The Vergecast - Reviews for the Macbook Air and iPad Pro (2020) and how the coronavirus is affecting tech companies and culture

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Amazon warehouse workers are outraged after a coworker tested positive for COVID-19 and they weren’t notified ‘We’re all going to get sick eventually’: Amazon workers are struggling to provide for a nation in quarantine It’s time for a regular Amazon daily coronavirus briefing Twitter locks account encouraging coronavirus ‘chickenpox parties’ Zoom is 2020’s hottest yoga studio Apple says customers must wait to pick up repairs locked inside its retail stores Best Buy moves to curbside pickup only as it sees surge in orders for home office equipment Disney Plus and Facebook are also reducing streaming quality in Europe Amazon and Apple are reducing streaming quality to lessen broadband strain in Europe YouTube joins Netflix in reducing video quality in Europe YouTube creators figure out how to film during a pandemic Fashion influencers are rethinking their curated aesthetics because they can’t leave their houses Fox will broadcast NASCAR’s substitute sim racing ‘season’ on television Pro drivers are competing with gamers after F1 and NASCAR canceled races How to watch movies with friends online Everything you need to know about the coronavirus  Subscribe to Home Screen: a newsletter to brighten your inbox Apple MacBook Air (2020) review: the best Mac for most people Apple iPad Pro review 2020: small spec bump, big camera bump Never buy hardware today based on a promise of software tomorrow The new MacBook Air and iPad Pro are already discounted on Amazon Huawei hopes the P40 Pro can lure you away from Google  Living a Google-free life with a Huawei phone Dell now lets you control iPhones from its PCs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we talk about how the coronavirus is affecting tech companies and tech culture big and small. We go into our MacBook Air and iPad Pro reviews. Talk a little bit about the Huawei P40 Pro. There's an Android history lesson in there somewhere. There's a weird little Dell app that we think is interesting. Coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash 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 I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of working for mom.

I mean, that's the easiest trip. I'm sorry, it was there and I took it. I'm your friend, Nealai. Dieter Bonas here. Hi, I'm also at home. Paul Miller. Hello, I'm at home. It'd be great if you're like, I'm at a rave.

But I think you're at home. It is week two of us doing this from this setup, which we're all at home. I hope it sounds good. I think it does. We're changing some things up. Let us know. We're obviously trying to improve it week by week. But we are all working from home, just like all of you should be if you have the ability

to do it, the people who are out going to work every day. we thank you. But if you have the ability to work from home, you should be, just like us. We're trying to make this show as good as possible. Let us know how we're doing. Okay. It is a strange time to do a podcast that is not only about computers because there's the world's biggest story, which is the coronavirus.

I do want to call out, first of all, the Verge Science team, which is absolutely slammed covering the coronavirus, the response to the worldwide pandemic and the many, many stories inside of that. So point you at them. They're doing great. We're going to have Nicole, who is our health reporter. She was on the virtualist a couple weeks ago. We'll have her back.

We'll have Mary Beth, who's our science editor back. And we'll have Liz Apato or deputy editor. We're going to have them coming back on the show in the future as events warrant. There is a bunch of stuff that we need to talk about. But Dita reviewed the iPad this week. I reviewed a MacBook air. We're definitely going to talk about those reviews. But I do want to call out some less sort of like directly virus-related stories and more of the effects of the

pandemic that are absolutely in the verge zone. So first, I'm just going to say, it's been two weeks since there was a flow chart presented at the White House. By the time you're listening to this, it will have been two weeks since Donald Trump got on in front of the podium and said Google's making us a website and they held up a flow chart about how you can get tested. That flowchart, in case you forgot, because why would you remember it, that flowchart said you would go to a website that was maybe or maybe not made by Google. You'd enter your symptoms. It would say you need a test.

You would direct you to a place where you could drive through a testing clinic in the parking lot of a major retailer like Walmart or Target or something. You would get a test. You would drive home. And then the website would give you the result. That was the promise they literally held up a flow chart saying that was going to happen. It has been two weeks. That website does not exist as near as we can tell.

A website exists. Google made a website. The website has state-by-state information links to your state health department and other things you might want to know. But it is not the other website. The website that does do this stuff verily. They did it just for the Bay Area. That website still exists. I haven't checked recently if they like opened up to more people, but reports said it was, you know.

It was like 20. They tested 20 people in the first. They recently published a YouTube video that says this is what the drive-through. This is how the thing works and what a process looks like, which is great. Great. You would go and you'd sign up, and then you get a number, and then you go in your car, and the first step you keep your window rolled up and, like, show your driver's license through the window. And then the second step, they, like, give you a, like, QR code and your windshield wiper and the third step you get tested. All that looks fine. Do you remember Microsoft released the Courier concept video? That's what you just described to me. It's a beautiful Microsoft concept video. It's a book that opens and it turns into a tablet. it's been two weeks. I don't want to forget about it. It is true that Walmart did open to drive-through testing facilities in and around Chicago, but only for first responders and medical

workers. But a big underlying story here is testing who can get a test, when you can get a test. We're going to keep tracking it. It is somewhat coincidental to the Burgecast comes out on Fridays, which is the day that the promise was made. So it's very easy for me to remember how many weeks it's been. But that's one big story. I just want to keep calling it out because the testing is really, it's really critical to getting it under control, and that was a promise of it. So, it's been two weeks since then. We're going to keep tracking on it. Then there's the other part, which I think is it touches a lot of the companies that we usually talk about in the verge gas. So Amazon is still functional. They have changed their entire product mix. Jeff Bezos put out

a note saying it was all he was thinking about was his response to COVID-19 and Amazon's role in it. Their warehouses are still working. Just as it has still. two great stories on the site now about warehouse workers who are extremely fearful because they're still going to work, working in close proximity with each other. There was a warehouse where, and Josh has a bunch of reporting here, where someone got sick, tested positive, Amazon didn't inform the rest of the warehouse workers. And they found out from news reports, they found out by demanding HR. So there's, I think there's going to be a lot of Amazon-related information that comes out because obviously those people, those folks are still going to work.

and it's really important that they still go to work as all of our consumption sort of shifts online and they become responsible for delivering so many supplies to people. I want to connect that to what Casey has been doing on the interface, which is his newsletter, about social platforms and democracy. He wrote a really great piece calling for Amazon, Facebook, the big platforms, Google, that we rely on to hold their own infrastructure briefings just like we're getting from the government because we are deeply reliant on Amazon now. We're deeply reliant on Google and Facebook.

Facebook, it would be nice to know how they're doing, particularly Amazon, which is going to be delivering a lot of stuff. So that's, like, just one big set of reporting that we've done. I thought this would be a good time to go get a job at Amazon warehouse. And I looked it up. And the nearest one to the city is New Jersey. So that means everything that I buy is all, like, sort of processed. I don't know. So I gave up on that dream.

Isn't there one in Queens? Not that I didn't know of one, but that there was. weren't any jobs listed at least. Yeah, Amazon has said they're going to hire 100,000 people to work in these warehouses. I mean, the scale of demand is very high for their service. Right. That was my thinking. Like, and I'm in the prime of you. I'm ready to work. Put me to work. Oh, my God, Paul. Stay home. I want to sort things and run ragged and become sad and broken down as an Amazon employee. Look, Paul, you thought being managed by me was like being managed by a robot. wait until Amazon gets hold you.

I do think that the daily briefings are a good idea, especially when as people get more and more concerned about the welfare of the workers in the warehouse, there should be a lot more transparency about what's going on there for those workers and for everybody that wants to know if it's even ethical to be ordering stuff from Amazon right now. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's a part of this whole thing where I would say The Verge is historically obsessed with buttons. Yeah.

In general, it's like a thing that we really like. And one of the easiest ways for us to find a story is to say, what happens when you push this button, right? And we have an entire podcast called Why'd You Push That Button? And so, like, you know, Casey and the Facebook moderator story is really like when you push the report button on Facebook or YouTube, there's an army of people who have to do the work. I think with Amazon, when you push the button and something shows up your house, that has been so invisible for so long. And now the work that they're doing in the world carries an heightened element of risk. And I think this whole thing for me is really like you push the button on the internet on the screen.

