Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of phone chips that actually can power your computers. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay's here. Hey buddy, what's up? We have a lot to get to today, but mostly we're going to talk about the MacBook Neo. Like, we should just lay that out up top. There's a lot of news. We have Xbox stuff to talk about. We have a bunch of other Apple stuff to talk about. Brendan Carr is still a dummy. We got a lot to do. But all I care about right now is the MacBook Neo.
It should be said both David and I purchased MacBook Neos for the purpose of the podcast because we just need an excuse to buy MacBook Neos.
There was no reason for me to buy. I literally two days ago was sitting on my computer, sitting like at our dining room table, shopping for a MacBook Neo on my M4 MacBook Air, and I had this moment of being like, what on earth am I doing here? So, the story we both told ourselves today is that we're doing this A, for the Vergecast. And B, I'm going to give this computer to my wife. She came home for lunch today and I showed her the computer. I was like, 'This is your new computer.' And she could not have been less enthusiastic.
Yeah, that's right. Just the most whatever possible response to this new computer. I tried to do that with the Studio XR. I was like, 'I'll buy myself this.' And I was like, 'Becky, in your office, you'll have two monitors. I'll give you my old one.' And she was like, 'I don't need that.' And there you can't get over that wall. Like, there's nothing to be said.
By the way, shout out to—I won't say the person or the Apple store that I went to—but I went to the Apple store to buy a MacBook Neo. Again, because I convinced myself if I spoke about the MacBook Neo on the Vergecast without physically holding one, the audience wouldn't think I had any credibility. This is how I worked my way into this purchase. So, I go to the store and I'm buying the laptop, and the person at the store recognizes me, and I was like, I'm this close to buying an XDR. Like, I was staring at it. He's like, 'Do you want me to sell it to you?' And I was like, 'The second it goes on sale for $1, I'm going to buy this thing.' And I started joking, $32.98, like, hit me. And he's like, 'I'll get you a dollar off.' And I thought about it.
He's like, 'Do you want me to go get a manager to get you off?' And I thought about it, and then I was like, 'What I have foolishly chosen to sell is our stupid ethics policy, and I can't take your $1.' And I Charlie Brown my way out of that store.
So, this suggests that if you try hard enough, you can get any Apple product for $1 less than the retail price.
It does seem like there's some pricing flexibility at the Apple store.
Yeah. Also, shout out to the person and Vergecast fan that I ran into at the Apple store this morning who was very excited to talk about the Vergecast and the Neo and is very excited that we're going to be talking about the Neo on the Vergecast. Shouts to you. You know who you are. That's where David and I get recognized. Not on the street.
In the Apple store. In the Apple store and at CES. It's great times for both of us.
It's great. Before we start with Neo, can I start with just a very big nerd update?
So, last week I spoke about the Kaleidoscape, the very expensive streamer in my house. There were some comments on our Instagram that are like, 'It feels like we're subscribing just for Nilay to live his extravagant lifestyle.' And I just want to point out it's a review unit. I did not spend $13,000 of our subscribers' money on high bit rate streaming. Although I would. So, I just want to lay that out. The reality is I did not do that, but if I had the opportunity, I might. You know, I think we can say again, our ethics policy requires that when we hit the point that your subscription money is only funding Nilay's luxurious lifestyle, we'll tell you. You know what I mean? We'll come on this podcast and be like, 'Listen, we're good from now on if you subscribe to The Verge. It's boat money.'
And yeah, and we'll do that from the boat. It'll be great. We're not there yet.
So, it's a review unit. Just want to lay that out there. We're going to send it back, the whole thing. That's the ethics policy. And the second piece, and I just want to shout out to all of our people out there. The number of people who reacted to that segment by just saying out loud, 'This is why I torrent Blu-rays,' is off the charts. Like, the number of people are like, 'You and your dumb legal streamer caring about high quality, you can just get the torrents for free.' And then there was an argument, a pretty good argument, I think both on our Instagram comments and on the YouTube Shorts comments of all places, about the relative extremely minor bit rate differences between Kaleidoscape and Blu-rays. And the best part of this, in this conversation that was kicked off by people being like, 'This is why I steal the movies,' was a deep complaint that Disney, in particular, Disney cheaps out when it encodes its movies for Blu-ray. And they insist on putting all of the movie onto one Blu-ray regardless of how long the movies are.
So, like, Avengers: Endgame is three hours, but they fit it onto a single Blu-ray.
They compress it however much they need to.
However much they need to. So, in this one case, the $13,000 Kaleidoscape is better because Kaleidoscape doesn't have to care about file sizes when they re-encode from the source. And it was like in this extremely heated debate about, like, 'I stream the movies. Why would you pay for this? This is stupid. You can get torrents.' There are these people who are like, 'Yeah, but for Disney ones, you have to pay.'
This is like when you were like, 'Everybody needs—what was it? Sony Bravia Core just to watch Spider-Man.'
Exactly. Right. Anyway, shout out to all the people. That is exactly what I want from the Verge community is that argument. It's very good.
Can I ask a really stupid question? If you hypothetically—and this is not legal advice—if you torrent a Blu-ray, will it look as good as a Blu-ray?
It depends on what you torrent.
