The Vergecast - We reviewed the Mac Studio, the Studio Display, the iPhone SE, and the iPad Air

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Monica Chin, Allison Johnson, and Dan Seifert discuss The Verge's reviews of the Apple products announced last week: the new iPhone SE, iPad Air, Mac Studio, and Studio Display. Further reading: Apple’s new iPhone SE is a modern phone stuck in yesterday’s design Samsung’s really good midrange phone just got a bigger battery and a price cut Apple Mac Studio review: finally Apple Studio Display review: nothing to see here  ‘Pro’ has lost all meaning, and Apple knows it Apple’s chips are on the table Apple’s charts set the M1 Ultra up for an RTX 3090 fight it could never win Apple iPad Air (2022) review: it’s the nice one  Universal Control is Apple’s most impressive new feature in years The Mac Studio is myth fulfillment  Vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars — or leave the platform Ukrainian influencers ring the frontlines to TikTok How Wordpress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Cranz, Dan Seaford, Allison Johnson, and Monica Chin joined the show. We talk about all the Apple reviews, the iPhone SC, the Mac Studio, the Studio display, and the iPad Air. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need.

Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for newly. 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 bad charts. I wanted to start in a high and then I was like, what's in my heart? And it's chart crime, which is my new favorite phrase. There's a lot of them. I'm a friend, Eli.

Alex Cranz is here. I am so excited for this very specific podcast. This one's, it's going to get off for else. I'm pumped. Dan Seferred is here. How you doing? Allison is here. Hey, Allison.

Hello. A little bit later, Monica is going to join us because it's Apple Review Week. It is. It's been Apple Review Week. It's been Apple Review Week. For a week. Allison reviewed the iPhone SC. Monica reviewed the Macs Studio, which I reviewed the Studio display.

We reviewed both things at the same time, but I was focused on display, and she was focused on the studio. And then Dan reviewed the iPad. The iPad error. So lots of Apple stuff. There's some other stuff we should talk about. But like Alex said, this podcast is going to get wild. Because there's good parts and there's bad parts and there's medium parts. We're going to laugh.

We're going to cry. It's the full spectrum. There's going to be some very oblique references to Dieter jokes. It's going to be great. Let's start with the iPhone. Allison, you reviewed the iPhone SE. It feels like there's a little. a lot to say and also nothing to say. Yeah. Like it's a very nice phone. That's the thing. It's like,

it's still what the iPhone SE has been. It is a very inexpensive way to get into Apple's ecosystem. You get, so it starts at 429. You get, you know, the newest processor, the A15. But it's kind of just a lot of the same of what the iPhone SE has offered in the past. There's, I mean, there's 5G now, which, you know, we're. Cool. excited about. But yeah, it's still, it's still a really solid, like, amazing mid-range phone. But I think at this point, this is just kind of like my whole takeaway in the review is a 4.7 inch screen is just not cutting it. And I say this as a person who loves small phones dearly. They're wonderful. I'm with you. Yeah. And it's, it's like such a joy to put this.

phone in my coat pocket and have that moment where I'm like, oh, is the phone in my pocket? I'm like, yes, it is. It was just really small. But it just, it feels really cramped. And it's those bezels, really. It's like the aspect ratio of the screen and there's a lot of real estate taken up by the chunky bezels. It's an iPhone 8 design, which was put out to pasture quite a while ago except for the iPhone SE. If they had kept the size of the phone, like the external size of the phone, but

gotten rid of the bezels and just made it all screen, would you have liked it more? I definitely would have liked it more, but then it's like, what is the iPhone mini? And then that's a philosophical question you have to ask. When you say it's an iPhone 8 design, isn't it more

like an iPhone 6 design? Right, this basic design is floating around for a very long, long time. Yeah, I have my original SE. That's like the iPhone 5. Yeah, yeah. It goes back. It is a throwback. Yeah. I don't know. It's not the worst. You have the home button still, which some people just really want and they don't want face ID and that iPhone SE will give you that. You get the latest performance. You get a great phone. You get to keep your touch ID. So if that's you, then this is your phone and it's awesome. So I was talking to our friend Joanna Stern with Wall Street Journal and

she went through the same review week that we did and she was like, you don't understand for Wall Street Journal readers. The iPhone SC is the Super Bowl. Like this is what they want. This is what they care about the most. She was like, I can't screw up the SC review. This is it. Like they don't, they want they love the home button. They want a great camera. They don't want to mess with what they know. this is like the phone for them. I think it's fascinating, right? Like our audience is very much like what is the latest and great. I mean, if you're listening to this show, you were very interested in things like phone specifications.

At least I believe you are. And I just think that's like, you know, Apple's product line is so big now. It's like basically every $50 price point, or I guess now in the 5G era at every $70 price point, Apple has a phone for you. And this one is just like holding down the low end. But then I'm just looking at their pricing. You can get an iPhone 11, which is kind of like a dramatically better phone with a bigger screen for, what, 70 bucks more? It's $499. Yeah.

And it's like, I would just get that. Right. Like, you can get a 128 gig version at iPhone 11 for 549. But would you have 5G? You wouldn't have 5G, but I think that there's something to be said about, like, how most iPhone SE buyers are actually buying their phone. And they're not rolling up to Apple.com. ordering it there and they're probably not really ordering it or buying it from the Apple store. They're probably buying it through a carrier and the carrier's like it's $11 a month for the,

and then like in the tiniest print, it's $11 a month and then it says for the rest of your life, but like in the tiniest print. And then they put you on a 5G plan and that plan is more expensive even though you don't need it. Right. But they're not looking at like, oh, this one is $600 or your $500 versus $430. They're like, this is $11 a month. It's like really cheap. It has all the stuff that I'm familiar with.

that's why I'm buying it. But like I really also feel like the reason people buy the SE, the marketing line says they love the home button and it's familiar, but the real line is it's cheap. And that is why it sells. It is purely because it's cheap. If Apple made a cheap iPhone mini or iPhone 11 design that was just $400 or $430, that's the one people would buy if it was cheap. It's just because it's cheap. That's the reality of it. Here's my question. iPhone SE comes out, if they did an iPhone XSEE extra L, a large iPhone SE, same price,

giant screen, would that sell more? Yes, absolutely. The most more. You can tell by just how poor the iPhone mini sales have been. People always choose the bigger screen. At the same price, they choose the bigger screen. That's the thing I poke at is what if, this is get a little galaxy

brain, what if the reason people don't buy the mini and buy the SE, is because the SE is small, but also cheap. And the people who want a small phone also do not care about specs. I think all the people that want a small phone write for tech blogs. Like, that's the entire market. Oh, no.

Probably true. It's me. I mean, like, but Allison, not to put you too much on the spot here. But like you like small phones, which is fair and cool. But what phone do you own? It's an iPhone 11. So like. Which was the.

the smallest phone you could get. Yeah. All right. All right, Dan. Huh? What now, counselor? I'm just excited to have somebody on the Vergecast today who also likes small phones. Yes.

Because I have been bullied so often by large phone takes. It's unfair. We have a lot of small phone proponents on our staff, but I will just offer you this counterpoint. Yes. My mother was a, like, devout Steve Jobs fan. like this woman read the biography when it came out and called me in tears and she was like after he left all the designs went bad and these phones are ugly and so she never wanted to give up her like

last steve jobs iPhone 5 that's a I love her so she held on to it for her she was a tiny phone and then it was time to finally give up the phone they could not was not operative anymore and we went to the store and she was like I just want a small one all these phones are too big they ruined did have, like, this is the conversation I'm having in the middle of a pandemic in an Apple store. She's like, after Steve Jobs died, I'm like, I can't be here with you. And I was like, no, no, you don't understand. The font size on your phone is out of control. Display scaling on your phone is like, it's tiny screen huge letters.

Like, you're reading one word at a time. So I bought her the pro max. And it's great. And now she is never going back. she's like, this is the best phone I've ever had, right? Because it's gigantic. And if I could buy her that mid-range, like, Samsung makes a thousand phones like this. The mid-range phone with a huge screen.

And that's like their sweet spot. And I feel like Apple doesn't have that thing. So we end up in this weird conversation with the iPhone mini. But if they had that thing, it would by far in a way be the best selling iPhone. Yeah. That's what the 11, the XR was. Right. Right.

That weirdo phone that they made. Yeah. I mean, you could look at this like the history of the iPhone. The iPhone sales didn't really skyrocket until the 6 plus came out. Apple finally came out with that big screen iPhone and sales took off. And then the screen has gotten progressively bigger across the line until they introduced the mini, which no one bought. I know. We've gotten so far away from the iPhone SC.

