Upgrade - 271: The 16-inch MacBook Pro

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

The butterfly keyboard era is over! Apple is releasing a new 16-inch MacBook Pro this week, featuring a Magic Keyboard, upgraded audio, the biggest battery allowed by law, and a lot more. Jason has an exclusive interview with Apple’s MacBook Pro product manager, Shruti Haldea. Then Jason and Myke break down the new laptop's features and feature omissions, while reserving a little bit of time for the launch of Disney+.

from relay fm this is upgrade 271 today's show is brought to you by squarespace express vpn and id tech my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hello jason snell hello mike hurley huge show today jasonnell. We usually start off our episodes of Hashtag Snell Talk. I'm just going to ask you a question today. Where are you? Mike, I am in New York City. And Jason Snell, why are you in New York City today? Well, when I heard that you were going to be traveling over the weekend and we weren't

going to be able to do Upgrade until you got back, I just didn't know what to do. So I was very sad and I decided i would take take a trip to new york in order to find out about the brand new 16 inch macbook pro there it is oh very shortly have an interview we got to you got to sit down with somebody at apple today right i yes i did i talked to Shruthi Holdaya, who is a product manager for the MacBook Pro. Yeah, and we talked a lot about the MacBook Pro, 16 inch and pro users in general

and the pro workflows team and great conversation with her. And in the exact same place that I had that conversation with Colleen Novielli not too long ago. And so we'll have that soon on this episode. But I think before we jump into that conversation, it's probably worth contextualizing. In case there are people that don't know, because it was funny, like last time, I'm assuming there'll be some upgradians out there that the first time they ever hear about this news is when they press play on the episode.

That happened with the iMac when we spoke about that with that episode with Colleen that you mentioned. So what are the headlines of this brand new MacBook Pro? Apple kind of went through a list of us. So I got the briefing on Tuesday and we're releasing this on at the embargo time on Wednesday. And they came through with a list of their priorities, which I thought was interesting to see them contextualize it like that. So display is number one. Like this is a 16-inch MacBook Pro.

It has a 16-inch diagonal display. It is slightly more dense. It's got more pixels. It's got smaller bezels. The computer itself is actually slightly larger it's not i know that you know trying to separate rumors from fact is hilarious this is one of those rumors that was like it's a 16 inch display but they shrunk the bezels enough that it fits in the exact size of the 15 inch it's not true it is not much bigger but it is a little

tiny bit bigger than the 15 inch but it's got this big 16-inch display, and the bezels are smaller than they were on the 15-inch. So that's number one. Number two is performance. It's got what you would expect, which is the latest ninth-generation Intel Core processors, 6-core i7 and an 8-core i9 in the higher-end configuration. So it's got the latest and greatest it's got radeon pro 5000 m series graphics processors which is the brand new radeon graphics stuff so that's number two number three is the battery it's got a hundred watt hour battery this is literally the largest lithium ion battery allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration as a carry-on.

So it's like a legal limit. You can't make one bigger than this in an internal battery in a device. Yeah. That's kind of fascinating, isn't it, really, that that's where we are now, that we're bumping up against air aviation laws in the size of the batteries. Yeah, and actually, I asked Apple about that today and what they said was, they're not sure if they would actually like... It's a heavy battery, right? There's trade-offs there. And I talked with Shruti about that too.

So it's not like Apple's goal is to have a giant battery in there because they also want to save power and be more efficient. And it's a balancing act. But in this case, it's a hard stop. Like, well, if you want to maximize your battery, we've got a maximum for you, which is they won't let it on a plane if it's bigger than this. So, and to fill that battery, there is an adapter. The power adapter is not larger than it was before, but it is a more powerful adapter. It's a 96-watt USB-C adapter that comes in the box. So yeah.

Powerful. It's warm. As I'm sitting here charging the MacBook Pro, it's warm. If you just get an iPhone near that thing, it charges up. It just radiates power. Just lay it nearby, and it's going to drink in the electrons. In fact, by the way, I am coming to you live from the 16 inch macbook pro of course in what may be the first podcast ever recorded on a 16 inch macbook pro i don't know maybe i'm i'm gonna say that is completely accurate well we

don't know because apple did um have some creative professionals seated with this in advance so who knows yeah okay they may have tried it out but probably who knows but probably i would say it's a safe bet it's the first podcast it's probably not the first piece of media created on one yes certainly not certainly not um okay so the other the other priorities here on this product storage um up to eight terabytes you can get of internal storage on this thing now. Sound, which surprised me, this is not one that I was expecting. They revamped the audio.

And again, I talked with Shruthi about this, but there's a new six speaker audio system in it with these woofers that are vibration canceling. And then another one that I did not see coming mike is what apple is calling studio quality microphones built into the macbook pro i think we'll come back to that one a little bit later on in the episode yeah i'm very intrigued about what that means yeah exactly right it is in the short version is they are way better and i hope all laptop mics are like this, but it remains to be seen. I'm going to let everybody judge for themselves. I am not talking to you at the moment on that microphone,

but that might happen later just as a little sample for everybody, but we're not there yet. We're not there yet. And then Mike, Oh, I left one out. The most important one. I know I'm just a little drama here.

The keyboard, the keyboard, the keyboard, the keyboard. They talked about the keyboard a lot. They did it in the most important one. I know. It's a little drama here. The keyboard, the keyboard, the keyboard, the keyboard. They talked about the keyboard a lot. They did it in the most Apple way, which I could have told you. I did tell you.

I told everybody, like Apple's not going to say, we're really sorry. We made a bad keyboard. What they're going to do is make a great new keyboard and say, hey, everybody,

good news, great keyboard. Yeah. And they're not going to, you know, I think they went as far as to admit that, you know, not everybody liked it. I think they said their standard thing, which is, you know, a majority of people had no problem with it, but it wasn't as broadly appealing as it needed to be. And I think that's a perfectly fine way you can phrase it.

appealing as it needed to be. And I think that's a perfectly fine way you can phrase it. So the 16-inch MacBook Pro has a magic keyboard. They're calling it the magic keyboard. It is not exactly the same as the magic keyboard that you find as an external keyboard on a desktop or as a Bluetooth keyboard. It is inspired by the magic keyboard for the desktop but um you know redesigned with a laptop in mind it's it's got a millimeter of key travel so it's definitely it feels a lot like the magic keyboard i'll put it that way having written a few thousand words on it today it is um it definitely feels like like a magic keyboard but uh it's it what it is is a scissor switch keyboard, not a butterfly keyboard. And Apple's done some things to try to do key stability because they really care about that. But in the end, it is a totally new keyboard based on more traditional scissor technology.

And I'm not going to assume anything at this point, but I think it's a good sign. And as you'll hear Sruti talk about, they spent a lot of time and effort trying this time, like trying to figure out what was going to make people happy, because obviously whatever process they used last time, this is not the part she said, she, they're not going to say this, but like, obviously whatever their process was last time, didn't catch all of the things that, that people ended up complaining about about the butterfly keyboard so they went back to the drawing board and asked and even you know a broad selection of people um you know what

they were looking for in a keyboard and and that all got into this brand new keyboard so even though it's got all of this other technical prowess around it and the bigger screen um you know i think for a lot of people the big story is just going to be hey apple made a laptop with a new keyboard it's not like the old keyboards all right there is a lot to drill into uh about each of those points because there's still i still have a bunch of questions and i'm sure that there's more information that you can give but why don't you introduce our interview our guest and then after we do after we get back from that we can talk a little bit more in detail about the new 16-inch macbook pro all right yes i i talked to just before we recorded this i talked to to shruti haldia who is the product manager for a bunch of mac stuff started as you you'll hear, started with Mac Mini.

And MacBook Pro is her thing. So she was super excited to talk about this one because this is obviously a big moment in the life of the MacBook Pro. So Shruti, I'm glad that you are here. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me about this and about the MacBook Pro. But before we get to that, because I know everybody wants to know about it, but I thought I'd start by asking you something I like to ask people from Apple when I interview them, which is, do you have an Apple story? Did you use Apple stuff before you even became an Apple employee? Absolutely. I still remember the really amazing moment when I first used a Mac. It was at the computer lab at my high school. I had gotten someone's hand-me-down PC notebook. My parents had given it to me. I was pretty young, couldn't really put together the dollars for a new computer. But my computer lab at high school had these awesome Macs.

And one day I just went there to go and write a composition for my 10th grade class. And I was just blown away by the friendly UI and the user experience. And I kind of fell in love at that moment with Apple. And that's where my journey with Apple began. That's a very familiar story. I definitely had that in my college newspaper. It was the same thing. They were like, we have Macs here.

Why don't you sit down and write your article? And I was like, oh. Yeah. And that was it. I guess a lot of people talk about iPods and iPhones and things, but you've got a Mac story. I like it. Well, I got an iPod like maybe 10 years later or 15 when they were first introduced. But that was definitely the seminal Apple moment,

the Mac moment. I think everybody has a moment like that. They're using Apple products. So how long have you been working at Apple? I'll be coming upon a decade. Wow. In a couple of weeks, actually. So what is it that you do at Apple? So I have spent the last five plus years working as the product manager of MacBook Pro. I recently started to work on a few other products, including Mac Pro, iMac Pro, Mac Mini, all the Pro Macs. You had some Mac Mini in your background, too. I did. It was the first product I got to be the product manager of. That's great. I love the Mac Mini. But we're not here to talk about the Mac Mini today. No, we're not. We're here to talk about the new 16-inch MacBook Pro.

That's exciting. It's so exciting. It's a big day. I feel like this is one of those days that only comes along every three or four years where there's a major update to an Apple product, and then we see some iterations on that for a while. And this feels like one of those moments where it's not just a, hey, I mean, hey, it's faster is a nice thing to hear. But this is more than that. Am I wrong? This seems like a big update. This is a very big update. It's so much more than about performance. It's about us rethinking MacBook Pro and bringing great performance and features and capabilities

on so many different planes. It's such an incredible product. People who choose the MacBook Pro, you know, they are some of the most interesting and audacious people. We see incredible films being cut on MacBook Pro. We hear about great research being conducted with tools literally on MacBook Pro. We hear about great research being conducted with tools literally like MacBook Pro. And so it's an incredibly inspiring thing

to be able to work on this product. And so it's so meaningful for us to be able to deliver a great new product that takes performance to new heights, that has a gorgeous new display, that has a keyboard that we know customers will absolutely love, that has the best possible I.O. with Thunderbolt 3 ports with up to 40 gigabits per second of

throughput. You can buy two of those Pro Display XDRs if you would like when they come out in December, and this will drive two of them. Exactly. Pretty good. It's just so meaningful to be able to create a product that we think will inspire people to do their life's best work. MacBook Pro customers are pretty inspiring to us. In thinking about this product today, it's been funny to think about, you know, you can have these incredibly advanced Intel, ninth generation Intel core processors and these GPUs that are powerful and you've got more SSD storage than ever and you've got more video RAM than ever. And a whole lot of conversation today is spent around the keyboard.