Well, sure, but like in theory, can you rip a Blu-ray and have a digital file that will play back looking as good as a Blu-ray?
Yeah, you can torrent a bit-for-bit Blu-ray. You're going to end up with some weirdness. They call them remuxes.
I'm sure the people in the comments will explain all this to David, but you can get a bit-for-bit copy of a Blu-ray. The problem then is where are you going to play it back, right? And like, how are you going to play it back and who is going to play the Blu-ray? Or, you know, if you're going to stream it off your NAS to an app like Plex or Infuse on Apple TV, will the Apple TV play back uncompressed Atmos or will that get re-encoded into 5.1, which is basically what happens right now. So, you just end up with some like, 'I have got this huge file and I need to play it back somewhere,' but you can get—and the problem with the Blu-ray is Blu-rays have like menus and extra scenes and like you have no navigation for that. Like, the code to run the Blu-ray menu doesn't run anywhere, right? You've just got a bunch of video files. So, there's some weirdness there, but I mean, this is what people are doing.
I love it. I was just very happy that we got from 'Nilay is an idiot who's spending extravagantly' to 'this is why I steal the Blu-rays' to 'I'm very mad at how Disney encodes its Blu-rays.' Like, basically in five comments.
It's pretty good. Yeah. I couldn't be happier with our community.
There is a real like piracy is back culture thing happening that we should probably dig into some other time. Like, there was such a long run of like moral conflict over downloading media. And I feel like there is no longer moral conflict over downloading media.
I think a lot of people would walk up to David Ellison, look him dead in the eye, and be like, 'I will steal every movie that you make using Warner Brothers Discovery.'
It's just going to happen. And we'll come back around. Warner Brothers is going to make an appearance during the lightning round, I believe, because you're back.
And whenever you're here, we have to talk about Warner and Fair Use for the rest of my life, apparently. Thank you, David Ellison.
But yeah, we should get to the MacBook Neo because the computer is out. Our review is out. Antonio Di Benedetto reviewed it for us. The reaction to this thing, I would say, has been pretty universally like rapturous. This computer appears to have accomplished exactly the thing Apple intended it to accomplish and maybe even more so. Like, have you been as surprised by the positivity around this thing as I have?
Not really. I think what I'm more intrigued by is the positivity around the sense that Apple is having a good time for the first time in years. Like, when you open the box for the Neo, it has the little tab that says hello on it and that like the classic Mac font. Like, Apple has not been playful in a long time. Like, truly has not. Their TikTok account is bananas. Like, literally pictures of bananas, right? Do you see the TikTok they made of just a lime doing a FaceTime call?
I mean, it's just like nonsensical avant-garde weirdo TikToks that they're making. They started another new Instagram account that, you know, it's just more branded content, but there's just a playfulness to Apple's vibe around the Neo that I think connects directly to it. It costs $599. The more expensive one costs $699. It's colorful. It's fun. Like, this thing is not taking itself very seriously. So then you run into—and it's running an iPhone chip and it has 8 gigs of RAM, but you're not supposed to take it seriously. So why would you take it seriously? And it turns out an iPhone chip with 8 gigs of RAM, as we have known for a long time, is remarkably capable. We've just been hidden behind iOS. And so if you just let that system be capable, it turns out to be very capable.
Yeah. I mean, I think to me the thing that has been so interesting has been exactly the thing you just described about a bunch of people being like, 'Well, this computer doesn't do X, Y, and Z.' And just overwhelmingly it's like, 'Well, then it's not for you. That's fine.' I think people instinctively understand what this computer is for in a way I think is really fascinating. And we started to see this even over the course of like the 24 hours after it shipped, right? You go from, 'Okay, it's just a cheap laptop. Well, Apple makes the M1 Air, why not continue to do that?' And then you start to see some of the things that Apple did to this, right? It is the marketing campaign and it is the colors and it is some of the choices they made with the device. Not all of which I agree with, by the way. I have some real quibbles with this particular computer here. But it started to really coalesce around like, 'Oh, Apple's actually doing a very specific thing here.' And it is—we talk all the time about Apple's ability to sort of have a whole thought, right? And this computer feels like this is not a worse MacBook designed to be cheaper. This is like a different idea about a computer in a way that I think resonated with people pretty aggressively. I mean, Apple will tell you—this was their entire message to us when we talked to their executives at the event. They kept saying, 'We can't make crap. We're not going to make crap. We were just able to make this computer great using the things we had today.' I watched the teardown video of it, and it is remarkable at how much it is just an iPhone.
Like, the motherboard is this big.
Right. It's nothing. It's spread out a little bit because they have room, but you can see that, oh, this is just an iPhone with a huge battery and some speakers.
It's so striking because you pick the thing up and one of the first things you notice about it is like it is dense.
It is a solid piece of computer and that's because it is just all battery. Like, there's just nothing else going on in there. It's an iPhone with a giant ass battery and a keyboard. That's the whole thing that's happening there.