See, Alex, you called it. You're like, this is going to go sideways. The SC itself, Allison, tell us about the phone. It's nice. I mean, it really flies, like, there's nothing, well, there's very little that I feel like I can't do on it that I can do on a $1,000 phone, which has been the case with the SE. That's just kind of its trick is like, this is less than $500 and it does an amazing job. And if you look at it purely like in the midrange class, like across Android 2, it, you know, it gives you IP 67 rating. got wireless charging. It's not mag safe, but you get the Chi charging and that processor, it immediately stands out. It's sort of, it would be a no-brainer to me if the screen was a

little more modern. But yeah, I just found myself, like, not that the iPhone SE owner's probably going to be doing a lot of gaming, but I'd put Genschen impact on there and your just, your songs are over so much on the screen. I was like peeking around. Like, where's my... Oh, okay. I thought it was really interesting the way you put it in your review

that like just the modern web and modern apps are just not designed for 16 by 9, 4.7-inch screen anymore. And that's where everything starts feeling cramped. The gaming example, but like think about your email app. Like you see what, two emails on a screen before you have to start scrolling. Or, you know, other applications

that are very standard in like everyday applications are all taking advantage of the wider aspect ratio, the taller screens because there's more real estate there to play with. And when you don't have that, especially if you're used to it, when you go back to like, like maybe if, you know, the SE buyer, someone who's never had it, they're not used to it. They're no, no, no what they're missing. But if you're used to it and you try to go back to that, it is like a jarring experience. And I think that's really what came through in your review. Yeah, yeah. I think if you're, if you're coming from an SE and it's just time to get a new phone and you want to get this one because

you want to hang on to it for the next five or six years, like, do it. You will be so happy. But, yeah, I can't envision coming from a bigger screen and going to back to the 4.7 inch because I'm so tiny. I'm like, I'm doing my duolingo and I'm like, I can't read these little words. I need to, I need some kind of new glasses. I don't know. I'm also getting old. What was the battery life like on it? Because I think that was like a big question mark coming into this. I thought it was fine. Yeah, the previous model battery life was a little iffy.

It was a little dodging, I think, whether you could get through a full day of kind of moderate use. In my experience, on a moderate day, I could get to the end of the day and I still had enough in the tank to get into some of the next day too. So it definitely, it feels like an improvement to me. I think it's a heavy user. And that was like with 5G on and doing its thing? Yes, which 5G is questionable where I live. But no millimeter wave. I want to come back to the thing you said about five or six years.

So it has an A15 in it, which is Apple's highest in iPhone chip. It does not have an M1 Ultra in it. It has A15 in it. Maybe it should. Yeah, who knows? What this thing needs is 48 GPUs. No, it's got an A15 in it, which, you know, for a $430 phone is pretty remarkable. And that's, I think that's, and Apple's really good at software updates over time,

much better than any Android phone vendor. So that's where, okay, five or six years out of this phone sounds really reasonable. And that's why you put the really high-end chip in there because you're expecting people to hold onto it for a long time. But I would just put that right next to what you're saying about the screen. which is this already feel small for the current state of web and apps. Six years from now, like this trend is not slowing down. Like six years from now, who knows?

Like every developer could be assuming that your phone unfolds to become a much larger screen. True. Right? And like, I don't know that's going to happen, but you just see the trend line is when we make fancy features on the website, right? We like test them out and we know that most of our readers are mobile, but we just sort of assume they have big phones

because that's what the data tells us. And so you just keep this trend going and it's like soon you will not be able to read the web on your tiny phone. The processor will be there and maybe the mobile network speed will be there. But you're just going to get completely left behind

by the screen size. It's the first time I've thought about that with an iPhone. Yeah. And I felt so I dug out the 2016 iPhone I see. I put iOS 15.

on it, which worked. But I was going through something on Instagram, and I was trying to light something that someone like damned to me, and I physically couldn't. It was like the little like real estate that I needed to be hitting on the screen just like didn't exist. It was sort of like, yeah, this is what this is maybe going to come to in five years when you're on your 4.7 screen. and everybody else has the folding whatever.

And it just kind of sucks. It's like that is the really cool thing about this phone is you can keep it for so long. And this 2016 SE is running iOS 15 flying. But it's like the modern web has been gone. Let's talk about the camera real quick. It's got the single camera. No night mode, which seems like a real miss to me.

Yeah. And it just seems to be a choice on Apple's part because I can't imagine that the processor is holding it back. There are other phones with this processor that have night mode. That kind of stinks. There's a lot of mid-range phones on Android that have perfectly decent night modes and cost about the same amount of money, have less fancy processors. So that sticks out a little bit. it is the same camera hardware as the previous generation, still a single camera, which doesn't bother me a lot. I think people probably aren't buying it for the camera or they're not super

interested in an ultra wide or kind of messing with a lot of settings. Maybe you are, but what you do get is pretty good. I mean, it's an iPhone camera. It does what it does very well. And video recording is very good, especially in the mid-range class. Do you think it's on par with the iPhone 11, for example? It's pretty close, yeah. I think the night mode is kind of the... I think you get night mode on the 11. I do, in fact.

The 11 is when I stopped using my RX100 as much. And I know that's the fun you have, so it's like the comparison. When the 11 came out, I noticed that I slowly stopped using my RX100 as much as I had been. I don't have the 10S looked horrible, so that's probably like. like embedded in my brain. So this is like goes back to the thing about the Wall Street Journal audience. Like the update you can bring to the audience is like the camera is way better and you don't have to think about it or you can zoom, right?

Because that, that breaks people's brains that you can zoom on an iPhone but it makes the image quality worse, like significantly worse in digital zoom. And that to me is just like adding night mode to this would have effectively been free. It would have blown every other mid-range phone out of the water. and everyone could have seen that they got something cool. And it just seems like such an odd feature omission. Yeah, I can't figure it out. And there's sort of like a theory.

You know, if you look at the product cycle, it was four years between the first two versions of his phone and then two years. So this is maybe like the S-E-S is sort of one theory on it. But like maybe in another two years we're going to get, you know, that. that more a bigger screen you're going to get. Could they do it as a software update? Like, could they just announce it when they announce all the other iPhones and be like, and by the way, this one's getting night mode.

Oh, you did when iOS 16 comes out. Yeah. Right. We've added, who knows? That would be great. I don't know. Right to your senator. Right to your senator.

Okay, I want to end this by complaining with the New York Times, which I've been quietly vibrating in the background ready to do. So I don't understand what's going on at the Times review. I'm certain the person who writes review is lovely. The New York Times has fully decided that people should not care about their smartphone cameras. Like, they just don't think people care about better pictures. So they wrote this review of the SE. And I just want to read this line to you.

And you tell me what you think, because I think it is bonkers. So it's all this stuff. You probably want this $130 phone if you meet this any criteria. You don't care about features like ultra-fast cellular. it, fine. You correctly recognize that smartphone technology has been around for so long, you should pay less for it, fine. And then there's this line. You don't care about what the number of camera lenses or pixels on a screen tell your friends and colleagues about your wealth. And I'm just like, yeah, I mean, okay, maybe I just want to flex like my Ranger over keys in

the club with my iPhone that anybody can buy. Sure, that's just who I've been. But like, the number one that helps you take better pictures. And like all anybody cares about these phones anymore is like the cameras. Like when we do reviews, what are all the questions we get are cameras? And maybe that's our audience. It's not the last journal. It's not the time. I just don't understand this approach to this review.

Yeah. It's kind of news to me if like multiple cameras on a phone is a status thing. Yeah. There's a lot of phones that have a lot of cameras. I don't know. I'm only carrying that Nokia 9 purely around. It's got six camera lenses on the back. When was the last time a phone was considered one, like a status symbol?

Right? Like 2014, 2015, when they're like, we're making these phones for billionaires and then we stopped. I think there's something about like folding phones. Folding phones, when people see that, that's different. That's just the form factor. Eventually, I'm just telling you, and I haven't. rolled up in the club in a long time. But if you roll up in the club and you're like, I have an iPhone 13 pro.

Like, that shit is not going to work. You have a broken iPhone 13 pro because the Belder will throw it to the ground. What are you talking about? You're like, I have the fanciest Toyota Camry that has ever been made. Also, yeah, it's not hard. I mean, the mid-range funzel will just, like, pack on the camera lenses. I have a macro lens on my phone. Like, that's not really going to get you anywhere special.

Yeah. For whatever reason, the fact that the Times has decided that good photos is not a thing that phone buyers should care about, it just breaks my brain completely. And then the idea that the number of lenses are signifier of wealth, and that is the only reason you should care about the number of lenses, is just like no one's rolling up with a light show camera. I've got 96 lenses. I'm just,

I just looked at the back of my iPhone, and now I'm very confident in my family's hereditary wealth for the next few generations. I just like, what are you talking? I honestly think like, Apple shit, my request is like, add night mode to the camera.

The people who buy this phone will probably be happier if they take better photos in low light. Absolutely. That's like the main thing that is confounding to people. Yeah. That's one I don't get.

I don't buy any good explanation from Apple. Just put night mode on it. I'll start a campaign. I'll start a letter writing campaign. Can I tell you what the time said about low-light photography? That's my favorite lawyer. They said you can always just use the flash. Oh, wow.

Which is technically true. You can make everything into some sort of bizarre 90s cobra snake photo shoot. That is a choice you have. can make your children look like they are completely strung out at any moment of the day by shooting flash photos of them, especially your LED flash on the iPhone. Anyway, that is confounding. I just want to complain about it because I can't let it go. I just want to clarify, you can't always use the flash because, like, the iPhone has auto or off on the flash.

So the iPhone decides whether you can use the flash or not. Well, you put it in video mode. And then you just have the light on the entire time. You turn the flashlight on and then you take a picture. What you want to do is you want to switch your already behind the curve camera to its 1080P video mode. It does 4K. It does 4K? Yeah.