Other people now have to put themselves at some amount of risk. And I think it's really brought that into relief for me. So that's one set of things. Just Amazon is a whole Josh is covering it. I want to call that out. Then there's what is happening on the social platforms. I think another really interesting dynamic that's playing out is we have talked a lot on the show about how social platforms moderate content, who should be responsible for it, whether the government should be involved.

Here, it's pretty clear that there are right answers and wrong answers, and there's what the CDC and the World Health Organization say, and then there's, like, you should drink bleach to cure yourself from the virus. So the platforms have all taken stronger lines on moderating themselves, because there's no controversy.

Yeah, what's interesting about this is not only have they taken stronger lines, but they've also said explicitly a couple of platforms, we're taking a stronger line, and that might mean that we're going to moderate stuff, we're going to err on the side of moderating too much. We might hide something that we shouldn't. And that's, we know we're going to make those mistakes, get ready for it.

It's going to be fine. And everyone's like, yep, cool, fine. However, in terms of their actual actions, there have definitely been some tweets and some other things from like high profile politicians that really crossed the line and didn't get taken down because they, you know, reasons. I don't want to go too far into this, but I disagree that there's an obvious right and wrong. with some of the stuff. Like, like, it is not certain or clear or obvious that all of the recommendations made by world health organizations have been accurate. Like, it is not obvious.

I think there's an open debate about the early recommendations of not wearing a mask, whether that was for the supply of masks or if that is actually a health recommendation. You know, I think you're right. I think it's more like you don't usually see medium issue guys. guidelines on what you can post on Medium, right? And yesterday, they put out guidelines, in case E and Zoe covered them in the newsletter. Like, they put out guidelines that, like, if you publish a blog post on Medium where you're like, burn the CDC down, they're going to take your post down. And that's, that is just an easier call for a platform, like medium,

which usually doesn't do stuff like that. Twitter is locking accounts that are encouraging coronavirus chickenpox parties, right? It's just an easier call. So Paul, I agree, like the Masting in particular, right? I just think there's lots of things that are worth debate. Yeah, but I think that what, okay, fine. And I think the substance of the debate we do not need to do right now. Like I would hand that over to the particular science reporters. I'm saying here the platforms have taken aside in a way that they feel is much more supported

than their usual muddle. One platform I did not expect to have to deal with like moderation issues and improving moderation tools was Zoom. Because you think of Zoom is just like the only people that, ever on your Zoom are your coworkers. But that's not what Zoom is anymore. Yeah. And there was a, I think, Taylor Lawrence and Mike Isaac and some other folks at the times,

there was many bylens in the story, had a whole story about Zoom. And in the middle of it was, now that all the teenagers are on Zoom, they're getting bullied and there's calls for Zoom to moderate the Zoom platform. I would never let Zoom employees into our work Zoom. Nope. There are no reasons. And I would never want a button in our work Zoom that, like, hit a recording. could send it out to Zoom support.

But I think on the consumer side, they might need that stuff. Discord is like that. I mean, Discord is a lot of teens hanging out with each other and bullying each other and talking about suicide. And so Discord has some pretty strong, I don't know the efficacy, but has some pretty strong moderation. Yeah, and that's just the split between Discord as a consumer product. They know who their audience is. And Zoom is an enterprise product that is now being used. used by consumers in deeply unexpected ways.

And that is just, we're seeing, like, Slack broke its user records because everybody's working from home and everybody's communicating on these platforms. Jake wrote an entire story about how all these yoga studios are now doing our classes on Zoom. Like, those are unexpected use of the technology. Like, in normal circumstances, unexpected use of technology are like, what we do here. That's what the verge is about. You know, it's like, these are like somewhat joyful, unexpected emergent behaviors.

they're being caused by something horrible. But enterprise software being used by millions of consumers in unexpected ways to potentially bully and harm each other, that means Zoom has to quickly become a consumer company in a way that it was never conceived of from the start, even though it did have that free tier. I think that free tier was to get your startup to use it so that one day your startup would be successful and then you would pay Zoom. It wasn't so that like a bunch of teenagers would use it. And I think that we're going to see that play out over time.

That's a really hard moderation question. Speaking of working from home, the laptop sales are up according to a bunch of the analyst firms. You know, if you are in a state with like shelter at home, stay at home regulations, Best Buy, you know, says it's like an essential business. It has to stay open so people can buy office furniture. They've closed down in store so you can only order online and then drive to the curbside and I'll put it in. If you forget to order something online, you can order at the curb from the Best Buy employees, which is like a remarkable outcome. Apple is doing the same thing Their stores are closed

If you have a repair If you have something that you gave to Apple for a repair You just can't get it You just got to wait Like that's just a ripple effect Of this that I don't think anybody Anybody still coming And then this is the next one

It's kind of the big one for me It's something that we have just Been watching and playing out We're asking a lot of questions Particularly in Europe The internet is being strained And so you see all these services Say they're going to slow things down

So Disney Plus and Facebook are reducing their video streaming quality in Europe. Amazon and Apple are reducing their quality in Europe. YouTube and Netflix followed in reducing their video quality in Europe. YouTube overall is reducing its default video quality to SD for the next month. And then Sony is slowing down PlayStation downloads in Europe, but they promise that multiplayer will remain fine. That is, I mean, how much do we talk about broadband policy on the show? We had Jessica Rosenmorsal from the FCC on. Gigi Sown, just wrote an editorial for us.

The day they recorded on Thursday, you should go read it about how we kind of like walked into this mess. But one thing we always talk about is European Internet is more highly regulated. They get faster service for cheaper prices. And here in this moment, when everyone is using it, their capacity is limited in a way that it does not quite yet appear that American capacity is limited. We'll see. Obviously, Europe is ahead of the curve. So maybe it's going to happen to us too, but that is a really interesting split and sort of an unexpected outcome. I do wonder if there's a tiny part of it where in Europe, because they have on average faster speeds that maybe HD is more the norm, like, you know, super like 4Ks, like just high, high resolution streaming is more than norm.

And so like downrising makes a bigger difference, whereas broadband in the U.S. by and large is not that fast. And so maybe fewer people are getting those very, very high bandwidth streams in the first place. Oh, you're saying we've all just been so deeply conditioned to it paying $70 a month for $25 down. Yeah. Comcast's holding us for access capacity. That would be a really cool number to know the average, not available to them, but not on paper, but the actual gigabytes per capita transferred in a day and see what that is like per per country. I mean, Europe is known as a continent of pixel density enthusiasts.

Yeah, Paul, I've always thought of you as being a somewhat secret European. I don't think I like that. Europe's fine. I don't know. A lot of people in Europe have bad internet. And I would say that I'm curious, would this situation call for quote unquote, reasonable management? I think that remains to be seen. That's the net neutrality term, right?

Like an ISP has, should have some right to manage. its network so that it works. Yeah, and so that's the term in the States. I don't know across Europe what the equivalent term is. I don't know that those ISPs have asked for this to be done. Certainly what they're not. What we're not seeing is a bunch of ISPs across Europe, throttling Disney Plus on their own, right?

We're seeing the companies voluntarily doing it before the ISPs do it. What we have not yet seen here, or at least heard about, is our ISPs, which have no net neutrality regulation, which if you've been listening to the show, you were deeply aware of, they have not taken those steps. In fact, what our ISPs have done is, and we talked about this last week, they have removed a bunch of restrictions and, like, toll bridges that consumers usually face. So data caps have gone away, late fees have gone away. The idea that they're going to throttle anything is sort of like they're really backing off of that stuff. So I think it's a really interesting time. Like, if all of Comcast Network, and I will just

closed Comcast and Vexter and Box Media, which is our parent company. But if all of Comcast's network was slowed down by people staying at home, and Comcast said, you know what, screw it. It's Netflix. We're just like, we're going to block Netflix today. They would be legally able to do that. No one could stop them from, I think obviously if Comcast decided to block Netflix while everyone was working from home, there would be some sort of market response to that.

