The Vergecast - Panos Panay, E3 2017, and iPad Pro 10.5-inch

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

Day two of The Vergecast this week! Yesterday, Nilay interviewed Brian Merchant, author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Today, we have another full episode with a lot going on. First off, E3 happened this week, and there’s a ton of news in the gaming world. Paul interviews culture reporter Megan Farokhmanesh (who is at the expo) live on tape to talk about what happened on the show floor, the press conferences, and the multitude of games that were shown. Next, Dieter and Nilay have a fun conversation with special guest Panos Panay from Microsoft to talk about Microsoft’s newest product, the Surface Laptop. And, of course, we have new reviews out this week! Along with the Surface Laptop, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter discuss the 10.5-inch iPad Pro and the future of these new kinds of computers. There’s a whole mess of stuff in between that, so listen through it all, and you’ll get it all. 05:37 - Xbox One X 13:47 - E3 2017 with Megan Farokhmanesh 34:44 - Panos Panay interview 1:00:57 - 10.5-inch iPad Pro and Surface Laptop reviews 1:17:44 - Paul’s weekly segment “I C Seed; so much seeing” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of Theverge.com. Can I start by telling the boat thing since we're talking about ships? Anyway, I'm Nealai Patel. Paul Miller is here. Dieter Bone is here. And I'm just on the edge of my seat because I want to know about the boat thing. Little inside baseball. Maybe you never will know about the boat thing.

Working with Nilai Patel, it is literally impossible to go for four hours without him referencing boats, talking about boat. talking about boat politics, wishing he maybe had a jaunty sailor hat? Yeah. Like, do it love boats. Do you aware that there were two boat games at E3? Uh-oh. I can't keep them straight.

But there are two boat-related. All right, let me tell all the people that, first of all, this is the Vergecast. Yes. It's where we talk about boats. The flag boat. The flag boat. It's going to be a little bit of a different verge cast this week. It's a second verge cast.

It's a second verge cast. I did a special edition with Brian Merchant, who wrote a book called The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone. It's already in the feed. If you're listening to this, I don't know how you didn't see that one. So listen to that. It's great. We talk about a lot of things, including a bunch of controversy was ginned up

some quotes from Tony Fidel about Phil Schiller and how the iPhone was made. So it's really interesting. It is some deep, deep stuff about literally the secret research project. inside of Apple where they rigged up a projector over a fingerworks touchpad that like literally a junior engineer had bought. It's crazy stuff. So listen to that. Then I'm very excited to say, Dieter and I hung out with Panos Panay from Microsoft this

week. Talk about all things surface. So we're going to run that in the middle. And then Megan is at E3, Megan Frokemanesh. And Paul talked to Megan about what is going on E3 because I don't know if you noticed. E3 blew up our site this week. I think, what was it, Tuesday? We published a hundred stories on Tuesday,

which is great. And it was all video game news because Chris Plant, I don't know this, loves video games. And he runs our culture section. So that's what they did on Tuesday. So just a ton of news, tons of things going on. Lots of segments, basically. And then Paul, of course, has a segment that he does every week.

Yeah. And we're not going to forget it this week. We're super not going to forget it. I'm not going to do a bad job either. That's my promise to you. So let's get started. Let's let's get into E3. Let's talk about boats.

Yeah. I forgot to tell the boat story. The deepest controversy in New York City this summer is the ferry system. Boat supply. Boat supply. Boat demand has radically outstripped boat supply. People are literally waiting in line. Right.

And I'm just saying there was a story in the New York Times. Isn't waiting in line all anybody ever does in New York? We invented a new slightly different donut. We're going to form a line that's a thousand miles long. Right here, right now. Boats are culture. Everything's a technology story. The subways, our infrastructure in New York City, is crumbling, agreed upon.

The mayor of New York City does not actually control the subway system. The state of New York does. Lost in political drama. But the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio is like, you know what's great? Boats. I'm going to start a new ferry service. Ordered a bunch of high-speed catamaranes. this is true.

That's what they're supposed to be. Only a few of them have been delivered. He had children in New York vote on what they should be called. Thus, the children have named the boats things like lunchbox. This is a true story. So there's a boat floating up and down the eastern river lunchbox waiting on the side. The boat captains trained in a like a VR simulation room. That's on the verge.

Andy Hawkins went and did the boat VR thing. But the new boats are too small. because the city did not anticipate that people would want to take cheap boat rides, which if they had just asked me is a data point that I would have happily provided at any time.

Honestly, if anybody wants to ask me at any time, do you think people like boat rides? I will tell you the answer. Literally at any time. See me on the street? Just roll up, be like, what are your thoughts on boats? And I'll let you know. That's market research right there. Anyway. Ask Nile. But this is technology. Our high-speed catamaran

not doing the work. I didn't know they're a catamaran. The catamaranes. Man. Anyway. Now moving on to the virtual world. A number of boat simulators are launched... No, no, no.

E3 happened. Yeah. A lot of news. I think so. I think it was jam-packed. Yeah. And I talked to Megan about this. I mean, I feel like I don't play these games because I'm old.

Yeah. But this is a vibrant industry That is still like just embracing new technology Making crazy 4K stuff Also they're stabbing slightly fewer necks than in years past I think I saw Spider-Man is allowed to kill people It's slightly fewer right Addie was like I think she said eye stabs are the new neck stabs this year

Oh They're just moving it up the face right those are real um but yeah those aren't like the like i feel like nobody's talking nearly as much about like the big new violent games there's a lot of more interesting projects but first we should talk about probably the biggest news of the show which is the xbox one x nailed it not a well-named product the xbox one x 499 this is the new console for microsoft yep well a new box a new A new Xbox or what? Is it a new cost?

There you go. All right. Is it a new generation? Let's just do the basics and then we can do the philosophy. Yeah. It's 499. That's the only thing you need to know. It's definitely a lot more powerful than the PlayStation 4 Pro.

We were just talking before the show started that we always go to Paul for nerd things and maybe that's not fair. But I'm going to do it anyway, Paul. What's a terra flop? And why does it matter that the Xbox has six of them? It's a trillion operations per second. Do you guys remember when the G4, Apple did a commercial for the G4, it was one of the first personal computers that was a gigaflop. And at that rated at a gigaflop.

And at that time, that was like the definition of a supercomputer, and there were export controls on it. So Apple did like this ad. We're like, this is so powerful. We can't even export it. Because it could be used to make weapons. Well, so now we're at Terraflop. But the terraflops are specifically referring to the GPUs typically.

Yeah. See, I thought it was like a belly flop, but on land instead of water. That's where you're on. That's what I call that price. A trillion floating point operations. That landed like a belly flop on land. Trillion floating point operations per second. Yeah.

Which is a lot. It's doing video game math. It's rendering more pixel. more vertices. But the main thing here is it can play a whole bunch of games, native 4K 60 frames for second. The PS4 Pro cannot. And buy a whole bunch of games, you mean Forza, because, like, there's not, like, everything else isn't, doesn't seem to be taking full advantage of the hardware that they've talked about. I mean, that's the thing.

Like, you know, we're already at a point where people watch 4K Netflix. Mm-hmm. But 4K Blu-ray exists. Yeah. But people just watch 4K Netflix if they have 4K TV. I thought a lot about buying a 4K Blu-ray player. And I feel like, I feel like... I have not purchased a 4K Blue Ray player.

And you're... And you love boats. Who doesn't? Do they make a marine capable 4K Blue Ray player? So, I mean, I think it's undeniable that if you want the most beautiful boat game experience, Ubisoft did a spinoff of the Assassin's Creed game that had boats, and they just made pirate ships, like multiplayer pirate ship shooting simulator. which is really exciting.

If you want the most beautiful version of a lot of games, you're probably going to want to play them on the Xbox 1X. If you want to play them with your friends, this generation, most people have chosen the PlayStation 4. Yeah. And so you are going to have a very nice visual experience with the PlayStation 4 Pro. Or I think this is the bigger, almost the bigger story to me. You know, Microsoft just lowered the price of the Xbox 1S,

which plays 4K Blu-ray. Yeah. And it's $250 now. I just think the 4K gaming, I think it's beautiful. I think it's noticeable. And I definitely think you'll be able to tell a little bit of a difference between pro and X games side by side. But I don't think most people really are clamoring for it right now. I think we've wrote a lot about the price.