That's what's so baffling about it. It records 4K video that's better than like basically any Android phone you can buy, but they didn't put night mode in it. Yeah. Utterly baffling. I love it. Because this is like full on 4K 60? Yes. And it in the base storage is what, 32 gigs?

664. So you can record 10 minutes 4K60 on this phone. That's great. I love it. All right. That's the iPhone SC. I will complain about the New York Times more at a later date. Rest is short.

I can do it at the drop of that. But Allison, thank you so much. It was a great review. You were just saying there's another Samsung phone, like a mid-range Samsung phone that's worth comparing to this, right? That's on the site now. Yeah, Samsung just announced A53, 5G, which the A-52, to 5G last year.

It's mid-range phone about 500 bucks. I thought it was really the best bet for that price range on Android. So they announced the newest version. It is $50 cheaper, which puts it just under the iPhone SC at the 128 gigabyte storage level. So I wonder if they're doing a little undercutting there. How big is the screen? It's much bigger. It's a 6.5 inch, I believe.

Holy! It could like be an iPhone SE. You could fit several iPhone SEs into it. But it's the closest thing, I think, too. And they're getting there on the software updates, too. They're promising four years of Android OS updates and five years of security updates. So I feel like Samsung is like slowly chipping away

at what was just kind of. like a guinea for the iPhone SE was like, you're going to get all these years and software updates is super cheap and it is built really well. So that's one to watch. I'm really interested in trying it out. And word on the street

also is that it does not have a millimeter wave just like the iPhone and will also be sold at Verizon. The lie is over. Because our nightmare is over. Oh, Alison, before you go, do you have like an ORAN update for every time you're on? I'm like, I got to ask, there's one person who cares about O-Ran as much as me.

It's awesome. I have no update. Yep. That's right. Yeah, that's the update. Do we have a fourth wireless carrier in this country? No. All right.

Just checking. Around the clock, Dish Network. Four years ago, Dish Network promised us to our house network. We're going to do an emergency verge cast when O'Ran finally happens. We should. Like, absolutely. The Project Genesis, Genesis. cis, verge cast. It's

a gena 5sys, by the way. We're going to be on to like the 6G hype cycle by the time their 5G network comes. It's going to be very depressing. All right. Allison, thank you so much for joining the show. We'll be right back with Monica Chin. Talk about this Mac studio. Support for this show

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn. to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We're back. Monica Chin is here. Hey, Monica. Hello. It's good to see you. I feel like we've been talking every minute of the day for the past week about these reviews. So Monica got the M1 Ultra Mac Studio and the studio display with a nanotexture coding. And then I had the M1 Max, Mac Studio. in the regular studio display with the regular coding.

And I mostly just did benchmarks and then gave the computer to Monica. So she did all the computer review stuff along with our amazing video and art teams. And I mostly just see all the webcams. So let's start with the computers. It seems Monica like Apple has pulled off a chip design dream with this M1 Ultra and then packaged it in a computer that everyone seems to be very happy with. Yep. That's pretty much right. Basically, you know, for years.

and years and years, people, various companies have been trying to take two GPUs and make them into one GPU. And usually you just put two GPUs or two chips on one board and you put it in the system. And then you basically say the software has to figure out how to make those two GPUs work together. And that's really difficult to automate because they really need to be in sync with each other. Like if one of them is not rendering things when it's supposed to, it can throw everything off. So usually what programs do is they just have the two GPUs, like, do separate things. So Apple's taken two M1 Maxes.

They've used this technique called Ultra Fusion to put them into one GPU. But the difference here and what we haven't seen done successfully at this scale before is that they are actually presenting themselves as one chip. So a software will see them as one chip, and it will just give them a task, and they will do the task and divide it between themselves. So the software doesn't have to do anything. You, the user, do not have to do anything manually. They just work as one chip. There's a 2.5 terabytes of data going between them, or that's the bandwidth that it supports.

So these things are able to talk to each other and to MacOS at like a speed that we just have not seen before. And that's like a crazy amount of power that they put in this thing. Yeah, I would say that the clarification I make, I think I'm pretty sure MacOS is helping a lot here. like the promise of all Apple things that is on the hardware and the software. So it seems like, yep,

they've done this ultra fusion chip design technique, which Alex, you talked about a bit last week, right? They've assembled the chips in this way that seems to be more prevalent, but they've actually pulled it off. And then between the chip and the operating system, a application like Adobe Premiere,

which is always the one that comes up when we do these reviews, does not need to be, it's just seamless for it. Yeah, you didn't have to actually do anything because I know a lot of times when you do these kind of things you have to tinker, right? Like to get, sometimes something will see it.

One program will be like, oh, yeah, I see these two things as one. And sometimes you'll have to spend 40 hours downloading drivers and installing them. And this just like, you turned on Premiere and Premier. I was like, oh, hey, cool, you have the new. Like, did you have to update Premiere? Did you have to do like? We were never asked to do anything that, like, I would have,

we did not have to do on the M1 Max machine. You do not have to divide anything manually. So you didn't have to, like, reach out to Adobe and be like, send me a special updated version. For a dual GPU setup, no, we did not. That's cool. Yeah. That is super cool. It worked out of the box.

That is really awesome. I mean, that's the dream. Yeah. Every other time we've done a pro review of a Mac and we've done the game. And Monica, you mentioned this in your review. Like, we've just, like, give the thing to people. And then they're, like, complain. It doesn't seem faster or in particular creative cloud is like not updated.

And it's usually like Apple has wacky GPU ideas and no one else gives a shit. Yeah, I mean it was real, it's really interesting. Like I honestly think, you know, we have all these benchmarks, whatever. I think the most telling thing is you watch the Mac Pro Review where we gave this device to like all kinds of podcast people and music people and artists. And they all use it across the board. They're all like, this is not any faster. And we gave this studio to our art director, our illustrator, our audio engineer, people like that. Every single one of them used it for like five minutes said, this is so fast.

The reactions were just opposite ends of the scale. Was that the M1 Ultra or the Max? That was the Ultra. And that's like the super high-end one. So that ultra that you had was the 20-core CPU with 64 GPU cores. Yep. The fascinating thing about all this is these cores are the same across the M-1. line, right? So when we do benchmarks and we do like single threaded CPU tasks, you can buy

the $8,000 computer, but if you have a single threaded or single core task, it's as fast as like the MacBook Air. Yeah, I mean, that we would really need a revolution in architecture to see those increase, which, you know, we might very well get, but that's all we were expecting here. I mean, the thing about this computer to me, and this came up in the review, is the chip is fast, but it is consistently the Ultra is 2X as fast as the max, which is already a very fast chip, on the benchmarks. In the multi-core benchmarks, like sit-bench multi-poorer and geek bench multi-core, you know, that's what you'd expect.

It has twice the course, you know. But it is impressive that, you know, Apple got that right and it was delivering the twice the score, twice the score on the multi-core benchmarks that it was opposed to. So in terms of like real world tasks that we ran, we were not seeing that. Like we were not always seeing double the scores on Tomb Raider. We were not seeing double the scores on like Puget Bench for Premiere, Puget Bench for After Effects. So which I think just underscores that, you know, these are systems and these are software. And, you know, if you're not using a software that doesn't effectively scale to every available core or, you know, effectively utilize all that GPU power, you're not necessarily going to be seeing that benefit.

But the ultra was a little bit faster than the max. That was the impression that we got from the various professionals who use this for us. It was like noticeably faster for them, but it was not either they didn't feel it was twice as fast or the max is already so fast that like having that time is not like super, did not like change their lives. It seemed like a lot of the folks that you were working with were coming from Intel based machines, right? Like they're every day, I know Becca's daily drivers, the old Mac Pro. The old Mac Pro. $14,000 computer that we bought. $17,000 Mac Pro.

It's that crusty old, crusty two-year-old machine of ours that we spent a salary on. She works on that, which is Intel-based. I know Andrew works on an Intel-based machine. Alex Castro, the illustrator, he works on an Intel-based PC that he was comparing it. So they were seeing these huge advantages

coming to this desktop form factor that they had not seen before. but I just wonder how much of that was because they were moving from Intel to Apple Silicon now. And like there might be like diminishing returns between the Macs and the Ultra, you know, because the big leap is going from Intel to Apple Silicon, right? Dan, I think that point is like well taken. Although I'm not sure this is what I mean about Apple's wacky GPU ideas. Part of the jump to Apple Silicon was all these apps when they moved to Apple Silicon,

they started using metal. They started actually taking advantage of the GPUs. And then the GPUs were not wacky old AMD GPUs or wacky Intel integrated GPUs. They were like reasonably good. Some little kooky AMD chips. Yeah. Apple's like, what do you got? Amy's like, I don't know.