Yeah. But it turns out keyboards do matter. They're very important. They're built into the product. You kind of have to take whatever comes with the product. And you know as much as anyone else that there's been some grumbling about the butterfly keyboard design. And I think the phrase you used earlier was a lot of people really like it, but it wasn't a hit with everyone. And you wanted to do something that had, would it be fair to say have broader appeal? Yeah, maybe that was more universally loved. Sure.

We found that, you know, we've done extensive research with internally at Apple. Our engineering teams have looked very closely at this question of what it is that makes for an amazing typing experience. And this was a very long and thorough investigation. And we looked at things like the mechanoreceptors on your fingertips. What felt like a satisfying key buckle to that, you know, to that sensor on your fingertip, which is actually called a Piscinian corpuscle. We looked at, you know, keyboard acoustics. What are some of the sounds that are pleasing to the ear and are also pleasing to your neighbor? Because they're not necessarily benefiting from you typing, but they have to potentially hear what you're typing at the same time.

Right. This is a keyboard that will probably be used in a public space, and you have to keep that in mind. Right. Or at home. You know, and maybe there's someone sleeping next to you when you're working. It's a public space of a sort, right? Yeah, maybe it is. And you're going to bug somebody else with it. Absolutely.

We thought about delivering a satisfying and comfortable typing experience and bringing all the knowledge we had from various keyboards, including, of course, the Magic Keyboard that ships with iMac Pro that is, you know, very well loved. We then refined the design to adapt it to a great notebook typing experience. For example, the mechanism locks into the keycap, allowing for a very stable key feel. And the travel is now one millimeter. And we think customers are going to just love it. Right.

So that's more travel than was on the Butterfly design. That's right. Yeah. The Butterfly has closer to 0.55 key travel. So it's interesting when you talk about the sound and acoustic modeling and all of that. Definitely the sense I've gotten is over the last few years,

actually having so many people talk about keyboards on laptops, is this is not something you can quantify in the same way as gigahertz or processor cores or gigabytes or terabytes of storage or RAM or anything like that. This is, there's a little more art to it in terms of like how humans respond to sound or feel. Absolutely. Or like, you know, does the sound a keyboard makes really matter in terms of the typing? No. And yet, yes.

Exactly. You know, when you think about this question of what makes for a satisfying typing experience, it's sort of about what users believe is satisfying. It's informed by things like their past experience and unconvention and expectation. It's not necessarily a technical answer. It's not about efficiency of the keyboard. It's about what people like. So there's a combination of, you know, technical precision, as well as the art of understanding what defines, you know, a satisfying experience, both from a sound standpoint as well as a typing feel. So I remember I actually went back and looked at an article I wrote in 2015 about the Magic keyboard originally when it came out and my response to it then, which was very much like,

oh, they really did a good job with this. This feels really good. Now you say inspired by the Magic keyboard that is still available as a Bluetooth keyboard and comes with the iMac Pro. What does that mean in terms of what did you have to do differently? How much of it is the Magic Keyboard and how much of it is sort of just using the Magic Keyboard as a guide? It was more of using the Magic Keyboard on iMac Pro as a guide because you have to adapt it for a notebook. And, you know, for example, the extended wireless Magic Keyboard, it's on an incline, you know. Right, it's got that pitch.

Right. And we wanted to bring it to the MacBook Pro. We wanted to have a similar typing feel and experience, but, you know, the finger registration may be a little different at this angle. And we wanted to give it an even more stable key feel. So it's an adaptation inspired by that. It definitely feels quite reminiscent of it. Good.

So even though technically it may be a little bit different, but it's still scissor switches underneath. It's a different mechanism. You anticipate that this is going to be a beloved and reliable mechanism in the future? We certainly hope so. And the reason I believe that people will enjoy using it is that we've done such extensive internal user studies. We went out of our way to get a very large group of great users, diverse users at Apple to try it out in its many iterations. So you did a lot of legwork here. There was legwork.

And it was based on thinking through, you know, if you want to make sure that, you know, it appeals to a lot of people, you sort of have to have a good, broad sense of, you know, a diverse group of people. So people with, you know, who are developers, people who write a lot, people with small hands, people who are more sensitive to sound. I mean, there's so many different factors here. So the engineering teams did an extraordinarily thorough job with investigating this. This is complicated stuff, and you think it's just a keyboard, but it is. I mean,

it is complicated. This is not all going to be about keyboards, I swear. I do have a couple other things that are notable about this keyboard that we should at least mention. One of them is is complicated. This is not all going to be about keyboards, I swear. I do have a couple other things that are notable about this keyboard that we should at least mention. One of them is the touch bar is still there at the top. It has been shrunken a little bit in terms of the width. And now we've got the discrete power button slash touch ID button that we have already seen in the MacBook Air on one side. And on the other side, there's a physical escape key, which I, again, you mentioned kind of comes back to especially developers who rely on the escape key a lot and were sad when it wasn't a physical key anymore. So developers, especially those who use text editors like Vim, they can hit the escape key

several times a minute as they're swapping between modes. And some developers, I've actually talked to a few, they sometimes like rest their pinky on the escape key just sort of by default. So for them, having the physical escape key back is a huge win. The new Magic Keyboard, we think customers are going to just love it. I think there's some navigational structure to that too. You can feel, you can't, on the touch bar, you can't act by feel, right? Because you can't feel where the buttons are. And if you touch it, you're touching it and you're interacting with it. But you can get the sense of where the corner of the keyboard is by touching the escape key or by touching the

touch ID on the other side, you know, you can orient sort of without looking down. That's true too. And that brings me to the arrow keys as well, which are back in their kind of half height inverted T configuration, which again, can't believe I'm talking a lot about the shape of arrow keys, but who knew it turns out people really like the inverted T and that neutral space, that blank space as a way to orient where their hands are on the keyboard without looking down. Absolutely. We think, you know, if you're navigating through a spreadsheet or source code or even playing a game, it's just nice to be able to sort of get to the arrow keys without having to look down. So, agreed. Now, did I notice that the, I swear this is the last keyboard question, did I notice that the space between the keys is a little bit greater than it was on the previous keyboard? Yes. We've actually decreased the size of the

keycaps just slightly. And as a result, the space between keys is now a little bit bigger. That's just because when you have higher travel, like you do with this one millimeter keyboard, you want to make sure that the finger doesn't glance an adjacent key when you're pressing. And so the podcast listeners can't see you. You actually showed, you put your hands out. And the idea there is that as you're depressing a key, if it's going down a whole millimeter, you may brush against the key that's right next to it. So you want to keep them apart a little bit. Exactly. That's right.

So as we increase the travel of the key, we increase the space between them as well. Well, I've gotten to the point where I'm doing play-by-play about people pretending to type things. So I think we should move on. I want to talk about the display. It's in the name. We have gone from a 15-inch to a 16-inch display. Yes. There's more space. There's a higher pixel density. Tell me a little bit about the thought process behind saying we want to, you know, 15-inch MacBook Pro had a pretty big screen, but it's like we can make this bigger. And not just by making the bezel smaller, the computer is a little bit bigger, too, in order to fit that screen in. Yeah.

So it's just a little bit bigger. Just a little. Just a little bit. It's just about 2% in the X and Y dimensions. Because you're right, we grew the display and we also slimmed the borders. So as a result, the footprint of the product is almost the same as the previous generation, which is great because our pro customers will benefit from that much more screen real estate and get that incredibly immersive front of screen experience. And you got some more pixels for that.

Yes, 3072 by 1920, almost 6 million pixels in total. So not quite a 2x screen. It looks like it ships in a scaled resolution. Yeah. Any reason to not, you know, was there thought about whether you could go to 2x, full on 2x without scaling? So for customers who prefer to be in that, you know, in a 2x mode, if you will, you can certainly just go into display system preferences and choose another option. So that's an option for every customer. We love this UI because it matches that of the other Macs and it gives you a great amount of screen real estate and, you know,

sizes icons in the appropriate aesthetic. So correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like one of the stories as I was looking at this product today that keeps coming back is this idea that Apple is prioritizing the needs of the pro users maybe more than in the previous generation. And follow me here. Just the idea that if it needs to get a little wider, or a little heavier, so that there's more battery life, so that there's a bigger screen, it's not an enormous computer by any means. Not at all. We so often see Apple fighting very hard to make everything always a little bit smaller,

always a little bit thinner. And it feels like a lot of the decisions, including the screen here, were, well, no, we want 11 hours of battery life. Let's do that. Let's put in the new cooling system so that we can have the most power possible. Exactly. Even if this means that it is not as svelte as it was, because that's what the pros want. Is that accurate to sort of say that that's the philosophy of this? You can say no, it's fine. Well, first of all, I would say it's still pretty svelte from my vantage point, but maybe I'm a little biased. But you know, sometimes it would always feel like it just had to be a little bit smaller. And I kind of like it. This is what I'm saying here. I kind of like it saying, you know what? No, you guys want a bigger screen. And we're going to make it as small as we can while giving you the big screen.

Yeah. So with any new product, and especially with a portable product, there are always a set of tradeoffs. You can either maximize battery life or display size or go for a very thin and sleek product. These are all levers and you can choose a set of them. And so it's always about choosing the right set. And for this MacBook Pro, you know, we worked very hard on defining the right performance targets as a starting point. We worked with our pro workflow team, we talked about what we wanted pros to be able to do with this product, what we wanted them to be able to create. And that was kind of the starting point. So that's where we went with to the, you know,

the new thermal design that enables up to 12 more watts of power in sustained heavy workloads, and really drives performance higher than ever before. Right. For people who don't know, one of the most important things when it comes to laptop performance is having a good thermal system. otherwise if your components get too hot, they get throttled down and then your computer is slower. So the fans and the cooling system are actually integral to being able to do high performance work on a laptop. Exactly. Being able to cool the silicon, dissipating that heat is, like you said, integral to driving performance, especially for those sustained workloads. Like if you're rendering something in 3D or doing a transcode, some of those longer workloads, having that great thermal dissipation will support great performance.

Right. That keeps the pros happy for sure. So sound is a theme in this product, which I thought was interesting, both input and output. New audio system in the article that I wrote that will be up at about simultaneously with this podcast. I said that I think it may be the first laptop that I actually consider acceptable

for listening to music, which, you know, laptop speakers don't sound very good, but this sounds surprisingly good. And I know you're doing some clever things with having speaker components firing opposite each other so that they can cancel each other out so that they don't vibrate and create kind of like awful resonance. What's going on with the audio system? Yes, we're so excited

about the audio experience on the new MacBook Pro. So the speakers are awesome. There's a new six speaker sound system that features force canceling woofers. These force canceling woofers have dual opposed drivers. And when they actuate, they actually cancel out each other's force. So they emit sound, but cancel out each other's force. They're physically back to back, canceling one another out so that they don't shake your computer. Exactly. Because that shaking of your computer parts, if you will, would not only cause sound distortion, but it would change the journey of sound to your ears, like if you're radiating sound through different parts of the notebook. It's no good. It's no good. So when you say six, those back-to-back-

Are four of them. Are on one side and on the other side. And there's two tweeters for the higher frequency range. And of course, you know, getting awesome woofers means like the bass is better. So we have a half octave deeper bass. But because we've tuned the speakers to deliver a great overall audio experience, you know, we have a really flat frequency response curve. That's why music sounds so natural. It sounds so clear. Like you said, it doesn't sound like a notebook speaker.