Does it make you as angry about the iPad as it has been making me? So, let's just talk about this now because I think the main philosophical argument has been basically does the existence of the MacBook Neo just completely obviate the iPad? And Apple would obviously tell you no. But I have a very hard time now coming to the conclusion that if you have $600 to spend on an Apple device, you should buy anything other than this device. Like, this to me makes the iPad Air, especially if you're thinking about it as a somewhat primary computing device. Like, even if it's not your only computer, it's a thing you intend to do more than just hold and watch movies on. If you want to—like, my mom is a good example, right? Like, my mom uses her iPad a lot to look at pictures, to browse the web, specifically Zillow. She does New York Times games on it every morning and she does a lot of like email and basic little things. The Neo is a better, more usable machine for almost all of those things to me.
Maybe. Maybe I don't—I want to stay on the positive side. I often get accused of being relentlessly negative and boy am I ready. But I think you know that I think the right combo for most people is a laptop and a phone.
And this is why non-iPad tablets have all kind of just sort of—they live in that sort of fizzled out middle space where everyone knows it's the right category for a bunch of things, but it never hits the way the iPad seems to have hit in certain places. I think this is the right laptop for people whose lives are primarily on phones.
Oh, that's a good way of thinking about it. If your phone is your main computer, this is a great secondary computer.
Yeah. And I think the truth is that for most people, literally in the world, for most people, their phone is their main computer.
And so then you're like, okay, what do I really need? I need a more capable web browser quite often.
And then there's a subset of apps that might be fun to use. And then this thing is like, well, here's a more capable web browser and a pretty good keyboard and a good trackpad and a fine display. You know, I'm a display nerd, so 100% of sRGB is not where I want to live. But it's like all that stuff is fine because really what you're doing is like here's a device that can do things my phone cannot do. You put it up against the iPad and the reason I'm asking does this make you mad about the iPad is if they just didn't nerf the iPad's operating system, this question would have been solved by the iPad ages ago.
Ages ago. And this has a lower spec chip and less RAM than most iPads.
Yeah, the equivalent iPad to this price-wise runs an M4.
Yeah, I just reviewed it. It's also $600 and it has an M4 in it. It is vastly more powerful than this thing. And they just will not let the iPad be powerful in the way that this thing is allowed to be powerful.
Here's my theory about that. I wonder about this and I've wondered about it for ages and various combinations of people will deny it to my face or insist that it's a conspiracy theory, but really what you want the iPad to do is just run desktop Safari. If it would just run desktop Safari, not weird iPad mobile Safari Plus, but—
They would tell you desktop Safari.
They are lying to you. This is what I mean. Different people will jump out of the woodwork and both confirm and deny this in the same breath.
They use phrases like desktop class and it's like, well, what is that?
Nope. I just want the one that's very obviously able to be run on an A18 chip with 8 gigs of RAM.
If you would just do that, the iPad becomes a different computer. And that to me is the entire—that is the MacBook Neo. Like, at the end of the day, you boil it all the way down and it is not that it can run GarageBand because an iPad can run GarageBand. It's not that it can browse Zillow because most people just browse Zillow on their phones. Like, whatever it is that you're saying. It's not that it is a better DoorDash machine or like whatever apps exist on a phone. It is, oh, the browser is good and there's a keyboard and a mouse and for everything that hits the wall on a mobile device, that's the exit ramp. And this thing just provides that exit ramp over and over again. It's very capable of doing all the other stuff that you know you—how many creators have now posted the videos of them scrolling 4K timelines and all the stuff that people are worried about. Of course it's capable of doing that stuff, but I just—I think the reason people are excited about it is it is the perfect companion to a phone and I don't think that that paradigm has truly existed yet.
Yeah, that's a good theory. I think that's largely right and it is—we've always talked about the upside of PCs and I use PCs broadly like Macs, Windows, whatever, as the backstop to all of that stuff that there are walls you run into on your phone and on your tablet and on other devices. Some of which are artificially created by the companies that make them. Particularly in Apple's case, it just refuses to allow you to do certain things that you want to do. But in part because like the UI doesn't afford it, right? There are just things you can't do on a six-inch screen as well as you would want to do it on another device. And so having a larger device as the backup is valuable. It just has been for a long time. And I think you're right that this becomes a cheap and pretty good version of every single one of those things, right? Like, Antonio's review basically just goes over all the things it's pretty good at and it being pretty good at everything ends up being really, really, really meaningful especially when you put it up against all of these other Windows laptops at the same price and even higher which almost always come with at least one sort of screaming problem.
Bad performance, bad battery life, bad keyboards, bad webcams, bad whatever else. It's like there's almost always at least one sort of huge gotcha feature and the Neo just doesn't have any. And to be able to offer this will do all the things you want to do pretty well for $600 is a huge deal. By the way, did you end up getting the $600 one or did you get the 512 gigs of storage and the Touch ID?
I bought the Touch ID, Nilay. I don't know why. I don't know. I also bought the Touch ID and the guy who sold it to me at the Apple store essentially told me I was getting the Touch ID. He was like, 'Oh, and you want the 512 and the Touch ID, right?' It was like—
He said, 'These things are absolutely flying out of the store,' which I thought was really interesting. And B, it was literally like he assumed I was going to spend the extra $100, which I was anyway, but like it was just not even a question in his mind.
This is how Apple's pricing works.
It's genius. Like, they truly clocked me the minute I walked in and they were like, 'This is the actual price of the thing. Let's be honest with each other.'