You're some weird shit. So like I feel like the chips themselves are more powerful. And now what you're seeing is Apple's approach to GPUs beyond just the wacky parts is no longer this like wacky idea that they're just, going to throw more like GPU chips at the problem. They're just going to make the GPU itself bigger and addressed as a single device and then figure out how to distribute your cross-course. And I think that, that feels scalable. Like, that's why you see that the 2X and the benchmarks. Well, it's scalable in a really, a way that's got to be super frustrating for AMD and Nvidia because notoriously GPU makers do not like to talk about, they're like, they're not

cores. We don't talk about threads. We talk about compute units or they make up some other word. The chip industry doing weird graphs? Yeah, it's great. It's wild. Never seen that before. But Invidia and AMD are like very particular about this. If you try to say, oh, this has got 56 or 64, they're going to be like, no, no, no, that doesn't matter. Invidia in particular is like, that doesn't matter. And Apple is saying, no, actually these do matter. Here are really measurable differences. When you bolt twice the number of GPU cores on, you're going to see, you know, close to twice the performance. And that's got to be a little scary for the GPU industry, right? Like, somebody's kind of calling them out. I mean, another thing not to overlook here is that Adobe has

at this point had like two years to get its shit together when it comes to making its programs run really well on Apple devices. And that like prior to M1's being released, we had been saying for years, like all these out products are really good. The career street doesn't run well on them. It's full of bugs. On our Mac purview, it was like breaking everyone's plugins. Now we have a bunch of these programs that our professionals we're using have been made and optimized to run on the M1 chip. And that allowed, I think, these devices to unlock potential in those programs

that, like, previous Apple machines just haven't been able to do because the software hasn't been focused on that area for a while. Yeah. I will say that Adobe's the big stuff. has moved over, right? So parts of Premiere, parts of After Effects, parts of Photoshop.

Like 90% of that stuff is optimized. There were, you're mentioning Puget Bench, people don't know, Puget Bench is basically like, they're a systems vendor, but they sell a bunch of benchmarking plug-ins so that then they can sell you a faster machine

to make their benchmarks go higher. It's a great business model. Some of the best marketing I've ever seen. But their plugins that run these benchmarks in Adobe programs are basically just like, automations. Right, you download a bunch of assets, you like run the plug in, it times how fast. It's actually really fun to watch it because it takes control of your mouse for like half an hour. It just plays around in Premiere. And you can just watch and try to figure out what it's doing.

It's like making, it's like throwing like effects on the pictures. It's like making them all green for no reason. And then it gives you a number at the end. It's really fun. Yeah. And it's like we're going to run a GPU heavy effect. And it's like, what we're going to do is take this video clip and make it look ridiculous. Right? It's just like nuts. just invert all the colors. It's like, oh, yes, as one does. Like you do. But it was like Photoshop or, it was Photoshop that we couldn't run the benchmark because

that part of Photoshop was not available on Apple Silicon yet. Right. Right. And there's like, there are these weird corner cases where the transition is complete. But to your point, it is mostly complete and it's mostly pretty good. I think the question about do you get the M1 Max or the M1 Ultra? Like if you know you need this computer, which I think now our entire video team fully in their heart believes they need this.

computer. Right. You're probably good enough right now with the max. That's like basically what we saw. Yeah. So no one who we talked to thought that the max was inadequate for their workflows. But, you know, they would have all chosen to be on the ultra if they could. I think Alex Castro Illustrator said something to me that was like, yeah, like the max would be great for my work. I think if I really wanted to take it to the next level, I'd want to be on the ultra. Alex is like drafting the email to request a new computer right now. Look at all this art we could have if you just gave me and one else. wandering the hall.

I think, like, you know, if you're someone who really needs every last outspeed you get, which some people do, and some people do want to pay for that, then, you know, the ultra will be like a millisecond faster on various things that you're doing, which does add up in your workflow. But no one was using the max and was like, oh, this is slow. Like, the max is also, like, very, very fast. Yeah. Well, so the ultra is twice as expensive.

So I would just connect this to our iPhone SC conversation, which we were just having, Monica, which is, like, the thing will last a long time. So I think a good question is how long do you expect to keep this computer? If it's a long time, then having the performance headroom of the ultra might well be worth it as things get more demanding. If I don't know, you're running some sort of tax scheme and you're just like flipping computers every two years. I've never run a tax scheme. I mean studios like studios do flip computers every couple of years, right? They're called tax schemes, Stan.

They run the tax scheme. But they're the ones that are going to buy the ultra, right? Like, if you're doing a production, maybe our, you know, Vox Media produces Netflix shows. Maybe those teams really want these M1 Ultras because they have a lot of production work to do. But if you're a consumer, like us, and you're doing, and even if you're doing like heavy consumer work, like, I mean, Monica, this was the point you made right at the top of your review. I could run thousands of Google Docs on this all day long and never hit the ceiling of it, right? Right. So, like, I think that the ultra consumer or the ultra purchaser is very distinct and, like, knows what they want and what they need out of it.

And then, like, if you just want, like, a killer desktop computer, just buy the Macs and load up on storage and RAM. And save that $2,000 for those other things that you're going to need to pay for. Yeah. The other thing about longevity that it is worth, you know, is going to matter. It's not going to matter to some people. It's going to matter a lot to other people is that it's not modular like the Mac Pro was. so you aren't going to be upgrading the RAM or the storage. Oh, but you could plug a display into it.

That makes it modular. Any keyboard you want. There is that. Well, that's, like, they've still got to announce the Mac Pro. They've still got to show that off. So I guess we're not going to have to listen to more talk about the M1 Ultra when it comes out. And they're just going to be like, yeah, it's got that. But also modularity.

Like, is that the play? And that means they're going to have to figure out, like, PCI expansion for this. How does PCI expansion work in the M1 world is going to be a, fascinating to see. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question. I also, I think that's what's left for the Mac Pro, though. I mean, they were very clear. There's no more chips, but there's a Mac Pro coming. Well, there's wheels. You can't get wheels for the studio. Well, so they've got to do internal expansion. They might move that to M2. You know, there's, they were clear there's no more M1 chips coming. Or, and this is my, this is my idea, they could go back to wacky GPU ideas in the

Mac Pro. Yeah. Just start stacking Ultras. on top of each other and have like a tower. What if they sold M1 Ultras on a PCI card that you could click in so you could just keep running more and more M1 Ultras and like more GPUs? No, no, you think I'm crazy, but this is what I'm suggesting that they're going to do like wacky afterburner card setups where they sell a physical piece of hardware that effectively accelerates one program, which is what the after burner card does for Final Cut Pro. there's all kinds, like, all that stuff remains

wide open. What if they let you update the storage in the RAM? What if that's the Mac Pro? So you're never going to get the RAM because the RAM is unified memory architecture. That is the bet. And then when we talk about the jump to Apple Silicon, like some huge undefined acceleration

for all these Pro apps is that the video cards have access to just heaps of RAM and the CPUs have access to RAM fast enough to run a video card. Right. Which is like an inversion of how things... They're each getting the thing the other kind of system used to have,

but it's just one huge pool of memory. And like, I don't know, we had our Apple briefing. I was like, okay, like on the MacBook air with 8 gigs of RAM, people run out of memory. What happens when Alex Castro is like, I need to justify this ultra? Like, here's a hundred and 29 gigabyte file. And they're like, yeah, it'll be interesting.

So it's like a... I don't think that... we've seen that play out in computing that Apple's big UMA bet. Obviously, we've seen it play out on iPhones and iPads because they have unified memory. But we haven't seen it play out on these systems, and we certainly haven't seen play out in pro machines that potentially need to last a long time. But Monica, this was the con. When you're listing pros and cons, the cons is you buy it, and that's it.

Like, you get what you get. Do you get what you get? That doesn't necessarily matter to everyone, but for some people in this crowd, it certainly is going to matter, especially to your point, this thing is so expensive. if people are going to buy it wanting it to last, wanting it to last for a long time. And I think that is, you know, it's always the story with Apple.

Like, you can't upgrade Apple stuff. But as you're getting into this price range in this market, I do think that is something to consider. I would not buy this M1 Max with 32 gigs of RAM. I immediately bought it. It gets here tomorrow. Did you really? There are two kinds of people.

I bought it, like, they hadn't even finished the keynote. And I was like refreshing the thing. Because I'm on a 2016 MacBook Pro that when I do a Zoom call, I can't open a spreadsheet. So like, I think 32 gigs by RAM is going to be like perfectly adequate for someone who is like, my budget is $2,000 for a desktop that's going to last five plus years. I think it's totally going to be perfectly adequate. If you're going to be running the Premiere Pros and whatnot, then like maybe you want to

upgrade that RAM, but it's not an inexpensive upgrade. It's what, $400 to go to 64 gigs? It's huge. Apple is so excited because, for, For years, the horrible thing about buying a computer from Apple was the RAM markup. And now you cannot escape it. Like, before you could be like, okay, I'll buy it. And then I'll go upgrade my RAM for a reasonable price.

And now it's like, nope, I guess I'm going to pay $200 for 24 gigabytes more of RAM or whatever. So this is, they're living the dream. I just looked at this. And so when I bought my 16-inch Macquick Pro, I bought the M1 Pro because that was like battery life is all I really care about. And we, in our testing, we discovered the max had a lower battery life. And I realized that I thought I had like bought 64 gigs grand, but I bought 32. So I don't even know what I'm talking about.

