Upgrade - 606: Photogenic Lemon

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

From Relay, this is Upgrade, episode 606. Today's show is brought to you by Claude. Delete me, Sentry and one password. My name is Mike Hurley, and I'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason. Hi, Mike. Big week. So, Jason, we're publishing a day later than usual.

So my Snell talk question to you... Half a day, maybe, but it doesn't matter. It's fine. My Snell talk question to you is, what color MacBook Neo do you have in your office right now? It's a funny story. I was working in the back of the house the other day, and I had a thought. And so I added an item to our shopping list, which was photogenic lemon. And then I'm out walking the dog with Lauren. And she says, why does it say photogenic lemon on our shopping list?

And I said, well, funny story. I had an idea for artwork for my review of the MacBook Neo. And since it's citrus color, I thought maybe. putting it with a lemon would be good or other citrus, but it needs to be a nice looking lemon. So please buy, when you go to the store, please buy a nice looking lemon. And I do indeed have the citrus MacBook Neo. And that's why this episode is slightly late, because we are dropping it at embargo time. Yes. So, which is a Tuesday morning very early, uh, when we normally release on a Monday afternoon. So apologies for being late, but this is why we're late because we can

talk about the MacBook Neo now. We could have done a reactions episode. I would have been nonsense. I would have had to pretend that I didn't know anything about the MacBook Neo and hadn't used it and that seemed like a waste of time. But before we get to the review, we do have important work to conduct, the beginning of which is the results of the draft. And I'll just say, Jason Snell, congratulations. You are once again the draft champion. him. Oh, March is very, very good to me. That's what I'm saying. March. I remain undefeated in the month of March.

That's true. That is very true. I had to look this up because I feel like I've been draft champion for a really long time. Yeah. So what happens? I won the draft championship at WWDC 2022. I lost it for one month. Well, sorry, for three months. WWDC 2024, you won the draft and then I took it back in September. So potentially, our long national nightmare of my reign is over. It's a historic moment. I got to change the, you and I changed before the show, our draft pennant. It's only the second time, or I guess the third time that that has happened, the third time. So it's a rare thing.

Now, I will say, you know, Mike, you know, I know you're not a huge sports fan, although I did watch some F1 this weekend. Good stuff. Yeah, on Apple TV, I'm just saying, it was, it was work. Have you heard the phrase winning ugly? No, but I can get it. This is ugly. This is an ugly draft. This didn't go very well for any of us. It was, it was, although I will say what got me through was my strategy to not pick anything that wasn't a Mac.

Yeah. Because I just wasn't, and it bit me. a point because my my my my oh I didn't really because it would have been my last pick and my and my last pick was right but um I was going to pick a studio display or a new display at some point and I didn't do that and that was that was down but my strategy was I don't know what they're going to do with iPads I don't know if I believe that iPads are are coming or not I'm just not going to pick any iPhone or iPad products and I'm going to focus on laptops and that uh that basically carried me over so yeah I just grew on the iPad so I had two iPad pick

Apple Intelligence and a new color and that destroyed me. There's no new base iPad. And then the rest of it, you know, it's all just Mac stuff. We will get into the details of the picks yes and no. But congratulations, Jason. Thank you. Three to two.

You have beaten me in the draft. And I had the, after explaining why I was going to take the, I was going to set it so that you had to take the under. I then said it so that you could take the over on the price. I made a wild decision to bet on Apple coming in with a surprising price and they did so I would have won the tiebreaker too which is pretty awesome

so yeah for me I went down on MacBook as the name they went with Neo we found that out early because they posted a tech document on their own website Apple love it when Apple blows it for themselves I think that's a rough one no one would have got that otherwise like you never would have gotten that otherwise that name

no not if we put if we listed a hundred product names down would we get to Neo I also said it I bought into a rare miss for Mark German, who said that the screen would be smaller than 13. It was exactly 13.0. We'll get into the details more. New laptop comes with more than 8 gigs of RAM.

That was a dumb pick because it's the A18 Pro, and it comes with 8 gigs of RAM. And then the ones I got right, Mac Pro doesn't get an update. Oh, always bet against the Mac Pro. New laptop does not have Thunderbolt. There's your A18 Pro pick. I don't know what I was thinking with the RAM. And new laptop does not have MagSafe.

which really was a shot in the dark, and I got that shot. So my correct picks with a new laptop comes in at least four Kaila options. It comes in four. And that the RAM prices on the MacBook Pro are the same, which they are unbelievably, I think.

Unbelievable, yes. This is one example of the many ways in which Apple flexed on the rest of the computer industry last week. So much flexing. Really the only thing that they changed was they increased the base price of the MacBook Air, right?

Like, that's kind of the only real change. the iPhone 17E, as we spoke about, the storage went up, you know, storage went up across the board. Like, it's a, they really did a, like, showing either A, their purchasing power, either, you know, now that they can still get the decent prices, or that they bought a lot, or that they're willing to eat margin on these products. But for whatever the reasons are. Some combination thereof, yeah. Yeah. They've kept that stuff the same. What I got wrong was that the new base iPad

will support Apple Intelligence that the new laptop would be wedge-shaped that the new base iPad would come in a new color and that the new laptop has MagSafe. I am still a bit bitter about the MagSafe one if I'm being honest. Sorry to Adina for the wedge shape. Not happening.

To be fair though, once this product was announced like I said to her like, all right, be ready because you might need to choose a color here. As soon as I start looking at the specs, I was like, this isn't the one for her. her anyway. No. I don't think.

So that was the draft. Jason, congratulations. Thank you. Feels good. And I look forward to taking it back at WWDC. That's the point. We'll see how we go.

Sure. Great. I want to do some follow-up. Now, on the last episode, we had someone right in to ask if anybody, if we believed anyone at Apple pays attention to the score card. Yeah, the Apple report card. You bumped into Apple vice president of marketing.

Greg Jawsweak. I did. And what did Joe say to you? Well, he said, I don't know. I don't know if I want to talk to Jason. He said as he introduced himself, I mean, we go back a long way, but as he said hello, he may he may give me a bad report card. You know what?

Pretty funny. And that's a just joke. And I put it my hands and I said, it's not me. I just hand out the grades. I don't do the grading. And he laughed and gave me a hug. So that was very nice. You should have told him about.

your five out of five for the Mac, you know? And then it all would have changed, you know. John Turnus was there, too, and he said hi. And I'm sure he knew that I gave the Mac five out of five. I think we get the, you know, all the love for the hardware for John Turner. And yes, there was, I was just chatting with Phil Schiller, right? And then Greg Josweak and John Turner walked over. And John Gruber took a picture of it, of me surrounded by these out of six.

And I'm like, I still had my backpack on. I should have dropped it on the ground. It was so heavy. but and I'm like oh I guess I'm talking to all the executives now and then it was funny because we talked we chatted for a couple of minutes and then Trudy who's the head of PR came over and I definitely in my mind thought oh the cops are here time to move along gentlemen break this up break this up other people to talk to but it was nice to chat with with all of them and I got to chat with Phil Schiller a little bit later too which was lovely I don't see him I see him frequently at these events but I don't always get a chance to chat with with all of them and I got to chat with Phil Schiller a little bit later too which was lovely I don't see him I see him frequently at these events but I don't always get a chance to chat. with him. And I just feel like, I don't know, there's some connection I have with Phil just because, and I said this to him this time, like, I remember when he came to Macworld for a demo of like early OS10, when they changed from HFS to HFS plus in the file system, they came to Macworld and talked about it and why it was. And like, we go back to when Apple, I mean, we go back so far that

it's when Apple came to us. Like, that was a long time ago. Because, you know, we spoke about this before, but that was the time in which, you know, you would say to them, like, we're not going to come to this event unless you actually have something to show us. Well, that, yeah, I mean, the jobs era really kind of turned that around. But like the, it was definitely also an era where they felt like they needed to prove it to the, to the users and to the market. And so they would come to Macworld, for example. And they'd do a press tour, right? They come to Macworld. They come to, you know, PC World and Wired and whatever else was in San Francisco. They'd do a little. press tour. But one of the things that we're trying to do is say, like, take us seriously, we're on this. This is the stuff that we're doing. And it's just, you know, a lot of water under the bridge since then. And it's funny. When I see Phil, I'm like, and Jaws, too, those guys were there back then. And I was there back then. And there are not a lot of us around who were there back then. So it's kind of a fun, fun catch-up for that. So that was kind of a fun bonus at this

whirlwind my 24 hours in New York City to chat with those guys. But yeah, Jaws made a report card joke. That was pretty funny. Speaking of Apple history, you have reviewed David Pogue's upcoming book about Apple the first 50 years for the Wall Street Journal that came out over the weekend. I did. That was a random email from an editor, a book editor at the Wall Street Journal, who was apparently a tech journalist in the 90s and was going to some of these same events that I was.

Wow. And he is, he may be out there now. He said he was a listener to multiple podcasts of mine. Well, I really hope that this is one of them then. I do too. And he thought I would be a good fit for reviewing David Polk's book. And that was very nice. That came in in January.

I already had a lot going on. I ended up reading David Polk's book on my vacation. So that was, it's a very large book. Yes. And wrote an article about it that I'm pretty proud of. I think it's a good article. And we went out and bought, we played the game of where do you buy a copy of a newspaper. It posted on the web on Friday and it was in the weekend edition on Saturday.

So I bought that. I mean, it's very rare at this point of my career to have a clip appear in a paper publication. That's kind of wild. And, and yeah, that's, I don't know if people. outside of journalism, we'll get it. But one of the things is sort of like, where is your byline been? And that was really my first thought. I was honored to be asked. And I also thought, like, I can't turn down being in the Wall Street Journal, right? Like, that's a, that's on my list now of, like, yeah, I wrote something that was in the Wall Street Journal. That's kind of cool. That's one of the big names.

You also, you're published in the newspaper. Like, you weren't just on the web. I am in the newspaper. You are in the news. Like, that is like an extra thing, right? You can't argue with you write something for the web. You are in the newspaper, which is super cool. I found the review. I read it and really liked it, and I don't know what your direction was. But it felt more like a conversation

about the whole time rather than the book itself. One of the lessons that you learn when you're writing for other publications, and this is true of all content, right? It's like, what do they expect? Yeah. And so I read a bunch of book reviews that were in the Wall Street Journal.