But you know, like, how old gifts with like the low color and you have the dithering? What if you had like dithered Netflix? I mean, isn't that like Disney Plus and SD? Like, that's what we're describing. So that stuff is happening. We're going to keep paying attention to it. I think the two big stories that I want the verge to get into more aggressively are the role of enterprise software, turning into consumer software on Zoom, and then the broadband story. Because everybody at home is a big broadband story.

And services going up and down in the capacity of our networks. I think those are our stories. We talk about them forever. We're going to pay a lot of it. attention to it. And then a few more things just like unhappier emergent behavior notes. The creator economy is obviously responding to this. Ashley has a great story about how fashion influencers are rethinking their entire strategy because they can't go out and curate and do photo shoots. So go read that story. It's really interesting. And then Julia had a great story today about YouTube

creators who some of whom are like, yeah, we just film everything at home anyway. So we're good. And then other ones, one of my favorite channels is B is for Build. She talked to them. They decided that they were going to basically quarantine as a group and not see anybody else. So they could continue doing like their car build videos. So I think it's just really neat. So go check out those stories. Like these are ripple effects beyond what you would ever expect.

Sean O'Kane had a great story about how professional race car drivers in F1 and NASCAR and I was just like racing online as fans. And that blew up over the weekend. And then Fox decided it was just going to broadcast not NASCAR racing. but the virtual racing league with the NASCAR drivers in it, which is like, you were talking about esports last week, like this is like the best. I love this story, like the, how naturally they just slipped over to just like, we'll just, you know, we're playing, we're like testing ourselves on these rigs anyway.

We're racing in video game style all of the time anyway. So they just like became Twitch streamers essentially. And it just worked. I mean, it's more complicated than became Twitch streamers, but just how smoothly this transition happened is actually like circumstances aside like really like fascinating and kind of fun it is a bummer like actual

NASCAR events are the best I've been to one I know you've been to one or two right? Yeah so that's still sad but like how quickly they were able to just like turn this on and make this change is like incredible. Can I read you my favorite factoid from this? At one point I'm just reading this paragraph

at one point while fighting for the league Cleggerman's computer tried to force a Windows update sending him straight to the wall. So good. Some things never change. It's like he's got to make a pit stop to get his DLL swapped out. That's amazing.

What was really interesting about this story, you should read it, Sean's story. He's like, all these race car drivers, they all have full setups at home. They all have wheels. They all have pedals. It is obviously a different thing. But like the physical controls of what they're doing map one to one. And so they were, they were, they were. eager and ready, whereas like, you know, if we, if LeBron James was playing NBA 2K, like,

some middle schooler could like beat him. It's a different set of physical controls. That's a great story. I think it's really neat. Paul, you wanted to talk about watching movies with friends online. Oh, yeah. This is something, this has been like, like my, what's it in Moby Dick where it's a whale? Is it a white whale?

It's a white whale. Yeah, this has been my white whale. The whale is called Moby Dick. Okay. That's the name of a whale. The titular whale of the novel. Paul, you know what happens to Ahab, right? No.

My God. Does the whale eat Ahab like in Pinocchio? The whale wins. Okay. I want to watch movies with people who aren't in the same place as me, right? So you can, the low-tech version of this is you both cue up the movie and you go three, two, one, play, right? And now you are probably three seconds off from each. other from just accidents of the world.

So there's a lot of services now, and these have existed, but obviously getting a lot more use. Like Netflix party is a big one. So you've got like chat, but you're all watching in sync. But the problem and like the irony of it all is that how do you watch a movie that you paid for? Like if you buy a movie on iTunes, right? If you have a physical copy of a movie, like, like you can't, you can't screen share it

because of HDCP. Like, basically, DRM makes this way harder. And so now the only way to have these shared experiences is for, like, the movie has to be in the cloud. Unless you, and this is what I'm recommending, you buy the movie and then you steal it. And then you distribute the stolen copy. And then one of these services, 27 or 27, 27, 27 allows you to. to watch a file simultaneously as someone else. So if you've distributed the movie that you stole on Google Drive, and then you watch it.

So there's still hope, but I just love that. DRM always pushes us to the worst solution. This is an audio-only show, but I want you to know that while Paul was recommending that you do crimes, Neelai and I were both staring up into the right thinking about, how are we going to deal with this? Just like, I don't know. What's good is that I don't think the police are going to find it worth. making contact with us in person if it's time for that crime. So it's like, you know, your mild teen crimes.

Now is the time to do them. Wait, Paul, here's my pushback, though. DRM has also made it way easier because if you are a Netflix subscriber and you live in their DRM wall garden, and you just like download this Chrome extension and watch the thing, right? Yeah, but Netflix has a trash selection. Like, Netflix has a lot of unique, interesting, new content that you've never seen before and it has like four movies.

Right. Like, it has four good films that are touchstones. You know what I mean? Like, those kind of movies are almost always pay these days. That's true. Okay. Well, if you have a better non-mile-crime solution is problem, tweet it, tweet it us at Future Paul. Keep Paul out of jail.

That's our only goal here. Okay. I wanted to make sure we talk about it is the biggest story in the world. It is going to reset a lot of things. We have a whole guide, everything you need to about the coronavirus. Again, the science team in particular, just doing an incredible job. covering the stuff. So go look at that guide. And then Verge executive editor TC. SOTIC has a new newsletter called Home Screen, which is about the weird and wonderful things that are happening on the

internet when everyone's at home. Subscribe to that in case you just need a break. And I think everybody kind of needs a break from time to time right now. So check out homescreen. It's just my hope, I don't know if this is a hope. I don't know if you're allowed to hope for things as outcomes of this. My instinct is that more people are spending time on their laptops and not their phones right now. And so like a return of like desktop internet culture is upon us. And I think that is very exciting. But TC's tracking that all home screen. Check that out. Okay. So we're in laptops. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. And then Dieter and I are going to fight about iPads versus MacBooks. Why are we fighting? Support for the show comes from Framer.

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That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can be getting lost in the shuffle. Gramerly gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing you're doing, Gramerly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a lot.

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you never will. Download Grammarly for free at grammerly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Dieter. Let's fight. No, you reviewed the iPad Pro, which... I did. It's just hard because the whole

thing people are excited about is the keyboard and the keyboard isn't here yet. Yeah, the keyboard's not here yet. And the iPad Pro itself is a super minor spec bump. They improve the GPU on it for reasons. If you are rendering 4K video on your

iPad Pro, you might want it. And they added a LiDR sensor and there are no apps that take full advantage of the LiDAR sensor. Like zero that you can download right now. There are apps that get free benefits of the LIDAR sensor because it can instantly map a room. You don't have to wave your iPad around.

And it's able to do better occlusion so you can put like a bowl or a cat or something else in front of your virtual object instead of just a person. And you know, they can do some other things okay. And I had this whole thing that I sort of gesture to in the review where I'm like, you're paying for this thing that let's be honest,

you're not going to use, right? Like who really is using AR with their iPads that much, that it's worth the extra cost of this thing. And I think that's true, although I need a desk because I don't have one. And so I started using the AR on the iPad to like test out different desks in my dining room. Did the LiDar sensor made shopping for a desk that much better? Or could you have waited to four seconds for a decade?

Wayfair's VR thing. Wayfair's AR thing only works on a phone. Because if you try and visit it with the desktop class web browser on the iPad, it doesn't realize that you have cameras and it doesn't give you the AR button. Oh my God. Yep. That is the worst catch 22. That's amazing. I kind of thought where you were going with that is that you need a desk and you are going to AR yourself a desk.

But you're air yourself to shop for a desk. Correct. Because otherwise you'd just be sitting there pretending to have a desk. Yes. I know. That's why I thought it was a little silly. So it's interesting as the iPad becomes more laptop, because I like your point about the iPad could theoretically be a lot, or not theoretically be somewhat cheaper if it didn't have bonkers, cameras and LIDAR on the back. And we wish our laptops had those nice front facing cameras. But if you imagine a laptop, someone tried to sell you a laptop that costs, you know, $100 extra. And there's a bonkers camera on the back of the screen. You're like, well, I don't need that. Yeah, to me, the more Apple put out a camera that it can't quite use yet, there's a online version of WWDC coming, like, okay, the hardware is ahead of the software for the first time in Apple history.