It's my own computer. I bought my own money. We're just going to be like out of, out of capacity in about a year, Deli. We're both going to be crying with our 32 gigabytes of RAM. Well, I just think for consumer use, right? And like I would say that I'm a professional user of Google Docs. You know, like I'm a pro slack user, but. If they ever make a Google Docs specific Mac book, I will, I'm going to have a great time in that review.

They're like, our world-class chip team has added it. I mean, we're joking, but I have a browser window open right now that has eight Google Docs open in it right now. And that's just for this. That's fine. If they make one, if they're like, we've added a dedicated 12-core processor. Just for Chrome tabs. It just accelerates Chrome. I'm buying that computer.

I will be like Alex. and I will be ordering it on my phone before the keynote is over. Keynote is over. Is there someone we know that might, you know, work on a certain product line at a certain company that we could pitch a Google Doc specific hardware to? It'll be like the MacSueaio, I'll just have all you guys lined up to interview one by one about your Google Docs experience and how much faster it was than your Google Docs set up. Like a 20-minute video that's just me being like, so here's my Google Docs experience.

Just cabbing through. I really like to open file in recent, and you know, that's a lot slower on this machine. That would be just 20 minutes would be bitching about every time I started in Google Doc. It goes to my personal Gmail account and not my work one. All I'm saying is this UMA architecture, like, we still don't know it's going to play out in desktop computing. And I would just always buy the most RAM. I think that's been the rule for 20 years that buying more memory for your computer is almost a more useful upgrade than the processor itself. Sure.

But to Alex's point, that could have been. done at any point that you owned the computer. And now it's like, okay, well, I'm shelling out two grand for the base model of this computer. 512 gigabyte is actually a bigger concern I have than 32 gigs of RAM. Like, I would fill that up with media. That is not enough, yeah. So you need, you probably want to upgrade the storage. But you can buy more storage.

This thing is. Ports galore, man. Just stick an SD card in the front. I get it. But like, who wants to do that? Right now, every Mac accessory maker in the world. is like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make a little wedge of a hard drive,

and we're going to put it right under the top and instead have more ports on it. But that takes up a port that you could be using for more. Another display. Right, but I will add more ports. If I want to connect five displays to this thing and just have them on the wall, I can't, I got every port counts.

Monica, one thing that just did not pan out is Apple compared the ultra to the 3090 on a series of charts. I don't know why. They had like relative performance on the Y axis. You know, that very useful word that we all know what that means. Yeah, we definitely, and they would definitely tell us which benchmarks they were running, which they refused to do.

But you didn't find that to be the case at all, that it could run with the 3090. No, I could not, did not replicate that in the GP benchmarks we ran. Our editor TC has a 390 at home. He ran GeekBench compute for us. It just absolutely demolished the M1 Ultra. Like, M1Otta didn't even get, like, half of its score. There have been some, like, back in, like, October. there were some issues with GeekBench and Apple, but GeekBenzhenge has had, like, a lot of time to fix that issue.

And also, these were not, like, kooky scores that I would not expect to get. Like, this is, like, I think it's just a lot worse. Yeah. So Heim and I looked, now that we have our results from benchmarks, the 3090s, like twice as powerful in various benchmarks as the ultra, depending on the benchmark, depending on the test. And so Heim and I went back and looked at those weird Apple graphs. Okay, so the y-axis is relative performance. Right. And the x-axis is power and watts.

So the y-axis already is like just confusing. And maybe they're just, you know, they're, they're just moving other numbers. Like, they're just turning geek bench scores into zero to 100. Like, I don't know what they're doing. Which makes total sense to do in charts, you know, just move numbers around. Yeah, just convert them into a different set of units for no reason. But here's the thing. The 30-90 line on that chart stop.

at 320 watts. And the 3090 has a standard TDP of 350 watts and can spike to 400. So they just stopped the line at 320 watts. And we're like, oh, that's why. Like, there's just more line. That's the graph. Like the relative performance Y axis goes up to 200. but the 3090 line can go to 400 if you just keep letting go.

How utterly useful? I have complained about these charts so much. I mean, Apple is deeply aware of how I feel about the charts. This is not going to shock anyone also, but the gaming, the frame rates we were seeing in games were not at all close to what we saw from the 3090 either. Actually, can you talk about this? A lot of our comments were about Shadow the Tomb Raider, which is not optimized for Apple Silicon. but it's like the only benchmark that we have across multiple systems.

It is a standard benchmark that everyone runs into a very GPU heavy game. It has been out for, you know, quite a few years now. Like, it's not like it's this brand new game that, you know, Apple hasn't figured out to run. I mean, it is a game that, like, a graphically powerful computer, we would expect it would be able to run. Well, it was one of the first games with ray tracing. Like, it was one of the first things we used for benchmarking for ray tracing.

Like Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a very good benchmark product. And it's like that in civilization, that's which if you're going to benchmark across Apple and Windows, that's kind of it. Because Apple does not care about gaming. We'll never care about gaming. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But they just don't care. And they're never going to care about, you know, excuse me, PC gaming.

They're never going to care about transferring PC gaming. They're never going to. and those companies are never going to modify their software to make it run better on an M1. I mean, they might. If Apple was smart, they would go and they would pay the developer shadow the Tomb Raider to optimize it for Apple Silicon just to end this. Just, yeah, just to end this. And it's also funny that they compared it to a 30-90 when MacOS can't even really use

Nvidia GPUs anymore. Like they got rid of Kuda support years ago. Yeah, sure. But like that's what they're comparing is because that's a best. one on the PC side. Right. I understand. Here's the thing.

I understand why they compare it to a 3090. All they're saying is for 200 watts less power, we can like run with the big dogs, right? That's what they're trying to say. And that was what they said last year when they compared to the 3080 and that also turned out to be not really necessarily true. Why walk into that fight? Like the thing is historic. The thing is a massive victory in ship design.

The performance is out of control. People love it, and you're like, here's this graph that's going to make you mad at us. And then not be true. Like, what are you doing? And just to be, to clarify on what was bad, the frame rates we were getting from the M1 Ultra were still like, you know, well above 60. So it's not like, like, this couldn't run the game. Like, the frame rates were clearly good. The issue is that there's still stutter going on in the game.

Like, it was still like, even when it was running like over 100 frames per second, like, it was still. hiccuping all the time, which I think just goes to show, like, you know, this is not a gaming PC, no one's going to buy it for games. We understand that, like, games are optimized for it. We understand that. But, you know, in terms of comparing graphics power to the graphics power that other machines have, like, that's a number we get that we're going to use. If you can find us a game that runs an Apple Silicon and Windows that is graphically intensive, that has a built-in benchmark. And don't say, like, World of Warcraft, because I'm not going to bench World of Warcraft. Sorry, I'm not doing that.

If you can find us, that test, we'll run it. But this is what we got. I think it's basically the answer. So I just want to start the high before we go to the low. That's what I was trying to do there is like we're going to build up. Historic computer. Deeply disappointing display. I don't know what's going on with this display.

So Apple announced the Mac Studio. They announced the studio display. They cancel the 27-inch IMac. Everyone is like, okay, here's what they're doing. They're reselling display from the 27-inch iMac, which is the only 5K display apart from the, I would say, much-hated LG Ultra Fine 5K. People do not like that display. So here it is.

It's in a case. You can plug it into this thing. It replaces sort of the iMac pro vibe. There is, I would say, just an inordinate amount of chatter about whether Apple will do another iMac pro or another 20s. I don't know what's going to happen. These are the computers to sell now. So we get the display.

Apple's like the displays, the 5K display, it's beautiful. They don't make a lot of claims about the disqual. display itself for reasons I will get into in a moment, but they make a huge claim about its video conferencing capability, right? It's got a three mic array. It's got six speakers. It's got a 12 megapixel camera that is the same camera as the iPad. How was that camera, Nelai? And it's got an A13 chip, which is the same chip as the iPhone 11 we were just talking about that I was like, this is the phone that made me stop using our RX100. So I'm expecting to be blown away. And I will say this is probably not fair to Apple. It's not fair to the Opel team,

but what I was expecting was there's that startup, Opel, that Cam has reviewed their camera. It's a $400 standalone camera. It's called the Opel C1. It is the same camera module as the original pixel and a little Intel chip that does computational photography. And the webcam is great. This is great. I bought one for our CEO because I was like, you got to stop doing all hands with this whole company on your MacBook Air. Right? So, like, the thing's great. So I'm expecting that.

Apple's going to do computational photography at smartphone level. Yeah. On this display. Did you get that? The thing is garbage. It's so, so bad. I mean, it's so bad.

It's really ridiculous to look at. It's, I don't know what's wrong with it. I honestly can't tell you. It's a 12 megapixel sensor and an A-series processor, five years, a half a day, decade of experience will tell you that Apple is good at those two components making good photos. An A-series processor, like, that's Apple's stuff. They know how to do anything. It's like, put those together and make photos that are better than any Android phone. And the thing is garbage.