It just sounds like a wonderful listening experience. So now the value, so this is a pro laptop. I'm wondering what the use cases are for having good speakers in a laptop. Is it people editing audio and video? Is it people who are pros, but they're working on something and they can listen to music in the background? Is it what, when you think about like, we want the speakers on this pro laptop to be better, what are the use cases that you're thinking of?

Oh, I can think of so many. Let me give you three sort of random ones. So one is, imagine someone working on an edit of a film, and they want to show the director the latest cut, the daily, if you will. And maybe they just go into an office and they play back a recent clip on this, you know, gorgeous 16 inch retina display. They'll now have great sound to marry with whatever they're showing. It's going to make that edit look better because it sounds better. Well, it'll just be a better, higher quality viewing experience. Make the director happy. You want to make the director happy. And, you know, at the same time, when that editor is

back home and watching a movie, you know, with his kids, then, you know, it's great to have an awesome, you know, viewing experience, but also just being able to watch movies on your MacBook Pro. It's just great. We gave a Pro, a 16-inch MacBook Pro a few days ago, and she's a musician, and she's very talented, and she was watching some movies, and she said, it's like I have a cinema on my lap. That was pretty awesome. And for a little while now, I think at least in the last generation of laptops, Apple started doing some really nice sort of like stereo separation stuff happening. Yes, exactly.

The stereo field. It's not new in this laptop, but you're pushing the stereo field a little bit further apart so you really can hear even from a laptop. The stereo separation is awesome. You can see when people are walking from left to right. Exactly. And it's panning with them and all of that stuff. It's so cool. And the music, stereo effects, it's all there.

And there's such a wide sound stage and there's such great spatial imaging. So you can just really get a sense of sounds coming from different parts of the soundstage. Yeah, I'm impressed. And I say that, again, as somebody who basically thought that if you're going to listen to audio on a laptop, you should plug in headphones immediately. Like don't even bother with anything other than like beeps. Yeah. Well, that's not a great shared listening experience. This is true. This is true. But also the speakers were not that great. Fair enough.

But this is better for sure. I'm really glad that you like the speakers. We also have awesome studio quality mics. Yeah. Tell me about this. This was, I was, so studio quality mics. I was like, well, we'll see. I'll be the judge of that. Okay. You know, I'm in a hotel room right now, so I can't, I can't really judge it. But I will say as somebody who has heard a lot of laptop mic audio, because doing podcasts,

you end up with lots of people who either don't have another mic or they think they're recording on their microphone, but they're actually recording their laptop audio. And laptop audio is terrible. It's terrible. Like I would rather have your headphone audio from your, you know, from your phone earbuds than laptop audio. But this laptop audio is way better than that. I'm not sure I'm ready to recommend that everybody throw away their microphones and only ever use the 16-inch MacBook Pro to record all audio from here on out. But I want every – I certainly want every laptop to have microphones like this because it is – it sounds pretty good. It sounds pretty good. So the new microphones on the new MacBook Pro, they have such a high signal-to-noise ratio. It rivals that of popular third-party standalone mics that even podcasters and musicians use.

We had a little demo with the Blue Yeti. Oh. And, yeah, it sounded pretty good. And I used a Blue Yeti for several years. Okay. And yeah, it sounded pretty good. And I used a Blue Yeti for several years. So I think, yes, I do think there's an argument to be made that if you're not so serious that you want to spend hundreds of dollars on equipment and you have this laptop, we'll see.

I don't want to commit to this yet. Fair enough. I am intrigued by just how good those microphones are. Well, you know, they're often- Don't type while you're doing your podcast though, because the microphones are right to the upper left of the keyboard, right? They're on the upper left side. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the one danger is that is that, you know, don't do a lot of typing while you're talking. Do you typically type a lot when you talk?

I don't, but I have. Let me tell you, I have the scars of people who do their podcast and then they are hammering at their keyboard and it does not sound that part as bad. You know what's amazing? People are oftentimes caught in moments where they want to record something. We find that with musicians. They'll be on the tour bus traveling to their next gig and they'll record on their Mac notebook

or on their iPhone. On their iPhone, I hear that a lot. Absolutely. You gotta get it down. Yeah, it's an idea and it has to be, you know, noted. It's a musical idea. And sometimes those samples, those sounds actually make it into their final recordings. And so it'll be so great to have this awesome high fidelity recording experience for those customers so they can have a great, you know, great source material to work with.

Because you know that's going to happen. It happens already. There's going to be a hit song recorded on this microphone for sure. There's no doubt about it. I hope so. But it does sound good. All right, we should talk about the big numbers, the numbers. There are lots of them.

There are ninth generation Intel processors. You've got i7 and i9 as options. There are also new GPUs in these things. Yeah, this new notebook is just packed with performance. It has the latest Intel core processors for pro notebooks. That's the ninth generation six core i7 and eight core core i9 processors. So for customers who are upgrading from 15-inch quad-core MacBook Pros, they'll see up to two times faster performance. That's a huge upgrade in performance and capability. On the graphics side, we now have AMD's latest Radeon Pro 5000M series graphics, which are the latest 7 nanometer graphics from AMD.

And when paired with GDR6 memory, the performance is outstanding. We're getting twice the performance versus the previous generation MacBook Pro on graphics. And that's just on the standard configurations. Performance is even better when you pair the new graphics with uh eight gigs of video memory right especially for another one of those examples of saying what if we did even more there's that's another trend i'm sensing in this product yes okay we're giving you the latest and greatest also we're giving you the option to max this thing out yes absolutely that is definitely um you know the idea here is to give pros the ability to design the system that can power their workflow. Right, and they're all going to have different things that they prioritize.

So one pro might say, I need the 8 gigs of video RAM. Another pro might say, you know what I need is 8 terabytes of SSD. Another might say 64 gigs of system memory is crucial um for my you know photography editing right with gigapixel images and those are all all-time highs on mac laptops absolutely so that's that's you know and and the pros we talk about pros they are so varied they have so many there's not like one pro market or even five pro markets there's there it's it's almost one for every person who uses it. But certainly, there are a bunch of different industries, and they all have different priorities. So that's an interesting trend with this to say, you know, we're going to give you the base model cutting edge, and you've

got your two kind of like standard configurations. But you can go as far up as you need to go in a whole bunch of different dimensions. Absolutely. I think it's pretty great. It's not only great for pros, but even students and people who are just aspiring to create their life's best work, they want to get a completely decked out new MacBook Pro that they want to be able to use for years. They may want to get 32 gigs of memory or make sure they have enough storage to capture their entire photo library as they go out with their DSLR. Now, speaking of being maxed out, something I wanted to mention that just tickled me while we were talking about it earlier today is the battery in this thing, which is a 100 watt hour battery, which, fun fact, the FAA won't let you on a plane with a built-in lithium ion battery that's greater capacity than 100. Exactly. So you guys, I assume, just sort of said, what's the biggest battery we could stick

in this thing? That's exactly what we asked. We wanted to give customers the biggest possible battery life and biggest possible battery. And so now the MacBook Pro has 100 watt hour battery, it's 16 more watt hours than the previous generation. And the battery life is awesome. So whether pros are working on performance intensive tasks, or just kicking back and watching films, they're going to see great battery life, it's going to be up to 11 hours of battery life for wireless web browsing and up to 11 hours of video playback in full screen mode. And it's interesting because this new 16-inch MacBook Pro, it has a larger display. There are more pixels and the battery is driving that. It also powers more performance. So the battery is driving that as well. And in addition to doing those two things,

you're getting an additional hour of battery life. This is the dance that we see a lot with mobile devices, with the iPhone, with the iPad. It's also true of laptops that you're not just making, in this case, the battery bigger. You get the chance to do that. But you're also using, presumably, a system that is more efficient when it can be

and trying to get both of those things to balance out. It's that same old story. You're trying to get them all to balance out so that you can maximize battery life when you need to. And I was today while I was using my test unit, I looked at the significant energy consumption in the menu bar and it said, your screen is very bright. I was like, oh, that's a good tip. I could make it a little dimmer if I wanted to have more battery life. I thought that was a nice tip. We just talked about the price. So there was a lot of speculation about this product. I don't know if you noticed that. I did notice that.

A lot of people talking about it and hoping that this product would arrive. And one of the persistent conversations that was had was that based on everybody's imagination of what this product was going to be, they're like, boy, that's going to, that product's going to be incredibly expensive, right? Like I remember seeing a story that said, it will be a miracle if this thing starts lower than 3000. And it's, it's filling the slots of the 15-inch MacBook Pro. It's not some high-end aspirational device at the top of the line above the 15 and 13. It replaces the 15 at the same price points. Yep.

Yeah. How do you do that? The new 16-inch MacBook Pro delivers so much capability and performance and at the same price in the U.S. as the previous generation 15-inch. Right, so $2399 and $2799. Exactly. So on the $2399, you get the gorgeous 16-inch Retina display. It's so immersive, great front-of-screen performance with P wide color, and 500 nits of brightness. And then six core Core i7 processors on that one, you have Radeon Pro 5300M graphics, super fast.

They're the latest graphics from AMD. Four gigs of VRAM standard, 16 gigs of system memory, and now double the storage with 512 gigs. That's all $2399. So that's the same price as the currently, the previous generation 15-inch MacBook Pro. Right. It's yesterday now. It's yesterday's MacBook Pro. Right. Yesterday's MacBook Pro. And on the higher end, you have an 8-core processor. It's a Core i9 processor. There's Radeon Pro 5500M graphics. You have a one terabyte SSD and that's $2799. So that's a great amount of capability and performance and portability and battery life. So for everybody who had $2399 saved up and I thought, oh, I got to wait for this 16 inch that I keep hearing is rumored.

But oh, it's going to be more. I'm not going to have saved enough. The answer is it's the same price. It's the same price. I like that. I like when that happens. A little while ago, you mentioned the Pro Workflow team. Yeah.

And we've heard talk of them. I actually know somebody on that team. It is this really interesting idea of getting real pros into Apple and having them talk to the people who make the products that they use. Yeah. No, the Pro Workflow team is so awesome. It has this great balance of real creators, award-winning cinematographers, musicians, 3D animators, and also system architects. So you have this great collaboration about pro workflows, actual work that pros are doing,

the roadblocks they're hitting, the performance wishlist that they have. And we come together at Apple and we solve those problems. And that's been an incredibly gratifying experience. I've got to think that it's got to be useful just to get out of your... I mean, I would imagine if you're designing computer systems, you are, everybody gets stuck in a rut a little bit. You're in your job of, I'm designing this

system. And their perspective has got to be so completely different, right? Because they're looking for tools to solve the problems in their line. And so to have those things kind of cross over, I would imagine gives you a completely different perspective. Totally. I mean, the difference is between, you know, it's easy to fall into a mindset of, oh, let's increase the performance by 60%. Well, a pro might be saying, well, I need to edit four streams of ProRes 4x4 in, you know, Final Cut. Or I need to do an 8K work stream. And those are the problems that they're solving. And so instead of taking a mindset around improvements and percentages, it's really

important to get grounded in the problems that our pros are faced with, that are blocking their progress, that are limiting their ability to create what they want to create. I have to take this action 50 times a day, and it makes me wait five minutes every time. What if I didn't have to wait? How much better would my job be? Sometimes it's like a complicated problem and sometimes it's simple. Sometimes it's, there's a UI issue that we have to solve. Sometimes it's deep in the thermal architecture. How do we deliver the heat dissipation to allow the sustained workload to work like this? So it means that you've got people from the outside, except they're not. They're also from the inside saying, this is a thing that we need, instead of it being sort of like, well, how do we make this computer better?