That's unusual, but so it goes. The more interesting to me is they added this processor that doesn't seem any faster than the previous processor. It's only faster in the GPU. And I asked Apple, I'm like, why? Why did you do this? And they're like, look, look, like, there are people that, like, have genuine pro workflows. Like, there are genuinely people who need to, like, I don't know, fold stuff with molecules or export 4K or whatever. And they're using their iPads for that.

And sure, I believe that. But the big question with maybe not this processor, but in general with the iPad, is always perennially, this hardware is great. Will the software be able to take full advantage of it? And that answer, I think, is always going to be maybe next year, right? I pad iPad Pro lives in the Bluetooth zone now, only it works, you know, pretty well. I mean, well, so you also got to try out the mouse and keyboard, mouse and keyboard, just the trackpad support. So the track pad stuff, I mean, we should talk about that. It's great. I am concerned about how it's going to be if you don't have a magic track pad.

So I want to, I'm getting the bridge keyboard, which is like a hundred bucks less than Apple's keyboard. So Sam Biford's going to review it. I'm going to make a video with it. Stay tuned for that next week. but I don't think that they can support all of the three-finger gestures. We'll see. I could be wrong. But if there's a world where, like, the only way to get the best, like, gesture experience on the iPad is to buy the magic keyboard and everything else is kind of like, eh, in comparison, that would suck. Yeah, but there are Windows trackpads that do multi-finger gestures, right?

Sure. Find me a, like, standalone trackpad to work with an iPad on Amazon.com right now. Sure, I guess I'm just thinking about the Apple also announced a Logitech case. Yeah, so presumably that'll support all the gestures. So I think it's going to be fine. And this bridge thing, you know, we'll see when I try it out. It'll presumably it'll all is going to turn out just fine. But there's just like a tiny, tiny little fear in me that Apple is going to reserve something for itself.

When you use your iPad with the magic track pad, do you feel silly? Or do you feel like, oh, this works, this could be a setup just like this. You feel silly for like half a second, and then it just feels pretty natural. You know, the acceleration is not quite the way that I'm used to it. It has, like, I made this reference to the Apple TV and Neil, I got real mad at me. It does sort of have that sort of acceleration, deceleration. Somebody actually pointed out, I forget who it was, that it actually, like, when you stop moving it, it, like, has a little bit of inertia, like the thing that keeps going a little bit, which is really interesting. Wait, just the Apple TV cursor stuff or the actual?

No, I think the cursor. Anyway, I think that the icon, when the icon changes shape. Text selection isn't quite as good as on a Mac or a Windows PC, but it's also like, man, I know. Apple made the choice to make text selection with your finger worse in iPad OS. They made it like harder to do. And the idea was, well, no, the AI I'll figure it out. And they'll, you know, they'll just know if you're trying to select text or not. And what they actually did is they prepared their cursor for trackpad support,

and then they backported it to touch, right? They would never admit it. They would, in fact, tell me that I'm wrong. But that's what it feels like. The native text selection experience on the iPad is second class to the way it used to work and to the trackpad. So what is particularly galling about this is they also ruined it on the iPhone, where you were almost never going to plug in a trackpad. If you were the person who's like Bluetoothing and trackpad in here, I don't even know if that works.

But it's also, because it's iOS, right? That's the part of it. So it is also worse on the iPhone, which is maddening because I miss that little loop magnifier every time I try to select text on the iPhone. Like, I just wish it was there and it's gone. And your claim, which I would say is 38% conspiracy theory. Oh, it's way more conspiracy theory than that. It's definitely like 64. Okay, 64% conspiracy.

But your claim is they made the shift in tech selection because they knew they were going to add trackpad support. Oh, no, that part is, that's not a conspiracy theory. That, I believe, 100,000 percent. They needed to have consistent text selection experience across touch and trackpad. But my conspiracy is they like, it's not a conspiracy. I think that they optimized for trackpad too much and for touch too little. And this gets at like the choices that they're making. for the iPad OS now and what they're going to do with the next version,

are they going to try and maintain a consistency of user experience between using a trackpad and not? Because on Windows, there's a quote-unquote tablet mode, right? And like things work a little bit differently when you're in tablet mode. And an iPad, everything basically works the same. And I'm wondering if they're going to try and maintain that or not. I think this all comes down to how much of a different operating system is iPadOS. Because if you remember when they announced iPadOS, they told us over and over again that they were just naming it different so that people would know it was different, but it wasn't really different.

And we're like, that makes no sense. It purely makes no sense. Like, why would you give it a different name if it wasn't going to be different than iOS? And they're like, yeah, because obviously. And that was more or less the conversation that went around in circles. Like, is it different? Is it going to fork off? Is it going to be at something?

And I'm like, no, no, it's all the same. And we did this a lot. now we're at a point where, okay, well, what you want is for text selection on the phone to maybe be different than text selection on the iPad. And maybe when the iPad isn't in the keyboard case, you want its text selection paradigm to be like the phone, but you put it in the keyboard case, and the text selection paradigm changes to the thing you have now. And that means iPad OS has to have multiple modes.

It has to be very different than the phone. And you can just quickly spiral that out into the iPad as a different, a whole different thing, which they have maybe set themselves up for by calling it something. something else, but they have yet not admitted that it will be something else. Yeah, there's two things there. I think that Apple does not want to have different modes. I think they think that's fundamentally inelegant the way that Windows does it. And the Chrome OS does it that way, too, actually.

I think they want there to be one mode. But I think if you can get around the mode problem, if you're like, when you put it in the keyboard cases, it magically understands. It's the person to work this way. And you never call the mode. Yeah. The neural engine takes over. I just don't admit that it's a mode.

Yeah, they could do that. We'll see what they're going to do. They promised big things, and I don't know if they were, when Fraterigi said, stay tuned or whatever, if he was referring to this or to something coming with iOS 14. Is it going to be iPadOS 14? iPadOS 2? The number that they put at the end of iPadOS is going to be really telling. Because right now they basically refer to it as like iPadOS 13.4, I think. Or they're like iOS 13 about 4.

So, yeah. Like, did they call it iPadOS just to satisfy the number of, like, critics and ourselves included, who are like, the iPad should be a different OS. So, like, here you go. Dummies. We named it different. Shut up. Probably. It's just like a reasonable.

Like, you know, you imagine like, what would you do if you ran Apple? I'm like, I would just do that. And I'd be like, shut up, Neelai. We did it. But then there's like the easier or the harder part, which is, is it different? Is it a, the way that TVOS is a different operating system that shares a lot of frameworks and code. I mean, the real question is, what does this feel like with the keyboard on it? Does it feel like a radically different product when you had that case?

And assuming this thing ships in May, and honestly, do you think we have to review the whole iPad experience again or just the keyboard? I mean, both. I mean, we could review the whole iPad experience again, but it doesn't change the iPad experience that much in terms of, of the nitty gritty of how you do stuff. It changes the affective experience of what does it like to have this thing and use this thing. I'm going to review that. And that in some sense is both, but it's mostly a review of the keyboard and how it

changes your feelings about the iPad. But like even then, even with the keyboard, even after everything and all the new stuff that it can do and down the line, it's still just like every now and then, I'm just like, what are you doing? It does not work with like a really old legacy web page that I need to use to write the newsletter. It just doesn't work. Trackpad, no trackpad doesn't matter. Really?

Yeah. There's just like there's still just things that you just have to go through two or three extra hoops to make work on the iPad. And then even when you do it, you don't know if it's going to work. So for example, one of the things that I use to write my newsletter is pinboard. Pinboard's great. Love pinboard. It's how I save all my links. But I want to be able to copy my links out of pinboard and put them into our content management system, into our editor.

And, you know, it's like kind of a hassle. And there's like, I could like lord a bunch of programming and write an API and create a script that exports a thing and save it in the cloud, whatever. Or I could do what's easy and just Google some JavaScript and JQuery commands and write a tamper monkey script for Chrome and Edge and Safari or whatever. and it will rewrite the page as soon as it loads so that it's in the format that I want to copy and paste into R CMS. Are you with me so far? Yes. You can't run, like, other programming languages on iOS. You can't run a script.