I have a theory. Yeah. I've got a theory. It's a really bad theory. So I was looking at, you know, the lovely video. Everybody please go watch it. There's a really great comparison shot. And it's Neli and like four different cameras at once. There are no. shadows, right? Like contrast does not exist on this thing. I think they used cardboard cutouts of people for all of their testing. So they never had to actually like mimic real world like contrast in what people actually see. Yeah. I don't know, man. We took briefings, you know, and they were saying they were on these cameras and the briefings that did not look this bad. I got home. I plugged the thing in. I plugged it into the Mac Studio that I had. I plugged it into my MacBook Pro. Monica had one.

she plugged into much like it just looks bad like Joanna Stern compared it to her blackberry for like 10 years ago it does some weird stuff too right so like part of the pitch is that it supports center stage which is the auto framing type of feature that they debuted on the iPads already and it's kind of whack when it does that which is it's kind of a weird thing to put on a monitor where you're sitting still anyways but it has that feature it's got portrait mode with an M1 computer so if you've got a Mac Studio or you You got an M1 MacBook. You can do Portrait Mode on there.

But, like, it's a 12 megapixel camera, which has a very wide field of view. From 12 megapixels, you can pull a 4K video feed out of because that's enough resolution for 4K. But this camera never gives you the full 4K. If you turn off center stage, it, like, is a very cropped in view of that field of view. And it's still 1080P. It's very low quality. It's very strange. Do you think they cheaped out on the ramp?

am in the studio display. They didn't get the upgrade when they were buying and then they're like, oh, should have gotten the 64. Well, let me just finish this. And then we can, we can, I don't know what's wrong with this thing. So all week, I am sending basically selfies of myself in various lighting conditions to Apple, which is a weird thing to do. I'm like, here I'm in my basement again.

Like, hooray, like here I'm in the office. Like, I'm comparing it. You know, we got, there's some friends of the verge out there who review products. So like some little back channel opens up. And we're also like this crazy. Again, more selfies of myself sent to more people this past week than I've ever been comfortable with my entire line. You know, and Apple's like, we're looking into it. You know, it's all very sincere.

I ran a full cisdiagnose. Actually, Monica ran it for me. We sent that over it because I didn't have the machine anymore because I was back home and it was in the office. We sent that to Apple. We checked all the firmware. We updated the soft. It's all the same. So finally last night, Apple says, and Dan,

And I were joking. Like, I could have written this line the first day. I just pre-recorded it in the video. Yeah. Like, I didn't need to wait until the last minute. Like, we've seen the thing. It's not behaving as we expected. A future software update will fix it.

Okay. Sure. I don't know. Like, maybe it will. The rule, and this has been our rule from the beginning of the verge, dating back to our Engadgett days, like whatever, is we've been burned too many times. So people promise to our software updates and you review what's in the box because you can never account on the software date coming and you never know what it's actually going to fix.

So I asked, when is it coming? What will it fix? No answers. So I don't know if they can fix it. I don't know if they should fix it. Now that the reviews are out, there's like noise in the world, that this is the last minute bug and it actually isn't. Who knows? I don't know. But the thing looks like a potato. That's what I got for you. My biggest impression was that I would take a lot of, I was like hanging out with the person who made our video Becca this entire week. And we would often be these meetings together when we were talking about this review. It would be like me and Becca trying to get in the frame and center state would just lose its mind Like it could not figure out it would have focused on it was like swooping back and forth like like a like

Like it was like VR amusement park rides like it just like it could not figure out where like everyone was just telling us to turn it off because it was so distracting like kept going in and out It keeps moving around I was trying to record my little update last night with center stage on and I was like I can't Like this is just not working like it's just like flying around the room Anyway, so we were not the only people who ran into problems with the camera. Joanna ran into these problems, got the same statement. John Gruber ran into these problems, got the same statement. He actually called up the center stage stuff. I was so distracted by how bad the camera was.

I was like, I can't even think about anything else. Like, I'm not looking at your center stage right now. I will say the microphone is great. It is like really good. The speakers, I don't know if two speakers and a stereo pair that are like 18 inches apart can produce spatial audio. I don't even know if spatial audio is like a real thing that is worth it. That is a lot of air quotes happening right now on this podcast. It's just like, did I try to have the experience of Jimmy Page sneaking up behind me with a guitar solo with this computer?

Like, yes. Did it have like, was I surprised? But the speakers do sound good. I just, you know how I feel about audio processing. And then the display itself is just like, this panel is from 2014, man. It was impeccably calibrated. It is impeccably calibrated. It is very bright.

Dan's theory about 600 nits versus 500 nits is it's in a different case and it has fans so they can run the backlight LED is brighter. Right. It doesn't have a whole computer in there soaking up, making heat. So that's my theory at least. Right. But in your day-to-day use, are you running this thing into full 600 nits? Like, maybe. Are you going to see it?

Like, I don't know. But then it's just a single LED backlight. And I went and I was just like, look at it. It's like, there are $379 TVs with full array local dimming now. You guys all took offense at this, but I actually kind of like it. And that's because I watch all of them. It's a dumb reason. It's a dumb reason.

I know. So Alex is coming out as a dark, dark grays enthusiast. I love my dark grays. No, but I love my OLED. I adore my OLED. The thing I cannot stand about 99% of backlit TVs is they cannot mimic. like even really good tons of... The bloom.

Yeah, the bloom. The bloom just distracts me, irritates me. And so I would rather have screen-wide bloom where I don't have to think about it than like the bloom and little spots. Just everything's blooming so you just get used to it? Yeah. Like that, for me, I was like, you know what?

I don't hate that. But also I watch, like, I'd be using it in a big room anyway with a lot of light. So it's not going to hit me as hard as somebody who's like, sitting in the darkness trying to use this thing. It will suck. Like I will say I've never seen two displays look more different than seeing the XDR next to this one,

the pro-display XDR next this one in like a dark or dark office. Like it was just, it was like basically like literally night and day. Like there was one like very bright dark gray and one that is actually black. It was wild. I do think the thing that provided the most irritation for when I, because I went and looked at it with Monica. I brought in all my really stupid little nerdy patterns. And I was like, let's test patterns.

And Monica was like, I said it just like that. Monica was like very, very polite and was like, sure. No, it was awesome. It was awesome. But before that, Monica had to like wipe the entire thing down repeatedly because you had the nanotexture, right? Oh, every two seconds we had to wipe it down because your hand comes within like 10 feet of this thing and it gets a fingerprint on it. Magnet for hand oils. Yeah, which we sort of, you know, that obviously was a problem for us because we were carrying this thing around everywhere.

I don't know how much of a problem that is for like the average person just going to have it on a desk. Like I don't know how often they're to be touching their display. But. Well, they're going to move. They're going to adjust the angle. If you adjust the angle, you will have to probably have to wipe it. You will need to wear gloves. Alex, you're weird ideas with backwards aside.

And I kind of buy the argument like blooming in an LCD TV is bad. Like, this is what a great iPS LCD. has looked like since 2014. Right? I mean, they started ship, I'm looking at a 2015 IMac right now with the same panel in it. It is exactly the same.

Right, you can get the QD OLED that Cam has on his desk. It was in the office, and I went and looked at it. Stunning, gorgeous. I cannot wait to read the review. $1,300. But cheaper than this thing. Cheaper.

And you can save the money and you can buy a webcam that doesn't insult your friends in color. Or you can buy, spend four, like, okay, it's $1,600, $1,600. So for $100 more, you get a better display. You can buy two MacBookaires. Yeah, for $100 more, you get the QD OLED and you get the Opel. And then you've got a good webcam and a really, really good display that you can presumably

touch without needing gloves. I'm going to be the, the reason to buy the Apple display argument is because of its stupid 5K resolution, though. But to Milai's point, like, you've had that since 2014. Like, like, the person who wants the 5K display is not interested in the QD OLED because it is a 1440P panel that doesn't scale macOS nicely, and it doesn't have pixel perfect icons and all this other stuff, which is like a thing that a lot of, you know, creatives and developers care deeply about. They want that sharp resolution. If you're coding all day long, you're looking at little text, sharp resolution matters a lot more than refresh rates. So theoretically, everyone in this room

should want the 5K because all we do is look at text all day. Yeah, but unless you play games in the evening, like then you know you want the refresh rates, right? And you want the contrast. Or if you're using your monitor to watch movies or whatever it is, then the QDOL it'll be fantastic. But like you could have gotten that experience for seven years now or however long it's been, I don't know how to count.

Is it eight years? Maybe it's eight years since 2014 now. And we're not seeing any advancement on this. And like it's a $1,600 display. Like I feel like we could. use the fact that the panel was old if it was $800. Like we'd be like, all right, whatever, that's the Apple tax that you're paying and you get the speakers in the microphone and a terrible webcam.

But this is like $1,600. When I look at like $1,600 displays, I'm looking at 5K, 2K panels from LG that are ultra wide with, you know, DCIP3 gamets and everything like that that are like 40 inches. That's a $1,600 display. Like, they kind of blow this away when it comes to like an actual monitor experience. This could end up being like the home pod, the original home pod. So if we wait a year, it'll probably like half in price. They'll put out a tiny one.

They will cancel this one and they will put out a 15 inch USBC display. You like hold it in your palm and like, yeah. Yeah, to me it's you can't have HDR without local dimming. If you just like play it out in your head to do HDR, you need some parts of the screen that are way brighter than others. so you can't just ramp the whole backlight you need to selectively light up parts of the display. So you can't have HDR at local dimming. There's no local living, so they have no HDR.