And I read a bunch of book reviews in the New York Times as well, especially nonfiction. I read a lot of nonfiction reviews in those two outlets. And I discovered, yes, a book review in the Wall Street Journal about a nonfiction book is going to be kind of a summary of what you gleaned from the book in boiled down and in context with a little bit of judgment about the details of the book. But it's not meant to be like, people who are reading it are not thinking,

should I read this book that, you know, is it good or not? They, you want to give them like a, a little taste of kind of what's covered in the book and what could be, what the reviewer gleaned from the book is what they kind of want to do. So it is funny. It ends up being me sort of telling the arc of the story of the book in a short form, in a thousand words. Yeah.

Along with, mentions along the way about oh Mr. Pogue does this and Mr. Pogue does that and there's this funny thing. Mr. Pogue. Yeah, that's, it's funny. They don't say Mr. Jobs or Mr. Wozniak or Mr. I didn't, I didn't mention John Scully by name but they didn't, but I do refer to

Mr. Pogue and my bio at the end says Mr. Snell, which I just think is funny that the author and the writer get misters. Yes. Get the salutation, but the other people mentioned in the, in the story, don't. So that that was just a style.

And again, that's one of the things you learn is like their style's going to be whatever it is. But I did try to match what they seem to want out of a book review, which was that. And that was a lot easier because a thousand words kind of like, I totally understand it. What you really want to do is have people read it and either feel like they don't need to read the book because they got the gist of it. Or ideally, they also read it and think, oh, that sounds fun. And then they read the book. But you want it to be kind of an entertaining experience regardless. That seems to be the part of the premise there.

So after reading many book reviews, which I admit I have not read a lot of those over the years in the Wall Street Journal and the Times, certainly, I had a good idea of what the format was. So that was kind of fun. Very cool. Apple have removed the 512 gigabyte of RAM option from the Mac Studio Configurator. So if you're looking for some evidence that the RAM situation has changed, half a terabyte of RAM, no more. 256 is now the maximum you can get for the Mac Studio. Yeah, I mean, we're going to see little inklings of Apple doing whatever it's doing. It's not doing the simple like, ah, ramps too expensive, everything costs more now. It's more complicated than that, but there are places where they've clearly done the analysis and said, no, we're not going to do that. And also Apple have made some additions to their leadership page. This is the page that has all the executives in it. So Catherine Adams is now Senior Vice President of Government Affairs, and Jennifer Neustead is now SVP and General Counsel.

These are things we knew would happen because of least. Jackson's retirement. We've known about these. But there are some changes that we didn't know what we're going to happen. One, Eddie Q, who's now sporting a new headshot, is SVP of services and health. This is a role that it has been reporting on in Room Aroundup and Mark German, right, that this was happening, but now we're seeing it actually reflected in Eddie's title. But the key interesting part here is that Steve LeMay has been added as vice president of human Interface Design, and Molly Anderson is Vice President of Industrial Design. They have little bios, and they, like many others, says reporting directly to CEO Tim Cook. I find this fascinating,

because why did this not exist before? Why is this now a thing that we're doing? We couldn't know the reason to this, but it does feel like a sweetener in a way of like neither of you are the person, right, with which they had in, um, right. I've forgotten his name though. Well, no, I think even, even Alan Dye was not. I mean, it was, anyway, yeah. Anyway. So this is, this is, I don't think Alan Dye was in charge of all design.

That's true. That's true. It was just Johnny I. So they want to elevate, they want to have their design people be visible. This is how it should be. Absolutely. They are below the line. There's a line for senior vice president and below it, you're just a vice president,

a measly vice president. But above the line, you were a senior vice president. Also, Eddie got a new picture. I do like that. Eddie's picture was looking kind of out of date. They need to refresh most of the pictures on this page. But Eddie, Eddie's looking great in his photo. He's looking very happy.

He's got that trademark smile. Yep. But I think this is a big deal. Again, I still would like to see someone above that line when it comes to design at Apple. But having them on this page at all, I think is important. You know, I don't know if I do. I mean, it could be both of them though, Jason. I just think it's a very important role.

And I feel like if hardware engineering should be up, is up there and software engineering is up there, I would like to see design up there too, personally. Well, you give them room to go. But I'm okay with industrial design and human interface design being completely separate. That's fine with me. Oh, yeah. No, again, I'm not saying it should be one person. Like, from my perspective, I feel like they should both, I feel like design of hardware and software at Apple should be as important as engineering.

That's my view on this, because they are the design company. Like, this is their whole thing. But anyway, I'm pleased to see them added on the page. And I like the powerless intrigue of it happening now. This episode is brought to you by Claude from Anthropic. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop are good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging Cohn at midnight or strategizing your next business move,

Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. One of the problems that I've been tackling with Claude recently is to build a system for tracking sales at Cortex brand. So I was previously doing this in just a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet was terrible. I used to just put the number in every week and then start a new row. This is no good. And so I gave that spreadsheet to Claude and worked with Claude to create a web app for me that lives on my Mac,

where I can enter into details now. It does all the calculations for me. It does trend forecasting. It shows anomalies. It's amazing. And what I love about it is this is a living project. Just this morning, I was making some tweaks about it because I wanted things to work differently. And I'm able to just have a conversation with Claude and get what I want.

It really is incredible. If you're a developer spending half your day on tasks, you wish you could just hand off. What about Claude code? It runs in your terminal. and read your code base, and can take on things like writing tests, refactoring, or debugging without you hand-holding it through every step. Learning mode is a feature of Claude that's really great. You can see Claude's thought processes it debugs and optimizes your code.

It's like pair programming with someone who can explain every decision that they make. I really like being able to read through the ways that Claude is thinking, like it during learning mode, so you can go back and see what assumptions are they making, what decisions are they making. because that can help you give like, oh no, you'd be good with this context, you don't have that kind of stuff, which I think is fantastic. If you're considering adding a new tool to your setup, you want to know it works with everything else that you're using. And that's why it's so useful that Claude connects with your professional tools,

like GitHub, Jira, HubSpot, Notion, Google Workspace, and loads more. I connect to Claude to my Notion database. And so I can ask it questions about things that I have in there too and get answers that are related to my own work. It's fantastic. Were you ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today. at Claude.a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-sash-upgrade and check out Claude Pro,

which includes access to all of the features I mentioned in today's episode. That is, clod.a-I-S-U-R-Grade, a thanks to Claude for their support of this show and all of Relay. So let's talk about the MacBook Neo. I want to start by talking about the name. Neo? How does Neo sit with you? How does it sit with you initially and now? Initially, I was, when it leaked, I was not 100% convinced it was a real product name.

Yep. Because it felt like it could have also just been a code name placeholder name. But it's the real name. I think it's great. Okay. And here's why. It doesn't mean anything. It sounds kind of fresh, but it isn't particularly meaningful.

Neo, it's new. Like, that's great, good vibes. I mean, we have Neo-era and PRAN. Pro. They're all the same length. MacBook and then a tag at the end of it. I do wish that Neo was one syllable.

Yeah. I know that's so ridiculous to say, but it's... MacBook Air. MacBook Air. MacBook Air. MacBook Neo. Yeah, but it's Neo. To me it feels like it's the same length to even say in rhythm. It's because it's not

it's not, right, it's we're going to get into grammar here, but like the two BELs slide together. I don't say Neo. Yeah, I feel like that is an accent thing between the two of us, where I would say Neo. Like I kind of do a, the way that I say it, it comes in two syllables. This is incredibly unnecessary as a thing, but as podcast as we think about the way these products sound.

No, but I just, it's a simple tag that goes on the end. It doesn't have to mean anything because none of them have to mean anything or they mean everything. It doesn't mean anything. And that is a meaningless tag that still imparts some sort of a vibe is exactly what you want here. And I kind of like the idea that they, in fact, I look at this and I think, oh, maybe the I, because how do we refer to that low end base model, whatever iPad is we don't have a good name for it. Because if we say the iPad, it's like, I mean the iPad iPad iPad, not the other iPads that are also iPads, but aren't just iPad. They're iPad Air or iPad Pro.

Like, having a tag is better. it makes me want that other iPad to have a tag too, if it's iPad Neo or something else. Yeah, so I was thinking about this last night. I think of all of Apple's major product lines, the iPad is the only one where it has a product that is just the name with nothing else. Like even the Apple Watch gets Apple Watch series something.

AirPods, they get AirPods Pro, da-da-da, like AirPods. Like even like the AirPods, it says in the product name, like second-generate, all this kind of stuff, where iPad is just iPad? Well, it's kind of generation. I think maybe the base AirPods are kind of like this, although they do like iPods 3 sort of, or we at least call them that.

And we don't call it iPad 6 or iPad 8 or whatever it is. Apple won it just to be called that. Tags are good. I think that Apple has shown that adding tags is good. I would not be surprised if the iPad, that base model iPad, does get a tag at some point when it does a redesign, maybe. So anyway, not super important,

but having a tag on that product is a good idea. actually think and the name is fine because like I said it's meaningless and yet also kind of impart some kind of a general vibe and I think that's what they're going for I was not a fan when I when I saw the the leak I was convinced that it wasn't real in the sense like this is not the product name it's just a code name because the name's terrible and it's really taken me some time just to get to acceptance I don't know why there's just something about it that like I just can't really get my head around the name of this one like I feel like maybe it's because you pronounce it. Ne.

Ne, oh, that's the problem. But, like, I feel like the other products in the Mac lineup, they fit more to me of, like, what the product is. And I don't really feel like Neo means anything. And I guess that's the point. Anyway, I'm used to it now in the way that it's like I'm fine with it. But it's not, you're over it. It's not my favorite name, I would say.

I would have liked Nano instead, personally. But Nano implies a smallness that it doesn't have. But Nano doesn't mean, but it's like air doesn't mean anything. You know what I mean? Like if these things mean nothing, nano, I like more. I know it suffers that issue, but I just, you know,

it's like, what is Neo then? Anyway, let's talk about the design of this product. Yeah, but they can call it new then. MacBook new. That's the great thing. Yeah. No. I'm going to read a quote from your review.

