The Vergecast - New chips, new screens, new gadgets

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of the many definitions of electronic paper:  03:12 -The Verge’s David Pierce takes a look at the Boox Palma, a phone-shaped e-reader that runs Android. He also compares notes with Clockwise’s Matt Martin and writer Craig Mod.  The Boox Palma is an amazing gadget I didn't even know I wanted New Pop-up Walk, Reading Digitally in 2024 — Roden Newsletter Archive  30:06 - The Verge’s Nathan Edwards and Tom Warren join the show to discuss their experience using Microsoft’s new Surface Copilot PCs. They also answer a question from The Vergecast Hotline. Surface Laptop 7th Edition review: Microsoft’s best MacBook Air competitor yet With Copilot Plus, the new and improved Windows PCs are here  Microsoft’s embarrassing Recall  Microsoft makes Copilot less useful on new Copilot Plus PCs  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the many, many definitions of electronic paper. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am at the park for research and journalism, as you do. So I have this new device. It's called the Daylight DC-1, and it's a tablet, obviously, but the idea is that it's a different kind of tablet. It doesn't use a big, bright, colorful screen like the iPad, but it's also not an e-ink screen, which has sort of slow refresh rate and doesn't have some of the things. that you want from like a smoothly scrolling, easy typing tablet. It tries to be a middle ground.

And I find that middle ground really interesting. I've been using this tablet a lot. They really want you to use it outdoors. It's called the daylight. It comes in this like plush sort of outdoorsy case instead of like the sleek, metallic fabric-y thing you normally get with a tablet. And it's designed to just be a simpler kind of technology.

And I have a lot of testing left to do with this thing, but so far it's not that impressive a gadget, but I still find it fascinating. because I think this idea that what if instead of totally, you know, ground up reinventing every kind of gadget that exists in the world, we just tweaked the formula a little bit. Different kinds of screens, different sizes,

different shapes, different fabrics, different textures, and maybe that changes the way that we'll feel about these things and the way that we use them in more interesting ways than just, you know, throw it all away and try again. To some extent, that is actually what we're going to talk about in this episode. First, we're going to talk about an e-ink device called the Books Palma that I'm sort of obsessed with. We'll talk about why in a few minutes.

After that, we're going to talk about the new Surface laptop and Surface Pro from Microsoft, which are still very gadgety gadgets, but they're making this big bet that AI and a new kind of chip from Qualcomm can change how you feel about something that still looks like a tablet and still looks like a laptop, but might mean something else to you. It's a very gadgety episode, but it's also, I think, going to get strangely philosophical in spots. I'm very excited about it. We also have a question new from the hotline, lots to get to.

All that is coming up in just a second, but I have never played pickleball before, and those people are playing pickleball. I'm going to go learn how to play pickleball. This is the Vergecast. We'll see you in a sec. 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 in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. 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.

Welcome back. So one of the things that happens when you write about technology is that you tend to accumulate a lot of technology. This is like the world's best problem to have, by the way. I just have a million gadgets around all the time. And the truth is, very few of them have much staying power in my mind. life. I test something out maybe to write about it, maybe just to understand all this stuff a little better, and then it goes in a drawer or sits in a desk or goes back to whoever sent it to me until I have another question about it. I try new stuff for a living, which, again, it's great,

cannot recommend it enough, which is what makes the book's Palma kind of remarkable. I've got it right here. I almost always have it with me now, actually. It's a device that on paper is pretty much a smartphone. 6.1 inch screen, 6 gigs of RAM, camera on the back, runs Android, but it's not a smartphone. Because that 6.1 inch display is an E-ink screen, the E-ink carda-1200, if you're really curious, which makes the Palma kind of the exact middle between a smartphone and a Kindle. And for me, that turns out to be kind of perfect. The Palma launched last fall, and I remember being sort of interested in it back then. Books, the company, it's B-O-O-X, by the way, has been making these interesting E-ink Android devices for a while. And they started kind of clunky, but have

steadily gotten better over time. It's a China-based company, and it sells like a million different devices. There's the Books Note Air 3C and the Books Tab Ultra and the Books Page and the Books Leaf and the Books Leaf 2 and the Books Note Air 2 and the Books Go color. Basically every size of e-reader you can imagine, you can get. I already have a lot of e-readers, though. I read a lot on my iPad. I have a couple of Kindles of various sizes and generations. I have a remarkable tablet that I really like. I'm honestly good on e-ink devices. The Palma is also $280, which is a lot for an e-reader.

But I ended up getting one anyway, because over the months since it launched, I've seen a surprising number of people talk about how much they love this thing. So I got mine a couple of months ago, and I have to say, I understood the appeal pretty much right away. For me, there are two things about the Palma that have actually made it stick in my life. The first is just the size.

The fact that it fits in my pocket and is really easy to hold in one hand is a total game changer. That sounds sort of ridiculous to say, but it's really been true. It's easier for reading in bed. It's easier to bring with me on a walk or to a coffee shop. I can lug the palma the same way I lug my phone, and that has just made me have it around more often. The second thing is the fact that it runs Android, which, I mean, obviously, right? That's like the whole book's thing. Instead of just having to do everything through Amazon on a Kindle or through Barnes & Noble on a Nook,

you get the whole universe of Android stuff. For me as a reader, that means I can have three crucial things on the device at the same time. The place I read books, which happens to be the Kindle app, the place I read articles, which is an app called Readwise Reader, and the place that I save web pages and other links to get to later, which is an app called Rain Drop. All of my reading, no matter what form it takes, now lives on this one device with an E-ink screen.

Any app with pagination, you can scroll with the volume buttons on the side, which I really love. The battery lasts a long time, somewhere between like a few days and a week, depending on how I use it. I'm not distracted by other stuff because I don't have any other stuff because TikTok and YouTube all really suck on an e-ink screen. It's just perfect. I did also install pocketcasts and Spotify, which are where I listen to podcasts and music.

So now this thing is both my Kindle and my iPod. I go online to download new stuff, then I put the thing in airplane mode, and I'm good to go. Anyway, I sound like I'm shilling for the books palma, and I kind of am. I love this thing. But it's not because this is some magnificently perfect unique gadget. It's kind of flimsy. I wish the screen were higher res. I wish it supported a silas.

It's pretty slow even when you're just trying to get to the home screen. And most problematically by far, it's running Android 11, which is now four years old, and I am deeply worried it's never going to get updated past that. The upside of Kindle is that my Kindle from whatever six years ago still works great. There are lots of things about the Palma that I wish were better. And very little about it, actually, that someone else couldn't do better. But that's actually what's been so fun about using this thing. It has totally proven to me that there is something in this hardware combination, an e-ink display

in the body of a smartphone with all the apps I need. That's it. It's worse than my phone at a lot of things, but massively better than my phone in just enough ways that it's worth having around. I've spent a lot of time testing out new kinds of gadgets this year, smart glasses and AI pins and foldable devices and weird new ideas about tablets. And as it turns out, the thing I like the most is just a new take on the smartphone. Anyway, I wanted to know what other people liked about the palma and why this thing has been such a hit with people who have tried it.