Now this thing is just like out of the running. Like I do keep coming back to the fact that the cheapest TVs now have full array backlights, full array local dimming backlights with HDR. And maybe you could still use the panel, but why not innovate on the backlight, which is like a totally possible thing to do? and they did not do that.

For the same price you could go get for around the same price, a 48-inch LG OLED with 120 hertz refresh rate, the absolute best color and... But you would only get that 4K resolution. Yeah. And also it's a 48-inch screen on your desk, and I can tell you that's not a fun time. Don't do it.

It's so much TV. I personally cannot really see refresh rates beyond 60 hertz. This is actually like Deeter and I used to talk about this all the time. Like he was really, he could see the refresh rates. I absolutely can. And I see HDR in color and like, I don't know. Maybe that's just a thing. Like you're one or the other, you're left-handed or right-handed.

But to me, it's way more important to have the HDR in the, in the backlight, than refresh rates. I know we have tons of people in our audience, Monica, who can see it. It's a constant argument in our Slack as to like, how could you buy a 60-hertz monitor? I will say that like for a monitor where your inputs are detached, you've got your mouse, your keyboard, or your track pad, or whatever, I do not see as big of a different. I'm looking at 120 hertz monitor right now, and I really only use it ever for work. And if I turn it to 60 hertz, I really don't notice much of a difference. You do notice a difference in gaming because everything's a little bit smoother there. And I definitely notice it on a lot of touchscreen devices.

And we'll probably talk about this with the iPad. But if I'm directly manipulating things and I'm actually reading text as I'm scrolling it with my finger, I notice that 120 hertz because I can still read the touch. text as I do it, whereas a 60-hertz screen will blur it out or get choppy. So it really depends on your use cases, whether faster refresh rates make sense for your needs. But I think anybody could probably tell, to your point, Eli, the difference between an HDR and a non-HDR screen, most likely regardless of what you're doing. Yeah. I don't know, man. I don't know what's going to on this display. I don't know why it's $1,600. I don't know why buying a stand that allows you to adjust the height is another $400. That's a real offense. And the best part is if you make the

the wrong choice when you buy it, you're stuck. Yeah, screwed. If you have the Max, do it, you can plug five of them in. You can plug five of them in, which is obviously important. And then in a dark room, you would have just a source of blinding light. Just five gray pills. People have been talking about like perfect blacks on displays since at least 2007. Like, that's when I went to CS and Pioneer would have us in for their Kuro plasma demos,

where they'd show you that all the other ones had gray backlights and the Kuros. I saw, well, we still have a curoplasma, man. You light that thing up. The lights in our house dim. It is an experience. Waste 75 pounds. It's, yeah, it's just, it's in another room. And every time again, I go and, like, lovingly gaze at it.

We haven't turned it on it forever, but I'm never throwing it away. It was, like, the first expensive TV I ever bought, and we are keeping it until we're dead. Just brought out to the whole neighborhood. But perfect black clubs. But perfect. But that's like, since. It's 2007 we've been chasing after this. And a $1,600 display from Apple, which in every other category where it makes the displays, makes the best one.

It's like offensive. It's just utterly bonkers to me. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see if they can fix this webcam, and maybe that will change things dramatically. That'll also fix the black lights. Who knows? Software update to Fuller Aerole local team.

That'd be incredible. Surprise. All right. We still talk about this iPad. Monica, thank you so much. Thank you. We're going to take a quick. break. We'll be right back.

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start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. Actually, Monica's going to hang with us to talk about this iPad. But Dan, you reviewed the iPad error. I did. I will tell the audience that I specifically deleted the line here conclusion where you're like, I have nothing to say about this computer. And I was like, no, that's your job, honey.

I had this crisis of confidence. If I could put that in 99% of my reviews, I will love to do that. I will say that the fact that I had nothing really, really to complain about with the iPad is a testament to how good the iPad Air is. The iPad Air is an excellent product, and it is more excellent this year than it was two years ago when they last refreshed it. It is closer to the iPad Pro experience than it's ever been before, and it's remarkable that it does it for $600. Like, when you think about the original iPad came out in 2010 for $4.99, if you do the inflation calculation or whatever, it's going to be way more than $499 in today's

This is giving you, for $600, it's giving you basically Apple's fastest iPad processor, the same amount of RAM as you get in a comparable storage iPad Pro. It runs all the same software and everything like that. So it really obviates the need for the iPad Pro for a lot of people. There's some reasons you might want the iPad Pro, but fewer and far between. And it's just like a really great iPad. And I think the other question that you had when we were editing this draft, Nile, is like, well, why don't you just buy the $329? iPad if they all run the same software and they all do the same thing. Yes, that's true. The error is like if you just want it nicer experience. You want those nicer speakers. You want the

nicer build quality. You want the flexibility to work with the newer pencil, to work with the magic keyboard if you really want to. It's compatible with all the same accessories as the last model. And you just like, you know, want to be able to have that iPad that's going to last for five or six years. It's got all the headroom and all the power you could want. You're not going to hit the head limit of the power of this thing right now. But it'll last for a really long time, just like the iPhone SE, except that you're not really making those same compromises you do on the iPhone SE. You're not getting the old weird design. You're not getting a compromised screen experience.

That's with the $329 iPad is right. Yeah, the $329 is, but the $329 iPad does use an older processor and things like that. So you're like, you know, getting older technology. Well, this has got smaller bezels too, right? Yeah, this is like the modern Apple design ethos, right? It's got that uniform bezels across the screen, so it feels exactly the same, whether you're using portrait or landscape,

which is really nice. It's kind of like an iPad hallmark. I've tested a lot of reviewed a lot of tablets. I've got the stack of Samsung tablets here that I'm going to spend time with next finally. Promise you readers, we are working on them. We're not ignoring them. They do not have that flexibility to work as comfortably in portrait and landscape mode as the iPad does.

And the iPad does it really well, and part of that is because of its aspect ratio. and part of it is because the bezels around the screen are just all uniform, and it doesn't really matter how you hold it. So it gives you all the best experiences that the iPad offers for a price that is not $1,000 or $1,500 when you add in accessories and things like that. So it's like a really compelling type of tablet if you're in the market for this mid-sized, 10-inch, 11-inch tablet, which is a really great tablet experience.

Is the display better or worse than the Mac Studio display? it's better because it's it's you know it's it's different i mean like i don't know like it's if we go and qualify it on all the things that the mat that we just qualified the max studio display on right it doesn't have hdr it maxes out at 500 nits so it doesn't have that hdr mini l ed experience that you get on the 12.9 inch ipad right or the 11 inch pro so the 11 inch ipad pro does not have many LED so that's kind of why the 11 inch iPad pro and the ipad air are so similar because the screens are effectively the same except for refresh rate. Interesting.

So you don't get the HDR. You don't get full array local dimming or whatever. It's an LCD panel. But it is, you know, a great colors. It's plenty of brightness for use in any situation that I really could encounter in my time with it. And it's, you know, super responsive for touch and everything like that like a typical iOS device is. So there's really very little to complain about with the screen. It is only 60 hertz and it doesn't have pro motion.

And so for some folks who are, we talked about this earlier, if you're sensitive to. So, Neely, would be fine. You would not. Yeah. I mean, like, if you're sensitive to refresh rates, you might see a smoother experience on the iPad pro because that does have the 120 hertz screen. I think a big misconception is that you need that 120 hertz screen for great stylus experience. And that's not really the case at all. You can have just as good a stylus experience on the iPad air.

So if you're drawing or writing notes, I take a lot of handwritten notes on an iPad. I really didn't miss having 120 hertz there. Well, like, the Remarkable, too, has the best stylist experience out there right now, and it has a refresh rate of, like, one. Yeah, I mean, like, it's a wildly different technology there that you're stacked. But if you're comparing the air and the pro, and you're like, I want to buy the pro because I use the stylus all the time, it's like, well, maybe you don't really need the pro for your stylus work.

There's a digital artist on YouTube that I like a lot because I can't draw for anything, and he's actually pretty good at it. He tests all the tablets. And he does the comparisons of, like, the stylus response in slow motion. And, like, his ultimate conclusion, his name is Brad Colbeau. You can find him on YouTube. But, like, his ultimate conclusion is usually that there really isn't that much of a noticeable difference at the slower refresh rate. So the reason that you would get the iPad Pro are you get smoother scrolling when you're interacting with it.

Now, for me, what I use an iPad for is a lot of reading of static text. And I don't need smooth refresh rates for that. Like, it's just there. You don't want your pages to be really smooth when they're turning? Yeah, you know, like I turn it on the little page turn animation in the Kindle app so I can see the page curl over, which I do every single time. Like I turn it on every single time. I need that at 120 hertz. But like I really don't.

So like when I was using the error, it like I have, I own an 11 inch pro. That's my personal iPad. And like I didn't miss the pro screen at all. Like I really didn't miss anything about the pro. That was the weird part about it was. Well, you didn't miss Face ID? Oh, I'm sorry. That is, yeah.

You got me, Alex. That is like the one experience difference that I think a lot of people will experience between the pro and the air. The air has the same touch ID system in its power button that they had on the 2020 model. So you got to rest your finger on the power button to unlock it. It works very well. It recognizes your fingerprints very quickly. It's just not nearly as intuitive and seamless as the pro where you just tap the screen. It sees your face and you're in, right?

