, that inside like a pocket terrifies me. I got to be honest with you. Oh, everything about all of these concepts is like just damaged city. Okay. I feel like there's less that can go wrong with this. Because yes, inside like a pocket, yeah, maybe you get dust in there or something like that.

But there is no hinge. So it is since like while the screen is flexible, it's flexing around a rather static edge, if that makes sense. It is, but like it's moving. It is moving. The screen is physically either moving against a protective layer.

Right? Because that's how you would seal the edge where it goes in. Yeah. Like you would just wrap the whole thing in plastic in some way. I doubt you can do that. Or that edge has a gap and stuff will get in there. and then you'll unfurl and just destroy itself. You know what?

I had not considered that. The good news for TCL is that there's no screen because this is made out of paper. The trifold is a real, like a working concept with software and a real screen, but the slide out is just a paper mock-up right now. So meanwhile, Vivo has the Apex 2020. which is another concept. It's basically the stuff we've sort of seen. The screen wraps around the sides of the phone,

doesn't go all the way around to the back, and then they've got a selfie camera underneath the screen, so there's no notch and there's no hole. It looks, you know, it looks fine. I mean, it looks great, obviously, but, I mean, it looks fine. I don't know what else to say about this concept phone. And then Marquez Brownlee was him and one other, I think one other person, got to look at the Jaume Mi Mix Alpha,

which is the screen wraps all the way around the phone almost like completely. There's just one strip on the back for like for the camera modules. It's so beautiful. It looks dope. It looks like it would shatter if I just sneezed at it. But it looks pretty dope. And like you've got a full L.C. You got a full OLED screen right next to the rear cameras.

So you like to take a selfie, you just turn the thing around. and you've got a viewfinder right there. Right. It can't have like the metal band for external metal band for reinforcement. So that's like the fear. There's many things to fear with this phone. Like the power button, I think, is like they might have it like on the top and then they've got like virtual buttons on the side and on the screen.

Although I missed power button on the top. Back in the day, all smartphones had a power button on the top. Yeah, because they were small enough to fit in your hand. Yeah. This moment we're in where the technology is clearly not ready or durable. or practical. Yeah. But everyone's just inspired

to make silly shapes is the best. It's so much fun. Like there's no downside to being like, we made one out of paper. Yeah. Imagine what the future could be

because it's just fun. And no one's trying to sell anything. Yeah. Except for Motorola, which is a real mess on their part. But it's clear, like a bunch of designers are like revving the engines

for when the tech actually is here. Yeah. It's, uh, someone tweeted a third. of like bad Nokia designs. Engage. The Engage.

There was that one that was like a circle with corners. Yep. Like it was a circle and all the keys were like around the screen. Like Nokia just went crazy for a while. They made all those. Those weren't concepts. They shipped them. They're like here they are.

There was one that was basically like a lipstick case and you could like slide it out. I mean that was when Nokia, I mean like the phone, the internals and the software basically the same across every phone. The only way to differentiate all the models they had to make for all the carriers was like, this one has stripes. Yeah. Okay.

But it led them to just like wild heights of industrial design, most of which was impractical and bad, the engage. But like we're sort of like, it's here. I love the engage. Was side talking, you had to hold it against your head like a taco? I want to, here's what I said. Wild heights of industrial design,

most of which was bad, like the engage. And then you said, I love the engage. To talk on it, you had to hold it to your head like a taco. Yeah. Those are the same idea. I could also play Tony Hawk Pro Skater, though. I don't want to...

That was one of the most powerful phones that existed at that time. It was so powerful that the only way you could talk on it as a phone was to hold it on its side. So I get why TCL would want to, like, show off a paper phone mock-up. But isn't it incredibly expensive to make this trifle? mock up unless you're actually making the trifold phone? No, I mean, yes and no. They're not, like, that's the sunk costs they're willing to take. I mean, they don't necessarily have to make this thing.

They might, because they're TCL and who knows. But TCL's whole jam right now is they want to sell phones under the TCL brand. They're releasing phones. They announce them at CES that are, you know, flagship 2020 specs. We'll see how the cameras are on it, obviously. But they want to get them on U.S. carriers. So they're making a big push for you to like want to buy TCL phone. I think they're basically like they just see that LG has like no chance of anybody caring about them anymore.