So I called up a couple of them to chat about it. The first person I called was Matt Martin. He runs a company called Clockwise, and I actually caught him a few weeks into parental leave. He said he found the Palma the same way I did because people just wouldn't stop talking about it. People in my feed that really loved good products, look good designs. People like hit the zeitgeist somehow and like the little tech world that we live in. I also am having a new kid and I was like, well, I aspire to read. I aspire not to spend my 30 minutes before bed on Instagram Reels.

And so I got it. And I have to tell you, like, the thing that I find really quite compelling about it, even after using it for a month or so, is having a full OS on it. Like the Kindle, you're in Amazon's little world where, you know, it's the Kindle operating system running on top of Android, but you only have access to what Amazon gives you. It is basically a full version of Android. You can go to the Google Play Store. I downloaded the New York Times app.

I downloaded InSepaper. I downloaded Libby. And I download the Kindle app, which, by the way, makes for just some good reading experiences on a Kindle. And that's actually, it's the combination of the portability and be able to, like, flip through online articles that are cultivated in the New York Times and actually flip through things. It's actually pretty, I wouldn't say it's revolutionary, but it's an evolution that transforms the device for me to make it pretty compelling and something I'll reach for. I totally agree. The argument I have heard against this device is basically like just download those apps onto your phone. You do this. Like what is the point of having a whole separate dedicated device just for this? And I think to some extent the answer is like e-ink is nicer to look at. But it also feels like there's some there's something about having a thing that feels like a dedicated device. Even though it's not a totally dedicated device. That it's like I could put all the stuff I don't want to look at on the

Palma, and for some reason I haven't, and I don't feel tempted to, there is a web browser, and no part of me is tempted to go look at the web browser. And I have a hard time figuring out why that is. So I am addicted to New York Times little games. I play them with friends, and I was like, oh, I could play connections on here. Even that I find not compelling to do. Like, if it's outside of reading, I don't really want to do it on the Palma. And I think that the answer is probably not a very exciting one, which is that, you know,

as humans, you know, there's. just the old anecdote that we were probably all taught in Psych 101, which is that physical environment matters. Like, if you set up an environment for a specific context, your brain actually is kind of part of where to take into context and get prepared for that. And I think a separate device matters here a bit. Like, if I'm on the context of my phone, there's just like that muscle, like, you know, iOS has become so refined of getting between the application so quickly. Like, I can have a random thought. And this happens all the time. Like, sometimes you're reading, you're in a slow section, you have that random thought about like, oh, what was that thing that I wanted to buy on Amazon?

And you're there without even thinking about it. And now I'm on like a rabbit hole of attention that I didn't mean to be on. This is part of the reason I've been so interested in this gadget ecosystem for so long as I think anybody who says, oh, just use your smartphone differently. It's a matter of willpower. It's just like, no. You're wrong. And that's not how it works. And also, I don't, my phone is very good at a lot of things.

I'm happy. It's good at those things. So what, give me the full list of the apps you have on there. You mentioned Kindle, New York Times. What else you have? That's basically it, man. I mean, so it was kind of wild. I realized when I was logging and everything that I could install one password and like it would just work.

Oh, that's smart. Integrated, because, you know, it's a full install of Android. So I have, in addition to those, I have one password, an audible, Wikipedia, but I really, the home screen is just four apps. It's just Kindle, it's a paper or New York Times a lady. Because, again, it's a dedicated device for me. I don't really even seek out the other applications, do you said? Like you said, there's a web browser, and I don't really have any impulse to go use that. Do you wish there were things this thing could do that it doesn't?

What do you dislike about the Palma? Not yet. Honestly, I'm very happy with it. So I'll answer to all this. We're like, look, let's just acknowledge that we're weirdos. I wouldn't screen for the mountaintops that everybody should go get in books, Palma. Like, my mom would probably love this thing, but also she probably shouldn't get one. Like, it's fine.

And I'm also not like, I don't quite nerd out despite my profession being in a company that focuses on focus time and helping people more time in their day. I actually don't geek out on like all these different apps that try to, you know, give you more time to focus or prune your little garden when you're trying to focus your elements. But I just find the thing compelling because it helps me read. Like that's it. Full stop, full story. Yeah. I was at a pediatric appointment and I stuck in my pocket because I knew it would be waiting around. And I was sitting there and I pulled it out.

read an article that I'd say instead of pulling on my phone and looking at some dumb crap on Instagram. And like, I don't know, small win, but it kind of feels good. The way Matt put that was something I've been thinking about a lot ever since. When I have my phone in my pocket, my impulse when I pull it out is to open threads or TikTok or Instagram. I can fight that impulse and be productive and do the thing that I wanted to do, but that's still the impulse. When I have something like the Palma in my pocket, I open it up and my impulses is to open up Readwise or the Crosswords app. It just incentivizes a different kind of behavior in a way that I really like.

After I talk to Matt, the next person I called is probably the single person most responsible for all the other people in my threads feed talking about the palma. It's this guy. I'm Craig Maud and I'm a writer and photographer, and I make books. Craig wrote a blog post in early May about why he loves the palma, which got a lot of people excited. Craig has been thinking and writing about digital reading for a really long time. So for him to love a reading device is a pretty meaningful thing, actually.

especially because, as he told me, he never expected to love a digital reading device ever again. Oh, I totally stopped, hoping for the best, a long time ago. That's why I stopped writing about it. That's why I stopped talking to companies that would, like, you know, people would email me, be like, hey, I'm doing a startup around digital books. It's like instantly into the trash. Like, no. Yeah, good luck with that. I know how that song ends.

Earlier this year, though, the folks at Readwise called up Craig to talk to him about some digital reading stuff. He's actually an advisor to the company these days, but he also does just like the app. And so do I. It's very good. And they ended up showing him the palma. He bought one, along with one of the other larger books tablets, and immediately fell in love with it. So we compared notes for a little while.

I'm excited about this idea that ENC screens are cheap enough that anyone can kind of produce these devices now. And Android is an operating system. And, you know, in general, touch-based tablet operating systems, like, whatever, we've figured them out. We figured them out a long time ago. There's no cancer to be solved in tablets anymore. it all works the same. They're all fine. And so like Android is totally good enough. So like the fact

that you can kind of stick an Android computer into a device that has a great E-ink screen and run the Kindle app, which by the way, Kindle devices are just Android devices. Oh yeah, that's true. They're just running the Kindle app and that's all they run. And the books, folks, runs every Android app in the app store, runs the Readwise Reader app. So suddenly you have all your long form reading, beautifully synced between all your devices. The Reader ReWise Reader app is actually really thoughtfully done the scroll design that they released earlier this year. Do you do the paginated scroll?

Yes. Yes. And I love it. I think it's so good. I turned that on the second they launched it. And I have switched to and from Instapaper 100,000 times just because it paginates. Yeah. And I don't, especially for very long things, I just don't want to scroll it like a web page.

No. I told the Readwise folks like a year ago, like, please, dear God, just give you pagination. And they were like, I don't know, I'm not sure anybody except you wants that. And I was like, all right, fair enough. Understood. And then they launched it. And it was instantly everything about my reading life got better. Yeah.

No. And they did a really good job with it. And I love how they do the breaks. And with like the books pama, you can set the volume buttons as the scroll buttons. And it's just perfect one-handed reading. And there is something. You're absolutely right. Scrolling and reading long text sucks.

It sucks. And this is one of the reasons why I think if you looked at engagement on laptop screens, like long text, I can't. I can't read something over a thousand words on a laptop. I just can't do it. And so I've given up on it. So everything gets sent to reader. You know, you just click the little icon, you know, in your extensions bar and Chrome or whatever.