Like, it's, it's like, you have to stop, put your finger on the button, wait for it to do its thing. If you're like, you know, unlocking your password manager or buying an app or paying for something with Apple Pay, you got to stop, put your finger on the button. And I'm never holding it where my finger is near the button. So I always have it in the keyboard case. So I, for, you know, testing, I put it in the keyboard case. I think the keyboard case is great, but I don't think that this is the right iPad to buy if you want to replace your laptop because it's got a small screen. And like, I mean, most of the time for, you know, I think what this is really great at is that tablet experience. You are holding it in your hands.

You're sitting on your couch. You're lying in bed or whatever. You're watching a movie. You're reading a book. You're reading Apple News or an article or something like that. And it gives you that nice large screen that is still comfortable to hold. As soon as you try to go into like a laptop work environment, you really run into the walls of this really quickly in terms of like the size of the screen and the limitations that iPad OS puts on you. for multitasking, file management,

all the things that we've beaten to death for a couple of years now. And if you are intending on replacing your laptop, I strongly recommend you consider just going whole hog out to the 13-inch model. But then you give up the tablet experience because the 12.9-inch iPad is kind of a crummy tablet when you take it out of its case.

So that's kind of where I sit with it. It's a really great tablet experience, and I don't really knock iOS iPadOS all that hard for its like lack of laptop experience in the review because I think a lot of people are going to experience it's mostly as a tablet. We'll see.

I mean, I have an 11-inch pro, which I clearly don't use enough because I didn't remember what kind of display it had. The most used iPad in our house is my kids, $329 iPad, which runs exactly two apps, Disney Plus and YouTube Kids. And one is the one I wanted to use, and the other one is full of garbage. It's poisoning her mind. And that's the one that she wants to use the most. We'll let the audience try and figure out which one's which.

It's Disney Plus. Right. But it's like, that's what that thing is for. And the thing is trashed and it's fine. And then I think most people, like, if you've got the money to spend, you're going to want the nicer one. This is just how companies price products and create tiers. But then it's like, well, if I'm, they're so close in price, especially once you start factoring in the storage. Yeah.

So my big complaint about the iPad era was that it still comes with only 64 gigs of storage, which I think we talked about this last week. But like my perception did not change throughout the process of the review. So my review unit was a 256 gig model. I just kind of like cloned my I cloud account on. to it and loaded all my iPad apps that I use, and I'm at 87 gigs. So 64 gig right off the bat is like no good for me. Someone who's had an iPad for a couple of years doesn't rely on it for like work stuff. I just kind of like use it as an iPad. I think if Apple had gone to 128 with this as a base, it would have been great because the upgrade is $150 more and it goes all the way to

$256 right away. And then you are like $50 dollars away from the 128 gig iPad Pro, which now you're like, oh, should I just spend 50 bucks and give up that half that storage? They did this on purpose. This is like Phil Schiller and his pricing Matrix is like, I'm going to torture them. I'm going to torture them and is spending a little bit more money, right? Like, I think that all makes sense. The one place I disagree with you, and I don't travel as nearly as much they used to, the reason I bought the 11-inch iPad Pro and the keyboard case, which is a very expensive,

tiny little laptop, was it is great for traveling. It is especially great for airplanes because I've had a little. is like this endless single tasking cannot be broken. It doesn't try to use go-go data the way that like your laptop does. I think in that scenario, and I agree with you because back when I commuted, when that was like a regular thing for me, I used an iPad on the train every single day. It had built-in cellular connection. And that was like my train computer or it's a great playing computer.

And it's a great travel computer because the, I think the boundaries of iPad OS really mesh nicely with the boundaries of that environment that you're in. You're not going to be the most productive on a train. You're not going to be the most productive on a plane. You're going to bang out emails, write documents one at a time, things like that. You're not bouncing between tasks and things like that. You're not shuffling files around a lot in those scenarios. And I think the limitations of iPad OS, and frankly, for me, the limitations of Chrome OS work

really well in those environments. And I can be as productive as I possibly can be with that device. But it is not replacing my laptop because as soon as I get to wherever I'm going, I'm not using the iPad anymore. I'm using my laptop or I'm using a proper computer because it does give me that flexibility where I'm in an environment that I can be more productive. So like the keyboard case is excellent for that type of purpose and I actually really like typing on the magic keyboard, even though it's small. Like I weirdly get very comfortable on it very quickly and I can type very well on that. But like once I get to the office, the iPad's staying in my bag because I'm just using

my laptop, which is even bigger and more comfortable and I have more space and I'm more flexible there. So I don't think it replaces my laptop. When you start to add all these things together, though, like $600 for the air, $300 for the keyboard. If you want to get the pencil, now you're at $1,000. That's a MacBook Air with the same processor, twice a store, four times of storage. Right, but it's not as much fun to use. I've, I've, the reason I had a 12-inch MacBook with the single port for the longest time was because it was just like the right size for an airplane. sure but but but as soon as you got off that airplane you weren't using that anymore right well presumably i'd arrived at a destination where i was going to talk to other people and not like immediately

start using my laptop like that's like the saddest plane ride in the world we're different people that clearly do i've arrived i'm going to go to my hotel room and set up my three displays and just rock out like without your mac studio set up your five displays in your tv exactly i brought iMac with me um i don't know i don't remember what traveling was like it was a different life i was a different person back then uh so ipad air seems great it feels like if you need to buy an ipad right now that one's fine but we would probably expect new ipad pros the end of the year yeah it's weird if you're if you've been paying attention to the rumor mill it's like they go back and forth every other week new ipad pros are coming this year they're not coming this year they will bring the

mini LED screen down to the 11-inch. Oh, they're not going to do that this year. So it's like really hard to suss out whether we're going to see new iPad pros this year. I will say that they released new iPad pros last year, less springish. And the iPad Pro is typically on an 18 to 24 month upgrade cycle per history. So my money would be on early 2023 for an iPad Pro, but the supply chain kind of mucks everything up, so you can't really predict all that easily anymore. So I don't know. It's hard to say. If you're buying today, I would say the air should probably be your first choice. If you're looking for a great iPad experience, make sure you can deal with that 64 gigs of storage. If not, then you're looking at upgrading the storage, and then you're in this weird world of

should I buy the pro or not? And frankly, I don't know if I can help you too much there. You just got to look into your heart and decide which one is the better one for you. If you want face ID, is it face ID, right? It could be face ID. It could be the 120 hertz. I don't think it's the four speakers. I couldn't hear a difference between the two speakers on the air and the four speakers on the pro. Non-significant difference there. It's definitely not the 0.1 inch larger screen because it's a 10.9 versus 11.

Yeah, that's not it. And maybe it's, you know, the 120 hertz screen. I didn't even talk about this at all. The air now has an optional 5G, but it's only six sub-6. It works. If you get 5G on the pro, it's millimeter wave, which great if you can find it. But that 5G upgrade on the pro costs $200. And the 5G upgrade on this iPad air costs $150.

So you have to pay more for that millimeter wave that you probably won't get. You're standing under a street corner with an 11-inch iPad pro. Because you get an extra camera on the back. So you're taking pictures with your iPad on millimeter wave. Of the millimeter wave tower. Everyone's like, look at that rich guy. The staggering display of wealth. Got so many cameras.

This extra camera and millimeter wave? Who is that? And a keyboard case attached. Is that Warren Buffett? All right. A couple of, we're way over. A couple of notes. Universal Control also hit.

MacOS. iOS, iPadOS. Well, MacOS and iPad OS. So now you can just like scoot a mouse like magic. Very clever. It is very cool. It works really well. If you got an iPad and Mac,

although you have to upgrade your Mac to Monterey, which. Yes, you do. That's how they get you. Also, the studio display requires Monterey, which is like, monitor. It's got a whole computer there.

Yeah, that's why he definitely doesn't need a. Very confusing. Whatever. Two things I want to call out. Mia Sato are platforms and communities reporter on the creators desk, big Vimea story. So Vimeo pivoted away from being a YouTube competitor to being like this B2B video provider.

But now the creators on the platforms are being asked to pay thousands of dollars for hosting fees. They're not happy. That's a great story. You should read it. She also had an incredible story about Ukrainian influencers who were on TikTok doing TikTok stuff, like hustle, like business hustle advice and like workout tips.

And now they're all like war correspondence. It is remarkable. It's like a great verge story. It's about how people dramatically change the way they use. The tools they have when circumstances change. The layout's great. You got to go read it. And then lastly, this is just a fun one.

Jason Snell, he used to be editor of Macworld magazine. When the Mac Studio was announced, I was like, This thing reminds me of this idea for computer people have had for 20 years. So he wrote about it with all these pictures of old Mac magazines and why people wanted something like the Mac Studio. It's just a great story. It's called the Mac Studios myth fulfillment. If you're into computer history, it's really good.

Decoder this week, Matt Mullenleg, who's the CEO of Automatic. That's a company that owns WordPress and Tumblr and Day 1 and Pocketcast. Super interesting conversation. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Dan is D.C. Seifert. Monica is MC squared 96.

Allison is Allison Joe 1. That's it. That's for a chest. Rock around. Later.