Yeah. They made basically $99 of profit off you this day.
I mean, these are the problems for the other PC makers in the world.
Yep. One, the entire Windows PC market is basically driven by subsidies. So whether that's preloaded bloatware that those companies pay to preload on the PCs, whether it's the stickers that Intel and AMD pay to put on the keyboard deck, whether it's Microsoft itself doing weird pricing schemes so that Copilot shows up in your face and starts screaming at you the second you open the computer. Like, there's just a whole bunch of compromise in the pricing that is related to other companies using the computer as advertising. Just straightforwardly, that subsidy drives down the price of PCs the same way that subsidy drives down the price of like smart TVs, right? A smart TV is basically $0 now, and it's because it's a giant advertising terminal in your house. And literally, you can get a TV for $0 with a giant advertising terminal physically glued to the bottom of the TV. Like, that market has reached its conclusion. The PC market is on its way there. So, if you're going to get a Windows PC for $600, it's not the hardware compromises that will really kill you. It is the subsidy compromises that make the user experience horrible that will kill you. And Apple just doesn't do those things or if they do those things, they do them in a way that drives everyone crazy and we all know what's going on, but they have like, 'Well, we're just telling you that you can use Apple Wallet,' kind of like, you know what I mean?
Yeah. And what's funny is that is so much less present on macOS than in most other places. Like the—
Yeah. It constantly—your phone is telling you about Fitness Plus and about all the things you can do in Apple Music and about all the new stuff that's on Apple TV Plus. And I think in part because notifications are just so much less front and center on macOS. It just doesn't feel nearly as in your face as it does on the phone.
Yeah. And to whatever extent Apple doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff, it doesn't allow third parties to do that stuff.
Right. And again, this is like on the margin. Apple does this stuff like you can see it. It's present in their products. They are using their own products to advertise their own services in a way that I think is gross. And most people who experience it for what it is know that it's gross. But it's just not the same as Windows.
Like, they're just qualitatively different. And so like out of the box, you are just getting a nicer experience because it's not chunked up by advertising subsidy. And then there's just hardware scale. Apple makes a lot of A18 chips. All the money isn't in the chip because they've already made 20 billion of them.
And so the money is in the other components and you can feel it.
And I think that is just very, very difficult for other PC makers to compete with. Let alone Apple's really good at pricing you into spending a hundred more dollars on effectively nothing with such insane margins on their RAM already that they didn't have to do any pricing games because they can just take a little less money for RAM. They can take a little less profit for RAM. Like, what are you going to do? And I think Antonio has been talking to other PC makers and other PC makers are talking about it and—
David making this point, they seem caught way off guard.
Yeah, which is nuts, right? I mean, I think the most direct quote we've gotten so far was from Asus, which just had an earnings call, and one of the questions they got on their earnings call was essentially, 'What do you make of this computer? How do you feel about the Neo? Do you view this as a threat?' And this is Nick Wu, the CFO, who basically said, you know, we had an inkling this was coming. There have been sort of supply chain rumors about this for months, so like we kind of saw this coming. We were surprised it was as cheap as it was, which I think is really interesting. I think people probably expected this to be like $799 or $899, not $599 and $499 at education, which is a genuinely low price for a device like this. But then he says he was talking about the processor and the 8 gigs of RAM. And he said, 'This may limit certain applications. So I think when Apple positioned the product, it's probably focused more on content consumption. This differs somewhat from mainstream notebook usage scenarios because in that case the Neo feels more like a tablet because tablets are mostly for content consumption.' This just feels like that's just dead wrong.
It's just dead wrong. And I think it is so reminiscent to me. I read that quote and immediately thought of Steve Ballmer in 2007 being asked about the iPhone. And we actually just pulled this clip because I found this on YouTube again. And the first comment on YouTube is, 'YouTube showed this to me again 17 years later.' So I think the algorithm seems to have spiked this clip again. But let me just play you this response from Steve Ballmer when he's asked about the iPhone.
The first iPhone, 2007. Steve Jobs goes to Macworld and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that?
$500 fully subsidized with a plan. And I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine. Now it may sell very well or not. You know, we have our strategy. We've got great Windows Mobile devices in the market today. You can get a Motorola Q phone now for $99. It's a very capable machine. It'll do music. It'll do internet. It'll do email. It'll do instant messaging. So I kind of look at that and I say, 'Well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.'
First of all, I had a Motorola Q and it was not as good as the iPhone.
But also like obviously the details here are different. What Apple just did is go down in price and what Apple just did is make something available to many more people with a keyboard, ironically. But the response feels the same which is to look at this and say, well, this isn't what business users want and it's like, well, you have officially missed the point here.
And Microsoft has been missing this particular point for a very long time. The whole Windows ecosystem has been missing this point for a very long time that by some mix of I would call it tech debt and bad product management to be kind. These companies are either unable, unwilling or both to actually properly make great products in this price range and have been for a long time. Like, Antonio was working on this story which I think will probably be live by the time most people hear this. And at one point he was like, 'I don't blame PC manufacturers for not having a response to the Neo yet.' And I was like, buddy, you have this backwards. Then where is this 10 years ago? Like, this thing has been sitting here for forever. You let Chromebooks eat it alive and then Google kind of forgot Chromebooks exist and Chromebooks stopped getting better. That thing has been languishing for forever. And this has just been open PC space for a long time. And it's sort of wild that Apple was the one that managed to fill it like this. A company that generally had no interest in doing this kind of computer for a really long time.