It seems like $100 too much. There was a big argument on the verge staff about this price, right? I am on team Micah Singleton. Yeah, Micah Singleton was like, people pay this much money for all kinds of consumer tech all the time. Like, if this is the thing that you want and you pay for it, and certainly Microsoft is probably model. The iPad Pro, which we'll talk about later, starts at 650 when there's a regular iPad that you can get for like 3.30. So like people are just, people will spend the money. So I'd, the extra hundred bucks, like, it hurts because like teenagers are going to have a harder time getting it.

And that's a problem. But I don't know, man. like Microsoft is already losing so badly to the PlayStation 4 and the PS4 Pro and Sony's already refusing to like do cross-consul like, you know, multiplayer as much as like Microsoft and Nintendo seem to want to. I just think like, you know what? Go ahead and charge 500 bucks. It's not like you're going to sell a gazillion of these anyway.

You might as well sell them for a price that isn't like a giant loss. Yeah, I mean, I think this is, and again, I don't play a lot of games either, which is why we have the segment with Megan who actually has the expertise. But I think this is a deep reflection of the fact that the age of gamers is actually a lot higher than people perceive, right? Like a lot of people who have good jobs in their 30s play video games now, which is not traditionally how we have perceived of the video game market. So there is a way to capture their extra dollars, which is kind of. kind of what it seems like Microsoft is doing. It's also what Nintendo was kind of doing with the Switch, right? Like, all of their marketing is aimed at, like, I don't know, what you would call them, like, upscale millennials, is that a phrase? I think those are just the people in, like,

John Bush. Upscale millennials? It's like, it's like, it's like young Gen Xers. Yeah, I don't know. It's right. It's the people who are, like, past their first job. They're into their second job, their career is doing a thing, right? Like, there is a market for the game companies to capture, and they're aggressively trying to capture it. Yeah, but I think that's slightly, different than like the enthusiast because I think that the nice thing is that there is a relatively clear story here. It was very hard to pick between the Xbox one and the PlayStation 4 specs wise. They were so, so close. They're almost identical. Here, there's obvious, if you want the most powerful home console in the world, there's one to pick. Yeah. And you can do that and you can

pay more money to do that. But your friends won't be on the network. You want to be able to buy the fun VR headset. The PS, like Dieter was saying, the games aren't optimized for these things fully yet at all. As with every console ever, you can get more and more out of them over time. Like, is an extra, what is it, 1.3 terraflops? They keep upgrading the consoles. In another year, are they going to put out the X, Box 1, X2? Yeah, the Xbox 1, X2.

It's staring them in the face. They're like, we're just going to pull out this gun. called naming and we're just going to like point it at our face and tell the world it's called the Xbox 1x. So I have no idea. I think that's the big thing. It's like, well, what about an X-Gen? Yeah, wait, so this is a philosophical thing.

Is this a new console generation? I don't think so. So Microsoft's whole claim is they're trying to do away with the very concept of console generations. I don't actually believe they're going to pull that off. What I think is particularly, interesting is that they're doing in both directions. Yeah. So they're putting out more and more

power for hardware every year, but then they're doing all of, I mean, they have all the horsepower. So they can just emulate an Xbox. Or they can just run the games and they're doing it. Right. Right. They're going to let you play. I think you can actually just set up an original Xbox with the new Xbox and cross-play games

on them, which is wild. So they're pushing in both directions of saying there's just Xbox. Right. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I haven't decided. I'll have to think more about it. Chris Plan will get back and we can like...

We can get into it. So why don't we transition to some actual gaming expertise? Real video game players. You talk to Megan. Yes. Lead us into it. Megan is at E3. She loves video games.

She's been to a bunch of E3. She understands what's going on. So I asked her what is going on. Let's take a listen. Megan. Hi. Hello. Thank you for joining.

me from... Live, from E3. L.A. You're still there? I am still, yes. It's extremely hot here. Very sunny. Lovely beaches. This is the last day of like a two-month-long conference. I feel like I've lived here at E3 specifically my entire life because it started so early this

year. It started, was it Friday? There's press conferences or... Saturday. So normally, back in my day, my first E-3, things would kind of... Sometimes there would be like events on Sunday, but that's... And like Monday was like big press conference day. But things have kind of been pushing back a little bit more every year.

So this year EA did their big press conference on Saturday. And then it all kind of just rolled out from there. So how many E3s have you been to now? This is my fifth one. Wow. Okay. I know. So here's my main thing.

I feel like this has been a great year to watch E3 remotely because it's so good on Twitch now. Like every press conference understands that like Twitch is almost. was their primary platform, even though they are in LA doing a live stream from LA. I'm afraid that I'm becoming an old man and that I don't care about these video games because I'm old and irrelevant. And all I do is just play PC games like Factoreo, and I can't connect with this new generation. So I saw a lot of games that looked very interesting. I just couldn't visualize myself playing.

So I want to hear from you what is actually good and actually interesting and actually new versus stuff that just looks beautiful, but it's more of the same. So what stands out to you from this show? Good question. My favorite thing that I've seen so far, honestly, a lot of the demos I've seen, I haven't been able to play because it's stuff that still is in that stage of development or the actual show floor is such a mess that, like, I don't want to wait a line for three hours to play a demo. But I actually just a couple hours ago saw the newest demo for Detroit Become Human, which is like the newest game from Quantic Dream, which I am super stoked about, They made heavy rain.

They made Beyond Two Souls. I hated Heavy Rain. I loved Beyond Two Souls. But the game is just, I mean, visually, it is stunning. Like, it is a gorgeous game. But also, it's just kind of taken these ideas that I think the studio has been working on for a long time. So you having choice, you pursuing these different storylines and dealing with the consequences of that in a way that I think some other developers try to do, but don't always succeed at. This one just seems like a really nice evolution of that.

Is the gameplay really similar? Yes and no. Quick time events, kind of? They're not so much quick time events. So in the demo I saw it, so basically the game is about you play as these three androids with kind of interchanging stories who are becoming self-aware. And so they all have like different storylines. One escapes a factory after gaining consciousness.

One is an android hunting down other androids. Another one is basically starting like a revolution against humans. So the demo that we saw is for the new character, Marcus, who is leading this revolution. So the way that, you know, the demo played out is essentially. this mission where you're trying to bust into the store and feel all these other Android. So to do this, you first have to like wander on the area, collect information, you're analyzing stuff, you're going up to other androids. And he has the ability to like essentially shake them out of their just robotness and bring them into consciousness, I guess.

They weren't super clear on all that yet. But, so it's a lot of like planning out your move, but also reacting to things as they're happening. So at one point, like a bunch of cops show up and it's like, okay, like you have 10 seconds. Like there's like a timer. counting down to abandon your mission to go hide or to maybe like fight and everything you do contributes to like how the overall like mission goes and whether you fail if things end violently and so on. So another story driven game that I saw the way out from E3. It seems almost in this genre now.

Like I watched beyond I didn't have any desire to play Beyond Two Souls, but I watched at least half that game on Twitch like including the ending. It's just like a really compelling movie. that you're watching with a crazed Twitch chat room and a streamer. You're not wrong. But I really want to play a way out because it has this interesting co-op thing. Were you at the EA press conference? Have you seen anything about this?

I was, yeah. Yeah, this game is interesting to me because the guy who is pioneering it actually worked on one of my favorite games of, God, maybe it was 2015. Brothers, A Tale of Two Sons, and that was another co-op experience. So this guy has always been playing with the idea of playing on a couch with your friend, but playing video games together in a way that's different. So like with brothers, you could either, if you wanted to do co-op, you could like show the same controller, or if you played by yourself, you had to control both brothers at the same time.

But this one is interesting. A way out is interesting because the game you can only play it in split screen, so you have to play it with a friend, which I, it just seems kind of insane to me in like 2017. And it's like, we're ringing black split screen. You can't play it online? Okay, you can play it online, I think. The way they said it in the conference, it was a little ambiguous, but the impression I got was that yes, you can't play it online.

But they're doing a bunch of weird stuff with split screen, where even if they have two views on the same screen, they might even show a third view of another camera angle, of another thing that's happening. They're really into the split screen. I'm really curious how this will play out because they said they want you to be able to play on your couch with your friend, right? But it's two stories happening simultaneously.

So, like, a cutscene can be happening for one character, and then you or your friend as the other character can be outdoing stuff. So it just seems like a lot of information happening at once. Right. Which is, that's exciting to me. Because that's what, when I watch this show, I see so much that, like, there's a new Assassin's Creed, there's a new Call of Duty, which, you know, every E3, you kind of expect that. And they're kind of more and bigger and better. And you really don't know if you're going to really like them until you play them, because they always look beautiful on stage.