And I know that the people who design these computers are talking to customers. And I know that there's some of that. But to build a whole team and bring it inside Apple to say, we want you to ask us these questions. But the system architecture partnership there is so close that literally the cinematographer is sitting next to the system architect. And when a transcode takes too long, they're already deep in the source code. It's such a tight partnership.

And that's why it's so special. That's fantastic. Yeah, it's made a world of difference in how we think about performance and thermal architecture and delivering products that will enable pros to do their life's best work. So let's talk about the passion of the professional user, because it does all come back to that, right? This is not just a bone dry technical tool that's a lump of silicon and glass and aluminum. Absolutely not.

This is creativity. This is people's life's work. These are the paintbrushes and the canvas. The canvases, yes. People love the Mac. They don't just like it. They love it. And so it is such an honor to do what we do at Apple,

to work on these products that make such a difference in people's lives. That's fantastic. And I agree. People do love the Mac. It's taken for granted sometimes. And I know that people sometimes are like, well, you know how huge the iPhone is. Like, yeah, it's great. But do you know how huge the Mac is?

If you look, it's bigger than it's ever been. It's phenomenal. And people love it. Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, this is the kind of product where you obviously can hear the enthusiasm. You talk to the people who use the MacBook Pro, like their lives are on it. Their livelihood is on it. Their sweat and their blood, their life's work is often completely happening on their MacBook Pro.

And yes, when they're unhappy about something like the keyboard, perhaps, they will let you know it. But it is coming from a place of showing just how vital that tool is to what they do, which is not, I mean, that's gotta be a good thing because this is, you're enabling- Customers rely on MacBook Pro to do their life's best work. They really do.

And so we take the responsibility very seriously. Apple has incredible engineers working on the Mac and incredible team members all around the company working super hard to improve features, to design new innovations, to make the Mac experience awesome. We care so much about those customers. We care so much about the Mac. And one of the Apple phrases that we hear a lot is, we can't wait to see what you'll do with this. And I want to say to you, I can't wait to see what's next. No answer required. Shruti, thank you so much for spending time with us talking about the new MacBook Pro, 16-inch MacBook Pro. I think people are going to be very excited to read all about it and get their hands on it. Awesome. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

Obviously, a lot going on here. But before we continue, let me take a break to thank our first sponsor of this week's episode. The new sponsor is ID Tech. If your child has an okay technology learning experience, it could end up feeling more like homework for them. And you don't want that. You're a technology-minded person. You want them to have a great experience. And they might just find a passion that stays with them for the rest of their life if technology is taught to them in the right way. And igniting that fire is what ID Tech can do. Whether they're interested in coding,

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and fantasies were laid for sure i think looking at what we have this is like the realistic best case scenario that it is a better machine with a bigger screen a bigger battery much stronger performance and a completely revised keyboard like that's what was realistically the best that it was going to be right like what more would it have actually been yeah i mean i i i went through the list with truthy but um you know the fact that it's scissor mechanism, there's more travel. It's not quite 50%, but as she said, it's like gone from 55, like 0.55 millimeters to one millimeter. It's like almost twice as much travel. It's got the escape key, which as she said, you know, Unix programs like Vim from a million years ago, you still use escape. There are lots of people

who use escape all the time. And having it be a virtual key was terrible. And there's just a story again and again of Apple with this product design showing that it was listening to all of our complaints and seems to have knocked a whole bunch of them off. The ones that at least that it thought were reasonable. The escape key, we did that um analysis of the the little graphics that uh the gear rambo found in in a version of lena beta yeah yeah exactly right and said oh i think that there's an escape key so it's like i i kind of expected that there would be an escape key i had no expectation that they were going to go back to the half height arrow keys in an inverted t which you know i feel like such a nerd when

I talk about how I care about the shape of an arrow key layout. But the fact is, it's not just the arrow keys. As I mentioned in the interview, it's the neutral space. It's like, it helps you orient. It's so important to have things you can orient on on a keyboard by feel so you don't have to break concentration and look down. And having the physical escape key and the physical power key and having that blank space, the neutral space next to the arrow keys, it's a big deal. So, you know, they did all of that. And I went back, I sent you this link earlier before we started. In 2015, when the Magic Keyboard came out, I wrote this article on Six Colors where I said, you know, the MacBook keyboard really worried me. But now that I see that Apple has made the Magic Keyboard, I feel a lot better about the future of Apple's keyboards.

Because, you know, maybe we're not going to be in this kind of apocalypse where everybody uses the Butterfly Keyboard because the Magic Keyboard is here and it's great. And of course, that didn't happen. Instead, we did have the apocalypse of the Butterfly Keyboard. And it's taken till 2019 to get back four years to that magic keyboard and what we all thought should have happened in 2016 on the macbook pro and didn't which is just do a version of the magic keyboard that goes on the laptop and it took them several years to get there and a lot of pain and a lot of complaints and a lot of bad pr for apple but but they did get there they did get there and do what we kind of all thought that

they should have done all along which is uh it's good i like i i wrote a whole article a couple articles on it and uh i it it felt good to me i mean mean, I have not spent, I don't use the butterfly keyboard every day, even though we've got a couple in our house. So, you know, for me, it was just my memory of not liking it every time I've used it. Well, you know, you instantly hated it on the original MacBook. I did. I immediately didn't, didn't like it. I tried to be open-minded about it and say, look, maybe other people will like it, but it's not for me. And this keyboard doesn't feel exactly like the old MacBook keyboards, but I would say it is some combination of the classic MacBook keyboard feel and the Magic keyboard. And that's a good combination. I will say, like you mentioned, it's a version

of the Magic keyboard. It basically seems like it's inspired and very close, right? Like it's not exactly the same. Is that correct? Yeah, what Truthy said in the interview is that, you know, inspired by is the key phrase there. Because they did, it came up a couple of times today and she mentioned it. Like the Magic Keyboard is pitched.

It's like at an angle. It gets taller as it goes to the back. And you don't do that on a laptop keyboard. Laptop keyboards are flat. And while I would make the argument that desktop keyboards should also be flat and not pitched, it's bad. Don't do it. It bends your wrists in a bad way. On a laptop, they got to be flat. So they had to totally redesign it, but they used that as their inspiration. I think that is as close as you'll get to Apple saying, okay, we've got a keyboard people like. Let's do that.

Let me ask you, though. How confident are you that even with the changes that they've made, that they will have actually landed on a design that is going to be back to the reliability levels that we would have expected? We can't. I mean, all I can say is, well, first off, we don't actually know what the reliability levels were before it wasn't a thing but doesn't mean that there weren't issues it's just wasn't a thing and now everybody's hyper focused on it so it could still be a thing but at the bottom of this thing literally is a scissor switch and and there's a millimeter of travel and that means it is i think just physically a lot less likely for there to be the minute particle interaction seizing up that happened with that other keyboard so i i you never know what the internet's going to do you never know when people are focused on something everybody every new thing apple does

somebody is going to find something that goes wrong with it even if it's a one in a million and they're going to post a youtube video and it's going to get reblogged and like that kind of stuff you can't predict happen but that stuff always happens so all i can say is the component parts seem fairly well tested and so i'm encouraged and the fact that they're they're kind of basing this on the magic keyboard which everybody seems to have a positive feeling about is another you know the fact that they're calling it a magic keyboard like they are they are really trying to go down that path so uh who can tell i mean that's the problem with this is as i sit here talking to you nobody has this product yet except the reviewers and when you get

thousands of these out there um you know you can't tell until then whether there is some endemic problem with them or not. So, and I think that says a lot about how people feel about Apple and its keyboards now is that there has been, the thing that's happened in the last three years is a loss of trust. So Apple's going to have to earn that back and it's going to have to do it by people taking the plunge and giving it a try and saying yes or no to it. And then, you know, as the word of mouth spreads, if it's positive, then people will jump back in. I think Apple hammering home that this is a new keyboard by calling it the magic keyboard, calling it something

familiar. They're trying to get people to take the plunge and basically say, look, it's not that keyboard. It's this new keyboard. Give it a try. So one of the things that we thought leading up to this, right, was that this was going to be a more expensive machine, but now we know it isn't. I am really surprised that this is just the new, larger MacBook Pro. Yeah, I wonder where that report came from. That was Ming-Chi Kuo, right? I wonder where that report came from. That was Ming-Chi Kuo, right?

That was the idea that this was, as I said in the interview, this sort of capstone product that cost three grand and it's aspirational, which seemed like, well, you know, Apple's raising the price on everything, so maybe. But the truth is that instead, this is just Apple at its usual game, which is filling the slots. Occasionally, they raise the price of the slots, and they did raise the price of the slots three years ago. But this is just a drop-in replacement for the 15 at both price points with some expanded specs. And so that's really good. And so that's really good. Now, different markets may have different pricing,

but in the US, the pricing is the MacBook Pro 15 pricing. And that's great because that means if somebody was out there hoping for a new replacement for their 15 and they were just waiting, they're not going to suddenly have a product that costs $700 more than they thought. And I mean, you have one, if you found a hidden rainbow,

have a logo on it anywhere. Oh, the rainbow Apple logo. It's, you know, you can put a sticker on it. I, uh,

looking now it's just, it's just, uh, the usual space gray, but, you just put a sticker on it and then, then you get your, your,

uh, rainbow. Or if you put it on the inside, then it'll be a hidden rainbow until you open it and then it'll be a revealed rainbow so uh but that's it no no no no secret rainbows i'm afraid sorry uh i mean so macbook pro right like the this product has been pro since before it was called to name everything pro right like these machines were made for professionals professionals want performance and i guess in a nutshell everything is about twice as fast this time right is where we're at yeah before they were macbook pro they were powerbook right which was power so we went from power to pro but it's the same implication and you know apple has

defined pro products a certain way uh lately and this are going to make choices in terms of the battery, in terms of the cooling system, you know, you can have a really fast processor. And if it has to throttle down every time it gets going, then it's not actually fast. It's imaginary fast. And so, you know, with this, they've loaded in the latest Intel 9th generation processors and those AMD Radeon processors. And I think what really has struck me about the specs part of it, they have a base, but they've also really upped the max. So it's like, you can have eight gigs of VRAM, you can have 64 gigs of RAM, you can have eight terabytes of storage. They don't start there. But if you want to max... So what that means, and I don't start there but if you want to max so what that means and i i don't know all of

the details of the pricing it's as we release this it's undoubtedly out there but i i haven't seen it right now um but that's you're going to be able to spend a lot of money on one of these if you want to to load it up yeah and and and you know what for pros i think that's exactly right right like you want to if they want to prioritize something like like storage or uh ram then they can do that and they can go even further than they could before yeah like if you've got one of these on a film set and you're you're dumping a bunch of footage into it maybe you want an eight terabyte ssd right like maybe that's just a thing that you would benefit from and you will pay the ungodly amount of thousands of dollars that it will cost because it's easier for you. It makes the machine more usable for you.