Just looked around and was like, 'Oh, that's not hard.'
We've got these leftover iPhone chips.
All right. Let me play devil's advocate.
Because I agree with everything you're saying. And I do think the PC makers are a little bit boxed in by just the pricing dynamics. Like, they don't all make their own chips, right? They're also beholden to those chips. Like, Intel being bad is part of the problem here.
Yeah. Right. But at every level like Apple has to find the profit at the end of the process, right? They're like, we put all the parts together and then we mark it up. Like, Apple's profit margin if you look at their results is like rock solid between 30 and 40%. Like, that's just what they do every quarter. That's how much profit they make. And they just back into it because they make most of the components, right? And so when the price of RAM skyrockets, they can pay more to Samsung or whoever for RAM and they can kind of like back it out and all the other stuff. If you're a PC maker, if you're an Asus or a Dell or whoever, you don't make anything. So every part in your computer, someone else has to make the profit to make their company run, especially the chip, which is like usually the most important part of the computer. So you just start with, okay, we got to pay a margin to Intel that Apple doesn't have to pay.
You just start behind the curve, like legitimately behind the curve, and then Apple buys so many chips from TSMC that they get massive discounts on their volume, right? So you're just like all of a sudden like you just start way, way behind in the race. And so like I don't doubt that this is a very challenging thing to compete with just on the fundamentals of the fact that the PC competitors can't remove the margins from all the components and then mark it up at the end to solve the problem.
That's fair, right? But I'm just playing devil's advocate. Like, I just see that problem and I'm like, whatever. The real dynamic in the PC industry for more than the past 10 years now is that Apple decided it would own the high-end. So, if you just look at sales of laptops that cost more than $1,000, it is more likely than not that every one of those sales is an Apple laptop.
They just went and they're like, 'We're just going to compete on this price and up and we're going to win.' And statistically, they've won. And Microsoft knew this. Like, when Panos Panay ran Surface, he was like, 'This is my problem. I cannot convince this industry to spend that money in R&D to compete there. Microsoft is going to do it and then I will develop hinges and keyboards and trackpads and we'll just give it away to the ecosystem so that their stuff is good and we can credibly compete at the high end because if we lose the high-end there's nothing left,' right? And that's what they all did for the longest time. And maybe there's like good high-end PC laptop competition now.
They made some good progress. There has been good stuff over the years.
There's good—there's interesting ideas in that space. Good stuff. The bottom has languished and all of it is like, 'Do you want a 15-inch screen for $700? Here's whatever garbage that we can surround that screen with.'
And people are like, 'Yeah, that's the thing we wanted.' And I think Apple's showing up with the 13-inch screen at that price point. And like no one has an answer. But like I know why the PC market looks the way it looks. It's because Microsoft with Surface recognized that Apple was going to run away with a thousand dollars and up. And yeah, it was not economically viable for any one company to solve that problem. Microsoft had to do it for its entire ecosystem.
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about the Surface Go over the last few days because that was Microsoft's biggest swing at this price point. And actually, I went back and read Dieter reviewed the Surface Go in 2018 when it came out and gave it an eight and a half. Like, there were things to like about it, but it was fundamentally—it was a 10-inch computer. And there are a bunch of problems that come with making a 10-inch computer. And I think one of the things Apple understands and got right about this is that 13-inch is the right size for a laptop in so many ways. And especially at smaller sizes, Microsoft got really hung up on doing hybrids. That just didn't quite pan out the same way. And I think if you just go back and redo the Surface Go process and they're like, 'Okay, well, what if instead of trying to sort of overcorrect on the form factor here, we just make the cheapest Surface laptop we can and charge it at this price?' I wonder what that computer would look like now.
It would look like Microsoft declaring war on its PC partners and never doing it.
This, right? They're always in between the big parts of the market with a Surface, right?
Yeah, that's very true. You made a face when I said 13-inch. What's your problem with 13-inch?
Well, I didn't realize that I had recycled this, but I had a 12-inch MacBook, which was one of my very favorite computers. In fact, hilariously, you brought up Dieter. I bought it from Dieter and I—
He really screwed you on that one.
He did. In a very Minnesota way. At one point I was like, 'Do I remember to pay you for this?' And he was like, 'Of course you did.' And I don't know if that's true or not. So maybe I paid him for it, maybe I didn't, but that was—it was like a very Minnesota like, 'Yeah, you're fine. Don't worry about it. I just wanted this thing out of my hands.' This is ages ago and I love that computer. I think I finally recycled it. But that computer was the perfect size. And when the Neo was announced, I was really sad they hadn't gone one tick smaller. And now that I have it and we've had this conversation, I completely understand why they didn't. They made the most mainstream computer they could and 13-inch is the most mainstream size. And that is the right answer to this question.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I will say the—what, the Air is 13.6, right? I don't really appreciably notice the difference between the Neo screen and the Air screen at this point.