But, like, I like to see, like, new ideas. And I feel like this was kind of a new idea, which was kind of exciting to me. Another kind of new idea was VR making a real actual flagship game in VR with Fallout. Is Fallout 4 going to be the worst VR experience? Or is this like the VR experience? Do you have any ideas? I am actually the worst person in the world to ask about VR because it makes me want to throw up, like not on an emotional level, but like I can play for like five minutes.

And then I'm just like, ooh, I've got to sit down. Like, I've been in demos where, like, PR has been like, hey, you look like you're about to pass out. And I'm like, I sure am. So VR is not a thing that I am very heavily invested in. And Fall doesn't even have, like it looks like it has those like teleportation mechanics to, like, ease the burden. You know what? I actually don't really like the teleportation mechanics. I feel like that messes me up more.

Yeah, I like feeling like, I like it, like I like the vibe, for example, because you can actually move around and that helps. helps me like experiencing is a lot better. When it comes to like sitting down and having a stationary experience, just the jumping around thing really messes me up. Speaking of jumping around, I don't know, this is not scripted. It's a beautiful segue. Mario Odyssey. I, oh my God.

My greatest dream is this would be a rated M game where you're dropped into a Grand Theft Auto world. You run around and you jump on people, but then they really die. And it doesn't have to be extra gory, but just that you really kill people when you jump on them as Mario so you can really feel the moral weight of this decision. But instead, you just possess people with your hat.

I think that's worse. I think that's way worse than killing somebody because think about it, like, if I zoomed into your body and took over your life... I'd be very offended. I mean, you should be. It's a terrible thing to do to somebody. I feel like it's better to murder someone

than to take over their entire life and then go do things with their body that they don't want to do. Yeah. We've taken a dark turn. I've had this conversation a lot. with people with uh with the with star wars force awakens you know is she the bad man now that she you know uses force to control stormtroopers to do what she wants you know she's taking

over their agency so i mean stormtroopers are kind of assholes though unless you know except for john boyega the one shining example the people of new dong city are wearing suits so maybe you know maybe they're the stormtroopers of them are you first have you Have you gotten to play it or watch anybody play it? I have not gotten to play it myself. I'm actually trying to sneak into the Nintendo booth later today to get hands on. So at E3 this year, Nintendo built New Dock City, which is the city in the game. And it's kind of like a rub off of like New York City, but it actually sort of feels like it in the way that when you enter New Dog City, you're just like shoulder to shoulder with so many people because E3 is so packed.

But it's awesome because like if you get to play the demo. they give you a pin, and then you take the pin over to this cap store, and they give you a visor that's like Mario's hat with the creepy eyes, which to me is like such a strange transaction of like, take this pin, exchange it for hat. Good job. You played Mario. Now you're possessed by Mario. You have given your body to Mario.

Okay, so one other game, I want to hear anything else that stood out to you, but one other game that stood out to me was Anthem, and I'm trying to figure out why. Because it basically looks like it's a destiny game from, bio where the people who made Mass Effect is that it's like that team made a Destiny game

where you play Destiny but it had the thing I always wanted to do in Destiny and Destiny you're in like the town or whatever it's called The Citadel I don't know what it and you go you walk over to the edge

and you can't like I want to jump off the edge of the Citadel and go into this world that I see out in front of me which is like this sort of kind of shanty town. And in this anthem game, you walk up to the edge and then you jump and then you're flying and you go anywhere in the world. To me, that's like so exciting. And I have no idea how it actually plays or if it would be fun to me.

But just that idea of being able to, that's a next-gen idea to me to be able to step into a world, jump off the ledge and then fly anywhere in the world. So I think the thing I, because this game is still really early, in development, and we essentially saw a trailer, a really pretty trailer. But the fact that it is the Mass Effect team, and not the Mass Effect Andromeda team, which I think is an important distinction to make, that alone makes me interested, because I love the original trilogy, and Anthem is something they've been working on for a while, and it's long been rumored to be, like you said, their answer to destiny, which makes me not care quite as much, but I think

their ambition here is fascinating. There was a report that went up on Kataku where they were calling it Dylan because they wanted to be the Bob Dylan of video games where people just continued to talk about it for years after, which is so pretentious, but also I love it.

But that's kind of the part of the whole point of being Dylan is that you're really pretentious about it. Yeah. So I think it's too early for me to be, because I still can't figure out how the game plays. I'm like, well, this sure is like, it looks nice, this is some nice CGI we're seeing, but in terms of what it's actually going to be like and how similar it will be to Destiny, it's too hard for me to tell.

But just like that team gets me excited because I love what they've worked on for. Yeah, it's hard to tell if it'll be more RPG or less RPG than Destiny, but it definitely has classes that you can choose and customize and then things that you can collect in the world, like guns is something we saw. Yeah, I'm really interested in the actual world they'll build because I think they have like a good history. of making interesting aliens, I wonder if we will be able to fuck the aliens in Anthem, because honestly, that's my own question. Wow. I got the Avatar vibe.

I think that's what the blow blown away. Like, I didn't love Avatar as a movie, but visually and viscerally, it's one of my favorite things I've ever seen. And just, man, jumping off the ledge, you fly down, you fly through canyons, and you fly down into water, then you come up from water.

Everybody should see the trailer for Anthem. It's very good. So what did I miss? What is cool that I'm just too old to understand? Oh, gosh. You know, this E3 has been so strange because I feel like there weren't a ton of new game announcements. And if, like, personally, like, I found Nintendo's 30-minute Nintendo Direct to be like the most exciting thing of the show for me. Because Nintendo's brand is essentially like, here's a bunch of weird shit, now here's a bunch of cute shit.

And, like, that is very much how I would describe myself. Pokemon for Switch is pretty exciting. Yeah, it's insane that it's taken this long. And so we're finally going to get, you know, they call like a core RPG franchise or RPG experience, which maybe just means like the handheld games on Switch. But I'm just so interested to see like what they do with it because I think there's so much untapped potential there. And I don't understand like why it's taking them so long to get around to it. But of course, the Switch itself is kind of like a handheld experience. It can be.

It seems like the perfect timing. It seems, yeah, it does seem weird to wait decades to do it. But now is definitely the time with the switch. There's just nothing essentially portable. I've played most Pokemon just like emulated on my computer. I have to say, I have either purchased or have gotten codes for every Pokemon game that has been released since I got into gaming. So the last like five or so years and before that I was like buying all of them. I've gotten to a point where I'll play them for like two hours and then just never come back to them.

Because even though there have been so many improvements, they are kind of the same. So I'm really hoping that whatever they do with this switch game is something vastly different from what we've been. Like a next-gen Pokemon. I'm so on board for that. I'm really stoked. So what's the vibe on the actual show floor now that's open? So yeah. So this C3 is actually the first year they've had it open to the public.

They sold tickets. And it's insane how much of a difference it's made. I think they said they sold like what, like another like 1,500 tickets. but that they've also cut down on press, so it's not like there would actually be that same influx of people. But seriously, the first day walking around, you could barely get anywhere, and the lines are so deep.

But also, it's just been interesting because it feels like a very influencer-heavy show. So, like, at EA's press conference, they had influencers on stage. It didn't always work out. It's super great. There's a lot of, like, almost like, e-sports commentary happening.

And then just walking around the show floor in a couple events they've been at, it's insane how many people you see who just like have their phones out and are periscoping or doing the like what's up guys like i'm so and so from youtube like we're here live at e3 like it's been like that to some degree for the last couple years but i've never seen it like it is this year so i mean for context the line for whatever nintendo has in any given e3 is typically all the way around the show floor like it's like like a mile long and they you can wait in it all day and not get into the booth. Is that just worse now? Absolutely, yeah. It's been interesting because on the

press site, even, to be a little insider for a second, there's just a lot more stuff that's behind closed doors, but not only that, they're just like a lot like, they're being a lot more of a stickler about like spots because there is not as much time and it's harder to see things on the actual show floor. So I've had a harder time seeing things in general if you don't have appointments and everything is kind of just more restricted than before. You can't just like roll up and get a demo. Yeah, basically. But it seems like even, I was looking at a couple threads on NeoGaF, which is like a gaming forum. People who are here, like, they don't like the lines either. But it's just interesting because it seems like especially this year, E3 is really positioning itself to move towards more of like a PACS or a Comic-Con where the show this year feels less and less like it's for press and more like it's for fans, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

But also I don't think they found the correct way to balance the sheer number of people that are here and how much stuff there is to see. Yeah, well, from my outsider perspective, just watching it on Twitch has been pretty, it's been pretty easy to pick up on what's going on to see everything. Like, you can see like a YouTube recap. You can watch the full press conference, like live or right after it happened. So it feels pretty accessible from the outside, which is a nice feeling. But yeah, I can understand that it's tough when there are very few gameplay impressions. So everybody's just going off the same five minutes. minutes of footage they all saw in one press conference, it's harder to know what is actually good.