Like what if we took that spot. I think that's what they're thinking is. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. So like they're happy to make these concepts all the live long day. If it just makes you remember, oh yeah, TCL. I heard of them once because you're going to start seeing TCL phones in the store.

And so they need the brand to be credible. They have gotten my attention. Good job, TCL. And in the store, they won't be made out of paper. Yeah. That'll be great. Deeter, a little bit of pixel news, and we should wrap this thing out. So Google did another one of its feature drops, which is what they're called now.

And this time, they actually dropped the features when they said they would. Instead of, like, doling them out over the course of, like, a month and a half, they managed to get updates out to a lot of pixel users on time. and there's just a bunch of really neat, googly features. So there's stuff that, there's car crash detection, which is great. So if it detects you're in a car crash through magic and machine laundering and whatever, it can call for help. It has Dark's theme scheduling, which it finally should do. It has the new emojis, you know, other stuff. They have added the ability to put a boarding pass into Google Pay, whether or not your airline supports it.

I wrote in the newsletter that like virtually nobody did. That was a little bit mean. A bunch of airlines do internationally here in the U.S. It's pretty hard to get Google Pay support, whereas everybody supports Apple Wallet. Anyway, so that's cool. So you take a screenshot and then Google Pay is like, oh, hey, you've got a boarding pass here, and then it will save the QR code, and then it will know what the flight is, and then Google Assistant will start giving you flight updates for it.

This is a big thing I missed from iPhone. Like, it's pretty well integrated on iPhone, and it's pretty slow. It's pretty, and then the other thing they do is they change the, if you long press the power button, now it brings up your power button options at the bottom and then Google pay cards at the top. So it's like, it's easier to get to than it used to be to. It's easier to get to, but that is one of those like solutions that it's such a half, like, here's a single screen on which you can pay for stuff and turn off your phone. Is not, I don't think that was on anyone's like UI roadmap. No. I mean, Samsung pay on a Galaxy phone is, what if any time you swiped up anywhere ever, it brought up Samsung pay half the time?

And the other half it does, like, actual OS stuff. That's what Samsung pay is. It's like, ah. And then the other thing that they did that I think is just perfect Google. I wrote about this in the newsletter is they wanted to make it faster to get to, like, long press menus. So, you know, you long press a thing and then a menu pops up. And so they wrote a machine learning algorithm to see how hard you're pressing just by detecting how your finger smushes on the screen over time. So they basically replicated 3D touch without needing a special hardware layer.

No, it's the same as the Apple one, right? Because there's no 3D touch on the 11 Pro. Yeah, they just switch to long presses. And Google's like, we can do long presses. We don't need special hardware. And we can do long presses faster because we can detect how hard you're pressing on the screen by looking at, you know, the rate of smush. as like different capacitive sensors get lit up by how hard and how quickly you press. Okay.

I buy it. It's clever. Do you have it yet? Yeah. It's a little inconsistent, but it doesn't matter because you're not allowed to do unique things with it. Oh, it's just a faster long press. It's a faster, long press. I see.

It's a shorter, longer press. It's a shorter long press. I have missed 3D touch far more than I ever anticipated. Yeah. The number of people that, like, get angry when I'm dismissive of 3D touch always, blows me away. I just am like, it's, like, the two things that are useful with it are those little pop-up previews, which you can still do with long press. And like, I always found them, like, infuriating because you never really knew what they were going to do. And then accessing the cursor with the

keyboard, which you can still do with a long press on the space bar. And I know that it's not as, like, instant as, like, hard pressing, but sorry for your luck. I'd rather have the battery life. Yeah. I'm not saying, like, I wake up every day, morning. 3D touch. Maybe you do, though? No, that's like the headphone check. You just feel like a tinge now and then. Yeah, it's like a, it's like a wistful longing for times, you know, I was like

innocent then. Like I wrote the entire review of like the iPhone success. It was like all about 3D touch. Right. That was their feature. And like many Apple reviews it ended with, this will be great when developers support it. It's a real theme of the situation.

All right. Good job. Good job, Google. Okay. I think we're out. I think that's enough. Unless you want to make fun of Samsung TV branding again, they launched some new QLeds, but... Can I just read it to you?