And boom, it's in Reader, readwise reader. And, you know, it's on all these devices waiting to be read, beautifully paginated. You can do note taking, highlighting, synced beautifully. It goes into Obsidian. The Obsidian synced notes. You can see them. You click on them. It opens a readwise reader on the web.

All the loops are closed for engagement around long form reading. And I have found since getting these devices, because I used to send long-form articles to the Kindle, but it was such a clumsy affair. And the notes weren't really synced and saved. And it just felt like I was throwing things away, and I'd never be able to go back to them. And the archive was bad. Now that I can use Readwise Reader and I have an E-ink device that has essentially a week-long, two-week-long battery life, I never think about charging these things.

Even now, it's like 44 percent I've been using this for the last week. And now that I can do that, that ecosystem has completely reinvigorated all of my digital. reading and long-form reading. I've read more long-form articles in the last three months than I have probably in the last year. And I just love it. I love it. I love that everything that the Kindle had a monopoly on, which was mainly hardware and screens, that's gone. The mode is totally gone. And it feels like we're at this, now at this precipice, high refresh ink screens, low-cost Android devices. Let's go. Let's do something interesting around this space. Like, it's just really exciting. What is it about the palma in particular that sort of speaks to you?

Oh, you can just have it in your pocket. This is one of the things that drove me insane about the oasis. It's like, I like the oasis. The shape of it is shaped so it can't fit in any pocket known to man. It's the craziest shape I've ever seen in my life. It doesn't fit into any pocket. I don't know how they did it. It's like they went around the world and they checked every pocket.

And they're like, okay, make it one millimeter bigger than every single angle. So this, you know, this palma I'm holding right now, so light, it fits anywhere. You can just have it in your breast pocket. You can have it in your pant pocket, whatever. So it is my like go-to thing to have on trains whenever I'm traveling. I pull this thing out and I'm reading on it. It's also my bedtime computer. You know, it's like you can be in bed. All the lights are off. All the backlight stuff on these books devices are pretty well done. It's kind of like a, I don't know if it's a warm backlight, but it's like you can have it low enough or it doesn't really feel like it's affecting sleep. It's just perfect. One-handed. It's not heavy. It's not

going to fall on your face in a weird way. You can be on your side. You got it in your hand with your thumb on the volume controls and you can just easily go through an article until you fall asleep. It's like a gentle lullaby of a reader. It's great. And it makes you wonder why hasn't someone made an E-Inc phone? Because it's so everything that I'm looking for in a device is like the poma, the refresh rate is high enough. I mean, have you watched video on these things? It's really wild. Like it disincentivizes you from watching video, but the fact that this E-ink screen can update fast enough to show you video and it looks like video and it doesn't have that much ghosting, that just means that you can do highly interactive interfaces that wouldn't

be annoying to type messages on, do the basics. You could run Google Maps on this thing in Zoom and do searches and it would be fine. And I would love to have this as my main driver, so much more than, you know, the dopamine casino iPhone where it's like vying for your attention every two seconds and all the notifications looks so good, and it's just such a juicy device to be spending time with. But this pama, it really has reconfigured, like, because I hadn't been paying attention to the state of e-ink. And so, you know, the state of ink for me was whatever the latest Kindle was doing. And, you know, you don't really get a sense of how good it is with the Kindles. And these books devices have really

blown my mind, just how fast ink can be and how joyful it is to run all these different apps in the ink. Yeah, what do you do on the poma other than real? That's it. So that's the other great. All I run is Reader and Kindle, but I've, you know, poked around on the, if I need to do a web search, which I very rarely do, but if I need to, I can. And if I need to buy a Kindle book, I can go to the Kindle website and run that. And, like, the fact that I can do that and it doesn't feel like a burden or like I'm taxing the machine, you know, whereas like on the Kindle, anytime you had to load up the experimental, the experimental, not like 14 years later, still experimental browser. Disaster.

Doesn't work. Doesn't work well at all. Yeah, no, it's absolutely terrible. Yeah, it's just maybe you go, wow, there's a whole world of E-ink exploration that hasn't happened and can happen now. And the technology is clearly, like, the IP is, I think there's a lot of IP issues or whatever it was expensive to license before. Maybe that's all changed.

Yeah. And now you can make things like this, which is incredible. I love it. More E-ink, please. I agree. And I actually think what you said, the, like, if you need to, you can. To me, it's like the perfect description of everything about the Palma. Because, like, yes, you can watch video.

but it sucks. You wouldn't want to sit and watch a video. But ultimately, it's like if I need to watch a video in service of the thing that I'm reading for a minute, it's there. I will get through it. I will get the thing that I need out of it. And then I'll go back to reading, which is what I'm after here.

For sure. And so that to me is like the fact that it does all of these things, the fact that it does them poorly has actually become a feature or not a bug for me, which is not what I expected when I first got this device. It's the absolute perfect amount of friction. Yeah, yeah. Whereas the Kindle is too much friction

for doing most things. The book's devices, it's like just a little bit of friction where it's like, as you say, it's like you wouldn't want to go surf YouTube and be like, all right, let me watch MKBHD, you know, his most recent video on this thing. But if I needed to watch a little interview with Dennis Johnson talking about train dreams or whatever, like I could pop into that for a second and be like,

exactly like you said, get what you need to get out of it and go back into the reading. And that's exciting. And I think the perfect amount of friction is exactly what no one is willing to, bake into most devices. And this is kind of happening almost like as a byproduct, a natural byproduct of the technology. And that feels organic and really lovely. Totally. Is there anything you would change about the Palma, like as a gadget? I'd probably get rid of the camera.

I'd simplify it even more. I forgot it had a camera. Just this moment was the first time I've thought about the Palma's camera since the second I got it. Yeah, I've taken a few photos with it. It's kind of funny to then look at them, you know, later. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's right. I could take photos with this. But I'd probably put the volume rockers on both sides, so you could do page change on both sides of it, and just really optimize for like, if you're holding it with your right hand or left hand,

you have the exact same kind of hardware interaction model. I'd probably move the power button at the top because I think that's the best place for all power buttons. I think the iPhone power button on the side was the worst hardware change they made to the iPhone in the history of the iPhone. I mean, just because how many times do you accidentally, you know, do screenshots

And, you know, anyway, I love power on the top, which, by the way, this other books model does power on the top in their tablet. And that feels really good. And then just, yeah, just have those page trim buttons on both sides. And then I think that's it. Maybe the screen, like, I do feel like the screen on this thing is not extremely well protected. You know, I would. Interesting, yeah. I would love to see a gorilla glass version of this.

What would that feel like? How much heavier would it make it? I wouldn't want the body to be metal. I think this plastic body, I think the texture on the back of it is fine. I think lightness is a huge bonus when it comes to devices like this. And I just worry, like, sometimes when I put it in my bag, I'm like, is this screen going to get messed up? I'm still treating it. I'm not babying it at all.