Yeah. And it's like you don't get many shots to like, if you have a chance to go play a demo and you're on the show floor and you are a fan, you're going to be waiting probably hours for like a really good game. And it's like, well, is it worth it to spend two hours waiting in line for a 10 minute demo. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I don't know. I can't imagine. I hate lines. I think there, I would have waited a couple hours. probably to play Breath of the Wild before it came out last year. I waited maybe four hours to play the Wii U. Was it worth it? No, because I was like stoked on the Wii U and I thought there was the next generation of gaming. I was super wrong. Oh, no.

Well, this is such a sad story. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's why I don't go to E3 anymore. It's too many, too many bad hot takes. Just crushing, soul crushing. Yeah, because I'm old now. Well, when are we getting Skate 4, Megan? promise me a date.

Next year, 2018. Thank you. Skate 4. You heard it here first on the bruce.com. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Megan. There's tons more information about video games on Theverge.com. You could also go to our sister site, Polygon.com that Megan used to work for.

There's just so much information. And it's great to have information. Thank you. Yeah, of course. So that was great. I'm really, again, I've actually never been doing an E3. Really? I feel like I don't have to go because I go to CES.

That's your penance. That's as much pain as I have to. There are some people. I think Ross had been to like 12 in a row before this year or something. Yeah. But like I said, this is a weird verge cast. Like lots of segments. So, Deider, you have been reviewing a bunch of stuff.

I don't want to, we'll talk about the reviews after we get through the Panos interview. But lead us into this. You've been reviewing a lot of these, like, future of computer devices. You've actually published a bunch of these reviews recently. I have. This is a big week because. basically three sort of future of computer devices. I need to come up with a better term than future of computers.

Like devices that are something other than like laptops. Tablets with dreams. Right. So there's the iPad Pro. There's the new Surface Pro, which Dan reviewed. And then there's the Surface laptop, which is obviously a laptop. IdeaPeds. But it runs Windows 10S.

And so this week, they're like now available to people. So the reviews went up. And so Panos came and he hung out with our staff, which is really great. Got to know some of us. And then we recorded a brief Vergecast segment where we asked him about carpeting. And also what a laptop is because deep down, I don't think anybody knows anymore. He also, you'll hear it. But he basically the entire time he was with our staff.

He's like, I know you're going to ask me about phones. And finally someone said, well, tell us about phones. I'm not answering that question. And he set everybody up. So I'm going to actually read an ad. then we're going to run a segment. We'll be right back. This episode, The Vergecast, is brought to you by Squarespace. Whatever your next big idea might be, count on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life.

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that's offer code Verge V-E-R-G-E Squarespace drag some stuff around Like a ride on a boat Hey everybody We're here with Pannos Pune from Microsoft

It's still Microsoft It is still Microsoft as of this morning Yeah Some personal news No you just put out a bunch of hardware Dieter just reviewed the Surface laptop And we are

There's also the new Surface Pro available soon We're right like right now And you foolishly chosen To come on to this Vergecast without reading your reviews which is the worst part. I have no idea what Deeter wrote. I know Tom reviewed one as well

so I'm still trying to... I read Deeter's review. Deere gave you a very flattering review of the surface. I did. Right here, Deere. Well done, man. Thank you. I just want to start with the question. I think we have written in some collection of Verge people the what is the best Windows

laptop, what is the canonical Windows laptop story since our N gadget days? Right. And it's always a question and it feels like like you have finally just delivered what appears to be the canonical Windows laptop of 2017. Cool. Thanks. Yeah, we're done. Yeah.

All right. So that was it, right? Because I've short on time anyway. We should just close it. Well, no, I got a bunch of fan service questions about very specific granular features as well. But I just want to start broad. Obviously, Microsoft, big company, you've got a lot of partners. You've got a lot of competitors who are also your partners. How do you think about this product exactly at this moment in time? Was your goal to build the canonical Windows laptop?

Are you trying to blow Dell and HP out of the water? Where do you live? I think the thing we wanted to do was bring together the hardware, the software in a way where we took this classic form factor. That was kind of the word we used. It's classic. It can be so elegant and so everyday use. Bring that same design and craftsmanship that we feel is part of who we are as a team. Get it in this product.

So now this hardware software coming together with this, I will say pride and craftsmanship in a classic form factor resulted in what is now, you know, the surface laptop. I'm pretty excited about it. Yeah. Okay. So here's a granular fan service question. Oh, you got one.

Well, so I've shown this laptop to, I don't know, you know, a dozen different version employees. It's the same question. A dozen box employees. Yeah. Do you get an emotional response when you show them? And the emotional response is specifically about the Alcantara fabric. Yeah.

To a person, they're like, oh, this is nice. I don't trust it. And so you don't need to tell me it's going to be fine, because I know that's what you want to tell me, that take care of it, it'll be fine. It might be what I believe as well, but that's okay. No, I'm sure you do. I do too.

But was that, are you hoping for that emotional reaction? Yeah, I think you have to. If you hadn't put this fabric here, I would have been fine by me. And so I'm really curious why you need to it. But I don't think you would get that same emotional and that visceral response that you're getting if we did that. There's something about the tone and tone that comes from a fabric

next to the key set, next to the track pad, next to the screen, next to the, if you will, the chassis of the product, the embodiment of it coming together. And we called it tone in tone. So when you opened it, you did have that emotional reaction. But to hold that same emotional response, that kind of visceral, visual, like, wow, that's different. Looks cool. But when you put your hands on, it feels great.

That was critical. I think to hold it. We wanted to hold that emotion in the product. But is it going to last for five years? I think when you did the fabric on the pro. And that, to me, I think, elicit different response because you're like, well, I spilled coffee on it, I stain this fabric. I can take the key, I can just get another keyboard. You can't do that with this.

And I think you're seeing a different response because people hold on to these things for three, four, five years. Yeah. And they're definitely going to wear. Yeah. Yeah. So we talk about it a lot as a team. I think that's what you're looking for. And I'll just talk to you about it.

We spent a lot of time, the team spent a lot of time in Italy with the Alcantara team, just working on the fabrics, making sure they're durable, stain resistant. There is coating on it that it makes it stain resistant. It is durable at a level that is as durable as any metal out there in some ways. I mean, obviously, it's not as hard or rough, but it is from a last perspective. And then we thought, look, it is fabric. That's what it is. And there's a way to clean it. It's like any fabric that you know of in life.

And it wears better than any fabric out there. It's in high-end sports cars right now. It's in there for a reason. It lasts for several years. I think we knew there was this conversation that. would happen for sure. Our confidence in how durable the product is is super high. And I'm not worried about three to five years. I think like any kind of precious object, if you will, anything that you love or care for, you have to care for this product. Like I think you have to care for any laptop

you use. And if you like it, if you want it to wear and you want to push it and not even to do with the fabric, but you can take the outside, the inside, any product you've ever used, it's going to wear and it's going to be like that awesome old pair of jeans that you love and it wore perfectly to who you are and that's your personality, or you're going to keep it pristine. Those are, they both sit right there as options, but I think, and it's fundamental when you design a product like that, of course you have to look at three to five years of use. That's every single one of our tests, every way we beat these things to, with a, down to the pulp with reliability testing.

Do you have like a sweaty palm machine in your labs? We got crazier than that. We got every single lotion you can think of. Oh, man. Oh, yeah, that's really smart. We have sweat from many different people. I'm a bit of a germaphobe, so for me it's hard to hang out in the reliability lab when they're testing these things. But they like from Vaseline to lipstick to lotions, because you have to understand how durable this is.

There isn't a material out there that we think won't hit the product. By the way, that's both on the outside and the inside of the product, and that's true of every product we ship. It's not unique to this. But we have years of experience with fabrics now. and we've put a lot of energy into understanding them, learning about them. We found Alcantara, we understand it's, Alcantara itself is a premium brand. It sits in premium, you know, cars and it uses a very, has a very elegant tone to it. Of course, these are unique to surface, and they have a unique finish for the reliability aspect of the product, but all our energy into that history has gone into it, and we feel pretty good.