Apple could have probably upgraded the guts in the M1 MacBook Air and called it a day, but that would have sent the message to potential customers that they were buying a rehash. old product. We have a brand new shell, like a new design here. Obviously, it's pulling from the 20, you know, mid-2020s Apple laptop playbook from the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, but it is a new thing. It's that M1, or M2 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, or M1 MacBook Pro, the high end,

and then the M2 MacBook Air got that design, and then the Neo has that design. So it's got that flat top, curved side, curved edges. A little feet. A little feet. And that's the look. And I think I honestly, sometimes I think that Apple has these design decisions that go back a long time. And we'll talk about the color in the second, but this is the first really colorful laptop that Apple has even attempted since the original Ibook. And I wonder if the iPhone 5C experience similarly was something that they put in the vault over it.

Apple University put in the curriculum of if you're going to sell an old product, just sell the old product. If you're going to dress up an old product and act like it's new, people are smart enough to know that it's not. And so I think if it was, I think they made the decision, two reasons. One is, if you're just selling an M1 MacBook Air with some different guts, it's obviously an M1 MacBook Air, and I think customers know that this is really just an old laptop that got a little refurb. But I think the other thing is Apple does these designs

and then they ride them out for years, right? They ride them out for years. We may get end of this year, beginning and next year, a new MacBook Pro design. That will replace a MacBook Pro design that was introduced in 2021. So five plus years later. So one of the reasons you do a new design

for the Neo is to make it look like the other MacBooks. And the other reason you do it is because you're going to use this design for five years. And so that's the advantage you get is you do it once. And I think Apple's getting better and better at this, anticipating their needs for the next few years so that I think Apple wants to update these, all of its Macs, every time there's a chip revision. And that means you need to do a design that accommodates a fairly easy revision process.

So you do the big work up front, and then you just iterate the chip after that year after year. So the colors, we have silver, indigo, blush, and citrus. Yep. Is it enough? It's a good question. I think that all the reports that Apple was doing colorful laptops got, I think everybody ran away with that a little bit. And the truth is, silver is silver. blush is

I would say pretty visibly pink silver Because I could see I mean this is the real test Is when I look down I saw that it was pink And I can't see pink very well So I think it's pretty pink At least in some light it's pretty pink

But it's not shocking hot pink It is pinky silver So you could say it's rose silver Right but it is it is pink and all the keyboards are tinted to match, which is cute. So it's not, the silver one is white,

but all the other ones are tinted a little. They're not, they don't match the color. They're not the same. They're white with a tint of that color. So then we have indigo, which by the way was one of the colors of the original eye book,

which I think is kind of cute. Indigo is like midnight MacBook air, but maybe a little bit lighter. I, I didn't do a scientific test or anything, but it felt like it was a couple of steps lighter, if that makes any sense, sort of vibe-wise, from, but still, it's a dark blue.

And it's the, so we've got the computer for people who want silver and the computer for people who want a dark computer, which is this dark blue, the indigo. And maybe it's, again, my reds and greens are not great. So maybe it's a little more purply, a little more indigo and a little less midnight. But it's, it's in that ballpark. From the imagery on the website,

it does look like a different color to the midnight. It is not the same, but it's in that ballpark, I guess is what I would say. At a quick glance, you would, if you didn't know

the existence of this computer and you saw an indigo MacBook Neo sitting on a desk, you would be perfectly within your rights as you just walked past it to think that's probably just a midnight MacBook air because they look so similar.

And then there's citrus. And citrus, again, is not the color of a tennis ball. It is gold. But it's really gold, like really gold. It is the one that stands out the most. Yes. As being the most saturation of any of these four laptops.

It's the hero color, right? Like, this is the one that they're using in all of the imagery. Yeah. It's their cosmic orange. Yeah. So I think what it says is not, oh, Apple got it, and everything is bright now. I think what it says is Apple is now willing on a low-end system that they think is going to appeal to younger people, they want to get a fun vibe out there, is willing to experiment

with a variety of color options, but not too much. So it's like silver, and I'd say the indigo is, you know, it's a, it's a dark blue. It's like, for people who are like, oh, I like colors. I don't just wear black. I also wear navy blue. It's like, oh, boy, you're really close to black, but I get it. color. I like navy blue too. So it's it's it's dark laptop, silver laptop. And then the the blush is yes, it is pink. I leave it to others to tell me how pink it is, but it struck me as being still somewhat restrained. I think it would be very popular, but I think I think it still feels a little restrained. And then with citrus, they're going the other way where they're like, let's make it pop a little bit. It is not a crazy yellow laptop. I'm not sure anybody wants a tennis ball laptop,

right? Like a wild yellow laptop. It's not that. It is this. And citrus is good because it is, I mean, it is, to my eyes, in some light, it's kind of orangey, but more yellowy and really just gold. It seems to me like it's like big gold. You might like it. I don't know because of that. But that's the one that, look, they're going to watch the numbers. They're going to see how these sell. And the question that I have about this is the same question I have about cosmic orange iPhones, which is how to do. It doesn't have to be the one everybody wants. But like, does it do well enough that Apple gets the signal that it's worth having an iPhone in a bright color every time? Because some people like that, like to go for the bright color option.

Other people don't. I was talking to an Apple PR person at this event and about how much I love cosmic orange. and I realized he was holding his dark blue iPhone, 17. I was like, oh, not for you then. He says, no, not for me. And I'm like, okay, it doesn't need to be for everybody. So they'll watch it with this because I do believe they learned the lesson with the Ibook that people who are going around working in cafes or desks or wherever with a laptop,

it's portable. You take it with you. I think Apple maybe learned the lesson that people were reluctant to have a laptop that shouted, whoa, look at my laptop that I've got here. as opposed to just sort of fitting in. And the result was that every laptop appell made after that was white or black or silver or black or very dark blue or very slightly tinted silver. And so we'll see how it goes. I think it's fun.

You never forget that you're using a citrus laptop. I used it all weekend. And, you know, the aluminum all around the keyboard is that color. It is that color. and then the keyboard is slightly tinted. It's funny. I think optically, it makes the keyboard feel white because it is just a little yellow to go with the, with, with the, it, it's more harmonious. But it also kind of like feels like it's, it's a, right?

Because your eyes are looking at this bright yellow and then you see the slightly tinted key tops. So, yeah, it's, you'll never forget it. I think that this is a conservative choice to make a risk like this, though. It is the, if that makes sense, it is, it is a risk they're taking by putting themselves out there by having a bold color, but it is a restrained bold color. They could have made much bolder, they could have done a screaming red or pink that they didn't do. And they could have done another color that like really reads and pops like a green and they didn't do that. They could have done a lighter blue, but not sky blue, and they didn't do that. So, like, they, it's calibrated, right?

It's a calibrated choice to go down this path, and they're going to try it. But I wouldn't say it's what we maybe thought they were going to do, which is, like, throw the doors open and with abandon, just kind of like release wild colors. I don't think that's what they did. It's interesting that they carried the color through to the open part of the laptop. so, like, uniformly as the front? Because, like, you know, we have the IMAX, right, where they come in very bright colors. But the saturation is on the back of the computer,

and on the front, it's much more toned down, and they have the white border. And it's, like, interesting that they decided with the laptop that they were going to make you see your color the whole time. Yeah, it's a black border around the display. And then, but you can see a ring, you can see the aluminum frame around the,

black border, so you always can see it up there. And then, yeah, I don't know what they would have done down on the bottom otherwise, but like the whole thing is like framed and the track pad and all of it is that color. So you're not going to, Mike, I think this is one of the reasons why they're reluctant to do this on laptops, right? Is that going to be distracting to people on mass? They don't know yet. And you can't hide it. Like you can hide it on an IMac on the back. You can't hide it. So instead, it's just, it is everywhere. And we'll see what people feel. I feel. I feel strongly that some people want to have a fun laptop. But Apple, I think is reluctant to do it. And I'll tell you, I can, I don't know this. Nobody told, no little birdie told me this,

but like, I can't, I have to imagine that Apple experimented with all sorts of bright colors. And that either their institutional, like, history was like, this is too much. Or it's actually too much. And that I don't, that I don't know, because I, I do not have my own lab in which I can anodize various laptops into various shades, but I'm glad they're trying it, and I hope it goes well, and that there are other colorful options, because this is what we've always said when we talk about the colors are here, is the issue is not to force color on people. The issue is that some people would like a little more color in their lives. And if all you get is silver and black or dark gray or dark blue, you're not really letting people kind of express themselves in a way that

we've seen with the history of like the iPod especially that people really liked. So I hope this is the start of the trend, but it is a careful start. So the MacBook Neo, its size, shape, and weight are basically the same as the MacBook Air. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little thicker and a little smaller, but basically you would never know just seeing it laying somewhere that it wasn't a MacBook Air, I would say. Were you surprised by that? I don't know about surprise. I understand it. I think the important thing here for Apple was the price, right? In the end, I think the goal was the price. The retina MacBook from 2015, that computer, the goal was not the price, obviously, because it cost a lot of money. The goal was to make a small computer. And so they did. They made a 12-inch

laptop. But, you know, the compromises you make depend on what your premise is. And I think Apple's premise here was, we need to make a low cost, we need to build a low cost laptop around the A18 Pro. That was the goal, around an A series processor that will hold down a new price point down at the bottom of the MacBook line. And everything followed from that. So I think the size was not an issue. And in fact, they wanted the size to be, it's not supposed to be a selling point. This is not a small laptop. It's not meant to be the laptop you buy if you want a smaller laptop.

If you like the idea of a laptop this size, you should be able to say, well, they don't want people being like, oh, I really like small laptops, but it's so underpowered, and I really want the MacBook Air. So they're like, no, it's a good size for a laptop. I think they said when I talk to people on Wednesday,

they like that screen size, the 13 inch. I would argue, as somebody who used a small screen laptop for a long time, it gets real crowded. Modern MacOS gets real crowded under that size. The days of the 11-inch MacBook air are over. Even in the latter days of the 11-inch air before it, you know, I stopped using it. The interface just kept getting kind of bigger and more crowded. And it felt in the last couple of years like nobody was checking to see if things fit on the screen of the 11-inch air.