You can't, like, have the tamper monkey extension. They won't allow it. So I'm like, well, I guess I can't use the iPad. But, you know, you think about it, you look around, you see who else has had this problem. And it turns out that you can, if you, like, find the website that helps you do it, convert a full-on like tamper monkey script into a JavaScript bookmarklet. And so you just like plug it to this website and you make a bookmarklet and then you like save the bookmarklet and Safari. And that like mostly works. And then the next step that I need to do is I need to edit a bunch

of HTML source code, but I want to do it, you know, automatically. And so I've got solutions to do that in Windows and Mac that I just like hit a button. It runs my little, you know, search and replace scripts with Reg X and br-dr. That's really hard to do on the iPad. grabbing source code is actually really difficult to do on the iPad off a web page. But you know what? Can grab source code? Series shortcuts. Yeah.

So I have written... We were going to get there. Yeah. I have written a series shortcut that's like 50 steps long that's like, grab the source code, copy it. Get rid of all of the ID equals random number tags. After every paragraph tag, put two blank lines. Oh, by the way, you can't put blank lines directly in the search for place,

so you have to create a variable that's two blank lines and then put that in. Just like, I got there. Got all the way there. I created my bookmarklet. I created my series shortcut. I was so freaking proud of myself. I found the text editor that I wanted that wasn't too much overkill, just a right amount of overkill.

And then I went to my newsletter editor to publish it and be really proud of myself and tell everybody I did it. And I couldn't. What happened? The webpage doesn't work. It's an old, it uses a CK editor from like 2014 or something. and then on top of that, the, like, the preview pane is in an eye frame, and so it just displays all text is white, and so all I can see are the links, and so I just can't use it. I bet, I bet just a tiny little tamper monkey script.

I'm sure you could clear that right up. God damn it. So the counterpoint to this, I mean, Deider, I think you and I feel the same way about the iPad, which is you can goof around with series shortcuts and hacks and workflow extensions all day and all night, and you can probably get there, but then you can. you always hit a wall. And I always end up hitting a wall too. The counterpoint I would just point to Matt Penzerino over at TechCrunch wrote an entire review of the iPad Pro. He just spent like several a week or so with it.

This is his only computer. And he was like, this is great. I'm never going back. You should read it because it's sort of the opposite viewpoint. But like even in his review, he's like, the first thing I had to do was like create and assemble the share sheet that I wanted with all the shortcuts that I needed. and all of these other, like, well, you have to actively make the iPad do the thing you need it to do

in a way that I, maybe it's just because I've been using a Mac for so long, in a way that I never, but I want to see the source code of a webpage on a Mac. It's like, you just go to the view tab and just do it. Right, there it is. Or like you open the development unit as far, you just do it. And so I think that that's like the split.

Like the iPad in many ways is so much more complicated. And if you understand that complexity, it feels great, but it's held back by the wall around that complexity. Well, so the the iPad, like the learning curve on a Mac is like one, two, three, four, six, seven, nine, 15, right? Like that's the, that's the arc of the learning curve. On the iPad, it's like one, one, one. You're like, you're advancing.

You're learning stuff really fast and like it's really easy to use and you have no problem. But then like once you start to want to do something complicated, it spikes way higher, way sharper than it does on the Mac. Because you like, you all of a sudden have to, you don't progressively just. naturally learn how to do this stuff. You go looking for tutorials to do complicated things on the iPad way faster than you do on a Mac. Yeah. And that's not

because the iPad, it's not because the Mac is like magical. And it's not because I've used it for 40 years or however long. It's because like the way this thing works is it progressively teaches you things naturally without you noticing it. You can probably argue with this. I'm sure certain someone will argue with me about this.

I think the level of abstraction on the Mac is so much lower. Right. There's obviously still some level of abstraction, but you're not held away from what the computer is actually doing all the time in a way that the iPad. It's just like absolutely wants to hide that. Right. It absolutely wants you to go through whatever system level abstractions are the computer operating as opposed to the Mac, which is like, it's doing computer stuff. Would you like to look at it? Or in the case of Catalina, would you like to hit 45 dialogue boxes and say approved before you open one application from the internet? But look, it's just trying to keep you safe. And I feel like iPad OS is in the process of reforming. They are, in a sense, they have admitted wrongdoing with files. They're saying, okay, turns out computers, whatever those are, need something kind of like files. So we'll do some files.

But like that, I feel like that's progressively going to require rethinking the operating system because I feel like the operating system was designed with a lot of things that computers normally do, don't do. And if iPad OS is going to move towards does all computer things, that I feel like that is, there's some sort of fundamental redesign needed. And this is like the question of iPad OS. Like,

did they give themselves license to do that redesign in a way that doesn't touch the phone? And then we're just going to have to find out. I will say, and we can transition into the Mac review. People ask two questions. You know, what do you want to know about? I tweet it.

People tweet me. One is like, how is the performance compared to the Backbook Pro, the 13th Maccook Pro, by far the most common question. And then two was, should I buy this or the iPad Pro or the magic keyboard?

Those were the two absolutely most common questions. I can tell you about the 13th track of Crow, whatever, that's easy. The iPad Pro question is like, there's no way for me to, first, the keyboard isn't out, so I don't know.

Two, I don't know how frustrated you want to be, like on the daily. Like, is it a lot or a little? Like, are you interested in learning how a new computer works? Like, I can't, I honestly cannot tell you.

Yeah, I think your answer in the video and your review video was like, look into your heart. And like, that's, that is, that is the answer. And that's basically Apple's answer is like, people already know. Like, we don't have to worry about it. And I think that the collision course, the two platforms is, it's in many ways more apparent than ever. But it also, on the flip side, like, they're just radically different things. There's no way I would, after reviewing this air, I would ever be like a person who's, like, really happy with their iPad. I'd be like, actually you should use this MacBook.

Okay, so, Neely, tell us what the year. I mean, you've reviewed two of them now, right? So, like, it's interesting to follow up to Deeter annual MacBook air reviews and be like, well, what am I going to say now? So obviously, it's like, even your, like, review last year was like, well, what the hell do you say? Like, they up the processor. The keyboard's still a big question mark. To me, I think I started in this place in the written review, not so much the video, because I don't think anybody wants a history lesson in these videos. I went back and I watched the introduction of the butterfly keyboard MacBook pros.

And there's this like incredible moment where Phil Schiller is like, we think these are so great that we challenge the team to make a 13 inch MacBook Pro that MacBook Air users would want. And he's like, we're going to keep selling the MacBook Air. But check out this 13 inch MacBook Pro without a touchbar. It's smaller, it's lighter, it's faster, it's got a better screen. And we think MacBook Air owners are going to want, or MacBook Air. buyers are going to choose this over the MacBook care. It's remarkable. Like Apple

never just nukes its own products on stage. They're never like, we're going to keep selling this one, but here's 10 minutes of Schiller like going down the spec list of the new thing and being like, don't buy that thing. We think people it is, it's remarkable, especially

now in contact. So you can watch it. It didn't work. Like that's actually the crazy thing. People kept buying the air. And so they were forced in this position in the entire consternation of what is going to happen with the Mac. And I think what they wanted, and I think this is where that whole iPad Mac thing happens, they wanted people at the cheaper price points to buy iPads, right? Because that 13-inch Pro started at 1499.

So I think they were hoping to get rid of the entire bottom price segments of the Mac, have it for pro users in that way, and then all the consumers would buy iPads. I think that's what they were really hoping for. But people kept buying the air because it was cheap. And what the people wanted was a Mac. So they ended up rebooting the Mac, recommitting to it, all the stuff. We talked about it at length. And then they put out the new air with the retina display two years ago.

The processor was not there to drive that retina screen or do what it wants. I think the first line in your MacBook air review from two years ago was like, the fan is running. Yeah. Last year they bumped the processor. It was still a dual core I-5. I think it was like eighth-gen. It was still behind the curve. Great.

Still the Butterfly keyboard, the whole Butterfly keyboard thing. So then this year, you've got Magic keyboard, and you've got these 10th generation chips. I think the Magic keyboard is, right, they put it in the MacBook Pro first because, like, so many people were mad about the Escape Key and just generally the 15-inch MacBook Pro not being great. It's also more expensive product. They sell less volume. They could put it out there and make people happy. Great, they did it. What was the next one they were going to add it to?