I'm just throwing it in my bag. And I'm like, okay, whatever's going to happen is going to happen. But I do feel like a stronger, even just like a couple generations old gorilla glass might be a really. interesting modification. I don't know what the IPX rating is, but I'd want to make sure it would be fully submergeable. Those would be, you know, I see the POMA more as like a long-form reading Renaissance device rather than a digital book Renaissance device. I buy it. Hopefully it can be that too, though. Hopefully it can create better interfaces for digital books as well, not just for long-form articles. Totally. Yeah. And honestly, like, I have spent so many years wondering why Amazon has not

just built a decent way to read web articles on the Kindle. And if books just makes Amazon do that, it will have done the world of great service, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. It's never going to happen. No, no, no. You just have to accept that there's a certain size of company that internally just doesn't have the willpower to do these things where you look at the spreadsheet and you go, what's the market cap of this? What's, you know, it's essentially a rounding error. You know, it's zero. And it's just not going to happen unless you have a sea level person who owns it.

And I think with Jeff out of Amazon, I don't know anyone there who is. an avid old GQ, you know, Esquire reader or whatever. Right. It's like, we've got to make this amazing to read old Gay Talese articles or whatever. You know, it's like. Yep. So thankfully, we don't have to because the E-ink technology is now trickled down to everyone else.

And companies like books, which we should say, and I think it's important to say, books is a bad open source citizen. I don't know if you know about this, but like they are using, I think, Android models or Android software in a way that. that breaks the terms of the open source license. Oh, interesting. Like if Hacker News ever, like of a books device article comes up on Hacker News, you know, people go nuts about this and bring it out.

And I think it is important to bring up. Yeah. Because they are effectively violating the license. And I think it would be very easy for them to not violate it. And I think we should talk about this in podcast like this and say, hey, books, can you just be a good citizen? It's like such a dumb, easy thing to do. Why aren't you doing it?

and we'd love to, you know, it would help me even more enthusiastically recommend these devices. You know, I know anecdotally, I have probably sold at least a couple hundred of these things in the last couple of months. At least, these are people just messaging me directly. So it's probably in the thousands of folks who bought pommas and are using them. And in fact, anyone listening to this who has bought a Palmer and has had an interesting experience with it. I'd love sent. Please write into us. Tell us what changes you would like to see. I'd love to hear how people are using these things are thinking about it, but it does seem like we're in this moment where maybe, maybe, just maybe, digital reading of long form stuff could, the interfaces for it could change, the way we interact with these libraries could change,

and it's an exciting moment. I really agree with what Craig said there. I do think this is an exciting moment. I think there are a lot of companies out there being like, we will replace your smartphone. And I think that's mostly ridiculous. But I also think that there are a lot of. lot of things that can be done better than the way our phones do them, and it's fun to watch gadgets explore that. Sometimes they get it wrong, like the Humane AI pin, but there's still something to the idea that not everything should be inside of your smartphone. I've been using the Rayban meta smart glasses as a way to take photos without sticking my phone

in my kid's face. I've been using the Apple Watch as a faster way to set reminders or take notes, and I've been using the Palma as a way to read and listen to stuff without the rest of my digital life getting in the way. None of these things replace my phone all the time, but they do some of the time, and I think that might be enough. All right, enough about E. Inc. for now. We got to take a break, and then we're going to come back and talk about some Windows computers. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. We've talked a lot on this show over the last several weeks about this new generation of Windows PCs. Thanks to a new set of chips from Qualcomm and this new co-pilot AI stuff from Microsoft, the whole co-pilot plus PC idea, which is a name I really hate, but a concept I think is very cool, feels like it might be a moment in the history of PCs.

If these computers are as good and as versatile and as long-lasting and as powerful as Microsoft and Qualcomm would like you to believe, this could be really exciting for the whole laptop and desktop industry. It's been kind of a weird rollout, though. There was the whole issue with recall, which was Microsoft's big new AI feature that would let you search through and organize basically everything you ever did on your computer. Turns out giant security disaster, at least in the way that Microsoft initially implemented it. So that's been slowed way down. I don't think a lot of people are going to be excited about it at first. So suddenly recall feels less cool and exciting and like the future of Windows than it once did. But we're still getting some of these devices. I still

have lots of questions. Companies basically across the PC industry are all in on this co-pilot plus PC idea. We're starting to see tons of new models. We're going to have lots of new reviews. But personally, the ones I'm most excited about are the ones that come from Microsoft. Microsoft has been at, I think, the forefront of Windows hardware for a pretty long time, and with the new Surface Pro and the new Surface laptop, is really trying to, I would say, show the rest of the industry how this co-pilot plus PC thing can work. So Tom Warren and Nathan Edwards on our team have been reviewing those devices.

They haven't told me anything about how it's going, and I am desperate to find out. So I am going to use the fact that we are here on the Vergecast to make them tell me things about these new devices. Let's get into it. Tom Warren. Hello. Hello. Hello. Nathan Edwards. Hello.

Hi, David. First, let's just level set a little. I want to know the Microsoft gear you both currently have right now. Tom, what do you have in your possession that you've been playing with? So I have the 13-inch Surface laptop, 7th edition. Not 7th, 7th edition. That's very important. Yeah.

The 15-inch model as well. Okay. The laptop. And I've also got the Surface Pro 11. It's the 11th edition, yeah. 11th edition, yeah. For our purposes, we're just going to call them the new ones because God help anyone who tries to keep all these numbers in their brains.

Yes. And that's both of you. So God help both of you. Nathan, you're on the pro. Which pro are you on? I have the top of the line, new pro. It's also 13 inches. It's got, they of course sent the tricked out version, 32 gigs of RAM, one terabyte of storage,

and the elite 80100 processor. So this is like if there is going to be one that kicks ass, it's going to be this one. Yes, this is their $2,100 without the keyboard model. Okay. That's serious business. So I have a lot of questions for both of you about both of these devices, but I feel like the place we have to start is with the chips, right? Like that is there are lots of stories of this thing, but I feel like the question most people want to know is like, did Qualcomm do the thing here? Are these things actually good?

So Nathan, let's start very top of the line. And then, Tom, I want to hear you're more like mainstreamy experience. But what have you, what have you seen so far, Nathan? How do these things hold up? It does not disappoint me. Really? Yes. That's so exciting.

I don't have to think, most of the time I don't have to think about the fact that it's not X-86. It's not perfect. And there are like places in which it's like not the top runner. But it's a good laptop. It's a good laptop, a good Windows laptop with an arm processor. Which you like really cannot overstate how big a thing that. is to be able to say at this moment of time.

Yeah, and Tom has the ProX, and he's done a little bit of, like, digging it out and brushing the dust off, and I want to hear more on that. But, like, this, I'm not fundamentally fighting the thing, except in the sense that I would be fundamentally fighting Windows anyway. Like, generally, with a few edge exceptions, it, like, just works. Tom, has that been your experience, too? Yeah, pretty much. And I'm obviously using the 99-99-0-0-0-0-0-Surfed laptop.

and that's the base model. So I've been using that one primarily for the past week because mainly because we obviously didn't get these beforehand for review and bargaining and all that sort of stuff. So I was like, I don't want the tricked out one. I want to test what the base model one is because it's got 16 giga RAM, 256 gig of storage,

and in the X plus processor, which is, I think for me now testing, the elite is around about 20% better performing, roughly. So that's kind of the gap. But in real terms, if you're just using you day to day, you're probably not going to know it unless you're really pushing it. But yeah, in terms of app compatibility, I'd say like, you know,

like the 90% of the apps you're going to use aren't going to be emulated. And the key one being the browser, right, which obviously everyone kind of lives in these days. But then outside of that, yeah, there's going to be some app compatibility things, some weird things like Google Drive desktop still doesn't work. But that isn't necessarily because it can't emulate. it's probably because Google's just flagged it not to. So there's weird things of like the past 10, 12 years of Windows and Arm being a bit crappy, coming back to sort of hauntled this time.