I don't think you could go down there today. I think 13 is probably about as low as Apple is willing to go with it. And the other thing is you want to sell this to a whole new audience. a lot of the competition down there is a 14 inch display, right? Like, I don't think that audience wants tiny. I think they just want cheap or cheaper. And that's what Apple's going to give them here. So I think that all went into it.

It's like the size was just not the point. And I've seen a lot of people we know who are disappointed in this product because it's not the product of their dreams, which is a tiny laptop. And I agree, this is not the kind of fabled, what if they did the 12 inch written a MacBook as an Apple Silicon Mac, because that would be amazing. It would also not be $5.99.

It wouldn't be $9.99. It would probably be more like $13.99. And I think maybe nobody would buy it. But I would love it. I would love to see it because I think they could make that product now and it would be amazing. But I just don't think they want to. I don't think they think there's a place for it. And this is not, yeah, the purpose of this product is not for it to be small.

The purpose is for it to be cheap. And it is. to make the MacBook Neo, Apple establish new processes. I'm going to read a quote from aforementioned Molly Anderson, the VP of hardware designer Apple. This is to DZN magazine. We start to do with an extrusion. We flatten it and then form it with heat and pressure

to get as close as possible to the shape of the final product. Then we find machine to create the profile. So we're really reducing huge amounts of the machining cycle time that's involved. The goal is for us to use less material. overall and to reduce the amount of processing of that material. So we're going to talk about the price in a minute, but to get it down to a more effective price, less material and less time machining is what they're going for with this product. And this is, the MacBook Neo features the most recycled content of any Mac.

60% recycled content of any Apple products, sorry, not just any Mac. I think it's fun that they did this and that they talked about it for this product. the product doesn't feel like different from another Apple product in any way to me. Sure. So what I would say is this is really interesting that you did this for the MacBook Neo. They're going to do this for all future laptop designs. I mean, why wouldn't they, right? Like what would be the problem?

If it's cheaper and the quality is the same and remains to be seeing, but I don't notice a difference. Maybe they know that it's not the same and that they wouldn't do this on a MacBook Pro or something like that. But like I have a hard time imagining they wouldn't use a similar process if they could. on other laptops on the MacBook Air for sure. If it costs them less money to produce it and it's less wasteful in terms of materials and they can up their recycled content, like there's lots of reasons why they would do that.

But maybe, this is just a good example where maybe the premise of doing a cheaper laptop, they're like, we need a cheaper. I could see the meeting where somebody's like, do you know how much it costs to make just the aluminum? And somebody's like, well, what if we did? I've been thinking about a different process that we could do.

And this was the laptop where they're like, great, let us experiment on a new process for building these aluminum shells and we'll use the Neo as the test case. But it's just an Apple laptop. It does not feel weird in any way. It is just like the others. So new process, great. I'm sure they'll take what they learn from that and apply it to other products, especially if it saves the money. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online at a time when surveillance and data breaches are common enough to make everybody vulnerable. Data brokers make money from selling your data, but you can protect your privacy with DeleteMe, so you can keep your name, your contact information, your addresses, and all the other stuff that you don't want being sold on. These folks are the real deal. The New York Times Wirecutta

has named Delete Me, their top pick for data removal services, and I use them myself, so Delete me provided me with an account a long time ago now, and I was able to log in and give them the information that I wanted to be removed. Not everything. I don't want my professional email address scrubbed on the internet. My personal information? Absolutely. And they make it so easy for me to fill out what I need and then I can get my reports from them where they tell me we're removed you from this place and this place and this place and these ones are in progress. And I know that they're always there in the background, keeping that checking going and making sure that my privacy is protected. So take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for

Delete Me. We have a special offer for the listeners of this show. You can get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to J-O-I-N-D-E-E-M-E dot com slash upgrade-20 and use the promo code upgrade 20 at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to J-O-I-N-D-E-E-T-E-M-E dot com slash upgrade 20 and enter the code upgrade 20 at checkout. One last time, that is join delete me.com slash upgrade 20 and the code upgrade 20. A thanks to delete me for the support of this show and relay. I would expect, Jason, that at this point, we have gone the long

longest anybody has gone, we'll go for when talking about the MacBook Neo without mentioning the price. Yeah, we've not mentioned the price yet. We're restrained like that. As you say in your review, the price is staggering. So the entry price for the MacBook Neo is $599 with a $100 education discount, which is, you would assume the majority of this customer base who they're selling it to would be able to apply for education, $499 for a brand, $1,000.

new MacBook. Yeah, half the price of what the education MacBook Air is. It is you. You said staggering. I would say astounding. It's unprecedented for Apple to sell a product at this price bracket. Yeah, $4.99 Mac Mini, the original, was the lowest price Mac ever. And then the next year it was $5.99.

But famously, that was bring your own display keyboard and mouse. It doesn't count really in the same way, does it? It doesn't. It's a complete computer for $599, $499 in education. And we've, so one of the things I'm proud of us for talking about is, and I latched onto that Digitime story two years ago. Yep. Where they said it's a Chromebook.

Apple's working on a Chromebook killer. And I read, I read that report and I was like, hmm, that doesn't sound like what this is. That sounds like, this sounds like, this sounds like, this sounds like, this. sounds like an A-series processor laptop, which they could probably get away with, I thought, two years ago, that would allow them to enter a new price bracket, which is not the same as being a Chromebook killer. It might threaten Chromebooks. I think it certainly threatens... I think it is going to take a chunk out of that market, but you're right. It's not like, this is our Chromebook. Maybe. And PC laptops, too. And so I'm proud of us for talking about it over the last two years and being excited about it for, what I think is an interesting, but a good reason. This product is exciting because it exists at that price point. And our audience is made up almost entirely, if not entirely, of people for whom this price point is just not relevant, or at least not very relevant, because I assume most of our listeners

have Mac laptops. And until today, they were not $599 Mac laptops. There is a segment of people. Plus there's like, you buy one for your kids, you buy one for schools, you're supporting a school. and you don't have the budget for Macs, so you end up with a cheap PC laptop or you end up with a Chromebook. There's lots of different arguments to be made about what's down here, but I think I would say this.

Broadly, there are people in the market, for whatever reason, socioeconomic, yes, prioritization also, who look at a $1,000 computer and are like, are you kidding? There are people who have never considered buying a new Mac, a new Mac laptop, because they look at a Windows notebook for 599, 550,

and say, why would I spend $1,000 or $800 on a MacBook Air when I could get this 14-inch HP laptop for 550? That is the audience, and the test case was that Walmart M1 MacP? air, right? Which was not a new computer, but it was new-ish. It was new to you and at Walmart in the U.S. that they tested. And like Apple, it's important. I said this on another podcast. I'll throw it in here. My old boss, Jeff Edmund, who was a sales guy at PC World. And when we merged Macroll with PC World, he became my boss. Nice guy. He died a few years ago. Smart. Just good guy. Sales guy. But like a good, good sales guy. And he would talk about sales stuff that I just don't understand at all. You know, you do some sales, Mike.

You understand it more than me. I probably understand it more, yeah. But the thing that that just blew my mind was he said, you must be known to be considered. You must be considered to be bought. That was one of his like mantras that he had. And that's why you advertise. And I learned a lot.

It's like, why does brand advertising happen? It's like, because you can turn your fly-by-night operation into a well-known operation by advertising. And then you're not a mystery brand anymore. And I was thinking about Jeff and what he said last week because there's a whole span of people who never considered. Everybody knows Apple, right? Who never considered Apple.

Because Apple's, their zone of purchase is not, Apple does not enter it. And so Apple is never considered. and Apple will now be considered we'll see how they do we'll see how people react to it Apple did their thing that they do this goes back to Steve Jobs

I love it where they carted out it was a $550 HP Notebook 14 laptop and everybody got this demo it was hilarious oh wow huh put it right next to the Neo on the table and you know they picked it

so of course it's not gonna reflect well this is the one that smoke pulls out of it it's so bad Like it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a bad display. Yeah. With a bad angle of view, it's, it's a lousy webcam. And the whole thing just feels cheap because it is cheap.

And one of the things that, that Apple has done here by insisting, and I mentioned this in the review, by insisting that they're, if they're going to make a product, it's a famous line that came out, um, the last week that people were remembering where jobs said famously 17 years ago that, uh, we don't, uh, we don't. know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk. Apple has figured out how to make a $599 computer that's not a piece of junk. And one of the ways that that will change the market is that people will consider it who never considered a new Apple laptop before. Another way it will change it is that it's going to give some, it raises the bar for the competition. Now you're going to have some PC makers who are down in that price range who look at what

their offering is versus the Apple offering and go, oh man. And they're going to have to up their game and probably eat some margin in order to compete better and put better laptops in that category. Because if the average $500 PC laptop is as lousy as I think it is, and if the average Chromebook is as lousy as I think it is, I'm not saying that this is going to be, you know, it's going to rule in there and kill them all. I'm going to say it's going to be a formidable competitor because it brings that Apple brand promise of a solid, quality product to a market, to an audience that has never really seriously considered it. Yeah. Because it was just too expensive. That's for other people to buy.

I've never, and not like, I don't even, because I want to say, you can over-emphasize, like, I don't have the money to buy it. It's also like, it's not worth it for me to spend more money to buy it, is a lot of it. For a lot of people, because we all care about computers, right? Maybe too much. People who just don't care. They need one. They just don't care about it, but they need one. And so they, and then they look at $1,000 and like, what's the difference between that and this HP laptop for $500? I'll just get this one. Now Apple's down there saying, actually, you could get this. And then they look, if they look at it, if they consider it and take it seriously, some percentage of those people are going to say, oh, this seems much better. I'm going to buy this one instead. So, you know, it is a phone chip that is in this product. It was a chip that was designed for being a phone. And we're, it was a chip that was designed for being a phone. And we're, that comes some decisions that Apple have made along the way. One of those is the only configuration

is do you want 256 gigabytes or 512 gigabytes of storage? They are your two configurations, and then the 512 comes with touch ID, and that's 699. Yeah. That's still a pretty good deal, and I do not have that. You have the base one? I have the base one, so it's just got a lock button on it. It's $599. One of the reasons why I also see the criticism of this product from people who I think just don't understand how phone chips work. Apple choosing

the A18 Pro means it's going to have 8 gigs of RAM. And it means that it and also let's just be clear where do these chips come from? Why is it not this year's iPhone chip? The answer is because Apple's using this year's iPhone chip that's on the new process

at TSMC to sell iPhones. Yeah. These are the chips left over from the iPhone 16 Pro. These are all binned. So they have one less GPU than the iPhone 16 Pro did. These are chips that are kind of free. Yeah. And previously would have been wasted.