Their most popular laptop, right? The MacBook Air is their most popular. laptop and they added the good keyboard to that one next and then sort of we assume that the 13 inch pro will come along for the ride it's a great keyboard there's no i really like typing on it i do not like the touch bar so i have thoroughly enjoyed uh having physical brightness and volume keys again so i think that part is settled okay the big question mark can you buy this computer will be reliable the other question mark is like is it does it perform and i they didn't give us the i3 so i can't answer that question i says

expect it will be fine. The 10th generation I3 is like the well regarded part. The quad core I five that I have, yeah, I can make that fan turn on whenever I want. It's, it's, you know, like you open lightroom and like you see like a little bit and then you like do a couple of things and it's like going. Yeah, you run Cinebench, which is like hardest benchmark. That's full blast. And then there was a little bit of like YouTube controversy and like whatever, but the thermal design of the machine does not let it run at the full Turbobo speed for very long. Right?

So it's a 1.1 gigahertz part that turbo boost to 3.2 gigahertz. It can do that for a little bit. It'll hit 100 degrees Celsius and then it like throttles. And like if you just install the various Intel power gadget stuff, you can just like watch the curve happen. But the throttling for the MacBook Air is like a different feel and vibe than it is on a MacBook Pro. When there was the throttling controversy on the MacBook Pro, it was like, yo, what's going

on here? I need, I bought this thing for those faster clock speeds. What the hell? And like Apple genuinely did need to fix something there somewhat. They're still, you know, thermally constrained in, you know, interesting ways. But for the air, it's thermally throttling, I guess it just doesn't make me that mad? Yeah, I wouldn't, right? It never dips below its, like, advertised clock speed, at least that I've seen.

So, like, they sold you a 1.1 gigahertz part that claims a controller boost to 3.2. and like if you just like run it really hard it'll run it 1.5. Still a little faster than the advertised that says on the tape. Like there's nothing about this that made me mad. It's complex enough that I felt that I had to explain it in the review and I had to go ask Apple about it.

And to their credit, they did not dance. They're like, yes, this is how it's designed. Like straight out, no hesitation on that answer. So that's good. I think most people use these machines for, you know, browsing the web and playing podcasts. Oh, this is. This is actually what I want to talk about it because they didn't put it in either one of the reviews really.

Catalina is out of control. It is constantly asking questions. Like, there's a dummy element to Catalina that I just, maybe that's what everybody wants. Maybe Apple's going to get great uptake of Apple TV Plus because they put this one icon in the dock. And I'm certain there's a growth hacker at Apple who like made that call. But chill out. Like, just please. It's so close to bloatware.

You think that Apple engineers are used to setting up a new iPhone every year because they buy a new iPhone every year. And so they're like, oh, well, this sucks. We should fix that. But they only set up a Mac like once every three, four years. And so they don't know. They just don't see it. Well, you set up a new iPhone. It just like seamlessly turns into your old iPhone.

Like, you get a new Mac. And it's like you're mostly starting from scratch. It doesn't like carry over your doc preferences or whatever. Like you've got to like do it all over again. And it's like, have you thought about pages? It's like, no, dude. I haven't thought about pages in years. There's that.

So it's like, right, the performance is fine for all the things I need. Like, I got through workday just fine. I tried to push it. I heard the fan. I think that is totally fair. I think most people will never be in that. I don't think like a lot of people use Lightroom, right? It's like basically I'm getting out.

Okay, so Lightroom was because I'm wondering, that's my worry is like, because it's conceptually this sounds like a really great blend of performance and efficiency where you spike for. workloads and then you go back to humming along. But will seven Chrome tabs, you know, that's my worry. Is like, will there be some

workload that I thought was lightweight that actually challenges this? Or is it really the actual hardcore, like video editing and photo editing type stuff that spins those fans up? So I didn't experience it with Chrome. I think we have like our

staff feeding where like now 70 people are in Zoom. So it's just render during 70 video feeds. No fans? It wasn't like loud fans. It was just like the computer got a little hotter, right? It wasn't the worst.

Literally nothing about my normal, completely insane use of Chrome and like how many tabs I've even got there. It was really the, I need the CPU to work for a long time. That's when I definitely heard the fans.

Do most people need the CPU to work for a long time? I don't think they do. And I think that turbo boost stuff, you're right. I mean, that's why it's Intel strategy with their processors, right? We'll do variable clock speed.

So there's something interesting about this processor. It's an Intel 10th generation, which on every other computer that's getting it, like, supports Wi-Fi 6, and then you look at this MacBook Air, and it doesn't, and then, like, you look at the iFix that tear down, and, like, the module is way smaller than it is that we thought it would be. And so it turns out Apple's got a special version of it? Apple appears to have a special version of it. I asked about Wi-Fi 6. They said they were not. So, like, the big Ice-like thing, I mean, this is Intel, right? They, like, build all the components together and they sell you actually not just a CPU but a package apple has a special package that

does not have intel's Wi-Fi controller in it they're using their own module great that they're using their own module doesn't have Wi-Fi 6 so they've got a different Intel part I think they're running it at a higher power like a higher TDW than like the whatever and then the standard part so then you're getting more performance out of it I look if you spec out the the base model iPad Air for a hundred dollars more you can get the quad core I5 over the I3 That is no brainer money. Like, you should scrounge around the cushions until you find that $100 and get two more cores. Like, that's literally, you will see it and feel it, especially you keep this thing for as long as you want.

How do you have $100 in your cushions? Well, I have a baby. So she's always, she's just throwing money around. I don't know. Find $100. Like, your baby is the monopoly man. Percentage-wise against $1,000, just a lot of money. But I do think if you're going to keep this computer for a long time, which I think most people will, that extra

performance header is absolutely worth it. The stock configuration is $1,300. You get the I5 and double the storage. It's another thing that I think is worth it. So that's one I think most people should get. Oh, the battery. The thing that is the most troublesome, and I think this comes back to that performance conversation in a big way, is I run in Chrome for like a variety of reasons, including like some of our software works best in Chrome. Like some of the CMS stuff that we do works best in Chrome. I know a lot of other folks, squadcast, we're using squadcast to record this podcast right now. Only works in Chrome. I got to use Chrome. Zoom is an app that is open on my computer all day now. I use Zoom more than ever before. Slack is an electron app all day every day.

These three apps, just using them as I normally do, battery life is about five hours, which is not great, just like flatly not great. If you use Safari, you use their video run done test is in the Apple TV app, of course. If you use all of their stuff, you can get like 11 or 12 hours of battery life. So this is a huge gap between, and like, I don't, people are asking if I blame Apple for this. I don't, you can't, I'm not going to blame Apple for Slack being a battery hog. Like, that's Slack's problem, right? But their claims about battery life are not reflective of, like, the reality for many people, which is that they will have Slack and Zoom open, and they will often find themselves in a position where they need to use Chrome. A lot of people just need to use Chrome for

their jobs. Like, I recognize that Chrome is controversial. I recognize that, you know, Yep, Google wrote a web browser that destroys batteries on computers the world over. But then I look at our Windows laptop tests, same kind of workloads, and we're getting six, seven hours. And so I think that's a big, it's a big discrepancy. And at some point, the distance between Apple, just assuming that their ecosystem is the best, and then what people are actually doing with their computers, it's getting wider in a way that I think is. Have you thought about pages, Nelai? It's just nuts.

It's like, who is watching 12 hours in the Apple TV app? Like, what, how is that a useful metric of, like, video playback time? No, they're watching Netflix and Chrome. Yeah. The funny thing is, like, the, you know, I saw the five hours and I was like, oh, crap. But it turns out that if, like, even with an iPad Pro, which we normally think it was just lasting forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, and ever, if you just, like, use it as your work computer and just, like, are going with it and switching between apps and video conferencing when you can. can because it only works in the frontmost app and like all the other stuff that you do for work and you're like really going with it like you can kill it way faster than you normally would like you can

you can kill it at like six seven hours a nor we're normally like with just like hanging out browsing the web when you pick it up off your couch you don't charge it for three days and over the course of those three days you get like 12 right yeah i don't i don't use my ipad pro as a computer i find myself charging it way more often remember paul i remember very distinctly when like the first ipad came or maybe it was the second gen. We were on a podcast and you're like the, I don't know why this memory is stuck in my head, but you're like, the best thing about the iPad is the battery never dies, right? And it's like that was that was the thing.