These are the options that should be in the edge case machines. Right. And if you're a Photoshop person and you take enormous photos, you might say, well, I just want as much RAM ram as i could ever possibly give it and so you'll go up to 64 gigs of ram and that will also cost you a fortune but again you're a pro and that helps you do your job better and and one of the things that struck me that's truth you talked about about the think about the pro workflow group is the idea that um what you're trying to do is optimize for these scenarios that the pros have where you say things like, this is a job killer for me. Like this one thing takes me out of my flow or it costs me, you know, I have to stop working for 20 minutes while this thing happens. And if that thing can be fixed and it can be fixed by specific tweaks in the hardware, it can be fixed by more RAM, whatever that that fix is, what you're doing

is you're enabling that pro customer, pro user of a laptop to do their job better. Like that that's in the bottom line, it's like spending if spending a huge amount of money on RAM means you don't have to wait to run, you know, Photoshop, or every step you take a giant Photoshop file,'t have to wait to run you know photoshop or every step you take a giant photoshop file you have to wait for two minutes and now it's 30 seconds or five seconds well you've transformed your job and it's worth every penny even if it looks like a huge amount of money to us who are not inside that workflow the machine has a new thermal layout right like that's how it's enabling all of this additional power and headroom but obviously with that fans how are the fans i think i described them to you before we started as as uh soothing there is something about it i think it's a pleasant sound i have

heard a lot of laptop fans that are like kind of not pleasant but it's loud like i mean that's the point is it's not it's not a thermal system that's been designed to be quiet it's a thermal system that's been designed to blow out a lot of heat so that it can keep working at peak performance so you know they will they will crank up and um they were demoing something that was a MacBook Pro attached to two Pro Display XDRs running 8K video. And I walked, because you can do that. And I walked up to it. Everybody else was leaving. And I walked up to the guy who was sitting at the laptop, and I just put my ear down.

And I said, because I was like, what is that sound? Is that the Pro Display? And I was like, no, that's the laptop. It was really blowing. But for people who are like, oh, laptop fans, that's a bummer. I will remind you of not that long ago, I think like three years ago, where there was that whole mini scandal about how there were high speed configurations of Mac laptops that turned out to be slower than low speed configurations because they got so hot and the thermal system couldn't cool them off fast enough and they ended up

having to throttle back and be slow and that's not good like that's not what that people want that's not what pros who want performance want so but like look let's be real if you are plugging your laptop into two 6k monitors and you are not hearing your fans you should be concerned that you're not hearing your fans i feel look for look for the melted metal underneath your computer very bad it's going to happen yeah yeah so so they that's the whole idea here is that is that they you know they i think they're faster and there are more blades and they redesigned the heat tube or whatever they call it. Heat pipe, they call it.

The exhaust. But it is. That's what it is. It's like an exhaust of a car. And that's all redesigned so that they – obviously, they're using the same lessons that they've learned in other places and tried to apply it. This is their latest attempt at a state-of-the-art blower design basically for for a laptop so we'll you know we'll get it out there and people have opinions about when the fans rev up and how they sound and whether they sound soothing or not you can decide for yourself but there was something about it i was

like oh that's not not as unpleasant a fan noise as i expected but it's definitely there and i'm going to take it as a good sign that it's keeping that thing cool. So when it comes to the iPad Pro, especially the smaller size, well, the smaller size one, every time they've upped the overall screen size of that machine, I feel like you've been able to notice it, when you go from 9.7 to 10.5,

and then 10.5 up, and it got to 11 11 where we are now you can see the difference. Do you see clearly 16 inches over 15 inches? How much of a difference on a laptop screen of that size does an

extra inch actually feel like? Well, it's a great question and it's one that I'm going to defer to people who are hardcore 15 inch MacBook Pro users like maybe Marco Arment on ATP this week will probably have a lot to say about that. My understanding is he has one, so everybody just listen to ATP this week. Because for me, I spend most of my time looking at a 27-inch iMac and a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And occasionally, if I have my Mac laptop out, it's an 11-inch MacBook Air. So to me, it seems enormous, but I can't compare it to the 15.

And it's more, and more is better. And definitely using it, as somebody who's never really used a 15-inch laptop, I was always a 13-inch or 11- inch laptop person or 12 inch laptop person. I look at it and I just think, oh my God, the screen is huge. But that's the point, right? Like get as much as you can on the screen. And it's not any brighter than the previous 15. It's the same wide color gamut. It's 500 nits, but the pixel density is a little bit more and it is bigger and bigger is generally better, right? But beyond that, I can't really say.

I'm interested to hear what a veteran 15-inch user thinks of the difference between the 15 and the 16. Yeah, you know, I find this machine an exciting laptop, right? Like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on here, especially from just a power perspective. But this is never a computer that I would own because I have no desire for a laptop of this size in my life yeah i think i think the unsaid thing which i just left hanging with sruthi because you know apple's not going to comment on future products don't worry jason it's in six months it's not going to happen i cut out her answer where she said, well, yes, let me confirm all future products. No, my expectation is that this product is not an outlier, right? This product is the beginning of a new Apple laptop product update phase that will presumably roll out a lot of these same features on a 13 or 14-inch MacBook Pro and at some point a MacBook Air and who knows if there

will be other products too but I would imagine that this keyboard will just as the butterfly keyboard did roll out to all the products over time I just I it it doesn't make sense for them to do it as a one-off so this is the start of something so even if you don't care about a 15 inch MacBook Pro and you would rather have or or a 16-inch, I guess now, and you'd rather have a 13 or 14, or even if you're a MacBook Air user and you're like, I want this keyboard in a MacBook Air, I think it's just a matter of

when they next update those products because this seems to be, you know, this is the product that we will reference for the next three years, probably at least, and say, this is the product that we will reference for the next three years, probably at least, and say, this is where all this whole generation of Apple laptops started. Yeah. And I guess the interesting part of that is it looks like the MacBook Pro, right? Like there is no new design. they have changed the case in a lot of ways it is physically bigger in every dimension they've changed the entire like top case the keyboard area

right it's completely different because it's now taken into account a different keyboard layout in many important ways it has different housing for speakers it has all the different internal inside thermal stuff apple has decided this is the way it looks though so like this is the first part of a new generation of laptops don't expect them to start hovering or blowing smoke or whatever and you know a new laptop would do this is how they look well yeah the the the i think this gets us to the disappointment thing here which is the the all the things heaped on the unicorn the back of a unicorn um everybody was like i want it to look different like i get the impulse to say just do

something different this is boring apple i think feels like this is what a laptop should be like. So Apple's not going to do that redesign of how this looks. It looks just like the MacBook Pro has looked for a long time, and they aren't changing that at all. And then there's a bunch of other, like, people who hate the touch bar and wanted it to go away. Like, touch bar didn't go away. It got a little smaller, and all the keys and the touch bar are a little bit further apart from one another, didn't go away it got a little smaller and all the keys and the touch bar are a little bit further apart from one another which is uh truthy mentioned in part because of the travel because just the physics of it the the geometry of it like the more you have to push down with your finger you need the other neighbor keys further away because otherwise you'll hit them that's bad so

you know they spaced them out a little bit more but touch bar didn't go anywhere there there are only four ports there's no magSafe connector or anything that didn't come back. There's no SD card reader. None of that. If those were on your list, I think the answer is that either Apple didn't think they were a high enough priority or Apple doesn't think those are actually needed. But I do want to run the the numbers it is nine millimeters wider it's about five millimeters deeper and it is about a millimeter thicker like not not really that much not quite yeah but it is heavier quite significantly i think 0.28 pounds heavier like that was i mean the size change is fine, like for me, as someone who really values portability, whoa.

Yeah, it went from four to four and a quarter pounds, basically. And yeah, this is, look, I'm somebody who took a laptop back and forth in a backpack to and from work every single day for a decade, at least. And every ounce matters. And I think what you're seeing in this is Apple prioritizing

the things that they thought were most important to pros, which were power. Bigger battery. Yeah, power, battery life, all of those things, and screen. And I think maybe also this is just me doing some analysis of Apple, but I think maybe the thing that stung and the thing that they got when they said a couple years ago, we're recommitting to pros. We're, you know, basically we're sorry, but we care about pros and we care about the Mac and it's going to be better. I think maybe one of the things that really stung them was this idea that their priorities were misaligned with their customers. And I think the chief misalignment was about this idea that Apple products need to be thinner and lighter all the time. And that doesn't mean that weight doesn't matter. And it doesn't mean that size doesn't matter.

doesn't matter. And it doesn't mean that size doesn't matter, but it means that if you're a pro and your computer isn't powerful enough, or the keyboard isn't good enough or, you know, whatever, because they thought the most important thing to you was that it'd be a little bit thinner or a little bit lighter. Maybe that's wrong. Like that's misguided, that there are other products that Apple makes that are thin and light, and that are still pretty powerful. Like even the MacBook Air is still pretty powerful. It's not pro level powerful. And presumably that 13 inch MacBook Pro replacement whenever it comes, that is like this product, will be a thinner, lighter product than this. But the problem is like apple's it for macbooks so if you make the highest end macbook thinner and lighter and less capable there's nowhere to go they're like there's

no there's nowhere to go from there that's upward and and that's my that's my little pocket theory about the disconnect between apple observing four years of the disconnect between Apple and its pro users over laptops, I think that's the root of it, is that Apple so internalized the drive for thinness and lightness that they started making decisions that were out of whack with the priorities that their pro customers had pro customers had so yes this is heavier it's not heavy but it's heavier and it's not huge but it's bigger a little bit i mean look the iphone this year got it's the same bigger in every dimension yeah they're not trying to make you know super chunky products here but i think that there is something that has shifted at apple

and we can speculate is that less influence of jonathan ive maybe i don't know but there's something that shifted at apple where they're like oh you know especially for pro products like this is we've gone too far and the thing that we value most is not what our customers value most and it doesn't mean that they want to make six pound laptops and and huge you to make six pound laptops and, and huge, you know, enormous six pound laptops.