At the scale that they are producing iPhones, to the amount of chips they will need for the MacBook Neo, yes, these are essentially free. They're basically wasted, you know? Yeah, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't qualify. And this is why Apple puts A chips in bunches of stuff. This is why Apple puts A chips in displays and stuff.

And you're like, well, that seems like a lot. It's like it's because they're extra. They have to go somewhere. They have to go somewhere. In other, like, because they, because the iPhone volume is so large and they can't ship them all in the iPhone because some of them fail the tests and get binned. So that's what this is. And I think they built the product around that idea that this is going to be a

bin a chip from a previous model iPhone. And if you do that, you pick up all the features. Now, if they revised the MacBook Neo next year, it will presumably get the next A chip, which has 12 gigs of RAM. And I suspect that they will. But you're using the system on a chip. You're using

the configs that are available. I kind of doubt, given the price that Apple is ever going to do a special run of chips just for the MacBook Neo, right? It's going to use whatever is in the bin, basically. I mean, by the numbers we're talking about, it's a miracle

that they do special chips for the Mac. You know, like, when we're looking at the scale of these two businesses. If you think about it, if you think about it, they don't because those chips also power the iPad. Yeah. But even then, it's still like, you know, it's Yeah, but that's your high end,

I mean, that's your high end chip. And that's just how they do it is they've got A's and M's now. And the M's go in the iPad and the Mac, except in the low end for both. And then the A is going in the low end of the iPad and the Mac too. And that's just how it works.

But anyway, those limitations are baked in. It doesn't mean that you can not be critical of those limitations. You can be, but like, they are baked in. This is how you get a phone chip and a Mac is you get the phone configuration as well. And that, honestly, that, we'll talk about performance in a minute because that becomes the big question. Yeah. How does it play? Yeah.

Was that a good idea? So in regards to the price, Stephen and Hackett put together a great list of all of the ways in which the MacBook Neo is different to a MacBook Air. Like all of the many things that were taken out or changed to make, I guess, make this product hit $600 as the entry point. When I was looking through this list, one of the things that was really surprising to me or the thing that really struck it to my mind is what was the starting point? for this computer that led them down the road of being willing to take this much out of a MacBook. Well, and that's, so I talked to, I talked to Apple people about this. Actually, a friend of the show, Colleen Navielli was there. Every time she and I see each other, there's like a moment, we have a little moment of, hey, how's it going? And it's funny because it's very much like she got to know us doing

upgrade. Yeah. And I said, you know, what I asked the question. What, what does it, you know, how do you go through the thought process of what doesn't go in here that's in the MacBook Air and she said, we don't do that. We start at the bottom and then build it up.

And I'll say, realistically, you still have the same number bits that you know you have to put in a laptop. But philosophically, they didn't want to make it seem like they decontented

a MacBook Air. Well, that's just half glass, empty, half glass full. And I'm not criticizing it, but that is the right way to think about the product. It's not like,

how is this worse? It's so no, how is this still good? The reason I would, I will accept that idea, though, is because I think it all starts with the A18 Pro. Sure. And Stephen's list is interesting because you can actually go down that list and check the things. Because they made two sets of choices.

They made the choices that they actually just made when they picked the chip. And then they made the choices when they built the laptop around it. And those are different sets. They're just different sets. The RAM is a choice that they made from the chip. The Thunderbolt is a choice they made by choosing a chip that doesn't support Thunderbolt. Right? Like that stuff is, all of that is based on the chip.

And then there's the stuff that wraps around it. To me, the biggest ones that were missing that don't necessarily have to be missing is Truetone, back click keyboard, the physically clicking trackpad, fast charging. Like, these are things that, those are decisions that they've made. because either, you know, like an iPhone can do these things or an iPad can do these things if it has a keyboard attached to them or whatever. But these are decisions that they made, you know, because I assume this product was, again, I appreciate where the design philosophy, and I'm not saying that they're not saying that,

but you would get to different points and be like, okay, we can either do this or we can do this. And if we do this, this product becomes more expensive. Absolutely. I think it's a lot of, we're going to add this in, does this, if we add this in, what does it cost us? Yeah. Also, a lot of this stuff is stuff, we said this is not an M1 MacBook Air, but a lot of this stuff is stuff that Apple's laptops have done in the past or other Apple products have done. A lot of this is out of the parts bin. And I don't mean that in like a cheap way.

I mean, Apple's got a, one of the ways you make this product cheap is you use stuff that Apple's already built. for something else. You don't do custom design. So that keyboard and trackpad is right out of the first... It's a magic keyboard. It feels like a magic keyboard. If you think back to the early iPad Pro Magic keyboard, it had a magic keyboard and a physically clicking trackpad. The current one, I think, is a haptic. It is. But it didn't used to be. And they used that. And why did they use that?

Probably because they already had it designed. and it was cheaper. It's cheaper to make. And it's not that they already re-engineered the track pad to physically click without the diving board effect where it's hinged on the top. And so it moves much more. And you have to press it harder on the top

to get it to click because it's hinged up there. This is a floating clickable thing. The whole surface is clickable. It's very much like what they did with the iPad. Oh, that's good. It wasn't clear to me with how it clicked. And I was worried that it was like a hinged one. No, it's all just kind of floating.

You can push it down anywhere. And it does all the things, just like the iPad trackpad, does all the things in terms of multi-touch gestures and all of that. And it's not a cheap-o keyboard. It's the magic keyboard. It feels like a magic keyboard. So they took kind of like the iPad magic keyboard stuff and just rolled that in there. The, they didn't backlight it. That saved them on lighting.

And it saved them on an ambient light sensor to trigger the lighting, which is another thing that they omitted. they don't have another sensor with true tone. I think they're doing automatic. It does automatically adjust display brightness. I suspect that there's either another sensor for that that's not at the level of true tone or they're using the camera. Well, that's good.

I was worried that it meant that the screen would never adjust, which I thought will be a bad. No, it does auto adjust. The ambient light sensor that's not there, I think is for the keyboard backlighting. But it does adjust. It's got an auto, because I hate that feature and I had to turn it off.

because in my backyard it was going up and down and up and down. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop. So it does do that. So, yeah, they have all these choices, some of which come from the chip, and some of them are really just like, do we, like MagSafe. Like, they could have engineered this thing with MagSafe, but one, it might have been, I don't know what all the technical limitations are. I get the sense from Apple that, to put two USB ports on this at all,

because remember, no iPhone has two ports, that there was some work that had to be done. Unclear whether there was some backdoor work in the A18 Pro to make it possible for them to make the MacBook Neo. I wouldn't be surprised if they left some bits in the A18 Pro knowing that it would also eventually run on a Mac. But the USB ports are constrained. Only one of them is USB 3.

The other is USB 2. And they have to charge. Now, they did learn their lesson from the 12-inch MacBook, right? which is you can't have a one port design that also is your charging port. That's really bad. So it's two, and you can use either for charging.

The MagSafe decision, obviously, I think it's a price decision, right? Like they either would have had to maybe throw out one of the ports or, you know,

they're going to have to build a MagSafe in there, and then they got to ship a MagSafe cable, and like, would they do that? And like, I think they just said no. And also the M1AR doesn't have it. So I think there's very much like,

we've already got some technology, people who use the M1 Air, and the last generation MacBook Airs didn't have MagSafe, and they were fine. I do think it's a shame. It's a nice feature, so pay for it if you want.

Yeah, yeah, no, I get it. Yeah, I mean, that's it. That's it. You could say that about literally every decision is, yeah, but it's nice. It's a shame that it's not in here. And my answer, I'm sorry to say it. My answer is, is $5.99. Like, something's got to give. Something's got to give if they're going to cut, because this is not,

I would be more accepting of that argument if it was $200 less than the MacSafe. But it's a lot less than the MacBook Air. And some stuff has to give and you want to have some stuff that's left that's nicer about the other laptops. And I do feel like to hit $599, they had to be ruthless with some of this stuff. And again, I like MagSafe. I don't use it all the time. And I used to not have a laptop with MagSafe.

And while I missed it, I got used to charging with USBC. I don't think it is beneath Apple's quality bar, I guess, which is what they're trying to go for here. So we spoke about, you know, and I agree with you, that this product probably came from the sense of what would we do if we were to build a laptop around the A18 Pro chip? Yeah. So let's talk about the A18 Pro chip. In your usage over the last week or so, how does this chip compare to what you have used in other Macs? Well, so I did the benchmark test, which I really already did last year and two years ago. ago, right? Because this was the story

and we didn't know what this product would be but you could guess based on the chips. And the story is the same. It's a much more modern core than the M1. Even though it's only got six CPU cores instead of eight, it is substantially faster than the M1.

It's faster than the M3 at single processor core tests. Which is again, single processor stuff is what we are using for the vast majority of our computing on a daily basis. You're peaking a performance core. in order to do work right now, as opposed to kind of background work.

Multi-core, it's like an M-1, basically. And again, you know, that's because it doesn't have a lot of cores, and that's because it's an iPhone chip, and they don't put, like, in my comparison chart, you'll see M1, M2, M3 all had eight cores, M-4 and M-5 have 10 cores, A18 Pro has six cores. So it's got fewer cores to work with. the cores are good, there aren't as many of them.

And as a result, it's got basically M1 performance in multi-core. But again, if you're somebody who's doing a lot of multi-threaded multi-core work, this is probably not the computer for you. And it will do the work. That's the thing that I want to keep emphasizing here is it will do the work. It's just slower at it. Unless you're using something that's super RAM intensive, where it overwhelms the system because it's only got 8 gigs of RAM,

and it can't page it to disk. and like there are cases. But like with a lot of this stuff, it works. It's just slower because it's a $599 computer. The metal score in Geekbench, which is a, you know, again,

it's a GPU score. I'll say again, the M1 Air had seven GPU cores. The M2,345, I'll have 10 GPU cores on the MacBook Air. I have the M5. MacBook Pro here, but like regardless, you compare that to the five GPU cores in this. What do you think it's going to happen?