But Microsoft and Qualcomm have done a quite good job at like getting these software vendors to sort of play ball. And it's definitely a lot better than I've ever used in the past. That is super exciting. Nathan, have you run into anything that just like flatly didn't work? I mean, yeah, so Premiere Pro does not work, but they told us it wasn't going to work. You're going to hate this. ARC refuses to run. That's disappointing. It's my browser of choice on both Mac and Windows these days, although it's much better on Mac still.

And they were just like, sorry, we don't support Arm 64. Let us know if you want us to, to put my name in a little form. Please let me know. Yeah, please let it be known that we want it to. If you're listening, we would like that. But I would say that alone, those are things that presumably will get updated over time. And Tom, your point about the history of this maybe being a problem, that there are a lot of folks who were like actually turned it off

because the experience was so bad who are now going to have to be convinced to turn emulation stuff back on. My hope would be if the performance is as good as you guys are describing, that that'll start to happen fairly quickly. So even the stuff that exists, hopefully won't exist for too much longer.

Yeah, and with the Adobe stuff, so with Premiere Pro is quite a funny one because they disabled it or blocked it on the X elite, but they forgot to do it on the X plus. So I got it installed. And then I think they realized like a day later and then it dropped out my creative cloud but I still have it installed

and I can understand why they blocked it because so I try to process like a 4K a 22nd 4K video right on this thing and it was like stuttering like you couldn't just play it without it skipping and dropping frames and all that sort of stuff

I tried to explore and it said it was going to take five minutes to export and I was like for a 22nd 4G video that's like obviously way too long and for comparison this is really unfair comparison, but I'm going to make this comparison anyway. I tried it on my desktop PC, which is a 4,900K and a 4090, and it exported in seven seconds. I can see why they have Premier Pro blocked on there, because it's not a good experience. I feel like if you were trying to edit in that,

you would come, like, I feel like you'd make editing mistakes just from the basic, like, trying to crop a video or in the time and all that sort of stuff. It's just very laggy because it's obviously, yeah, it's not been optimized, and that is a heavyweight app. That Well, hopefully be better later this year once they release the actual Arm 64 version, which they've promised to. Got it. Okay. So it seems like the performance promises that we've gotten, some of it is like you won't notice the difference. And Nathan, it seems like that's kind of been your experience that most of the time you don't have to think about the fact that this is an arm processor instead of an X86 processor, which on its own giant terrific win. Microsoft in particular has also made a lot of noise about how it like beats the crap out of Apple Silicon and everybody is making large, grandiose performance claims here. Like in terms of actual raw performance, like good enough is a huge deal.

And that's frankly, I would say like that's the benchmark. And it sounds like we've mostly cleared it. And that's very exciting. How good are these actually that you've seen so far? Well, I want to preface by saying, Joan Anelius has our big benchmark article coming in a few days. That'll be the big word on it. The official word, but they are single core. They're not as good as the M3 at all.

Okay. They do pretty well on most things compared to the core ultra stuff and compared to Rise N8,000. But it's like, it's not like, it's not crushing anybody. They do, on the reviewers guide that this very funny, 58% faster than the M3, it is on very specifically on CineBench multi-core. Okay. Notably, it has about 50% more cores.

Each of those cores is slower than the M3 single core. There's just more of them, which is, you know what? Sure. Yes, sure. Fair. You did it. Like, good job. But it's competitive.

They're competitive, which is more than I could say for any Snapdragon-based Windows laptop before. Yeah, just to be in range feels like a victory. Yeah. Battery life is decent. Yeah, that was the next thing I was going to ask about, because this is hopefully the other big bribe product of. of switching to arm, what have you seen on the pro battery lifewise? So I haven't gotten a full day of battery out of it, but I've been doing a lot of benchmarking.

Okay. I haven't had like a full day of what I would consider my normal workday, just like doing spreadsheets and Word docs and Slack. Slack is still a battery killer. Every time I look at the battery usage thing, Slack is right up there. Maybe not as bad as it used to be on Arm. Slack is pretty bad on everything, to be fair. We should just do an episode at some point where we, We just sit and yell about all the apps that are grossly inefficient and messy on computers.

And we would spend a lot of time talking about Slack, I suspect. It's funny. It does to the computer what it does to our attention span. Just slowly destroys it. Tom, what are you seeing on the laptop? Yeah, really good battery life, to be honest. On the first day, I was, like, working outside, and it was like I had the screen at 100% brightness. I was downloading, like, multiple Steam games, doing video calls, working in Photoshop, all that sort of stuff. So I said that was probably more than my sort of average workday of using a laptop.

But I still got around about seven hours battery life on that day. And then in the evening I charged it up to like 100%. I was using it indoors at like, you know, 50% brightness. You didn't need the 100% brightness. And I think in around four hours it only drained 25%. So I was like, okay, that's good. And then I closed the lid and it had like 70% remaining at like 11pm. And I woke up the next day, did some stuff.

And then I ended up grabbing the laptop about midday. And it still had that 70%. It was like, I think I went to, went to sleep at like 72 and it had 70%. And I was like, okay, that's good as well. That's pretty exciting. Half the time, yeah, half the time you close a lid on Windows laptop, you're kind of like, is it going to wake? Like, just keep this thing plugged in because it's not actually going to,

it's going to just drain the battery overnight. So I've never seen it do that. It's usually like one or two percent. It drains overnight. Yeah. And to be it, I haven't left it long enough for like, you know, five, six nights to see whether that is one or two percent per day or if that's just a, you know, every time you sort of sleep it. But yeah, the battery life is phenomenal as long as you're in the native apps. Yeah. As long as you're doing sort of the lightweight stuff. So if I had a day, I think I had a day where I was working predominantly in like Slack and Discord and Chrome and WhatsApp, you know, not too heavy lifting apps. And I think I had a day where I was working predominantly in like Slack and like Slack and Discord and Chrome and WhatsApp, you know, and not, not too heavy lifting apps. And I think. And I think. And I think I charged it and I think I got sort of like something like six hours and it was about down 30% in those six hours. Wow. Okay. Which is pretty, yeah, which is quite surprising.