Yeah. So let's talk about the sort of the range of surface stuff, right? You make a number of different products. They range from... You're really stretching to make a surface pun right now, aren't you? I am. I'm trying not to. I'm doing my best.

We have a guest. I like that you think of a guest. I feel great about that. That's a good start. I'm a guest. Yeah. And usually... Treat me like a guest.

Just crazy town. Yeah. Anyway, so you've got a range. You've got the Surface Studio, right, which is a big high-end desktop. You've got a number of tablet-first products, although you call some of them laptop. now, which I think is fascinating. Then you have this very kind of classic laptop. As a consumer, how should you be looking at that line? I think you look at there's three products that we're pretty proud of that when you walk into the store. I mean, we're proud of the studio as well,

but I'm going to just put that aside for a second. But when you walk into a store as a consumer, you're going to see three products. And you're going to see the most versatile laptop you could possibly use. And that's the Surface Pro. And I think that's the one. Is that a laptop and not a tablet? I really believe it. I really believe it. You were saying it was the tablet that could place your laptop. That was for a minute.

And I think... It is now over. I think it is... You know, we see how people use it. We know what they use it for. We know it's the only device in their bag. There's no tablet. There's no laptop.

It's the pro. The new pro brought so much to the table, so much performance. The battery life was real. The typing experience has elevated itself, the track pad. And so we look at it in, because this really is.

The laptop, this is how people want to use it. It's how they are using it. It has, you know, it's powerful in its nature as a laptop and performs and competes against, you know, laptops in the market. What we thought was when you walk in, we can help even more with consumers like, okay, I'm here to buy a laptop. Great. There's three choices. You have the most versatile laptop. You have the Surface book, which we put in the performance category.

Like, this is the ultimate laptop. If you want the performance, if you're a creator, you want to reverse it, use the pen, push the GPU. that's what the surface book was for. And then we have the Surface laptop, which was the canonical, if you will, as you put it, or the classic form factor. That is, this is the most beautiful, elegant design in a laptop you will find. It's got that perfect balance of weight and thickness, and it's that thing you're going to take with you to class.

Which do you expect to be your most popular product? Gosh, you know, that's a hard question, man. We've been debating that ourselves. Yeah. You know, the pro is our heritage. That's where we fundamentally started. So I believe that's kind of our history will continue that way. But these other products, they're going to give it a run for its money for sure.

And I think it's hard to pick, you know, if you had three children that were running a race with you, which one would you want to win? And then they were all your kids. It's kind of hard to answer that question. But I think pro might have the lead there. I mean, the most interesting thing about the new pros is that there's a core I-5 without a fact. fan in it. Yeah. And that seems

really interesting to me because I think of it still has a tablet, which you still need to convince me that it's a laptop. Yeah. But like tablets shouldn't have fans in my head.

Yeah. But Intel across the board, but Microsoft is talking a little bit or has been about Arm. Like, do you just, I don't need you to tell me what your future products are,

but if you want to, please. Yeah, I don't know that I will today, but I appreciate you. Yeah. I don't want to lose your listeners either, but yeah, we probably won't tell you about future products. They're all gone now. There's new podcast analytics.

They're all gone. All right. I got to go. I can fall on to that question, right? There's, you announce this thing with Windows 10S. You're giving away the free upgrade instantly, right? And then it'll cost some money after a while. But there's not a lot of activity.

Build just happened. There was not a lot of focus on building for Windows 10S at build. Then there were a bunch of announcements. about Windows on Arm that would be able to also run X-86 apps. And that announcement was made, and it seems to have been very quiet. So it looks like you can move to a world where you're shipping an arm-based product, whether it's a laptop or tablet, with a great battery life, with easier integration of mobile broadband, because it's certainly easier to do that on Arm,

and a sort of modern, if you will, riff on the operating system. system that has, you know, it's locked to an app store and has to run your browser. But that's certainly not where the product is now. To me, the fact that you're letting people immediately upgrade to Windows 10 Pro for free kind of signals that's where you're expecting the user to be. Did you ask a question in that? I don't think you really did. It's a podcast.

It's a podcast. I think when we talk about, there were a lot of things you talked about there. I think the idea with Windows 10S is very, it's very simple. Yeah. And it's easy, I mean, the easiest way to put it, just simple. When a user uses the product, a consumer uses a product, a person, how you want to describe somebody who opens it and gets into the product and falls in love with what they're doing. It's a question of, hey, what do you do? How do you do it? And it doesn't need to be complicated for the user at all, I don't think. And so I think Windows 10S starts to simplify things quite a bit, where you're in, we can guarantee you the performance, we guarantee you the battery life.

it's very simple to use. There's no conflict. And then I think that value prop is super strong for somebody who just gets in and wants to use the product. And there might be this initial instinct that's like, well, I don't know what it is. So I have to get into Switch and get to Pro quickly. That's fine. Our goal wasn't to hope people upgrade. Our goal wasn't to hope people stay.

The goal was to give you the best value prop possible where you're in it. You're more secure. You're getting great battery life. and it's giving you this incredible performance, use it, go for it. If there was something you needed that wasn't about Windows 10S or wasn't in the store, then our goal wasn't to say, well, too bad. And the goal was then, hey, switch. It wasn't even upgrade.

It was just switch. Yeah. And get into pro, but understand that, hey, look, you know, you might download something that compromises your battery life or changes the performance on your machine, or you're going to call in two months and be like, I don't know what's going off on my machine is slowing down. But let me see. Okay. I will actually ask questions.

The question that I was working my way up to that we've like been circling around is it seems like Microsoft lives at the premium end. You've got Intel core I chips. You've got price points that, you know, start a thousand bucks, you know, or so. But like Microsoft has been building a bunch of Windows stuff that like could potentially work at a much lower price point. Does Microsoft hardware always live at the high end or would you, do you think that there's a world in which you could like cross the price spectrum, you know, all the way. way down to something less expensive. Yeah, I don't think, I don't, we think about what's the best thing for the hardware and software and the experience come into life.

That's how I think about it. I think that could end up a lot of times and is our focus to be more premium and our products are premium. Won't really compromise fit and finish on these products. That's not something that's on our list. I don't think that's about silicon. I don't think it's about the cost isn't about silicon. The cost isn't about performance, although it can be.

But it is around fit and finish where we won't let up. And once you put a premium fit and finish throughout throughout the product, that pride and craftsmanship that comes through, you definitely want the performance on a product like this as well. I'm not, I don't really, it doesn't matter to me what processors is in it right now. I love any processor we put into it because we'd put it in for the customer themselves. And price point is basically, it is, it can be a function of premium, but it's not necessarily that, but where we, where we act today, I don't see us moving all the way down the price point scale to see if we can cover every price point. We got awesome partners. They're doing a great job.

And I'm pretty proud of that. And so we do stay a little bit higher in. So, Deider and I keep asking the same questions. It's just a thing that happens. Is this happen before? All the time. Are you going to ask what USBC and steal my question? I'm definitely going to ask what USBC.

Okay. It's definitely where I was going. What would a podcast be without type C conversation? What would this podcast be without complaints? Later on, we're going to talk about headphone jacks. It's going to be great. It's all I ever do. Why don't we do that?

Why haven't I removed the headphone jack? Yeah, yeah. quite USBC, and then I want to end on sort of a, just a broader, you know, the whole kind of landscape of computing is changing, right? The traditional mobile operating systems and the laptop operating systems are colliding in interesting ways.

But let's start with USBC. You didn't put it on this product. You've said, you don't think it's ready. What was your, explain it in detail. What was your real thinking there? We look at this thing in and out. Like, Type C, USBC is one of the

foremost things that we think about for sure. You know, we're not confused of the future of type C and USBC. I went to a conversation, even inside internal, to Microsoft and they're like, why do you hate USBC? I'm like, I don't hate, I don't hate USBC. There are very few things in the world that I hate. I wouldn't. What are some of those? Try and tell my kids, like, hate's not good. Name one thing you hate. Go ahead. I hate when I can't find my socks in the morning. I got to be honest. That's hate? Yeah, really drives me nuts. Wow.