Yep. 13.6. I do notice the size of the thing. Like, the Air sort of wears itself a little lighter to me than the Neo does, even though they're technically the same weight and the Neo is actually a little smaller in some dimensions. The Neo feels chunkier as a computer to me. What have you made of it so far? You've been using it. I have two gripes I would like to talk about, but I want to know what you've thought of the Neo so far.
I think the Neo is a beautiful piece of hardware and for all the reasons I've said, I think only Apple can really produce it. And I'm really happy that they've got rid of Alan Dye because macOS Tahoe is a visual abomination.
Is this your first Tahoe experience?
I've used it like academically.
Do you know what I mean? Like—
Yeah. Like, I have a computer with Tahoe on it and I like—
You touch it through a piece of glass.
Yeah. Like, literally a piece of glass. Like, my work computers, I just don't update them until I have to because I just can't take them down. Like, this podcast machine, I don't even know what's running. Like—
It just needs to work and that's the thing it does. And then I thought Liquid Glass was bad so I didn't update my main work computer over there. Again, I have another Mac that has it on there, but it's just sort of—it was to dink around. It's like what I put the updates on. This is the first time I've like sat down and really used Tahoe with Liquid Glass. And every part of it is infuriating and Apple should be embarrassed. And the number one reason to not buy a MacBook Neo is because I know that Apple has no choice but to fix Liquid Glass and Tahoe at WWDC and you should wait until they rev macOS 27 and they undo this ungodly abomination of an interface. It is so bad. Liquid Glass on a phone is like fine. It's not great and I don't love it, but it's fine because you know phone is inherently a single tasker. What they have done to delineate Windows and the menu bar and items that you've selected on macOS with Liquid Glass is so bad. It goes against every principle of good design. It goes against every principle of just common sense. Like, should two things that are different look different or the same? Nilay, obviously the same. So, what if you couldn't tell what's what at any time on your computer? What if my whole interface was just like a weird blurry mess? There are parts of Tahoe that are legitimately slow for no reason. When you open Control Center from the menu bar, first of all, when you look at the menu bar in the top right, every button does something different. So, like you click the clock and the notifications slide in from the side. You click Control Center and there's like a very slow fade animation.
And Control Center like bubbles in which is exactly what you don't want for quick controls.
Like, it is basically like, oh, you just want to change the brightness. What if there was a Broadway show? Like, you don't want that. You just want the brightness toggle to appear. But that's different than the slide in. And you keep going down and then another one's a drop down and then you get all the way to like the Wi-Fi icon and it's a standard drop down and you keep going and you get to the regular menus and when you click on those menus they don't shade in dark enough for you to tell that you've selected a menu.
I'm so glad you're finally doing this. This makes me so happy.
I'm not even in the weeds of this interface. I'm like, I'm going to raise the brightness and pick save from the file icon and all of this is stupid.
Yeah, it is. I told you I didn't want to go negative, but I'm telling you the Neo was like at first it made me really happy and then it made me incredibly sad that this thing is—it's like a visual disaster. It got to the point where I did the only thing I can do when I'm so mad at an Apple interface. I just started texting John Gruber who hates it as much as anyone.
I was like, I see what you're saying. And he was like, yeah, dude, it's bad.
He's like, if anything, I'm not going hard enough.
The menu bar is actually such a perfect example because it's also like—it's translucent now, but it is still a hard border. So, and those two things don't make any sense. So, it's like it looks like it should be interactive with everything, but it's not. It's still a hard line. But just look at the menu bar now. Like, I'm just—I'm going to do this while I'm sitting here. Okay. So, you click on the clock and it slides in from the right. You click on the Control Center and it bubbles in. It really is slow. I hadn't really even noticed it until you said it. I mean, it is like a song and dance routine to be like, I want to turn the volume up.
And of all things, that should just appear. That's it. Then you do search and it opens up Spotlight in the center of the screen.
Yeah. Then you click on battery and it opens up a menu to the left. You click on Wi-Fi and it opens up a menu to the right.
It's like—it's literally like every single one of these was designed by a different person and none of them ever spoke to each other.
And Apple is so good at this. Like, historically, the thing that they're good at is looking at this and being—
Like, make this make sense.
And they've just lost the plot here.
My favorite Tahoe thing forever, though, is just if you want to understand the problem with Tahoe, take all of your apps and drag them to the same corner and then see if the top left corners line up. Spoiler alert, they don't. Apps are just—there's literally no rules anymore for what's going on with Tahoe. Tahoe is very bad. Liquid glass is very bad, but the Neo is still awesome. And I really like—we came out of last week being like, 'This thing is going to sell huge.' And I think it's actually going to be bigger than I thought. I think this will replace the MacBook Air as the sort of default 'I don't have any follow-up questions, what computer should you buy' computer for people.
Maybe. Maybe. I think we have yet to see. I think it's hard to know at the very beginning. I think all the benchmarks suggest that that is true. All the sort of early reviews, our reviews suggest that's true. I think once people start using them at scale, we're going to find out.
The 18 Pro is so tested. We like that chip is mature and good and made at monstrous scale. That I don't worry about like battery life problems we don't know about. I don't know. I just have a hard time imagining what it would be that would be the glaring problem.