Like you could have an iPad too and you would just go like a week and a half just like using it. And the battery would never die. And now we're at like retina screens, faster processors and you're back to sort of laptop zone battery life. Well, and it sucks that it sounds like some of the trade. off with the MacBook Air is you got a faster computer but less battery life. I don't know that it's actually faster than the iPad Pro, right? Like, well, it's faster than the last generation error for sure. Compared to the last generation error, I'm saying.

Yeah, I think that's true. At the end of the day, you know, like we're in the weeds. Like, do I think you should not buy this computer because Apple stuck the podcast app in the dock? I do not. Do I think that it's getting away from them? I actually think Apple has gotten to the point after A, first trying to kill this computer, and then bringing it back slowly where they're on their third revision of it and I finally am like this is just the Mac you should buy.

If someone says, I want to buy a Mac, which one should I get? I would be like the step-up configuration of the MacBook Air, just buy it, it's in stock at the store. You're not going to be mad at me because the space bar broke.

You're not going to be mad at me because the fans are spinning all the time. Like, it's going to be great. That's like a big deal for Apple to have this, that configuration is the one they're going to have to support, I think the most of all.

So I'm like, yeah, these are little nitpicks. I think in the next generation, they should focus on battery life, quite honestly. That's the thing. That's the only remaining, to me, outstanding issue with the machine is when you use it like a regular person, not just idly browsing the web or watching Apple TV, you don't get a ton of battery life. They could probably fix it. And honestly, like, Google needs to do the most work here.

And, you know, I don't know, maybe Apple will block even more cookies. until Google, like, whatever they're going to do, they should do it. But that to me is the only outstanding issue. And honestly, like, just use Safari. It would be fine. I will say what's interesting to me about both these products, they're already discounted on Amazon. They're already 50 bucks off on Amazon.

So that's great. I hope it works out. You know, people are working from home. Lauren Good wrote a review of the iPad Pro where she was, and you should read it because it's beautifully written. But she's like, why are they doing this? Like, there's a massive crisis going on. It's worth reading. It's worth pondering. But a lot of people are working from home.

And so that there's a moment of I need a laptop or a machine I can count on in my home to do my job. And I think Apple has stepped into it. I'm curious to see if other computer makers step into it as well. But Apple's saying, hey, we can release a computer, ship it to everybody. Our supply chain works. I think it's a statement of confidence in their part. Okay. We're going to take a break. We're going to do some stuff. We're right back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

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in today's episode. Claude. com. Paul Miller. Hello. Every week. The consistency that we rely on in these times.

Every week, I do a segment. And it's called, it's my year of the Linux desktop, boys. I built a PC in quarantine. Uh-oh. Yeah, I'm very, very, very excited. I got a Ryzen 5, 3,600 for the processor. Got a G-Force 2060 for the GPU.

It is the fastest computer I've ever had the privilege to use. It's so nice. And I love it so much. And I put, I put, why it's the year of the Linux desktop, I put PopOS on it, which is this distro that's based on Ubuntu. It's made by System 76, which actually sells Linux-based computers. So they actually have like a financial incentive to make a good distro. And it just, it is the first time ever, but just works. that literally just works

put the USB drive into the computer, boot to the drive, click install, and now I have a working computer, all the drivers, sound worked right out of the box,

everything totally worked. The GPU works. I have working free sync coming out of my 2016 to a high refresh rate monitor. Everything works. It was a miraculous

experience. It's here. Everybody build a Linux PCA at home. Now is the time. What else are you going to do it? It's a fun project for the whole family. My sister helped me.

She helped me with the cable management. It's clean inside. Let me tell you. One thing I'm still curious about, I haven't tried VR yet. Supposedly, Half-Life Alex works on Linux. There's lots of games that work on Linux, quote-unquote, like there's these wrapper layers that make them run. That doesn't mean they'll run well.

So that, you know, there's obviously still going to be limited. But for what I do, like coding, compiling rust, like, it is so deliciously fast. I just love it. I'm so happy. That's great. Ah, see, there's the hope we need. You're holding us together. I've just been playing Animal Crossing.

Oh, I'm so jealous of all this Switch people having so many social experiences with each other. Paul's like, I bought the living. I'm alone. All right, Dieter, talk to me about the Huawei P40 Pro. So there's the Huawei P40, there's the P40 Pro, and there's a P40 Pro Plus. Oh, I see. So these are Huawei's new flagships. They have the Kieran 990 processors.

They've got waterfall displays, which means that the display curves very aggressively on the side. So aggressively, they're like don't have space for a volume button. And then they all have cameras. And if you ask me to tell you which phone has what cameras and what the cameras are supposed to do, we would be here for 12 hours. There's so many different things. One of the phones, and nobody knows which, but one of the phones has two telephoto lenses.

Yes, one of the phones has two telephotos. That's amazing. They have a top shot feature. They've got, you know, there's a time of flight sensor on a couple of them. Like there's 40 megapixels, there's 50 megapixels, there's a 12 megapixel hanging out in there somewhere. Just like, if you think that you're going to make a decision between these things based on the spec sheet of the key,

cameras, good luck. What's fascinating to me is you look at these things, and if you were any further away than like two feet, they look just precisely like Galaxy S-20s. I mean, like, the camera module, the rectangle, just down the line. On the front, they look a different because they've got a wider oblong hole punch because they've got a couple of cameras up there, and like a face detector. whatever, so that's different. But of course, like all the things I just told you, if you live in the U.S., they don't matter

because you can't get it in the U.S. And if you live anywhere outside of China, well, do you like working apps? Because they can't get Google apps. And it also turns out that most of the apps that you know and love depend on Google mobile services in some way, or many of them do, especially for location. in the same way that Android turned into this thing where like the web rendering engine was getting hacked all the time. So Google's like Screwless. We need to update it more often.

And so we're just going to like update it through Google Play. And that's what became the, they've done that with location at some point in the Misty Mist. Maybe it was after they had that lawsuit with that satellite company. Who knows? Every single Android app that has a map on it uses Google's location services service. And Huawei doesn't have a replacement for it yet. And there's not like a really great maps app yet. Every single app that has push notifications uses Google Play services.

Huawei's building up basically like one-for-one equivalence of everything inside Google Mobile Services. It's just going to take them a while. Are they doing that in China or are they doing that for their worldwide? They're doing it in China and worldwide. Yeah. They should open-source that. We're the open-source transparent company. We open-sourced the code that runs our 5G spy towers and we're open-sourcing.

our replacement to Google Play services, we will be the bastion. Because for me, personally, I want to run Graphene OS, which is like a privacy-focused fork of Android. But without Google Play services, so many of the apps are broken or kind of half-working. And so you trust Huawei to make those services for you? No, I don't. I don't trust anybody. That's why I want open source. Gotcha. Neelai, read us of Eric Schmidt testimony from a satellite lawsuit case. I got it. This is like a Neilette-Mettel. It's like a greatest hint. This is from the This is My Next Days.

We haven't even launched the Byrds when I wrote this story. What year was it? It was May 2011. Oh, damn it. Google versus Skyhook. Well, I don't know. I'll tweet a link or something. So this is true.

So there's, what you're saying is to get location, you got to use Google mobile services, right? Location used to be a phone level feature, not an operating system level feature. Right. So you would, whatever app would talk to the phone, would talk to the Android layer, are not Google mobile services. Motorola, before Google bought it and sold it to Lenovo. The history is so tangled. Motorola, before Google bought it and then like auctioned it off to Lenovo to make

Samsung happy, Motorola is an independent company decided to use Skyhook, which was an independent location provider, as opposed to Google as its location provider. Google freaked out. Google wrote emails. They said the Skyhook, Motorola. deal feels like a disaster. They were mad that Apple had already moved away from Google. Google executive said, OEM, switching a Skyhook, could be, quote, this is a letter.