It's not what it means, but it does mean they start with worrying about the, the power and the battery and all, and the screen and all of that. And then what's the smallest package they can put that in. And it's just, it's a little bit of a change in balance. But this product feels to me very much

like that priority list has changed one priority that has remained the same is io we are completely the same for thunderbolt 3 slash usbc ports a headphone jack that's it yep no return of magsafe no sd card slot it's not gonna happen none of. None of that. Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen. I think that ship has sailed. I would love for Apple to put some effort into creating some sort of a magnetic connect USB-C something or other, but I just don't think it's ever going to happen. And the card slot thing is over. of like what microsoft are doing here where they have their magnetic surface connector on their products which enables like a crazy fast charging and stuff but they also allow power of a usbc yeah i would love apple to come up with some sort of like probably can't be inductive but something

like that a magnetic connect something or other fast charger but i just don't know if that's ever going to happen yeah it's just this is something i've noticed recently as you know like with all the new surface products i was like i actually kind of like that because that was something that people hated and there's before right like the microsoft you could only charge via their connector and they had usbc but you couldn't do it but now they've like aligned all of that stuff which is good but yeah this is where we are right like apple is all in on thunderbolt 3 and they will not budge from that like this is something where you know i feel like you could say that people who had issues with the keyboards and people who had issues with the io you could say that you know you could that apple would be

impressed on in in every possible way to make changes here. And they have decided not to budge on the IO. Like that's just where it is. What about these microphones then? Tell me about these microphones. So, you know, it's a three microphone system. They've had it for a while. What's different is that these are better microphones

so they have three microphones and they use them to do beamforming and the idea there is they're basically able to they're they're i don't know if they're technically omnidirectional but they're they're um picking out where the audio is coming from and then focusing on that but it's not doing any like uh noise reduction or you know processing of the audio after the fact. They say it's just a better microphone with a better noise floor, so it's not as hissy. And therefore, they're calling it studio quality, which that doesn't mean anything. It sounds pretty good, but I've only really used it in one room, which is the room I'm in right now. And at the desk where I am right now, it didn't sound as good as it did when I was over sitting on the edge of the bed. Because I think there's some acoustic issues.

If you type or click with the trackpad, it picks it up because it's right there next to the keyboard. And this is what I told Shruti. It's like the jury's still out on this. I guess we could let people hear what I sound like on that microphone if you would want to dare do that. Yes, I do want to do that because, I mean, of all of the things

that we have the ability to give people an actual test of, that is the one and only thing we can do in this environment, right? All right, Mike. Well, here I am. Now I'm on the microphone of the macbook pro

um it's different now so i can't hear it you did send me a test of it earlier and i will say it sounded better and i like what you wrote in your article that basically this is the case of like as a podcast professional if somebody forgets to set their microphone correctly and they're using one of these you will probably have audio that is a site more usable than you would have previously i think a lot more usable but it's not necessarily the case here's what i would say um i don't think people should like who have bought microphones should throw them away but if this if you have this computer, I think the bar for what you would need to buy to get a better sound is higher because this is a better microphone.

I think actually it's a good microphone. The problem I think I have with it is the context. It's sitting up and to the left of the keyboard, and what that means is if you're, depending on where your laptop is, it's going to have weird sound potentially, or it could have great sound, but it really is going to depend more on placement than a microphone where you

could place the microphone and it's by the keyboard. So if you touch the keyboard and it's by the fans, so if the fans are going, and let me tell you, let me tell you when we play dungeons and dragons and we're we're doing screen sharing and we're also looking at a map in a web browser that people are moving tokens around and stuff like i can tell you from denoising those files a bunch of people who do that on a laptop or anybody that that records a podcast with video

just to their co-hosts which is a thing that a lot of people do. The fans are going to blow, and the fan is right by the microphone. And even if the microphone is good, you can't hold the microphone a foot or two away from the fan. The microphone is positioned next to the fan. So I think that's the case, is that we'll see how it goes. And I hope people have enjoyed this extended demo of it here. But I think that's my take on it is it's a pretty good microphone. It's way better than any other

laptop microphone I've ever heard. If this was the standard for laptop microphones, I think the world would be a better place. And that said, it's got some issues that it kind of can't avoid because it just it is an on device microphoneice microphone and being on device adds a whole bunch of limitations that um you know but it's going to also make let's just say it's going to make great casual like company meetings skyping in or zoom or whatever and facetime calls and stuff like that and podcasts aside yeah and as truthy mentioned you know for musicians and stuff who are doing demos and they really just want to get something down, the thing they get down will actually sound

better now. Which is great. To use in their demos that they're building or whatever. And that's cool too. So I'm glad Apple did this. Who was asking for this? I mean, I guess some of their musicians maybe were asking for this. Maybe. But I was surprised by it and I think it's

not a feature I would have ever asked for, and yet it's pretty good. Yeah, like there is like an, you mentioned like intentionality, like with a microphone, where to get the best out of a microphone, you need to talk into the microphone. When you have an external microphone, you know where the microphone is, and that helps you talk into the microphone where you're just like talking at the laptop it's like i'm pleased that it exists but for if you're doing professional audio work you should probably still be using a microphone um yeah but it's a cool but as you say this is

one of those things like yeah sure like it's a professional machine give me weird stuff like this like put it in there let me see what i can do yeah why should a pro macbook not have a great laptop micro and in fact i'll just mention it still 720p webcam so like that would be an example on the flip side is maybe maybe a better webcam talking about like weird interesting stuff i think one of my very favorite things that i found out about this machine today is that because i just think this is a funny thing i will never need this but i love that they did it you can change the screen refresh rate in system preferences so if you're working on a 30 frames per second youtube video you can change the screen refresh rate to 30 frames per second

in system preferences so it matches the content that you're producing i just think that's really cool yeah so if you're doing film content you set it to 48 and then it's a multiple of 24 and it you're not gonna you're gonna see every frame and uh yeah it's a little thing but for the video pros uh that's a good thing i i think that's a nice little feature where you can see the existence of the ProWorkflow team. Because somebody's mentioned this. You don't come up with this stuff without having worked with video professionals, right? Because this feels like a wishlist type feature for some people, right?

Exactly. You don't just come up with that on your own. It's like, oh, I wonder if this would be useful. Like you need the feedback. You need to be listening to people, right? Yep. Battery life, I think we mentioned a bunch bunch it's about an hour more right right and you know they quote 11 but that's 11 web browsing or whatever which means if you're doing heavy heavy heavy work and uh the processors are going and the fans are going like it's not going to last 11 hours it's not going to be close to that but

it gives us the web browsing number gives us a milestone in terms of like, is there more battery than there was before? And the answer is yes, that, you know, it's one more hour on that test, which means that that'll scale. Presumably that also means that if you're using it harder, it's going to be, you know, more than maybe than it was, or alternately, if you're using it harder, it's because it's so much more powerful that maybe the battery won't last as long, but the work will get done faster and it's all it gets complicated but that's a big battery and they're quoting more battery life and you know i think there will be tests in this area over time now that it's out or coming out and we'll find out more but it may also it's going to vary from job to job right right? Because it depends on what kind of load

you're putting on this. If it's a big encode of 4K video, it's going to be a different thing than something else. That'll kill a battery dead, right? Encoding 4K video on battery. Yeah. Yeah, that will kill it.

Before we wrap up on this, and I guess touch on the Mac Pro ever so quickly, because there's a tidbit of news that we can share. I've got a couple tidbits. Yeah, I'm sure you do. Let me thank our second sponsor. And that is Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace. They let you easily create the website for your next idea or project. Squarespace give you all of the tools that you are going to need. They are the only one platform to help you put your project online. If you need a domain name, they can help you do that. If you want to build an online store,

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you will get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and show your support for this show. That is squarespace.com. And the code UPGRADE for 10% off your first purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. So I think that maybe over the last couple of years, it's probably been pretty fair to say that the professional that Apple had in mind for their products were

video editors, music producers, like maybe like the more like flashy professions when i would expect there are more macbook pro users that are doing none like more typing work right they are doing more going to meetings type work than sitting and actually editing video or producing music on these machines like if you imagine how many of them are out in the world do you think that this macbook pro is maybe a shift back towards kind of leveling it out a little bit as to who this machine is catering for i think it depends on how you what narrative you want to construct here because you could argue that if you look at the keyboard and the disappearance of the escape key, just those two things, you could look at it and say, they took their eye off the ball because those are things that developers, which are their number one, they've said

repeatedly, are their number one customer for pro hardware or developers that they would care about the keyboard or the escape key and that maybe that keyboard blunder is exacerbated by the fact that they were not concerned about their needs as much as the needs of other groups if you don't buy that you know i think i would say there's always a portion of the pro market that it doesn't need the product right like that's always been the case and it continues to be the case where the fact is if you've got if you love computers you love apple laptops and you've got the money you you know you buy a macbook pro because it's the best and i think there are a lot of people who do that,

that they buy the best because they want the best and they've got the money to spend on it. And a MacBook Air might be fine for them, but it's like, I don't want the MacBook Air. I want the MacBook Pro. It's the best or the biggest or whatever. And what are you going to use it for? Well, you know, email. Like, okay, you can do that. Watching movies. Great. The speakers are great on this you're gonna love it and they're not pros but they're a part of the market i think so i think it's a combination you know you can listen to what's truth he said she um i think said it really well about like the passion of the pro user and the fact that pros this is their life's work this is their life's

blood um amazing stuff gets created on macbook pros and they want to create a product that makes those people happy i think apple knows not that they talked about this but i think apple knows that yes some aspect of it is aspirational it's like this is a product so good the pros use it and i also use it right like this major motion picture was edited on it this song was created on it that's the kind of work that gets done on these things and i also have one it's definitely a component of it so you know i think apple is trying to make their aspirational pro users happy and that's that's also maybe why you know they have this approach of making the, um, making the top level so big, right? So like,

if you're an aspirational user, you buy the base model, maybe, but a real, a real pro in one of these areas is going to not buy the base model. They're going to buy the high end model and they're going to spec it up and they're going to put all the RAM in it and all the SSD in it, whatever else. And they're going to spend a huge amount of money on it. And with these 15-inch Pros, there's more of a wingspan there. And maybe that's the secret sauce is saying, this is a really nice laptop anyone can buy. And if you're a pro pro, you can pin the needle. You can spend a lot of money. You can get all the features that you want on the high end.

And we're providing that too. But it's tricky, right? Because it's a little bit about both. But I think if there is one criticism that really holds water here, it may be like looking at the keyboard and the touch bar and the escape key and all of that. That was a case maybe where they weren't thinking of a big part of their pro market when they made those decisions. I don't know.

Talking about the pro market, what do we know about the mac pro uh i have some macro mac pro facts mike mac pro facts that's what i want fact number one december we previously had a season fall now we have december and if you read this as a narrowing of detail and not a slipping of schedule, it would be the first, what, 21 days of December? Because that's when fall is, and then fall ends, and it's winter after that. But December is the word they used. So now we have a date. All the great pro Macs are released in December, apparently. And then I have fact number two, which is they are now going to be configurable the way they

phrased this today was so funny because it was like we're doing an upgrade to the mac pro that doesn't exist it's like that you can't you can't upgrade it it hasn't shipped yet but they're upgrading its specs in advance of its shipping so now you're going to be able to configure up to eight terabytes of ssd oh it was four now it's going to be eight because i guess it's one of those things where like now that the macbook pro can go up to eight you can't have the mac pro not right they've got big ssds and that they maybe didn't have in june and they want to sell them because uh think of the margins on those. So anyway, so that's fact number two. In fact,

number three is a funny one, which is in June, they said that the Mac pro can handle up to three 8k video streams, which people were like, Whoa, that's amazing. That's a huge amount of data. And what they said to us on Tuesday was,

well, we, we tweaked our, our card and you know, well, we tweaked our card and that super enormous card with all the heat sinks on it and the fans and everything, the afterburner. And our engineers worked on it and all that. And remember when we said it could do three streams of 8K?