Of course, you have a hard time imagining what it would be. It's so obvious what it would be and you can't—it's like blocked out in your brain like Westworld. They're like, 'It doesn't look—' It's 8 gigs of RAM.
That's what it would be. It would be—
Can I tell you how unbelievably vindicated I am? We're going to run a 12-minute supercut of everybody yelling at me for saying 8 gigs of RAM is fine, and then all those same people saying, 'Oh, it only has 8 gigs of RAM. That's not a problem for normal everyday computer users.' Yeah, fuckos. I was right. Hey, that's it. That's the only question mark I have is once millions of people buy this thing and they start using it for all kinds of stuff that nobody could possibly foresee, will 8 gigs of RAM swapping to this storage—
Will it be not a problem, which everyone assumes, or will some weird stuff blah blah? And then—
That's a fair question. I would just point out once again, Alan Dye's last vindictive act was to force this interface on millions of unsuspecting consumers who just want to spend $700 on a nice computer with Touch ID.
They're just out here doing their best.
And I'm telling you right now, Mark Zuckerberg, you got rolled because you have no taste. If you saw this work and you're like, 'That guy—I know everything I need to know about you, man.'
Fundamentally, the MacBook Neo is a referendum on Mark Zuckerberg's taste.
That's what I'm saying. This works for me.
The one other thing I should say before we move on from the Neo here is it is a bummer the thing doesn't have a backlight on the keyboard. Particularly because they color match the keyboards. So on the indigo one here, it's actually a pretty dark keyboard, which aesthetically looks really nice, but even sitting here in decent light, it is hard to see. It's dark text on a dark key. And I think Antonio had one of the lighter colors and said it was a little easier to see on the light keys what you're typing in the dark, but on this, like, they're dark keys and a backlight would have been really nice.
Here's all I'm hoping for. If you're not a car nerd, but I'm a huge car nerd. If you go into any car forums, all car forums are sort of dominated by people going on Temu and Alibaba and putting in RGB ambient lights all over their cars. Like, there's just a huge market for that for every car. This thing is so modular and so repairable. I'm just waiting for the weird Alibaba market of backlit keyboards for the Neo to show up. Like, you know, it's got to come.
That's what we want. We want weird gamer keyboards for the MacBook Neo. If you're making one now, send it to us. We will prominently feature it here on the purchase. We do want that. That's absolutely correct. Before we get off of Apple stuff, we reviewed the iPhone 17e this week. Allison did that. I reviewed the new iPad Air. I don't think we need to talk about either one of them because they are precisely exactly what you think. The 17e is sort of fascinating because Allison, I think, made the correct point, which is that it's a very good phone. I think as Apple approaches its budget devices, that is the right way to do it. They put MagSafe back again. It's like this is a much cleaner, correct set of trade-offs to get to a lower price. But the base iPhone 17 is the best the base iPhone has been in a long time. And the leap is $200. And I think if your budget allows only the 17e, awesome, you'll be very happy. But I think the case for moving up $200, especially given the economics of how people buy phones and the way that people use their phones and like the primacy of phones in modern life, you should spend the $200 and get the better phone if you can.
It's 100% the flip of what we're saying with the Neo. I think if you perceive the Neo as like this is a great companion laptop for people whose primary computer is a phone, you should absolutely spend less money on a laptop and more money on the phone.
Oh man. Okay. 17e and MacBook Air or 17 and MacBook Neo?
17 and Neo. That's what—like, 100% you want the real camera.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, unless there's some specific thing that you need that M5 chip for, which, you know, if you know what it is, you know what it is. Go get it. But yeah, I think for most people having a slightly more capable phone is a much better trade-off.
Yeah, I think you're right. But the other one we need to talk about here is the Studio Display XDR, which you have not bought, but I am confident by the time we do this podcast next week will be in your house.
The second it goes on non-corrupt sale for even $1, I'm buying this display.
What if I give them the dollar so that they can give you a dollar?
What if you buy me a computer? I will accept you buying me this computer. That's fine.
All right, deal. John Higgins reviewed it for us. It seems to be the thing we hoped it was. Are you as enthusiastic about this now having—we've tested it, we've seen it come out. Like, is it what you wanted?
Yeah, it's absolutely what I mean. It's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while outside of the MacBooks, right? But it's the first new display technology idea from Apple in quite a while. It is very expensive. But what you're buying for that is basically a bunch of calibration settings. And so I think I'm curious to see if other display makers use similar panels or similar technologies without all of the added cost of doing all the calibrations and bring some of the core technology at a lower price, which is 100% true of the 5K panel that Apple's using in the regular Studio Display, which you can now buy on Amazon in a totally no-name Chinese case for $500.
Right. And it's just not—
And we're going to review that too, because I think it's really interesting to see how it's literally the same panel from my 2012. Like, it's just been around and now you can buy it in a bunch of different configurations. The XDR is a step forward.
And so, like I said, I'm going to—I just—I again, I saw it at the event and I literally just looked at it in the store and I came this close to buying it because it looks great. Like spectacularly great. And it is a step forward. I barely even need this thing because I do almost all my photo editing on my MacBook Pro which has a panel like this. Like it has the same kind of core technology in it.