So yeah, but then if you start downloading stuff on Steam, which is an emulated app. Sure. Like I could notice it drop by like five to 10% just from downloading a big game on Steam. Not even playing, just downloading. Just downloading. Just as soon as it needs to do an emulated app, you can feel it. it working harder. And Steam's quite vigorous when it's downloading and unpacking games. On the CPU. Yeah. So it's understandable what it's done that. But yeah, it's emulated. So I'd be

very curious to see if there's ever going to be an on 64 Steam client and whether that would improve that. I'm sure that will be. Yeah, it feels like it's coming. But it seems like to me the two levels of battery test are like the first is sort of the cross-country flight test where it's like I can, I can use it in the airport and then like watch two movies. on it and then get to wherever I'm going without it dying. That's like, that's test number one. It feels like any laptop that can't pass that test sucks. And then there's the like use it all day and, you know, use it and don't charge till the next

morning. And this doesn't seem like it's quite gotten there. But it does seem like it probably passes the cross-country flight test, which again, for a pretty powerful Windows laptop is a big victory. And at least it's like it's not as good as Apple, which is pretty easily in the like I can use it all day and then charge it at lunch the next day with a lot of things. This doesn't feel like it's quite there, but it's almost there. And that's something. I think it probably is. Okay. If you're not doing the emulated stuff. Yeah, as long as you're not doing emulated stuff, I think so. Like,

I don't do the battery tests that other sort of reviews do where they just have a bunch of tabs or a bunch of videos going because that stuff is, it's not real world. You know, that's the stuff that Microsoft always says, you know, 15, 20 hours of video. Offline video playback. Like, who is that for? Yeah. But I do the real world stuff. And I think I charged it on Friday and I used it a bunch over the weekend. And then I haven't charged it since Friday and it's still that's 27%. Oh, all right. Then yeah, we're on to something there.

Nathan, it sounds like the pro is not quite as good though. It doesn't quite hang as well. I would say I haven't had the time. I haven't had the extended amounts of time to test it. So it was, yeah. Let me tell you, a Cineventch murders, murders the battery life. As does. Actually, what killed it was Blender.

So if you use Blender, don't get a Snapdragon thing yet. Like, if that's part of your workflow, it is emulated and it's not hitting the GPU course at all. It's just pure CPU compute. It's brute forcing it. It takes a long time and it's not pretty. That will, like, we're at now, like, if there's an app that you need that's not native yet, that's not to say this won't be a good choice, but I wouldn't go for it yet.

Yeah. And also, if ever a setup was going to set your computer on fire, blender running on the CPU would be the answer. Yes. It got toasting. Yeah, I would imagine. But not on the keyboard because that's detachable. Oh, yeah.

Okay, wait. I want to get into all the AI stuff. We have to talk about that for a minute. I totally forgot about that. This is very exciting. Tell me about this new keyboard setup and how you've been using it. So the Surface Pro has a detachable keyboard. It connects by Pogo pins.

That is the way it's always been. You can pull it off. It's like a little folio thing. This year, they finally put a battery in it. Not all of them, but there's the pro flex keyboard. It's Bluetooth. It's got a battery.

You want to take it off. You pull it off and it still works. And that feels like, obviously, this is the way detachable keyboards ought to be. Yes. Like often they're just like, here is a Bluetooth keyboard or here is a Pogo Pin keyboard

and you sort of have to pick. Pogo Pin is great because it doesn't run out of battery. But also, if you're in a situation where you want to detach the keyboard, then all of a sudden it's dead. But I love this thing. So how have you actually used it in practice? Like what, give me the detached use case?

Well, for example, for ergonomics, if you want to put the screen on like a big pile of books to get it higher up and keep your keyboard down below, you can do that. That's kind of the use case. As someone I spent years with like the, I would have the screen in the middle and I would put my laptop up on a stand next to it as kind of a second display. Having, being able to use the surface keyboard as the keyboard down on my desk for that, incredible. I will say that it is $350. And if your use case is like you're mostly at home with the thing running this as like your desktop, basically, and then you shove it in a bag once in a while I'll take it with you, you can buy a lot of really nice keyboards for $350 and then still have room in the budget for like the regular flex keyboard to take with you. Yeah, you can buy several really nice keyboards for $350. You can buy one really nice keyboard.

You can also buy one. It's like a third of the price of the size. I know, it's nuts. Yeah. It's truly nuts. It's $350 or $500, basically, with the slim pen. And like, many people consider a keyboard to be an important part of a laptop. Many people are saying, yeah.

But Microsoft, their big thing is like, listen, we give you options. You can have the regular Pogo pin one. You can have the Bluetooth one. If you already have a flex keyboard from a previous surface pro, you can just use that. It's backwards compatible. It's fine. So, like, I used to be like, oh, why? This isn't really a 999.

dollar laptop. It's $1,200 bucks, which you have the keyboard. But like, I do actually appreciate the optionality. Yeah, no, I totally buy it. Is there any other hardware stuff we should talk about? I feel like for the most part, the hardware is as it has been and it's still pretty good. I guess the OLED screen is new. Is that exciting? Has that changed your life in any meaningful way? It doesn't change my life. I mean, so it is 120 hertz variable. It goes up to 600 nits and then I think 900 nits of peak brightness for HDR. It's a nice screen. I will say 50% brightness or whatever, not quite enough. I keep having to crank it up a little bit.

And it does have a little faint grain to it at peak brightness where you can see the touch sensors in the panel. Several viewers have noticed this. We were talking back channel, Angel. Microsoft was like, we haven't noticed. And several reviewers like, yeah. They're like, don't worry about it. You're not seeing what you think you're seeing.

It's fine. It doesn't bother me. Welch noticed it. But no, it's a nice thing. I will say you're still in Donga Life. Two USBC ports. They do still have the surface connector on the. other side, which is like a magnetic proprietary connector, which again, Microsoft is like,

listen, you want to charge with that? It's fine. You can charge via USBC. That's fine. I have it connected to my, usually I have it connected to my like 32 inch 4K monitor with a USBC and it powers the laptop at full speed. It runs all those stuff. But right now, when you're not hooked in, two USB ports, C ports is still pretty limiting. Yeah, especially because there's no headphone jack. Yeah, it's not enough. I agree. I've gotten used to it as a MacBook error. user for years, but then every time I am forced to encounter a computer with more, it's like, oh, this is delightful. Like, I have a Surface laptop studio from a couple of years ago, and that thing just feels

like it has infinite ports compared to this one. It's just nice. Like right now, so we're recording, and I have my headphones plugged into a USBC dongle, and that takes up one port. And I have our microphone plugged into USBC, and that takes up the other port. And that's all the ports. I'm charging from the surface connector, so I'm glad that that's there. That's it.

Yes, I have dongles and gizmos and gadgets galore, but, like, it'd be nice. What do you think of the trackpad? It's fine. It's a track pad. I don't hate it. I don't love it. So I started using it today after using the bigger surface laptop trackpad for the last week, and I keep hitting the bottom of the key, like that, because they've made it vertically smaller.

Yes, it is a little compressed. It's small. You're right. I don't like that. Because the slim pen is always on display now as well, up the top. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so you've lost a little bit of, they just sort of shifted the keyboard down accordingly. Yeah, I don't love that.

The little cradle for the slim pen does charge the pen, which I do like. That's nice. Because I have an air with the new pencil pro. That thing just goes flying all over the place. Like, it magnus to the top to charge, but it's just, every time I pick it up, the pen flies off into the distance. I'm amazed I haven't lost it yet. You might have a magnet problem, but that's for another day. So wait, let's just talk about the AI stuff here for a few minutes before we switch gears.

The promise of all of this stuff is that it will do on device AI things that will make everything wonderful. Recall, obviously, its own story, not here. We'll worry about that another time. What stuff have you guys noticed in the course of testing these things that feels like it is part of the sort of AI PC future? I just want to say, as soon as I said that, Nathan's webcam started moving around, which I suspect is an answer to my question. A lot of gimmicks and a couple slightly useful features. Okay.