Yeah. And the answer is, it actually does about as well as the M1 MacBook Air in GPU, which means, again, can you play games on it? Sure. Are you going to be able to play games at a very high frame rate with high resolution like you can on a M5? No, you cannot because it's not an M5. That said, you know, there's a lot of, you know, a lot of the games that are on Apple's platforms

are kind of iPhone games anyway, and the iPhone is capable of playing games. You're driving a bigger display here. There's going to be issues. But again, I think it is not slower than, well, the way I would put it is it's not the slowest Apple Silicon Mac ever made. It's not, right? Even at the places where it's not as good,

it's faster than the M1 or about the same. I mean, it's slightly faster than the M1. And at the single peak, single core, it's more like M3.5. So pretty good, I would say, and I just want to emphasize this again, the most important thing about the Neo other than the price is that it's a Mac,

and you just use it like a Mac. It's not a half a Mac. It's not like a fake Mac. It's not a Mac where like some apps don't run. Or there are things that the little thing pops up and says, I'm sorry, this is a MacBook Neo. What are you doing? You can't do this. I appreciate that Apple's like

If you're if you're doing Final Cut Pro or Logic You should probably use a MacBook error Or a MacBook Pro They realize oh yeah Or the other one that's even more expensive That said I have edited podcasts and videos For years on systems

Way slower than the MacBook Neo Can I run Logic and edit a podcast Which I grant you is not making a song With 50 different music tracks It's a- But logic is a heavy app Even if you're just using it simply Yeah

Well, I was able to use Logic on an M1 and on latter-day Intel machines, and it worked, and it works on this too. And that's my point is, should you buy this for Logic? No. Can it run Logic to edit a podcast? Yeah. Is the export going to be slower in the encode? Sure, because it's a slow processor. Would you maybe need to keep it plugged in when you're exporting a Final Cut Pro video? Possibly, right? Maybe, maybe. But this is, and I just want to implement it. I emphasize this point. I think it's a thing that Apple's worried about, too, which is why when they did their launch video, they sort of showed it being a Mac and their marketing material show it being a Mac is it would be very easy, I think, for some people to make the assumption that because it's $599, it's not really a Mac. It doesn't do all the things a Mac does. It's like a partial Mac. It's like a broken Mac. And it's not, it's just a Mac. If you went to this, if you were using an M1 error and you switch to this, it would not, it would, it would, feel more modern because the design and the screen would feel kind of nicer, and it would be a little faster. But M1Ares are perfectly capable of doing all the Mac things, and so is this. It just,

it is. Is it cutting edge and state of the art? It's not. There are more expensive Macs that will give you more of everything. But I think it's important. The reason this product exists is because Apple, because of Apple Silicon, because of what the pace of innovation and increase in speed of the A chips and the cores that Apple's building have led to a point where an iPhone chip reached the point where Apple could ship a perfectly fine, usable Mac. And that's why they can go down below the MacBook Air for the first time. So it used to be the MacBook Air was the bare minimum, right? M1 MacBook Air came out and it was amazing, but it was very much like,

yeah, but this is it. Like this is, this is as low as you can go. And it's been that way for a while. But with the M series, as we go one, two, three, four, five, the M is so, the M series is so capable that you start to have these reviews, where it's like an M4 air and now an M5 air. And you're like, and just like with the iPad, you're like, yeah, I mean, it's super capable. They sell a MacBook Pro that runs the base M5 and ran the base.

Why did they do that? It's because there's so much headroom. They're so capable. And by doing that, they can slide under with an iPhone chip and make a completely capable Mac, which is what the Neo is. I just, I want to emphasize that. It is not a pro Mac at all. It is a consumer Mac. It is the slowest Mac that they sell.

But it will do all the Mac things, right? It's not going to, it's not a baby Mac that runs baby software. It is a Mac, period. That's all. So Macs also have webcams and speakers. They do. What is your experience with these two parts of the MacBook Neo? New sidefiring speakers on the sort of front side edge.

So like kind of where you do your wrist rests, like if you move your wrists out, those little sides there in the front. Not in the front of the laptop, in the side, but all the way toward the front. Hard to explain where they are. They sound pretty good. They're laptop speakers. But they sound pretty good. I think it's one of those cases where Apple built new speakers for this. Apple wants the speakers to sound good, but on a budget, they do sound pretty good, I would say.

So I was impressed. I think they sound fine. They are, you know, they're laptop speakers. They're not going to be, they're not going to blow you away. But could I put on a movie and crank up the sound and have it sound fine? Yes. I could. The webcam is the same old webcam that we're all used to from back before Apple made a better webcam.

Yeah. It's a 1080P webcam. It's fine. It's not fancy 12 megapixel center stage webcam. It is Apple's classic, I would say almost classic MacBook Air webcam, which is okay. So to wrap up this part, we actually have some awesome. upgrade, which we're going to do next, instead of at the end of the episode today, because people have MacBook Neo questions. The thing that I was thinking about when reading your

review, and again, in talking about it today, of you now, is the pathway that has led us to now where Mac user acquisition seems to be an important part of Apple's overall strategy. and I just wonder if this is the path they thought they were going to be going down, say, five, ten years ago, that Mac user acquisition would be like a product that you would design for. And I feel like this is not where they thought they were going to be, I feel like. No, I think you're right. I think this is, I mean, there's much more to be said about this over time. but I think the Apple of five or ten years ago, 10 years ago,

really thought that the iPad was going to be the thing that allowed them to break through. And they don't think that anymore. No. I think this product exists. I don't think this product was done. And a few people I heard talking about this at the event. I don't think this product was done to rebuke Apple's iPad strategy

in education and low-end, you know, computing strategy. I think, though, that it was formulated in part by an understanding that the iPad did not satisfy. You get a low-end iPad with a keyboard because they want a keyboard, especially in education. And, like, you're already, I mean, it's, it's already at $500 or $600, at least. I think they now understand all the limitations of trying to offer the iPad in those kinds of environments into those kinds of users. And I think that knowledge informed the decision to walk down this path. And it's everything we've been saying this decade in the Apple Silicon era for the Mac about how Apple Silicon has completely refreshed how we think of the Mac.

And I think how Apple thinks of the Mac. Because they came to that moment where they realigned the subsystem of all the OSs. And they put Apple chips in Macs. and they have been going down that path now where the Mac feels like an integrated part of their overall product strategy in a way it wasn't in the 2010s when it felt like a legacy product.

And this is a part of that. And one of the fruits of that is they're able to reach a different audience with it. But I think they also do it knowing how the market responded to the iPad, which they thought, is this a thing? And it is a thing in certain ways, but not, I think, the thing.

that they thought it would be. I don't think the iPad is what they thought, which is, oh, education's going to love it. It's the future of computers. We don't need computers anymore. We can have the iPad. And it turns out it's the year 2026 and people want to buy laptops. Fair enough. Fair enough. They can play that game too. So they will.

One last thing before we move on to Ask Upgrade. We mentioned the USBC ports earlier. I wanted to mention the thing that they did do. So what's annoying about this is that there are two ports that are not labeled differently. but they behave differently.

Yeah. The one furthest back is USB 3 and the one forward of that is USB 2. So what Apple did is they wrote software in MacOS. If you plug in a drive that's capable of USB 3 to the USB 2 port, you get a notification and notification center that says use other port for faster connection.

A faster connection is possible. with the other USB port on this Mac. They build it. It's good. It's a weird thing to have, but it's good that they did it. The classic thing would be to do nothing, right? But you will not plug in a thing

that's capable of more to a port that's not and not get warned, which is cool. And if you try to do a display, display is out, which is only 4K-60, but if you try to plug the bad port, the weak port, of the two ports, it will say

a little notification pops up. It says, use other port for display. To use an external display connect to the other USB port on this Mac. So it is a limitation, but I really appreciate that they sweated that detail to say, we need to let, wouldn't it be nice if we let people know that

if they're plugging in a drive to transfer files, that they plugged it into the slow port and not the faster port. And so they're looking at that device and saying this device is capable of more. And I like that. I think it's a touch. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Century. There are plenty of AI tools out there that will help you write code, but Century SEA is built to help you fix it when it breaks. The

difference is context. SEA isn't just guessing based on syntax. It is analyzing your actual century data, your stack traces, logs, and failure patterns. Because it has this full context, it can spot buggy code in review and help prevent issues before they happen, identify the root cause of production errors, and it can even draft a fix and hand the work off to an agent like cursor to open a pool request for you. I have friends that are developers. I've known developers for a long time, and have been very connected to the development community. One of the things that I've understood over this time period is that what people who make apps love the most is actually making new features and making their apps better for their users, and it's the most engaging work that

you can do. What you don't want to be doing is to be stuck inside of an app, trying to to fix a problem. And now, where so many developers are turning to AI tools, it can add new issues. And being able to have your issues and any AI issues all fixed by Century's SEA tools, you will be able to get back to doing the thing that you love the most, which is making your apps better with new, fun, exciting features. Cia turns Century into a complete loop. You have your traces, errors, logs and replays to see the problem and now AI to help solve it. Join the millions of developers at companies like Claude and Disney Plus who use Century to move faster. Try it free at S-E-N-T-R-Y.O and tell them that we sent you.

They have a free dev plan and listeners of this show can use the code Upgrade 26 to get $100 in Century credits. Our thanks to Century for their support of this show and relay. All right, let's do some MacBook Neo Ask Upgrade. Yeah, let's go. All right, Jake Gross wrote in and said, should the MacBook Neo be upgraded yearly as part of the new spring iPhone event with the latest iPhone chip and new colors?