How about six? It'll do six. Why can't it? It's okay. You know, that's like doing a donut in the parking lot you know what that reminds me of my cool car yeah it reminds me of 1000 tracks in logic oh yeah oh yeah we got a we got a little version of that same demo which made me laugh which is like what if there were an entire orchestra in a logic project which is an actual use case because that that's a case where there's so

many software instruments that they had to like chain max together with different sections of the orchestra and now you can do it all on one mac pro which is great and they had a demo with like a john williams uh symphony that was all software instruments running on one mac pro which is great but yeah there is that moment where people are like oh now you can have a podcast with a thousand guests and that would be the worst incomparable draft ever um but yeah so that's they're just dunking on us all by saying yeah sure why not six 8k video streams that's a huge amount of data but they they say they can do that now so they upgraded some specs of a product that hasn't actually shipped yet so it's not really an upgrade it's just a restatement of specs and we'll find out more in december when this thing actually comes out big

day huge day can we please extend uh thanks to our guest once again yeah so nice of her you know as i've said before as we said with colleen navielli a while ago you know these are voices we haven't heard before from apple and just a little behind the scenes like it's a little nerve-wracking right like you're an apple person you've been trained about public presentations but now you're having a conversation and there's a pr person in the room and like i i'm sure having not been on that side of it there's very much a feeling of like you know oh boy what what am i i i would think that it's a little bit nerve-wracking yeah but uh truth you did great yeah it was uh it was really nice to hear from her i think she is really passionate about the pro users of in general and of the mac and i think that really

came through and i was i was happy to have her so thank you to truthy hold hold you for coming on i really appreciate it but uh talking about professional Macintoshes, that isn't all we do around these parts. Should we do some upstream news, Jason? Good idea. Upstream is where we talk about the latest in streaming media and companies because, of course, Apple's in it in a big way. And I'm

going to start off with some Apple TV Plus news today. We had spoken about the fact that For All Mankind had already been renewed before it went on air for a second season that was because the production timelines were were long the morning show uh that was always a two-season deal yeah um now c and dickinson have both been renewed uh for a second season according to a variety article um which had some other interesting information in it about viewership numbers and

response. So I want to give a couple of quotes. So Variety has some sources that say, the service today has drawn millions of users who are spending on average more than an hour on the Apple TV Plus platform. And Apple insiders were impressed by the volume of activity on the platform, which spiked by triple digits this past weekend after the fanfare from the November 1st debut. So everyone seems happy. It's early days. I saw a post on Twitter by somebody who is in the TV industry who basically said, you know what?

Apple did fine. Yeah, they did good. They're not going to do The Sopranos the first time out. They had these four big shows. They basically had one that – and they said, I won't tell you which one, but my take on it was one was good, two were fine, and one was bad. And you know what? That's a pretty good batting average. And like, yeah, you got to start somewhere.

And now comes the hard part, I would actually say. And I know that that's the last thing anybody who's working on Apple TV for the last two years wants to hear, but they got to know it. Like now comes the hard part, which is say you know and i know that that's the last thing anybody who's working on apple tv out for the last two years wants to hear but they they got to know it like now comes the hard part which is you've got to keep going and you've got to roll out new shows and you're going to be judged and you've got to continue to give people um reason to watch your service and we'll see where they go from here but i think uh you know i i would caution against anybody who's too positive or negative about this like it's early days if you like the show's great but if you see things that are like apple hit it out of the park and it's the best ever it's like apple i think is doing fine and it's the first inning it's the you know first sorry for people who don't understand sports

it's the very beginning of the game that little translation there for you and likewise the people who say oh apple they totally failed it's over it's a disaster like that's also not true in fact one of the things that i think is funny is that i hear i've i've heard a lot of positive word of mouth about apple shows and i wonder if tv critics were so exhausted about hearing that Apple was coming into the business and that Apple's practices in terms of giving screeners to TV critics in advance was weird and kind of awkward and that they're a new player and they're perceived as being kind of arrogant, which I think is something that Apple might just have to own. My point is, I'm wondering if maybe the initial critical evaluation was tinged a little bit more harshly than because of all of those extenuating circumstances.

Because I keep talking to people who are just random people who watch these shows, and they seem pretty happy about it. I have not heard people say that something is a stinker, even though not everything is for everybody. And I've heard a lot of people say positive things too. So we'll see how it goes over time. Cause that's the other thing, right? Like the critics may say, this show is bad. This show is good. You know, a lot of times critics love stuff that fails and hate stuff that succeeds. So Apple will know the stats, but it's entirely possible that, you know, the morning show or C or for all mankind or Dickinson is going to have incredible word of mouth and incredible stats.

And it's going to end up emerging as the hit. Um, it's also possible that one of these shows really, um, either takes flight in episode seven, eight, nine, 10,

or crashes and burns. And because we've only seen the first four now of those four series uh we don't know that either and i think the critics haven't seen most of them either except maybe the morning show so it's early and we'll see how it goes but there's a lot more that apple now now comes the hard part for apple tv plus they just gotta keep on doing it every week. Disney Plus. It's available in the U.S., but the first day was a disaster for Disney. Yeah, we gave it to Apple last week

about the TV app being a little bit wonky, but Apple did launch that thing in 100 countries, and it more or less worked with some wonkiness. Disney Plus launched in the U.S. and, like, crashed and burned plus first off let's start with the app the app they made available when the service was available instead of like having the app available to download in advance and log in in advance so you'd be ready they they like didn't make it available until like the day that the service came out and then then there were all these service problems.

And this is the company that bought MLB Advanced Media. This is Bam Tech. They are a highly regarded technology platform for video streaming. And I don't know whether it's all at their feet, but people were really interested in Disney Plus and they were getting stream failures and app failures and login failures

and every kind of failure under the sun. Yeah, it seems to be like, as I say, there were issues. I had issues, but the issues in Apple TV Plus's launch were not widespread in the same way as the case of like people just could not use the service for the majority of the day um and you know maybe there is a i'm sure that there is a a difference in demand i don't know which one was in higher demand because disney plus is not worldwide right it wasn't a worldwide launch so i don't know but there there would have been a difference.

I don't know who it speaks good or bad for, but Disney should not have been in that situation because it was a pretty bad one. So not great, not great for them. There's also been some like really interesting and weird things happening. So surprise to everybody that the Star Wars movies, the first seven, I think, so far, are in 4K HDR on Disney+, which we did not know beforehand.

It is such a great story. So it's there in 4K HDR. This is apparently a master that was done with the intent of eventually releasing them on disc in 4k HDR or future formats. It apparently precedes George Lucas leaving Lucasfilm, or at least it precedes George Lucas being done with star Wars. Cause apparently he was involved in this final 4k version, which as far as we can tell is like george's final word

on his endless tweaking of star wars movies but the most amazing thing so for people who don't know this is so crazy so in the original star wars my favorite thing i love this so much it is unbelievable so in the original star wars in the cantina there's the grito grito is the guy who holds the alien who holds han solo at gunpoint and han doesn't want to come with him he's going to like take him to java the hut and job is going to kill him so grito is threatening him and han shoots him and he's dead and he tips the bartender and he walks out because Han is a tough guy. And in the special

edition version of Star Wars famously George Lucas re-edited that scene so that Greedo shoots and misses at Han and then Han shoots Greedo dead and the whole idea there is apparently that

self-defense that that they didn't want Han to seem like a bad guy who would kill someone in cold blood which is totally who Han Solo is right like he knows he's going to get taken to Jabba and killed and so he is acting in self-defense but it is a deferred self-defense

and George Lucas is like oh no kids will think it's okay to shoot green aliens so I'm gonna change it and people were really outraged because it kind of uh changes han's character and it's not great so this is a famous story you probably heard it there's like han shot first t-shirts it's great well guess what in the 4k hdr blu-ray, whatever TV news stream that's on Disney Plus. He changed it again. He changed it again. And so now, not only do they shoot simultaneously. It doesn't make any sense. So Han would have died, again, but Greedo is just a bad shot.

But the most amazing, my favorite part of this is, so Greedo doesn't speak English or whatever the equivalent is, English equivalent for Star Wars, and he's subtitled but in this new version after saying all these threats to Han in in his made-up alien nonsense and having it be subtitled before the moment where he they shoot simultaneously he says mclunky it's not subtitled it's just mclunky and then they shoot each other so there's new totally made up random grito dialogue that has never before seen since 1977 apparently and uh and then he and then they shoot simultaneously so it's like a last little gift it's like he's mad at somebody called mclunkey it's so strange i heard somebody say

that it's it's huttese and he's actually saying the same thing that another character says where it's uh you know it's a it's a thing that that you say that basically says prepare to die. But it just sounds like McClunky. McClunky. McClunky is maybe, you know, the secret word that says let's shoot each other simultaneously here. By the way, also, our friend Todd Vizzieri has been asking around for a while. Todd Vizzieri himself, a Disney employee through ILM, about the fate of The Simpsons, because The Simpsons is all on Disney Plus now. And one of the

big issues on the FX app with The Simpsons stuff was that there are two versions of The Simpsons. There's the 16x9 version, which is the widescreen version, and there's the 4x3 version, which is the standard TV aspect ratio. And the show changed midway through from 4x3 to 16x9. As as many shows any long-running

show and any shows right um and what happened was that at least in some versions of the simpsons they took the 4x3 episodes and they cropped the tops and bottoms off of them and just made them 16x9 by cutting picture out which is bad and you shouldn't do it uh they did this with with some other shows too where they're like oh well we'll just cut the tops and bottoms off then there are other shows right like uh the wire is one where they they're able to use some of the original film stuff to restore the wire why are they shot it in 16 by 9 but it wasn't framed that way it's it's complicated story buffy the vampire slayer is like that where they shot it on film. And so there is more detail,

but there's also like lights and people standing off the set that have to be erased. And it changes the composition. Yes, they occasionally, McClunky is over there. And so the long and short of it is that Disney Plus is, Todd got somebody at Disney Plus or related to Disney to say, oh yeah, the four by three episodes of The Simpsons will be in four by three. That is not the case yeah, the four by three episodes of the Simpsons will be in four by three.

That is not the case. All the four by three episodes of the Simpsons are apparently cut at the top and bottom to make them look like they're widescreen, which is bad because it cuts off like stuff, including jokes. There are a lot of the, the famous one is there's a joke about Duff beer where they have three different brands of Duff beer,

Duff light, Duff and Duff ultra. And the joke is that there's one tube that goes into the barrels and there's just like a splitter. So it's all the same beer. But in the 69 by nine version, you can't see the splitter. And so it doesn't make any sense.

And there's no joke there. It's bad and they should feel bad and they should fix it. But anyway, weird stuff is happening on Disney plus, but I'm looking forward to seeing The Mandalorian. So we've got that. Well, I will be getting it the end of March. Oh, boy.