Hit me with the useful ones first. So the Windows studio effects on the webcam, some of them are kind of nice. So they use this absurd, like ultra-wide webcam on the Surface Pro that like makes you look like you're being looked at by a four-year-old. You're looming over them. And so they use the studio effects to crop that down to like center you and it follows you around the frame like you've got your dedicated camera person, like the Nessub Max. does. It's also got fake eye contact thing like NVIDIA uses. Oh, no, that stuff creeps me out.

I mean, yeah, it's creepy. It feels like a good idea. It's one of those things that like once that's not creepy, it'll be great. But at least everything I've seen so far, it veers toward creepy. Is it creeping you out right now? Now you pointed, it wasn't until you pointed it out. And now I feel like I'm looking too deep into your eyes through a webcam. So there's that. It does have live captioning, uh, which is on device. And it can caption. And it can caption. any video that's playing on your computer. Oh, that's cool. I tried it a couple of times.

I tried it in a video call with Antonio and with Joanna. And it translated Italian, like spoken on the fly pretty well, but it was like, you know, where's the library level? Italian. Sure. I tried playing it on Netflix. I was watching Delicious in Dungeon. You will be shocked that it could not keep up, nor did it match the quality of the actual

human translated subtitles. But it's serviceable. in a pinch, I guess. It seems to be. Okay. A little slow, but like, it's cool that it can do that on device. That's a cool use of the NPU. I've not been that impressed with any of the image creation or co-creation stuff,

although I'm curious if Tom has a different experience. Yeah, Tom, have you seen any features that have jumped out to you? I mean, there's not a lot, let's be honest. That stuff feels like a bit of a sideshow to the windows and arm stuff, really. I don't know why they need to make such a big deal out of it, because it's like they're laying the foundations for this stuff, but it's not quite there yet. So you've got, in paint, they've got image co-creator, which is interesting on the surface laptop

because one thing I should say is that it doesn't support pen input anymore. Like, where you could use the slim pen before on the previous models, you can't now. The image co-creative feature here pretty much relies on you drawing what you want to see, which obviously you can do on a track pad, but it's kind of a little bit not the best way to draw you just want to do on the screen,

what you'd have to touch. So yeah, that feature seems a little bit, less useful than on the pro. If I'm honest, because it's just way more easy just to draw. But even still, it just uses like a local AI model, which I think it's using, is this stable diffusion you're using, I think? Yeah, they told us it was stable diffusion. And the results are pretty bad.

Yeah. I mean, what would you expect from paint? I don't know how high my bar for quality would really be there. Yeah, I tried to draw like a dog on a beach with a ball. And it drew the dog fine. but it just refused to pick up the fact that I'd drawn a ball. And in the prompt, I'd said I wanted a ball. It was just like this lonely dog, looking all sad on the beach.

And it just, yeah, it just looked junk anyway. But even though it's using a local AI model, you still need to be connected to the internet. And I know this because when I first did hands on May 20th, you could turn off the Wi-Fi and do the image creation in a Photos app. And it had no feel, so you could put Bill Gates, you know, whatever. You could do the typical Mario stuff, and it would generate it. And it was really bad because stable diffusion.

It wasn't very good. But you could do it. But they've changed that now. So you have to sign in. You have to be online, even though it's using AI local model to do that. The same is true for co-creator. Yeah. Like it generates it on device with the limited model that it has.

And then it runs it by the safety filters just in case. That's right. Yeah. But it could just, why not just send it off to a more powerful model somewhere else? Yeah, it's an odd way of doing that. you're actually doing all the hard stuff in the place where you wouldn't want to do the hard stuff. It's a very weird system. In general, though, it feels like the read on these so far, at least to me, seems like the basics are good, right?

That like, Tom, what you're saying is that the Windows on Arm thing is a much bigger deal, that it's like, okay, we've now done the thing that Windows now works pretty well on Arm. We'll solve some of these last remaining apps and use cases. But the question of like, so what do we do with that doesn't really seem like it's answered yet. And I guess maybe that's supposed to be recall, right? That, like, this is what we get with all this new stuff. But the, like, what is now possible and cool and new and exciting because we've made Windows

on Armwork and because these Qualcomm chips are good? It doesn't really feel like either of you have found a super exciting, compelling answer to that yet. Is that fair? No, I think it's because they're pretty much laying the groundwork for this stuff. So it's kind of, like, build it and they'll come. That's their approach, right? And obviously, a recall is supposed to be the flagship feature here.

But obviously, we can't, we can't try it yet. So, I mean, I have been using it for like two weeks on the Surface ProX when it was, you know, you could hack it to get it working. So I've got some thoughts on it. But yeah, like, I feel like even with that, it's not like a massive selling point. Like that's not really, I don't think, the reason you're going to buy this laptop. It's mainly because you want a good performing laptop that's thin and light and it actually has good battery life. You know, and as a base model at $999 is like pretty compelling. Like it's $100 less than a MacBook care M3 model.

That in itself is compelling enough, I think, to get people to buy it. So I don't know why Microsoft had to kind of like put these AI tricks in there that aren't, they're not really that impressive. Maybe recall. Yeah, sure. Might be impressive. Controversial. Nathan, is that where you've landed to kind of very good device?

Nice job. But this is not like a brand new day for the. the PC era yet? Yeah, I mean, I think that all of the AI stuff is they have this processor and they're trying to figure out reasons to use it. It's free real estate. They're looking for something to do with AI because AI is buzzy. It's on the chips anyway.

They've got the NPUs. What do you got to find something to do? But the reason to buy this thing, yeah, like Tom said, it's got good battery life. It's a, it's nice. Yeah. It's a third option. It's a good option, not for gaming, but for like normal productivity. stuff, like, seems like a good value.

Yeah. And yeah, I just kind of ignore the AI stuff for now. Somebody will find something useful to do with it, maybe, probably. Like, they've got to compute there, even just as it is. If that, if that module wasn't there at all, I don't think I'd notice. And it wouldn't change my opinion that much. Yeah, that's fair. I'm sitting here looking at my new iPad Pro and I feel precisely exactly the same way about it.

I tried to work on an iPad a couple weeks ago on vacation. and I hated every second of it. And I was like, why can't they just, you know the refrain. Oh, yeah. Just put MacOS on it. Whatever. Just put a real operating system on it. I will say, I got the Surface Pro, and I opened it up, and I was like, a real operating

system. I can have two windows side by side. I can run something in the background. I can do stuff. I can download utilities. I have a clipboard manager. You know what? And I can still watch Netflix if I really want to.

It's not a bad setup. Alex Cranz has been running around for two months saying everybody, who thinks they want an iPad pro actually wants a surface. And I think she's not crazy about that. No, she's not wrong. I mean, you very much still are using Windows 11. And therefore, you're on, you're like, especially on a surface, you're like fully locked into Microsoft's vision of the future of Windows, which involves a lot of opting out of things. In my experience, they're just really trying to push certain things like, would you like to use Edge? How about binging it? At a very funny moment where I,

I logged into my Edge account. So I use Edge on by a normal Windows laptop. And it's like, fantastic. Thanks for using Edge, the default browser. Now you're Bing and stuff again. That's not the search engine I asked for. Thank you. Yeah.

No, I'm good on that. I'm good on that front. All right, this is actually a good segue into a question we got on the hotline. We need to take a break really fast. Can you guys stick around and help me answer this question? Yes. Sure. All right.