Yeah. So, Samsung is like, it's... This is the thing that happens, right? They show us all the TVs at CS, and then they officially launch them with, like, prices and dates and blah, blah, blah. Okay, so they're out. They're QLeds. They've got a whole line at the very top end.

They've got an OLED. Okay. What's the big feature for TVs this year? Paul, you're excited about this. Variable refresh rate. Stoked. Yeah. Right?

The two new consoles are going to have variable refresh rate. It's great. It solves so many problems. Here's what Samsung has decided to brand variable refresh rate. You ready for this? Real Game Enhancer Plus. It's so good. It's so high quality.

Good job, Samsung. Game Enhancer. I get that, like, you can't just call it game enhancer because who knows what that means, right? Maybe you're just like you're screwing with the colors. Like, game enhancer on the game. Galaxy phones is like the worst nightmare ever. You can't get rid of it. So you got to call it Game Enhenser Plus.

Like I'm with, I'm with them there. The plus should be there. Wait, wait, wait. No, because you need to differentiate it from the other kinds of game enhancers it could possibly be. So your, wait, just to, your theory is that so many people are familiar with game enhancer on Samsung phones that they will, they will bring over that knowledge to their Samsung television. Yeah.

They'll be confused. I actually don't know if it's called Game Enhancer. Okay, so first, like, step one. The point is that I'm granting them the plus. They can have the plus. Why real? Is it a real game? Is it a real enhancer or is it a real plus?

What is the real affecting? And what would be fake in this world, in this context? Every time we do a story about, like, fixing your TV settings, like how to turn off motion smoothing, like half of the story is like, here's Samsung's dumb name for the feature. Here's LG's dumb name for the feature. And it's like,

how did we end up in this place? They had a meeting. They had a meeting where they named it something in Korean and they had a meeting where they named it something in English and in Spanish. Like they had to localize the name, the ship it all around the world. Yeah.

Dozens, if not hundreds of people have encountered the phrase, real game enhancer plus in dozens if not hundreds of languages. And they're all like, Yeah, that's fine. I don't, this company is absolutely it. If anyone works at Samsung,

let me just like to let me just run around and see how it works for a while, I would, I would just, I'd be so happy. I have two quick points to make. One is, I think I already mentioned this, but on a different episode, but the new, the HTML 2.1, it sounds like they'll have like a mode, it will negotiate game mode for you. It will ask your television, go into low latency, go into your, real game mode or whatever.

Do you think that the Xbox will like, the Xbox plugs in over H-TMI 2.1 to Samsung TV and Xbox says, hey TV and Samsung says, hey, Xbox. And Xbox says, hey, can you turn on that game mode? And Samsung's like, which one? I'm not sure, what do you call it? And Samsung is like, you know, I call it real game-enhanced Petsbit Plus.

And it's like so embarrassed, it just shuts off. This is like instead of doing the link negotiation using like binary or hex, it's actually just like, Bixby is talking to Cortana in natural language and like they feel shame. That's how the new, that's how HDMI 2.1 works as far as I'm aware.

My second point is that time is an illusion and therefore variable refresh rate is probably closer to reality. I mean, it's happening. Like you can, you're going to be able to buy the TVs this year. Yeah. You'll be able to buy the consoles.

I'm like, like, it's here. It's sweet. It's actually, we have not talked about enough. It is very, it is, it is one of those things that no one will pay attention to because it's so nerdy, but we'll actually make everything from, like, smart TV interfaces to video games a thousand times better. And we'll do that for 45 minutes on the Vergecast coming up next week. Because we are like in an hour and 40 right now.

Dieter, you've got S-20 review next week, right? The regular. I do. We're shooting it this week, and it'll be up next week. So we'll be back with that next week. Like I said, at the top of the show on Tuesday, Nicole and Liz are joining me in an interview episode to go deep on coronavirus. That is the biggest story.

It is rather unfortunately not local dimming on LCD TVs. The biggest story in the world is coronavirus. So look for that on Tuesday. We'll be back next week with the chat show. It's a busy time and all of us are stuck at home. So we've got nothing to do but come up with spicy takes for the website. So keep paying attention to the verge.com. That's it.

Rock and roll. Paul. Provo code.