Yearly, yes. Part of an iPhone event, maybe, maybe not. Not necessary. I would love for them to do it every year. And as we saw this year, it will not be the latest iPhone chip. It will be probably the year ago iPhone chip, which is fine. And new colors, yes, please, that would be a lot of fun. So I concur in part with Jake's

suggestion. I don't know if you're launching a whole bunch of iPhones, I don't know if that's the time to launch a new Mac. You might use another event or experience or press release to announce an update to the Neo. And I think it's not going to use the current iPhone chip. But I do like otherwise this idea. I feel like Apple now coming out of the Intel era where things kind of updated randomly. They know when the chips are coming out. They know what they're capable of. They know what computers it's going in. And I think they like the idea, like a car model year. You update the design every five or six years. And then every year or so, you just put in the new thing and keep it rolling. I think that's what they're doing. Yeah, I wrote about this on my blog this

past weekend. I think that what we saw last week, the Apple experience, like that is the model for the spring event that we will get each year that it actually won't be an event with a keynote? Because we've been talking about this, right? Like, how do you show off the regular iPhone and all of the best possible features were in the year before? Already shown. Yeah. One of the ways you do it is you wrap up a bunch of stuff together, give people a reason to come out and see you. And you've got three, four different items.

You've done the My Press Release. and you do these simultaneous events around the world. And really, it was the year before or the year before that when they had the London and New York event was maybe a test bed. And then this is like experience. This is what they would do where they'll show the iPhones off every year. They haven't even said it. Like, it was a warehouse, a former warehouse in Lower Manhattan in Chelsea.

By the High Line. And so it was fun because they're like, it's just this giant space. And they made a hands-on area and they made a little video area. And John Ternis came out and did an intro. And then they played the video. And it was funny because they, we got to see it before the world. They dropped it all like 15 minutes later. It was super weird for us.

So I like texted you and Steven. I was like MacBook Neo. But like the press release and the press list went up way before the product pages went up. It was really interesting. I think they wanted to. They wanted to hold it. They wanted it to break at the experience, basically, and then go wide. And that was kind of fun, too.

So, yeah. Darren says, which device do you think the MacBook Neo will cannibalize more? The iPad of a keyboard or the MacBook Air? I think it's going to cannibalize $500 PCs the most. But I would say the iPad with the keyboard. Yeah, I think so. I think MacBook Air, you're going to get a MacBook Air for the reason you get a MacBook Air. I think this is going to do.

think I'd pick a chunk out with the base iPad than anything else. MacBook Air will get some because right now the MacBook Air is the base or it was the base. Now it will be the better of the good, better best best place to be, in my opinion, or the better place to be. It's the middle. So many people will come into an Apple store saying, oh, it starts at $5.99 and then they'll look at the MacBook Air and they'll be like, oh, let's just get that. And that's good.

Like Apple wants that to be the case. Having something below it sort of, in fact, emphasizes the virtues of the MacBook Air. I think so it will lose some, but like I think of the iPad with a keyboard will lose more. However, I would say Apple is hoping that mostly it won't cannibalize and it's going to create new Mac buyers. So I guess the device that it will cannibalize the most will be that M1 MacBook Air that's no longer on sale at Walmart. But this is a Walmart MacBook Air that's instead available everywhere worldwide, which is also, you know, that was a test in the U.S. basically. So this is going to be exciting. but in terms of Apple products, I'd say that, you know, let's just do an iPad with a keyboard thing, especially in education.

I think a lot of that's going to get blown away. Paul says, is Neo or could Neo be a new brand label for Apple to designate to their economy tier? Imagine Apple announcing an iPhone Neo, Apple Watch Neo, Humboldt Neo, or even an iPad Neo. Let's see how it goes. I mean, SE is a dumb name. and we've said adjective list iPad is actually not great. And E? Why is it E?

Right? The iPhone. Why is it E? None of the other phones have a letter. Have a letter. Yeah. It could be iPhone, you know, if it all depends on how they want to roll out products. If they're going to roll out the iPhone E every year, it could just as easily be an iPhone 18 Neo as an iPhone 18.

Right? I'll tell you how we'll know one way or enough. or we'll see the result is, does this computer fly off the shelf? If it does, expect this brand name to be pushed out to other places where they want to sell to that exact custom rights. Of course. Yeah, that's a great example. Also, iPhone, I know iPhone 17 doesn't have a tag, but 17 is the tag in some ways. And then there's a modifier on it. So 17E, you know, it's fine. 17E works. It is, you know, whatever, economy, efficiency, it's fine. But, but I think, let's see how it sits with the public, how sales go. I think

what we've seen, here's what I'll say. I think what we've seen is once Apple gets a word, if they like it, they'll just use it everywhere, right? Max and Ultra and Pro and like these words go everywhere. So if this is the first use of Neo,

it is, I guess you could say, a neologism. Whoa. Whoa. Dad jokes about words. I was in the Wall Street Journal. Anyway,

they could use it. Don't you know? They could use it if they, if they want, if they like. It's now in their, it's now in their toolbox. It's now in their style guide. And so like, if they're liking it, they will, they'll cart it out in other places. I have no doubt. Airports Neo.

Oh, some colors. Let's go. Yeah. Peter says, with the introduction of the Neo, essentially the same size and weight as the current MacBook Air, do you think this creates an opportunity for Apple to redesign the air to be small? and lighter. The lower price point of the Neo could also make room for them to charge a premium for a smaller size like they did with the 12-inch MacBook, but Apple Silicon would actually make it good. What are your thoughts? I don't think it will because I think the MacBook Air is

the mainstream laptop that they sell the most of and that they like, and it doesn't need to be smaller. And like I said before, I think smaller displays at this point, it's hard to imagine Apple doing a smaller display than 13 because of the way the OS is gone. I think it would be really cramped at this point. I would love them to do another laptop that was designed to be tiny and was based on that concept that they had for the retina MacBook. But the MacBook Air is not it. Yeah, I also have some questions too about like what about another laptop then? You know, like if they're not going to change the MacBook air, could they do the MacBook and that one sits in the middle? I don't know if they would sell any of them. But I would love to see it as a former

11-inch MacBook Air user. I would love to see it. Because that redna, that redna, 12 inch retina MacBook was glorious, you know, with an asterisk. And the asterisk was like, but the keyboard was bad and the chip was underpowered. But like size wise and it only had one port. But if you could give me an Apple Silicon version of that with a, with a magic keyboard and two ports, it would be awesome. I just don't know if there's a product, if there's like, if Apple, if Apple feels like, Like that might be just a 100% cannibalistic product. And do they really need to make it?

I'm not sure they do. I don't want there to be that many laptops in the lineup personally. Also a good point. I think we may already be at too many laptops in the lineup, especially when there are different sizes of the air and the pro. I think that you're getting towards too many computers. if you now have like a fourth brand. Too many computers.

And that is overall then too many Macs anyway. Right? Like there are lots of Macs available for you, which is fantastic. But just like if we add another laptop in and we do it, have we got too many going on now? I think that's,

I think it's possible that we do. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by one password. It's easy to assume that being small means flying under the radar. But the reality is that small businesses are being targeted more and more by bad actors. Cybercriminals know that lean teams often lack the resources to prevent or respond to a breach. Teams of any size can be a target, but the good news is even the

smallest teams can foil cybercrime. One password provides simple security to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit weak passwords. They provide centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure. It is a simple turnkey solution that can be rolled out in hours whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. For small teams, responsibility for security often defaults to one employee who's already juggling other business functions. The most effective security solutions will need to be intuitive and user-friendly so that everyone at your company can and will use it. As small businesses grow, they may add tools or roles without updating access controls. This results in security risks that compound

over time. Prepare for that now with security that can meet you where you are, even as your security needs change. One password to enterprise password manager helps your company eliminate security headaches and improve security by identifying weak and compromised passwords and replacing them with strong, unique credentials, letting you securely store and share developer secrets and other sensitive data. Simple automated workflows mean your team can enforce security compliance and prevent breaches, potentially preventing millions of dollars in losses. It's the single most important investment you can make in your company's security and the most impactful investment too. One of the things that I really value about using

one password in my team environments is that as they grow and I bring in more people, even people who may not be as technically minded as I am, I can feel confident in the security of my business because I want them to use one password and they do. It means that the passwords that they create are going to be strong and they're not going to be writing stuff down where they don't need it. I really value that I don't have to worry about that because everybody's using one. OnePassword. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. Find out more at OnePassword.com slash upgrade and start securing every login.

That is OnePassword.com slash upgrade. Go there now and check it out. Our thanks to OnePassword for their support of this show and all of Relay. Jason Snow. Mr. Snow. The Mac, Mr. Hurley. The MacBook Pro got added, got an M5 Pro and M5 Max option added to it finally. The MacBook Pro got an M5

and then we don't worry about the other ones. We didn't worry. Now that we've got them. And I do have an M5 Max MacBook Pro or no M5 Pro, MacBook Pro here, which I've spent very little time with because I've been working on the MacBook Neo

and prioritizing that. I did run some tests. It's what you, it's kind of what you'd expect. You know, single core is basically the same because it's an M5 core as other M5s. The multi-core is,

incredibly impressive. I'm sure the max is even more impressive, but the multi-core test, because it's got like 18 processor cores, it's, uh, it's very, uh, impressive at multi-core. And in terms of metal, uh, you know, or in Cinnibench, like basically the maxes have so many GPUs that the maxes are always going to be better than the pros. But the pro is, uh, very impressive. It's, you know, it is what you would expect, which is it's got a, a lot of fast cores. And that's, uh, you know, That's what you're paying for. Is that a new brand name? I got a love of them.

All right. I need you to help me. Anyway, our apologies to Tracy Chapman. It's a fast core. Yeah. I need your help because Apple have renamed some of the cores. Let's do it. Yeah.

So the most powerful core in the M5 Pro Max is called the Supercore. In the M5 period. It's called the Supercore. Great point. All M5s retroactively back in time. That most powerful core is now called the super core. It used to be called the performance cards. Forget about it.

That's super core. And if I'm understanding it correctly, the efficiency core is now core performance core? No. In the M5? No. That's efficiency core. The efficiency core in the M5 is the efficiency core.

Okay. Okay. So traditionally in Apple Silicon, Apple has had two kinds of cores. a more powerful core and a core that uses less power because what happens is you can just kind of bubble things back on the less powerful core, which is more efficient with power.