Type C, really being with the team to see it and work all the way through is there has been an expectation around that port that I say is unmet right now. The expectation is very high on everything it can do and what it should do and what it will do. And what we learn as we go through it is, and by the way, as a side note, we use our surface connector to charge these devices. we know it's one of our highest kind of user delighters, just the magnetic, click it in and go and move. And that port actually is available to use Type C. So it's not that Type C can't be used on the device. We're providing it at after this holiday that people can use and plug into

and use Type C for the product. So for all those out there, like, well, what about the future? Like, it's future-proofed. It's there. Type C is available for you. But in the meantime, what we were most concerned about was what happens when you to that conference room and you plug, you look for type C, you have a type C, you try and plug it in and it doesn't project and you don't know why and you can't figure it out. Or I wanted to use power on my device.

And so I didn't bring my surface charger with me because I already have another charger for my phone. And so I plugged that charger into the wall and I plugged into my device. And we went from this beautiful charge time of less than two hours to why did it take 14 hours to charge my device? Or why did I run out of battery while I was plugged in? What's wrong with you, Surface? And the customer or the user doesn't quite understand what's happening. You might have a 3.5 watt charger with a 27.5 watt hour battery and physics there are challenged. And you're now in this place of trying to explain what's happening with that port, although there was a promise with it.

Some of it has Thunderbolt. Some Type C has Thunderbolt. Some type C doesn't have Thunderbolt. Some accessories work. Some accessories don't work. Try and go and find an accessory now that you plug in without a dongle. It's pretty challenging. And so we're looking at all these variables.

and then you just pause and ask, like, what are you using Type C for? That was the fundamental. Like, if you think about your customer, you think of what people are using. Like, just ask, what do you use it for? Like, Nealai, what do you use Type C for right now? I'm avoiding it. That's right. Yeah, I'm just wondering.

I'm charging my phone. But I get a lot of tweets on this. Like, what is wrong with you? Aren't you thinking? And I almost want to respond. Like, I'm sorry, like, what are you plugging into Type C right now that isn't just awesome everywhere else? I believe the future that promise when it gets standardized and Thunderbush. bolt is consistent and the things you plug in are consistent, whether it's a hard drive that

works or doesn't work, I think we'll be in a great future state. I think right now, though, our promise to our customers is, even on this product, when you think about 10S, it's simple, it's easy to use, you open it, you get in, you work. Our promise is it has to stay that way, even with the accessories you're plugging in. And when you're walking into a conference room or you're a teacher and you want to teach and you want to plug in, you're likely going to find USBA or display port at this point. So we gave you those ports that were so important. know how much people use USBA when we didn't want to take that away from them that was critical. But then for type C, we look and say, well, will it be in our future products?

When the time is right, of course it'll support that matters. I don't quote unquote hate it. I don't. I think it's awesome. Just need some consistency. And when that consistency is in play and our customers won't be confused and the people that use it, those mainstream customers that come in and they want this beautiful, elegant, seamless device. whether it's pro or its laptop, they get in, and everything they use works, that was critical to us.

We learned this lesson. We learned this lesson with our early products. When things don't work, it turns out people aren't happy. Yeah. I know you've got to run. I try to ask the big thinky question. You've been covering the hell out of it, actually, but you see every one of your major. By the way, I think you guys are great.

Thank you. Oh, I really appreciate that. Yeah, I think both of you are awesome and I appreciate it. I say that before I read your review after I read. I haven't read Tom's review either on Pro, but once I read them both, I could change that and I'll send you a mail. But right now, I think you guys are pretty awesome. Hey. You're forward thinkers for sure, and I'm grateful you had me.

I'm really happy you're on. And it's really fun to have great, cool products to talk about instead of sort of endless iterations, the same thing. But every one of your competitors and Microsoft is pushing towards what appears to be the future of computing. Yeah. So Google to varying amounts of success is trying to bring Android to the Chromebook. Apple has a real fuzzy boundary between iOS and macOS. There's the new iPad Pro, which you tell me you haven't used, and then we tried to make you use one, and you wouldn't do it.

He was on the record at the time, so I understand. That might be true, yeah, that might be true. It's not like you forced me, though. Yeah, we just held it in the air and you slowly back to it. I decided not to touch it. Right, and iOS 11 is kind of making that more laptop-y. You have now 10S. You have a range of surface products.

where do you see that boundary of the future of computing going? What's your biggest vision about that stuff? I think you can't... I think everything you said was limited to a form factor. Oh. Oh, interesting. And I think with the combination of AI machine learning, the VR world, HoloLens,

the current form factors you see, I don't think we're looking at it yet. Yeah. And you can use an OS, and the platform that is Windows 10 is phenomenal and especially from its ability to scale through so many different form factors, if you will, or use cases. It's crazy. It's awesome. So I think you look at the platform first, but I think what my response is, you ask questions that were based in Form Factor.

And I don't think we should, I don't think if we were to put ourselves in the column of what does the future look like? I don't think any of us are looking at the Form Factor right now yet. I don't believe that. form factors kind of can change the way people interact with things. And we've seen that. If you go look through time, you'll see it as a new form factor evolves how people use their products change dramatically. And that form factor only evolves when the technology underneath it does from a software perspective, from an AI perspective. And if you see all the things that Satya talks about, you think about the things that Terry talks about.

You look at Windows 10S and what that's doing. You can look at Chrome and Android, but you can look at Windows 10. you can look at what iOS is doing. These are all platforms evolving to a future at some point. But fundamentally, Windows, I believe, has this lead that's thinking about not only the current and giving you the classic form factor like a laptop and being beautiful and elegant and seamless, but it also has this opportunity to create a new vision of products that's not here yet. And you're working on those.

Well, yeah. He's not going to ask the phone question, but he's definitely. we're going to ask the phone question. Yeah, don't ask me the damn phone question. Don't ask me the damn phone question. And that's what I'm going to end. I'm pretty impressed you didn't ask it, but I appreciate that. I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of tweets.

By the way, send the tweets. I read them. I read them all, but I'm all good. I'd love to hear them, but I appreciate you didn't ask today. Well, I heard you, just to the listener knows. Before this, we met with a bunch of urge reporters. They asked the phone question. And Panos confidently said, I'm not going to answer that question.

So we have a limited. I just had to do you hear it. Anyway. It's spend your time of the right place. Do you think like pocketable rectangles? Is that a form factor? I think this was an incredible podcast. I feel like we got to bond a little bit, which I didn't expect to happen.

I like you more than I thought I would, which is super cool. Hopefully I didn't upset you or anything. No, this is great. Thank you. I love the, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for coming. We really, really appreciate it. It is my big takeaway.

First off, I think you guys did a great job. Well, thank you. He's a very intense man. Yeah. And excited. and happy, I think he was happy to be with you. Yeah. Which is cool.

I think there's a vibe you get like, I just did a good thing. I made some good stuff. I'm going to tell you about it. But this material stuff, I'm getting conflicting information because the first thing I thought was like sweat stains. And then Tom Moran's review is like, watch out for sweat stains. And then Panos is like saying, don't even worry about it. He's like, I got a whole lot full of sorts of.

That's basically his answer. He's like, think about gross stuff. We have a room full of it. Like, we have like every lotion ever made by humankind. We applied it to this thing. I don't want to be there for that. You know, I think, so I really like talking upon us. There's something that happens when we talk to the product people versus the marketing people.

I've noticed this over and over and over again over the years. The product people love nerding out about the product. It's always just a great conversation because we are nerds and we ask some really nerdy questions. I think with the fabric, it is hard to ignore the fact that the second you open it up, everybody reacts to it. And I think that's if you're Microsoft and you're trying to stand out in the store, you're trying to get people to not buy the Dell or the HP that they've bought out of just like impulse instinct for years, you need to have that reaction. And I think the fabric gives them that reaction. I think the downside is... The fabric gives them that reaction.

Yeah, it's gonna wear differently than a bunch of aluminum. Now, that is, there are people we work with who have, like, weird sweat. And I've seen across Vox Media, there are MacBook Pros where, like, the aluminum is pitted and gross. This stuff gets just as dirty as anything else. so it's a normal thing that happens but it might happen a lot worse for this fad we'll see maybe his claims will he's like it's going to be fine

I want like a one year check-in from someone who's used it every day and just see what it looks like but those people are out there right they have Surface pros with that keyboard cover and they aren't out screaming I think the difference is you can if that thing becomes gross so you just buy another one

here's the real problem that he's going to run into If your Surface laptop looks grimy and crappy, you're going to put a post on it on Instagram or Twitter and Reddit and BGR. We're like, oh, my God, it's the worst thing. If your Surface laptop is fine a year from now, you're not going to post a picture of it and no one's going to write a story that, hey, guess what, it's fine.

Like the only thing that's going to get a reaction from anybody is it looking like garbage. Yeah. And that's just what's going to happen. So you just got to embrace the adventure. Yeah. So Dieter, you reviewed the Surface laptop. I did.