At least we have a date, right? Like, I'm kind of frustrated that it's many, many months. Like, you know, it's best part of half a year, right? Like, between... You can come over to my house. We'll have a pajama party and we'll watch Disneyney plus i was i will very happily do that come on over i was hoping there would be some i mean you know because in theory yes i could use a vpn but i can't get the apps so like it's not really a tenable solution like i'm just gonna wait but i'm happy to have

a date now right march 31st that's when i can get this stuff thing i don't understand is for disney's original content like the mandalorian why not let me just pay for it i'll just give them the money now like don't give me the back catalog stuff if that's the issue but why not let me give them five pounds a month and get the new stuff i'll put i'll point you to the um to the fact that they couldn't handle the demand in the u.s on day one maybe they need to maybe they need to work on it they gotta work on that a bit but you know what i mean like i get why like you know all the stuff that's tied up with different companies because they want to they want to launch with a big a big bang and it's not just the mandalorian right they want to launch with all their all their movies and

their marvel stuff and all the other stuff too all those old spider-man cartoons yes it's also been funny like you know we won't go into all this today but like there's been a bunch of articles right and you can find many of them online like all of the things that are tied up in all these different issues that they're having like that whole thing where to get some of the content away from stars they have to put an ad for stars in the sign up screen yeah like yeah right right that that actually is a thing that we weren't going to talk about but i'll mention at least which is um a lot of irate people about the fact that apple is running trailers for other apple shows when you start to play an apple tv plus show um which i find funny because people like

netflix doesn't do and it's like yeah netflix autoplay is video with audio if you stop your remote for a moment like that's way more hostile um i get people don't like it it would be nice if apple would let people opt out but like i'm telling you everybody else like hbo does it amazon does it hulu does it like everybody does it everybody's got promos promos for their own material i will say i hate it when everybody does it i wish nobody would do it like we were just watching uh second season of jack ryan on amazon prime right and it wants to tell you about some other show at the beginning yeah we're watching it too um i actually i really enjoyed the first season i like the second season even more but like they're showing me some ad like stop just stop it i give you the money already. I would watch HBO for Game of Thrones.

I would watch the HBO stream for Game of Thrones, and it was always like, let's show you a trailer for Ballers. It's like, no, I don't want to watch Ballers. Leave me alone. But you know what? The skip button works for those two. So yeah, it's not great,

but at the same time, it is kind of industry practice, and people can say, well, I expect Apple to do better. It's like, I don't know. I expect Apple to try and get you to watch other shows because they spend a lot of money on those shows and you know there are there are worse ways they could do it including like how netflix does it but um to a certain degree i kind of expected they could be maybe a little more subtle and maybe they will be over time but right now they really want to expose you to other shows also also i will say i expect their tech to be a little more subtle and maybe they will be over time. But right now they really want to expose you to other shows.

Also, also, I will say, I expect their tech to be a little bit better. Like right now it seems like they're just randomly or they're burning in promos. And, uh,

in the long run, what they really should do is discover a show that you're not watching and promo that to you one time. Um, but that's not what's happening either. So still lots going on in the old stream it's never gonna stop mike there's more to come more to come uh because this is a special episode uh we've tipped the format on its head a little bit we do still actually have some follow-up that i

want to get to before we close out today's show j Jason. All right. This is not quite a backward edition of Upgrade. It's not quite Downgrade. Not quite a Downgrade. But let me thank our final sponsor for this week's episode, and that is ExpressVPN. Recently, over 100 million people had their personal information stolen in yet another major data breach. Social security numbers and contact details and credit scores

were taken from customers of Capital One. These things happen all the time, right? I could be affected, you could be affected. It's super frustrating. The information belonging to billions of users could have been leaked online. And this is another reason why I use a VPN because you can't control

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without using ExpressVPN because it's super easy to log on with just a click. It's super fast. It costs less than $7 a month. This is why I use it, just to make sure that I'm keeping as much of my own data to myself, because you cannot trust any big company with any information. That is how it feels.

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we were complaining that Apple had done a bad job of letting you navigate to their TV plus shows, right? Like it was just difficult to find the sections and all of the content. So Federico Vatici made a shortcut that lets you do it. And I'll put a link in the show notes to his article that he wrote on Mac Stories.

It's just a simple shortcut. You can tap it, you can select the show, and it goes to the section in the Apple TV app. It's just super sweet. I love little thingies, son. Imagine if Apple did that. Imagine. Can you imagine if Apple, the company that owns Shortcuts,

could have written that for us? Nah. We had some questions about family sharing um in ask upgrade about being able to have a family account probably with friends where you could share some stuff without all paying for like one purchases through one credit card right right we have multiple people write in to suggest that you could use gift cards as the source of funds, which makes sense, right? Like everyone's loading money together and putting it on a gift card and you're all paying, but you're still having to do reconciliation at that point, right? Like to work out how much, who's paying for what. Right. And there's still a level of trust, right? The level of trust is required. But Ben wrote in to say that if you turn off

purchase sharing, apps remain tied to individual accounts. So you're not actually sharing apps. But then you could turn on stuff like Arcade and Apple TV, and you will benefit from the joint subscriptions. So that could be what many people will be looking for. Obviously, you're still having one person foot the bill for Arcade and TV, but you're still not then having to like divvy up every single purchase of every application so that's some family sharing stuff and airpods pro you published a review at long last at long last and i'm happy to report on your behalf that it seems from the review that uh they passed the lawnmower test right they did they did pass the lawnmower test, and I'm happy to reveal now that the embargo has dropped

that it also passed the airplane test, because I've wanted to write about how, or tweet about or whatever, about how they did on the airplane, but I didn't want to admit that I was in New York, because that would be super suspicious. But they worked really well on the airplane, too. I agree with this, because I had just been on a plane.

I was not in New York, but I was on vacation which legitimate vacation i just got back from which the episode would have been late about any for anyway yeah people are going to say that we lied about you being gone and we lied about on twitter about recording the episode as soon as you got back all of that is absolutely true it's just also uh there was a new macbook pro it was just a good coincidence for us um so it really drowned out the vast majority of plain noise. Yeah, it's not the same as like covering your ears with noise-canceling headphones. It's not quite the same, but it's like it's close enough. And then I didn't have big, you know,

over-ear headphones on my head the whole flight, which was great. And I could notice every now and again, it would adjust, get a little bit better, which I thought was kind of cool that it was doing that. I noticed something that I didn't really thought about before. I didn't need to have the volume of my audio up very high at all. Right. Like half. That's the beauty of it is that you don't have to crank it and potentially damage your hearing. You can just have it at a normal level.

And because it's canceling out the other noise, it's just fine. I did notice that my left ear part is coming loose more often than I would like. So I'm going to try and I'm using the smalls. I'm going to try and bump up to the medium and see if that works for me. But I would love there to be foam tip options. After about an hour, my left ear on the outside of the ear, started right outside of the ear canal, started to hurt. I thought, oh no. And I took it out and put it back in and then it was fine.

So it literally must have been just pushing on the wrong spot and then it was fine. But I will say multiple hours of use of these things with noise cancellation on and I'm really happy with it. Like this is a great purchase for me. I really like these a lot i'm regretting that more and more i i regret buying those sony headphones i mean they did the job but they were they were pricey and um i did it because i needed to have something that wasn't in my ears and was noise canceling and instead uh apple made noise canceling airpods that have a vent to equalize pressure which is exactly what i wanted so um oh well i'll put those on ebay or something i don't know we have a mic

at the movies coming up we uh it's going to be our first holiday mic at the movies yes and so for that we are it's not our first we did a miracle of this this year. Oh, first of this year. I see. It's the 2019 original Mike at the Movies Holiday Edition and we are choosing, of course, the great holiday movie, the great Christmas movie, beloved by all. Die Hard. Die Hard. The upgrade

program is sticking its fork in the ground on this one and we are declaring Die Hard a holiday movie. This is one of the rare mike at the movies where i have seen the movie many times but i really want to talk about die hard with you uh so it gives us an excuse to watch it again yep november 25th so that's going to be when we're going to be talking about die hard uh to round out today's episode jason i have a couple of hashtag ask upgrade questions first one comes from jeff is transparency mode on airpods

pro better than uh or different to just wearing non-pro airpods which do little to block outside sound i think i think they let in more sound i think they're actually amplifying the outside sound and there's more noise than you just get with regular airpods yeah i've noticed that i like it i feel like like, you know, and I know that people smarter than me have said kind of the frequencies, but it doesn't let everything in. Like it's kind of doing some manipulation of the audio,

but it's definitely making it louder, which is useful. I mean, I think that the transparency mode is really good and I'm as happy to listen to my content in certain circumstances with transparency mode on as I am with the noise cancellation mode on, so I think it's really good. Wilhelm says, I'm returning my AirPods Pro after a week of use. I feel like an idiot for saying this, but it turns out that noise cancellation gives me a headache. It feels like my head is

getting inflated like a balloon. Am I the only person this is happening to? No, you are not the only person. I felt this way about every set of noise cancelling headphones I'd ever tried before AirPods Pro. I think it's just a personal sensitivity thing that for whatever reason, there's like a pressure. If you have a sinus cold or infection right now, maybe that is making it worse for you uh i don't know but like i whatever it is apple's doing with the uh pressure equalization stuff works for me but it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for everyone and some people and i don't know whether it's a different sort of brain or hearing thing but i think some people are very much unnerved by the canceled out um audio effect because it does feel like sort of the oxygen has

been removed from the room um and it doesn't bother me it's weird but it doesn't bother me but i could totally see how for some people that would actually cause distress and uh it's probably you know i'm not an expert here but there's probably a physical reason. Like it probably some people don't just can't do it because of some way they happen to react to it. And we'll finish out today with a very serious question from Adam. It says, Mike, the American holiday of Thanksgiving is coming up. Have you ever had occasion to participate in this meal? Yes. We actually typically try and book a American themed orled restaurant here in London for a Thanksgiving dinner.

I love that you do that. Thanksgiving dinner, there are just so many great foods that I would never eat otherwise because it just doesn't happen. And plus, depending on where you go in London, you can get a very good Thanksgiving meal because there are a lot of Americans here. Makes sense. you can get a very good Thanksgiving meal because there are a lot of Americans here. Makes sense. So if you do a good one, you can do very, very good business on that day where you would probably not be doing that great business, but you will completely fill out the restaurant weeks in advance for an expensive meal. So, yes, I would definitely try and find a Thanksgiving for it's in a couple of weeks.

Right. It's in a couple of weeks. End of the month. It is. And Adam does go on to ask Jason, what are your must-have Thanksgiving dishes? I like sweet potato pie instead of pumpkin pie.

Mashed potatoes. I would say turkey, although there was a period where I was having ham instead of turkey, but I have turkey now. I feel like those are the must-haves. I am a big fan of what

is it where you put like, is it sweet potato casserole? It's like the mushroom candy yams with marshmallows. My mom always made those and I never liked them. They're okay, but they're very popular. Very popular.

I like it very much. All right. So that ends this week's episode of Upgrade. Big one. Big episode this week, but a great one. Thanks for getting to the end, everybody. Wow. Yeah. Hey, this is one they're going to listen

all the way to the very end. Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you, Jason, for being on the ground there in New York City. Yes, absolutely. And if you have questions about the MacBook Pro you would like to hear us answer, just send in a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade, and we should hopefully be able to get some of those on our next episode.

If you want to find show notes for this week's episode, go over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 271. That should be in your podcast app of choice. You can find Jason online. He's at jsnr, J-S-N-E-R-R, and you can go to sixcolors.com

to read Jason's work. I am iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to our sponsors, the fine folk over at ExpressVPN, ID Tech, and Squarespace.

We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snow. McClunky! McClunky?