And then when you need to peak, then you crank up the performance scores or those higher level cores will say. And that's when you get peak performance. And it uses more power. But that's how they stay energy efficient, is they use more power. Now, they branded these early on performance and efficiency cores.

and over the years I've gotten the sense whenever I talk to the chip people there when they roll out a new chip that they feel a little frustrated by the choice of name of efficiency because they will often say in briefings they'll be like

you know it's pretty powerful on its own it's not you know it's not just about efficiency the efficiency core is very powerful and I got the sense that they were just frustrated about it so that came to a head obviously because now they've changed it so the M5 base has now

supercores we're calling them. That's the high level one. That's the peak performance one. And then the lower level one is efficiency. And they're still calling it that. That's the efficiency core. So that's in just the M5. Yeah. They didn't use that design for the M5 Pro and the M5

max. Instead, they have a new lower level core design in the M5 pro and the M5 max. And they don't want to call it efficiency. So they renamed that super powerful core as the super core. But they didn't want to keep calling that lower core efficiency. And now with the pro and the max chips, it's a new core design. Now is the time, everybody, to give it a new name.

Now, my understanding is that this is based on, it's actually based on the super core design. These are not, they're designed to be efficient. They're designed to be part of. multi-threaded tasks. They're designed to not use power, but they are a new design that I think is based not on an evolution of the old efficiency cores, but based on these supercores. So instead of going from efficiency core upwards to this new performance core, it's going from the new supercore downwards to create the new performance core. Yeah. So they seem to have, they seem to have built a variant of what they're using as the super core that is more capable

of doing lower power work in multi-threaded operation. At least that's what they say. I'm not a, you know, I haven't seen the chip design and I wouldn't understand it if I saw it. But that's what they say. So the M5, because they've gone back and so the MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro, the Vision Pro, they've got the M5. They now have super core and efficiency core. And efficient core. But on the pro and the Macs, it's different because they've got this. new core type. This is all okay. Hold on. I want to just be clear about this. This is all okay. There's a new design for the lower level chip on the pro and max that is more powerful. And they're like, we don't want to call it efficiency core because that suggests that this is like orthopedic

hardware that you wear it and it's uncomfortable, but it's good for you. Right. And they're like, no, no, no, this is a great chip because it's true. Like the the historic efficiency cores are pretty good. gotten a lot more powerful over time. It's one of the reasons that Apple Silicon Max feel so powerful is that even when they're not peaking the performance scores or now the Super Corps, they still do a good job. So they're like, we're not going to call it that. All of this I'm fine with. All of this I'm fine with. Rebranding the performance course of SuperCores is a little weird. It's marketing. It's even more obviously marketing now. Super. They're super. Here's the thing that he did, though, that is maddening to me.

which is they renamed the low level, the lower of the two, in the pro and the max M5s, to performance core. A word that moments before meant the higher level of the two until they renamed the higher level of the two to super, thereby making performance disappear and making it, I guess, in their mind, available as a way to reasonably describe the lower tier, even though it's meant the higher tier up to now.

Just to confirm, by lower, you mean what is essentially middle, because the lowest tier is still efficiency. On the chip. I don't want to talk about it as a product line. All these chips have two sets of course. The ones that are powerful and the ones that are more efficient. And they used to be performance and efficiency, but in the M5 Max and Pro, they're not that anymore.

Now they're super and performance. And it gets across the idea that we used to have what you thought there was no letter above A. We used to have the A cores and the B cores. But now we've got this impossible level letter above A and then A, which is just weird. I don't know why they did this. I don't know why they didn't come up with another name for that core other than just reusing performance. Because performance on the M5 Pro and Max doesn't mean what it meant on all previous generations. it means something different.

It's very confusing. But anyway, that's basically what they did. What it means is every generation of chip, and sometimes within the different variations of chips, Apple changes some aspect of it. They don't upgrade everything every time. They upgrade parts of it. And it seems like the thing they did on the M5 Pro and Max is upgrade that lower level set of chips or set of cores to be better. And they renamed it as a part of that.

But to be better, which means that it probably in multi-threaded performance, based on my test, is really good. That's great. And it's still got a long battery life. That's awesome. It just causes a mismatch with everything we used to say. Yeah. And I find that very confusing. But that's why they did it. So I can get this right in my head. The actual new thing is the performance course.

Because Supercore, you know, like I know that they've got the fusion architecture and did it like this. Supercore was introduced in the M5, as it turns out, retroactively. And so these just have lots of supercores that were already the M5 core, right? In some ways, that defines the product is the CPU core for that generation. So the top level CPU core for the M5 is the super core.

It has always been the super core. We have always been at war with the super core. So, okay. But the lower level cores in the M5 aren't in the M5 Pro and Max. They got replaced by a new one that's better. And they're calling it a confusing name,

but that's the thing to know about it is that it's better at overall performance, right? And that and that shows up in the benchmarks. So it is possible that say in the M6 we may see M6 chip would have super and efficiency. And then M6 Pro and M6 Max would have super and performance. I think the M6 is going to have super and performance. Yeah, they're going to get rid of efficiency. I think they will roll, my guess is they will roll this core design into the low end chips. next year.

They really should have come up of a different word. They needed a different word. They came up with one new word. Why not come up with two new words? Two new words. Solve all of this because this is so much more complicated than it used to be.

Or just wait and do it all at once. Right? Like wait for the M6 and then call it Super and Performance or whatever, right? Like bringing it halfway through and then retroactively renaming something. They didn't want to do that though. They didn't want to do that because they wanted to launch

these new chips with not calling those awesome cores as, anyway, whatever. Last thing to touch on today, we've gone so long. We had so much to say about the MacBook Neo, is there were new displays. The studio display,

it got a new center stage camera and Thunderball 5. A better webcam, because the old webcam wasn't very good. Support for Thunderball 5, although you can obviously use older. It goes back to, you can be drive it with basically everything that drove the old ones,

because it's basically no different and also for no change in price. And I'm going to do this really quick because we are running out of time. Why does this product exist? Lots of podcast time already has been spent on like, why would you buy this? And the answer is,

why do iPhone cases from Apple exist? Yeah. The studio display exists because it's an Apple product. It fits in with all the other Apple products. And there is a class of buyer who just wants the Apple display. And they don't care about the price. They don't want to go shopping.

They don't want to buy like a off-brand whatever and see if it's any good. They're just going to buy the Apple thing. And yeah, they're going to spend $3, $500 or $500 more or maybe get less out of it. It's totally true. Savvy shoppers, I would argue,

will probably not buy this. Yeah. But that's not why it's there. It's there because it allows Apple to have a display and say, would you like to buy a display with your Mac Studio? it's $5099

and some people will be like, I guess, and they'll buy it. But it is increasingly not a smart thing to buy unless you really just value the simplicity of having an Apple product on your desk. And they replace the pro display XDR

with the studio display XDR. It is still a 5K display. It's 27 inches, the same as the studio display. But it has a mini LED 120 hertz refresh rate of adapter sync display, 1,000 nits of SDR brightness, 2,000 nits peak brightness, color grading presets. It also gets the center stage camera and Thunderbolt 5.

This has a six speaker sound system. The camera and speaker are new to the high end display because the pro display XDR had neither. And there's a stand included, and it's $3,300, basically. Yeah, it's very expensive. And the people who are fans of the larger display of the Pro Display XDR will be sad because this is a 27 inch 5K.

It's amazing. I did see it. It's beautiful. Right. It's gorgeous. If you want a, I mean, it's a pro display. People will buy them. You may even buy one. I have bought one. You know, it's not for you, but it will be a beautiful display. Well, you know why it's not for me because I'll be plugging an M2 MacBook air in it. So I only get 60 hertz refresh rate, but it's because I bought this now because I am planning to buy the MacBook Pro later on this year.

Sure, sure. Anyway, it's gorgeous, it's very expensive. It's really designed as a pro-level product. In fact, even at the experience, they had it next to two regular studio displays rather than having like three studio display XDRs. Because I think even Apple was like, it's probably not going to buy three of them.

You probably buy one and then have two regular ones. Anyway, it looks great. It really did look great. It's gorgeous. The Thunder Bowl 5 thing, one of the things that they added is it's two Thunderbolt ports on the back now. So you can, if you have two of these,

you can daisy chain them. You don't have to, like, run them both out of a Thunderbolt Hub or a computer. They will run on a chain so you can have, like, they had three all running across, interconnected with a single cable to the laptop that was driving it. That's pretty sweet. pretty nice. But again, Apple's displays, look, that sort of display XER may be the best display you can get for that price in that configuration. I wouldn't be surprised. That was that,

that, you know, is what they do with displays. I would just say that Apple's game with displays is not, for anybody who's like, but there are other options out there. First, I would say there weren't other options out there before Apple started shipping displays. So I'm glad Apple is shipping displays, because it's almost like it stokes the market and makes everybody like, ah, we can undercut Apple now. And yeah, if you're a savvy shopper, there are better options than these.

But that's often true with Apple products, right? Like, especially accessories, is you can get an iPhone case way cheaper if it's not from Apple. But Apple makes iPhone cases because it's really easy to just buy a case when you order it online or go into the Apple store.

And that's where the studio display is at this point. Also, I will just very quickly mention that tilt adjustable, or the height adjustable stand is gorgeous. I think it's over-engineered. I think that's why it costs too much money. And I'm just going to do my standard statement here,

which is every iMac and display Apple cells should be height adjustable. Yes, it should be. And it should not be an extra $300 option to make it height-adjustable. It's bad ergonomics. Egonomics is part of accessibility. Shame on them.

Find a way to make a height-adjustable display that doesn't, or a high-adjustable option that doesn't cost $300 and then ship it as the default. because it's really nice, but I think it's over-engineered and that's why it costs what it costs. Yeah, anyway.

I'll talk about mine when it comes in. I'm excited about it. Can't wait. If you'd like to send us in your feedback, follow-up and questions, please go to Upgradefeedback.com. I'd like to thank our members to support us with UpgradePlus.

Go to GetUpgradeplus.com and you can sign up and support the show and get longer ad-free episodes every week. You can find us on YouTube by searching for Upgradable. podcast. If you'd like to see how the Challenger and Champion banners have changed, you can see that on YouTube. Thank you to our sponsors to support it this week's episode. That is Delete Me, Claude, One Password, and Century. And thank you so much for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snow. Goodbye, Mike Early.