Tom with 10S, Windows 10S. Tom weren't reviewed it with Windows 10 Pro. You reviewed the iPad Pro. Tom reviewed the Surface Pro. Just a lot of future of computing stuff. I have an iPad Pro reviewing it. Yep. Lauren has a 12.9 iPad Pro.

Dan reviewed the Surface Pro, and he did both the I-5 and the I-7 variants. Just a lot of stuff. Yeah. You can go out and buy all of it right now. You, so you're, but I hung out with you while you were in the process of reviewing the iPad Pro. Yeah. And you're like, this is my computer. Like the second that says iOS 11, I'm buying the hell out of this.

Yeah. Uh-oh. Mostly. Like, the answer is it, I, like, there's a whole, like, debate about main computer that goes along with this. But just, because we just had panels. Let me just get Surface laptop out of the way. It is the MacBook Air that you've been asking for that actually has 2017 specs. It just happens around Windows.

You will not want to use Windows 10S. And Microsoft's whole strategy of getting 10S apps into the App Store, Windows App Store, is not going to go as well as they hope because everyone is going to immediately upgrade to 10 Pro on this thing because it's free. If you are looking for a Windows laptop and you are willing to spend $1,300, you will very much like the Surface laptop fabric and all. That is where I land on that thing. I'm very impressed with that computer. The iPad, here's the thing that I didn't really write this very elegantly in the review, but if you go to an Apple store and there are two iPads sitting there, one is the iPad, the iPad, it's an iPad, it costs $330. It does iPad things. It has a beautiful screen. It is very thin and light and good, and there's really nothing to complain about with it. And then sitting right next to it is the iPad Pro, which has a slightly bigger screen and more like specs. then you could possibly imagine.

It has a smart keyboard connector. It has a screen that is like bonkers better on like five different levels, including the increased refresh rate and like all the stuff. And it costs $650. So it's a $300 delta. And if you're going to spend $6.50, I think you should spend $750 and get the larger storage.

So it's a $400 delta. Can I just say when you lay it out like that, that $300 delta between the iPad and the iPad Pro might be the best. value for dollar in computers right now. Yep. Just the screen on the pro, have you played with it yet? No, I just look that.

When we leave, I'll show it. It is that ProMotion is not a joke. It's a real thing. It's not just a marketing term. It's a real, it makes, like, you notice it. It's not, everybody's making the comparison to the jump from a regular screen to a retina screen. It's not quite that. Like, it's not the sort of thing where once you use it, you're like, I'm never using

anything else again. everything else is garbage. This thing is perfect. But it does make sort of a really like subtle qualitative difference in your experience of using the device as like a quality device. And I, I have this whole riff that I didn't put into the review that the iPad Pro is basically a luxury product, but where like Virtue and I don't know, Bentley and like other luxury brands, they make it luxury by putting nicer materials and diamonds and leather and Alcantara. and all this crap on their things to make it luxury. Apple makes it luxury by literally making the technology way better than anybody asked for.

Like the luxury is the screen and it is the like the scrolling and the promotion on the screen. Yeah. I mean, I just, that screen, if you've listened to the show, you know, Paul is a pixel density enthusiast. And I've been transforming into a high refresh rate enthusiast. Yeah, Paul only like reads high refresh rate monitor blogs now. That's really weird. Guys, I have something to tell you. I've been offered a position.

But it's, like, that stuff is really important. So, so, like, the other day, Best Buy had a deal. You could get the 9.7 pro for 450. And I looked around a bit. There's a bunch of 9.7 pros for $400 refer. Wow. So, I mean, I want the 120 hertz. Yeah.

But if I save my dollars, I can afford a pencil. And a keyboard. And the keyboard. Yeah, it gets shockingly expensive, extremely fast. If you kid out what I think is like the right model to get. So if you're like, I feel like you should get the bigger storage. Go from 64 to 256.

I feel like you should get the keyboard, which is like, I think 160 bucks. And, you know, maybe you don't need the pencil, but sure, get the pencil. It's 100 bucks. Get AppleCare to protect the thing. that whole package altogether all in is like $1,100, which is crazy. Right? It's, unless you make it your computer. Right, right.

And the big question is, can iOS 10 support that for most people? And I think that it's not appropriate to ask people to radically change what they do with their main computer in the way that iOS 10 demands. You can do it, but like you end up living in like a, like, a, like, I don't know, different kind of computing world. And maybe that's the world we should live in. But I'm much more excited to see what iOS 11 does to the iPad computing environment with proper drag and drop, with a files app and, you know, all the rest. I feel like $1,100 is what you're willing to pay, like when you're buying your kid a laptop to go to college. Yeah.

I think that's, you know, I asked Apple, what's the standard configuration here? Are you expecting people to buy all the things? and they were like, you know, we think people are going to buy what's right for them, and we want to give people a choice. And it just, I've been thinking about that over the past few days. It's weird because that's not how Apple usually thinks. Right? Like they just give you the product and it's complete and they've made all the choices for you.

And that, you know, their entire strength is that they've generally made the right set of choices for you. This one is just, it's a lot of boxes. When I got my review unit, just to put it all together, it was just like opening a lot of boxes and like getting rid of a lot of like stuff. It just didn't feel as complete as like a standard sort of Apple and boxing. And it just struck me, they should just sell a kit. Yeah. Right? Like they should just sell the $1,100 iPad Pro kit and that'll be good enough.

And then for the people who want to spend a little less money and they don't care about the pencil, like whatever. But that moment for them where they have to convince you to buy all the stuff and it feels like an upsell is like a strange moment in the Apple universe. Yeah. The last time I think that you had to make that many choices around Apple stuff was like before they had like wireless keyboard standard. And you had to like pick between like wired or wireless keyboard. What copy of Adobe software is going to come? It's like that configurator, but not for the core computing experience. But the thing is great.

Like, oh, that's a very minor criticism. I will say for this, what we call them? Tablet Dreams. Dream tabs. For these, for these dream tabs. I'm starting to get pretty tempted. I have managed, I put like a weird window manager on my laptop that involves some terminal stuff. And like, I'm pretty good at the terminal, but I went, I went too far.

I delve too deep. Can you come back? I can't come back. My computer sucks. I literally, I can show you this. There's this space. What, I keep a space that has this pop-up dialogue on it. Paul's computer looks completely insane.

There's no menu bar. He's picked a desktop background that just looks like, like, expose, so you can't even tell what's real. Icons everywhere. Something is crashed. If I click deny on this dialogue box, it just pops up again. So I just keep it. I keep it in its own space. Wait, really?

Go to the main space. What is this window manager? There's actually two. Wait, Paul is not kidding. There's a dialog box on his computer that he cannot dismiss. So it's just a three-finger swipe away at all times. So, but my actual work setup is, because I hate having like blank. areas around windows right and so i like it on windows that does like the snap the app like snap

together and i i have um uh what's what should we call it um better snap tool to help me do that but better snap tool likes to do like half and half so i was trying to get something that like it was more like a like a tiling window manager like you like people use like teemux like on on a terminal and it was it was like a super hack of the macOS window manager and it was a bad idea but um the ios 11's version of it is basically exactly how i use my computer i have one space where i keep slack and twitter they have one space where i keep a browser and a text editor um and then i have a space for like for this dialogue box and they have a space for like spotify or whatever and a space for a feed reader iPad like does it does exactly how I use on my computer in a

looks like a slightly slicker way and I just like I'm just so tired of my computer just slowing it. I'm even before this happened it's just like it's always slowing down it's always something's happening with it and it's like I feel like I couldn't do Windows 10S because it doesn't it doesn't even have hearthstone on it you know but uh but like I really like some of these apps that are coming out um for iOS 11 and they just

They just made the thing that I want iOS 11 to be, and I'm really excited. I really want to try it. Yeah. The one thing that gets me is the Safari. Yeah, well, it's a third window, but like often I have one Safari window open, an editor window for the Verge open, and then like Slack. And you can't do that on iOS. You want those all in the same view? Well, no, you want two browser windows and a second app open.

You can't do that. Yeah. Right, right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can kind of have three apps going, but two, you can't have three windows. So it's a weird, logical split. It comes down to, can you, do you want to, like, adjust your, like, productivity setup to match that, that UI paradigm, that windowing paradigm that you've been talking about, Paul, like the spaces and the split screens and so on and so on. On my computer, I don't like doing that because I like having, like, windows actually layered on top of each other.