Cool. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy. answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator

that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.

cloud. a. a. slash vergecast. That's clod. com.com. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.i. slash vergecast. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things.

One, being willing to unite. Lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have. All that, that's like secondary, third. Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually.

Let's dig in. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembark, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. public health officials seem remarkably calm.

We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Virgcast hotline. As always, the number is 866, Verge 1-1.

Send all of your questions. You can also email Vergecast at the verge.com. Send us all of your questions. the weirder the better. We've gotten some weird ones, and I enjoy it very much. This week, we have a question about precisely what we've been talking about, and it comes from Dean. Hey, my name is Dean. I'm from Northern Virginia. The question that I have is regarding Windows 11 computers and what's going to happen in the market. Now that the new Windows on Arm units are being released, will the market be some new style Windows 11 and some of the old ones?

still on the market or do you think soon the x86 architect would be completely gone and people will only be able to purchase the so-called AI PCs and I was wondering if there will be a massive you think there will be massive fire sale as the x86 inventory gets cleared out do you think it'll be a high-end low-end situation where the new architecture will be at the high end and the x86 will be at the low end just wondering how you see the PC market shaking out once the AI PCs, Windows on ARM PCs come on the market. Thank you. All right, Nathan, you were making several faces during that. Tell me what you think. I do not think that Snapdragon, I don't think that Arm is going to wholesale replace X-86

for Windows computers. Certainly not on the low end, because at least for now, Microsoft has mandated 16 gigs of RAM, and I think it's 256 gigs of storage. And the cheapest copilot plus PC we've seen so far is about a grand. I don't know. think we've seen anything under the 999 mark at the moment. They don't really have anything that can compete with like a $400 Windows laptop on price, nor do they have anything for gaming. They don't work right now with dedicated GPUs. The internal GPUs are not for gaming at all. No. I mean, you can do some casual stuff, but they're not going to wholesale replace. I don't think it's going to be a high low either because I think there's still going to be your high end x86 stuff, not just for

gaming, but for anything that requires serious graphical processing. Also, compatibility issues. Like, I think this is going to end up, at best, it'll be a third option at the Soda Fountain. And I think a good option for a lot of people, especially for the productivity, thin and light space. But yeah, we have a lot of unknowns about how Intel's next processor architecture is going to go, Lunar Lake, Arrowlake, and Tom, I think, can speak much better to that. Yeah, Tom, I'm curious your read on this, because you've been reporting a lot on how bullish

Microsoft is on all of this and how much kind of muscle and marketing weight it's putting behind this. And I feel like if I were to squint at it a little, I could imagine a world in which Microsoft is really excited about, you know, Arm being the future of everything on Windows. What is your sense of where we're headed there? Yeah, I think it's, like, they obviously tried to start doing this since 2012 and it's been a long time coming. And I think this is the beginning of the transition. I don't know if it will fully, you know, displace Intel and AMD. But I do wonder if AMD really has much of a market in the laptop side of things going forward, because they're always the second choice anyway. And now this kind of, does this make them a third

choice? I don't know. It's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out. But then Qualcomm about to rev their chips next year as well, which will probably be coming around about the same time as we see M4 MacBooks. So that's going to be interesting. So I think this is a train that's not going to slow down now. He's kicked off the way it should have done originally, or at at least a few years ago anyway. And I think it's definitely not going to slow down. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot more sort of PCs and cheaper ones in like the 2020-25-26 era.

So it seems like best-case scenario is not that Arm wins, but that this just makes everything more exciting and more competitive, right? That Intel has to get its act together because there's real competition. And so it starts doing better. and AMD starts doing better and all of a sudden we have a bunch of really good options instead of a bunch of, I would say, increasingly non-competitive options, which is where we've been for a while now, thanks to Intel. I also wonder about that because then it's like, okay, how do you make a Windows that works with everything all of these ways? So I guess Nathan is the best outcome here that we get one winner or the other in some meaningful way because it'll like make the software better and make everything make more sense. or should we, you know, let a thousand chip flowers bloom and everything will be fine?

I mean, that's Windows, isn't it? Let a chip a thousand flowers bloom? Like, their whole thing. Backwards compatibility, forwards compatibility, sideways compatibility. But that's been part of the challenge, right? Like, I think that if you want to describe whatever mess exists inside of Windows, I think you can ascribe a lot of it to that exact thing. Yeah, you can.

I mean, I don't think if there's going to be a winner, an overall winner, I don't know. I just don't see it. There's so much on X-86. I don't think it would be Arm. Like, they don't have the pull. They're beholden to huge enterprise deployments in a way that Mac, frankly, is not. They can be like, hey, heads up. We're switching silicon entirely.

And you're going to have to deal with it. And I don't think Microsoft can or wants to do that. But yeah, maybe this makes things more complicated for developers. They're like, okay, great. Now I got to make an arm 64 version. too. So it does seem like the idea that these co-pilot plus PCs are going to like immediately sweep the market and be so much better that they're going to like take over, at least from y'all's experience so far, it doesn't seem like we're there yet. That this is, what we have is like a

meaningful new competitor, not an entire new paradigm that is so much drastically better than I think we've had before. Maybe we'll get there. Maybe buying an arm thing right now is a smart future-proofing decision as this stuff gets better. But it doesn't sound like either of you would sort of going away, say, this is the obvious new future and everything else is going to be relegated to the side quickly, right? Is that fair? It's definitely important to point out that the co-pilot plus stuff isn't just arm. So there is going to be Intel and AMD ones coming.

And even like that listener who asked the question, like, is this going to be like a transition? There's going to be a fire stale. No, like that's not really going to happen. because essentially the premium end of the market is going to be all copilot plus PCs from now on. That's just the standard thing. Apart from maybe the gaming laptops are slightly different. But even some of those are going to be copilot PCs.

We've seen those from Nvidia and AMD. But yeah, no, I don't think it's like a sweeping transition to arm instantly, but I think it's like a slow burn. Like AMD and Nvidia are both rumoured to be doing arm chips for 2025 for PCs. So if they do that, then that puts a little additional pressure on Intel. So it's going to be interesting. Yeah, it does seem like 2025 is shaping up to be a pretty fascinating year in this space that like we're going to see everybody's chips on the table in a pretty new way with all of this coming out. And we're going to have some real answers to like,

where is all of this headed? Whereas right now, even with the arm stuff in front of us, what this whole market looks like is still just like this much theoretical. We don't have quite the features. We don't have Intel's new stuff. We don't have AMB's new stuff. We're almost to knowing everything, but we haven't quite seen all of it yet. And I think next year might be that time. Tom and Nathan, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything that we talked about from those surface laptops to my story on the books, Palma, and lots of other stuff at Theverge.com. I'm going to have a story about the daylight DC1, probably sometime this week. So keep an eye up for that. We'll put some links in the show notes. but as always, read theverge.com. It's a cool website.

And if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or you live in the DC area and want to teach me how to play pickleball, you can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge11. We love hearing all of your questions and thoughts and ideas and feedback on everything. We have lots of fun stuff planned for the rest of this year,

and we're trying to do some weird new stuff on the show. So if you have ideas of stuff you want us to do, we'd love to hear it. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore. The Vergecast is a Verge production, and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday

to talk more about some co-pilot plus PCs, lots of other gadget stuff, more AI news, and everything else going on in tech. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.