It, like, discovered emails. OEM switching a Skyhook could be awful for Google because it will cut off our ability to continue collecting data for our location database. Andy Rubin canceled the droid X launch. Like, Motorola was going to remember the droid X? I'm sure you don't. Before Motorola was bought by Google and sold Lenovo. made some phones. Andy Rubin wrote Motorola's CEO Sanjay John and said using Skyhook Wi-Fi is a stop ship

issue and he canceled the launch. Google basically cut out the ability for phone makers to do their own location in order to get Play services and Google Mobile Services. And now you're seeing that come true, which is because all the application developers just assumed that Google Mobile services was available to them because Google mandated that everybody use it. That's 10 years ago and now you're seeing it happen. A lot of location data is not, is augmenting GPS with which Wi-Fi hotspots you are close to. And like creating a database. Yeah, that was back then.

I mean, like there's multiple ways to do it. 10 years later, like GPS trips are more efficient, right? In 2010. But they still use a lot of Wi-Fi. Well, it's Wi-Fi. It's also cell tower triangulation. And this is one of the reasons Google, like, this is one of the reasons that they just like, who's going to tell? us where we are. Somebody figure it out. And Google's like, well, we're going to take all of

these signals, everything that we know, and put it in a pot and have a machine learning figure it out and tell you where you are. And nobody has to think about it ever again. So of course they're going to use it. Why would you not? Well, it turns out you can't work on Huawei phones. So yeah. Yeah. And it's just, this is this like long history. At one point, Samsung started shipping a phone with Skyhook and then Motorola wrote Google a letter saying, why can they do it? we can't. And then Andy Rubin wrote back and said, compatibility is a learning process and Motorola should not be concerned with other OEMs and their devices. Amazing.

Like, there are some deep politics in getting devices approved to use Google stuff. And the one that Google wanted the most was use our location services. So, great, now you're seeing it play out that they obviously took over that part of the platform. And so Huawei saying, Android is open. We can just do it. We can replace you. They have to build a thing that everybody just took for granted because 10 years ago, Google got in a fight with Motorola. This was like my first big feature that I wrote for this is my next. It's like burned into my brain that there's these like Andy Rubin and Eric Schmidt emails out in the world. Can I just like, can you guys indulge me just because it's that, you know, we're all working from home?

Go to the computer history museum's YouTube page and find their interview with John Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm. And before that, you know, father of the iPod, you know, just that, like he gave a two-hour oral history interview of basically his career. And it's amazing. Like his early days at Apple, hanging out with Steve Jobs, getting yelled at by Steve Jobs when he went to Palm, like all the stuff. And, you know, he was really blunt about what about us? He's like, look, we were like six months behind. And I came on and Palm was a gigantic mess. And so I had to focus on like making a good product. So that's what I did. Meanwhile, my competitor and guy that I knew, Sanjay Ja,

Motorola had like the Motorola machine just running and making phones. So he just parked himself outside of Verizon, and that caused Verizon to, like, screw us on a couple of deals and give it over to Motorola, and that's why we lost. Wow. He's just, like, br-dr. And he's like, because I had, I, like, I couldn't, like, sit on the park bench outside Verizon's offices every day. Sajat, to his credit, knew what he had to do to win, right?

Yeah. And that's like, the droid moment was the moment that, like, set Android as the default alternative to the iPhone. But did he win? because I would remind you that again I bought Motorola and then in order to get Samsung to stop messing with Android

sold Motorola to Lenovo. He took the eye off the ball to sit on a park bench a little too much. Anyway, even if you don't care about WebOS a tenth as much as I do, it's a super fun interview you should watch it sometime this weekend.

Yeah, I just got to say, that's the story about two guys who did not win. Like, in the end. Battles were won. The war decisively lost. All right, I just want to talk about one more little gadgety thing. How do we get off of P40?

Anyway, the P40 Pro looks like good hardware. It's got pixels. It's got high refresh rate. It does have a 90 hertz refresh rate. That is nice. Anyway. All right, Dieter, can you tell me about your investigation into this wacky Dell app that lets you control an iPhone for a PC.

I have not gotten very far. I've been like 15 minutes of Googling. This is not an investigation yet. However, Dell has an app. This is not a formal investigation. We have not at this time announced an investigation. Dell has an app that lets you mirror your phone on your PC and like control your phone like with your mouse and your keyboard.

We've seen this before. Only they're doing it with iPhones, which is like what? How? How? What the heck? I don't know the answer yet. I would tell you that what we're going to do is go into our reviews closet and, you know, grab our Dell and see, but we can't get to our reviews closet. So this app was made in partnership with a company called Screenovate, like Innovate, but with a screen.

Why? Yep. And I don't know how it works, but my hunch, and if you know the answer, please tweet at me. My hunch is that it airplays the screen to your computer. and then your computer with a Bluetooth connection sends trackpad and keyboard signals to the phone because it only works with iOS 13 and above which makes me think like accessibility uses the trackpad feature

in iOS 13. Whoa. There are no third party devices that can do airplay video. There are lots of third party devices that can do airplay audio but you cannot mirror video from an iOS device to anything but an Apple TV as far as I know or now a bunch of TV. No, that's not true.

There's a bunch of wacky apps that you can Airplay too on your computer. That's actually not the problem. The problem is sending the signals back. But all of them are illegal. Like, none of them are official. Like, the things that are officially supported by Airplay are a bunch of TVs now and Apple TV. And then there's a bunch of apps that basically like spoof an Apple TV. Yeah.

So it would be wild if Dell was shipping an app that spoofed an Apple TV. That would be wild. You know, what's, speaking to Rubinstein, what would be amazing is if Apple got pissed and, like, sued him. like they did when the pre-worked with iTunes back of the day. Because it is, it's remarkable that you could do this on a Dell, but you can't do it on a Mac. Because you might think it's silly to, like, have a mirror of your phone sitting on your desktop,

but, like, it's actually kind of nice. I use the your phone app on Windows. And, like, there are times like, oh, yeah, I just, like, I got a notification from my phone. It shows up on my desktop. I'm like, what is this? I don't have this app on my desktop. Ah, screw it.

I'll click the notification. It opens up my phone, mirrors my phone, pulls up the notification. I can, like, do the thing real quick, and then go on with my day and never take my hands off the keyboard deck of the laptop. Yeah. I mean, it's funny that Apple advertises how seamlessly the two things work together, but really what I want is just like a mirrored phone interface.

Like, I would say 25% of the time. Like, what is a better Instagram experience is like using it on the phone? Sometimes I just want to like check my Instagram notifications without using the web. Anyway, we're going to investigate this Dell thing. It is just a neat gadget. I'm also told that it works on more than just Dell laptops. So if you have a Windows laptop, try it out. Let us know how it goes.

But it's like a neat gadget to play with right now, so I want to call it. Okay, we've gone long. Thank you everybody for listening. I know it's like a weird time. I hope we're able to distract you a little bit. I do want to call out again, the Verge science team, which is covering the stuff. Actually, the whole Verge team is all over. Like our policy team is all over it.

Our creator team is all over it. But the Verge science team is a small team and they are slammed with like the biggest story in the world. So I want to call them out. Check out the Verge. We're covering everything. everything that's happening with the coronavirus. Like we talk about the top of show, there's ripple effects now into everything. So we're going to cover it a lot.

We're going to talk about it. But I want to make sure we balance that stuff out. I want you to subscribe to homescreen, which is TC's newsletter about all the weird and wonderful things people are doing on the internet. Described a processor, which is Dieter's newsletter. The Vergecast is still happening. We're recording from home. I just tweeted a picture of my extremely elaborate setup. So we're doing it.

On Tuesday, we've got Amy Webb, who is a futurist at NYU. really interesting conversation about sort of our preparedness and our ability to see these events and like how they might play out. She puts out a big future trends report, which is really interesting. So that's coming on Tuesday. We'll be back on Friday with the chat show. Tweeted us. We love hearing from you on at Reckless. Paul's at Future Paul. Deeter's at Backlon. We'll talk to you soon. Rock and roll. Paul. Stay safe.