I can see like a little bit of the Slack window and a little bit of the tweet deck window and a lot of the browser window. And like is that just, am I just old? And I just like want my mouse with a scroll wheel. And I should just try and switch to the full on like iPad way of doing things. Or is there like genuine utility there that is worth like demanding out of these computers? And then the, but like Paul, your story is like, well, maybe the answer is yes. but like can you open that door without ending up with people having to put an undismissable dialogue box in another space, right? Right.

Like if the spectrum of computing goes from like single full screen app window. We should not design our entire UI paradigms around Paul's ability to fuck up window managers. Like that's the edgiest of edge cases. Like 10S, if you switch from Windows 10S to Windows 10 Pro and only download stuff from the Windows store, you basically are running Windows 10S. It's not any different. 10S and 10 Pro are the same operating system. The thing that 10 Pro lets you do is fuck up your system by installing a bunch of like Adobe

Creative Cloud stuff that slows it down in the background, by installing a bunch of crazy window managers by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like the question, I do the same thing in my Mac. I've got a bunch of crap on my Mac that I know is slowing it down. And if I were to start fresh, it would feel way faster and probably get better battery life. So we want that door open. We want to walk through it. But once you walk through that door, it's like you're in like the evil version of Narnia,

where everything is a Wonderland, but she'll definitely, you know, get killed from a random map that you think is cool that you installed. How is that an evil version of Narnia? I don't know. I'm confused. I mean, I could get to it. Well, because Narnia is run by Aslan, who never. And we're not going here. We almost did, though.

We could. That's the door you don't want to walk. Yeah. I hate doing this because I hate metaphors in general, like, particularly the PC market, car market metaphor. Car truck? Car and truck? It's a boat. It's a car.

That's a truck. No. If you buy a car, you generally are not meant to screw with it. And most people don't, and it's fine. But you can if you want to. and you can do superficial things you can put body kits on your car

you can do crazy things you can buy a crate engine from Ford and put it in your Chevy if you are so inclined yeah if you if anybody ever meets Nilai and he has his car just walk around the car and point out anything on the car that isn't

perfectly black and he'll just lose his mind at you for two hours straight there's two things left it's the tailpipes I have I need a strategy I've thought about it a lot anyway But my point is, like, that choice exists. And we shouldn't get away from the world in which you are able to buy some things that offer you that choice.

Right? Like, people can't invent new kinds of things if they don't have the freedom to actually invent it on the platforms. And I think the one question Apple has yet to answer with iOS at all is how do you write an iOS app on an iOS device? And you're just not going to be able to do it if the thing remains as locked down as it is. at least so far as I can tell. I feel like they could be really freaking close. Yeah. Because they've got playgrounds on iPad now, which they're using to teach kids.

But that's like running Swift code right there. I mean, LLVM like runs on ARM. It could compile to arm like the compiler. Yeah, but like then you have like a local app distribution problem. Right. It's got to run on the iPad. You've got to put it into memory. You've got to let it address the operating system.

you're not signing it through the store. Like that actually starts to create. Is it Apple smart enough to enable like a developer mode? Like people are like already talking about needing trying to jailbreak the next version of iOS 11 on the next iPhone because it looks like right now they're not going to allow drag and drop on an iPhone. And like that could actually be useful on an iPhone. And so people are like, well, I'm going to jailbreak. There was like the whole reason the jailbreak ecosystem existed was to unlock a bunch of stuff that you know the OS could do. But that just isn't allowed.

And some of those are like flags of things. are built into the OS. I'm wondering how long it is until Apple's like, all right, this is how we ship it. 95% of people are going to never, you know, tap the box. But for some people, they'll tap the box, we'll give them a bunch of warnings. And then they will have, you know, a developer mode, iOS device that you can, you know, do stuff on. I would do that. I would love that. It's a lot, it's more work for them. But I think it would, it would gain them, their hardest core fans would love them for it. Yeah. I will see. It's just an interesting time, right?

Like, we haven't been at this decision. We've seen this decision point coming for a long time. It feels like with 10S, with iOS 11, it's arrived in a significant way. And that split between what do you want a laptop to be is people are going to start making that choice for real in a way that iPads previously, the choice has been, I'm going to radically rethink my relationship to computing. and now it's I can do almost everything I want my laptop to do

in a much simpler environment in 10S makes it even more clear yep anyhow that's I think we've now wait we forgot to do Paul every week yeah there's a segment

never forget never ever forget it's a segment that you do yeah it's called I see seed semi-colon so much seeing it's a high concept segment

I'll get you the spelling, Andrew. I. The letter C. I, referring to myself. Okay, I. And then a company that's called C seed, right? The letter C and then seed as in the past tense of seeing. Or like a seed from which a plant grows? Yeah, like a plant. Okay. Not the past tense of seeing. Okay, they made a really big TV. C seed is the name of the company.

So you've seen made a 262-inch 4K-wide LCD TV. That's a lot of liquid crystals. Yeah. With apparently a 5,000 to 1 contrast ratio, it's 19 feet wide, cost $539,000, which to be honest, it doesn't sound very much for like the world's largest TV. I feel like you can charge whatever you want. It's pretty crazy. Also, there's a picture of Chad Mum.

Like good for a Chad Mum. Wait, how much should it cost again? $539,000. Oh, and like their marketing copy just assumes that you have a mansion, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is where it goes in your mansion. I love the idea that someone's selling a product that is a TV that I literally could not fit in any direction or angle in my apartment.

So that's just the biggest TV ever. C-seed. C-seed. That's a great way to start a big thing. badly named company. Like now you have to know what C-C it is. You don't have a choice. Right, they didn't come out with like a 40-inch TV and you're like,

what's that terrible brand? They were like, here's just all of the panels we had. We started the company. We were like, should we make a lot of 40-inch TVs for just one TV? Well, how do you want to be a member? Yeah. When does it come out? Are we getting one?

I don't know. All right. Sorry. That's the limit of my knowledge about this very large television. Well, I want one, and I will have it, and it will go on my boat. All right. That is our show. Let us know if you like this segments thing.

I had fun doing the interview yesterday. Dieter and I had fun interviewing Panos. As you know, we're down to one show. You should listen and watch the last episode of Control, I delete. That was super fun. Taped it live here in New York. Everybody, thank you so much. Like 300 people were there.

They had assigned posters. it was, I was like, this is just a podcast, but we were signing stuff. College students were like happy to see Walt. They're all inspired. One, I'm going to tell this story. One kid was like, I'm going to college, but I know a lot of famous people have dropped out of college. And Walt was like, that's true. And he started naming like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.

And he was just like getting through the names. And the kid's dad was like, what are you doing? And Walt was like, those people are extraordinary. You should stay in college because you're not going to, you can't line up a moment. like those people and the kids' ad was like, thank you, Walt. It was just great. Thank you so much. But if you came and if you didn't, please listen, watch.

But like I said, we're down to this show. We're interested in doing more segments with this show. So if you like the ones that we did today, let us know. We'll keep at it. We'll keep experimenting. We're also, Andrew Marino, our producer, is doing a bunch of experiments in an app called Anchor, which is like a podcasting app that doesn't have all, it doesn't require you to like download a bunch of podcasts,

just like a self-contained audio platform that I think is really interesting. Casey wrote about it. Because it's anchor and that's boat adjacent. I love anything boat adjacent. But we've, it's anchorfm, anchor.fm. Anchor.fm.com slash verge. Or you can get the app and subscribe to the verge.

There's just been a bunch of weird stuff happening there, audio-wise, cool stories. Caitlin Tiffany, the great reporter on our culture team is doing some stuff. Casey Newton's going to start doing. a bunch of stuff there. There's other people have ideas. So listen to that stuff, and let us know which of those things should become podcast. It's like basically we're piloting new ideas on Anchor because I think it's easier to get audio out through that app

than having everybody subscribe to a whole new podcast full of whatever. So let us know there. There's also other stuff to listen to. Lauren Good, our terrific senior editor, host Too Embarrass to Ask with Kara Swisher on the recode side. Karas Swisher host Recode Decode and Peter Kafka hosts Recode Media. So don't worry. It's not like there's nothing to listen to. Listen to that stuff. Listen to us on Anchor.

Let us know what you think, and we're going to start rolling out some new podcasts in the future. And that's it. You can talk to us on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. Paul is at Future Paul. Dieter's at Backlon.

Oh, Megan's at. Megan underscore Nicolette. Nicolette. Yeah. All right, that's it. Snip, snip. Rock. Paul.