But you know what I keep saying? You stare at screens all day. You should spend the money on the best one you can because they last forever and you know if I can convince myself that I'll have this display for 10 years, it's only $320 a year.
I mean, I will say there are very few technology devices I would say it's even plausible to say, 'I'm going to buy this and keep this for a decade.' I think the Studio Display XDR has a strong shot to last a decade on your actual desk.
Monitors, screens just last forever. TVs and monitors just—they last forever. It is so hard to convince yourself to upgrade. So like I said, the second it goes on sale for even a dollar, I'm going to buy this thing and not like a corrupt sale.
It also apparently has a better webcam, which is very exciting.
I put tape over those webcams. No, thank you. My webcam, all of my webcams in that house, are there real cameras with power buttons.
For privacy reasons or for camera quality reasons?
Both. Yes. You get one with the other. And the idea that there's like a software-defined webcam in my computer that someone could come get. Yeah. This is where I am with Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg has tape on his laptop. You ever look at a picture of his laptop? See, there's tape on that webcam and it's like, 'Oh, buddy, you're the guy who wants to put glasses on everybody's face and has tape on his webcam.'
I know. Yeah. I will say, by the way, we keep getting emails from people volunteering to come to your house and take apart your iMac to turn it into a display for you. I don't know what your precious ethics will allow on that front, but we have a series of volunteers who are willing to come do this for you at any point.
That's allowed. I think that's not—I mean, that's just somebody doing their hobby, you know, like that's a good time.
Yeah. I owe a big part of my journalism career to fixing David Pogue's Xbox when he was the tech columnist at the New York Times.
This is how it starts. People go to Nilay's house and fix his iMac.
We'll do my little village here in Westchester County does repair cafes. Maybe I'll just hijack the repair cafes. Like everyone bring their 5K iMacs. We're making monitors. Just a parade of 5K iMacs down the street.
Yes. And then the senior citizens who are all there to get their ancient vacuum cleaners repaired will be very confused.
It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right, two more Apple rumors and then we're going to stop with Apple for a while. The first, from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, is that the next set of Apple releases is going to be high-end stuff. Having now done some of the low-end stuff, it's going to extend up even higher, potentially called Ultra, but not necessarily called Ultra. It sounds like the foldable iPhone fits into that, about which we also have some rumors. But there's just a real movement up in the market here for Apple. And I think this is really interesting. There was also this news this week about Uber Elite, which is like newer cars, fancier rides, just catering to expensive people. And I think that's a trend that is coming in a really real way. Like we've talked about this before that one of the great cool exciting things about technology is we all have the same iPhone, right? Like there is just the iPhone. No matter who you are, within very small stratifications, the same technology is available to everybody. We may be headed for a period of that not being the case in a really mainstream way.
I would pay a thousand extra dollars for a MacBook Neo that didn't have liquid glass on it. I was putting that out in the universe right now.
That may become available to you. But I think until now it's been, you know, new technology that hasn't quite come down—like foldable phones are still really expensive, right? But nobody would call that sort of a mainstream thing yet. And when they become mainstream, everybody sort of assumed the price will come back down. Maybe we're just headed to a point where there is going to be a true luxury class of mainstream technology for a while, which I think is really interesting and I don't know quite how to feel about it.
Damn it. Pricing products is kind of like an art and a science. And I think what you're seeing is there are some people—I mean, you're just seeing income inequality. That's what you're describing.
And so some people just don't care about $1,000 of price difference and they'll just spend it. And some people really care about $100 of price difference. And you can hear these companies are just headed— their products are headed in two different directions.
Yeah. And I think the Fold, the iPhone Fold being the Ultra product, it's hyper expensive, sort of makes sense. Like, you want to price your way into early adopters. You want to price your way into someone who, if they feel like the product is bad and they got cheated, isn't so mad, right? They're just going to buy another phone and move on with their lives. I think the rest of the Ultra products, you got to make a case for something beyond 'it's the fastest chip.' Sure. And I think once you get away from like 'Pro' is the designation which means nothing in Apple world anymore and you go to Ultra, like you have to make some case for it. It can't just be like it's wrapped in the finest of leathers. Like something else has to happen there, right?
I was going to say you get like the Hermès version is what Apple has traditionally done.
And it's going to need a new move. But I can see why you would introduce Ultra with the Fold to say this is the best possible thing or the most expensive possible thing and you're not just getting 'okay, it's so expensive most people can't afford it.' You're getting also we don't really know how it's going to work. And I think the rumors around the Fold are like, we don't really know how it's going to work.
Yeah. So the rumor right now, the rumor that came out this week is the outer display of the iPhone Fold will be about the size of a small iPhone, which seems like a victory. And then it'll open up—the wide aspect ratio will have side-by-side apps. This appears to be like an exciting new thing that Apple will tell you it has invented, but is not going to have the full sort of suite of iPad multitasking stuff. It won't run iPad apps, but it will let you do more stuff. There's—I have a lot of questions, but the biggest thing that is here that I think really sucks is that apparently Apple is going to ditch Face ID for Touch ID in order to accommodate the thinner display so that it can have them fold. I think this is a bad idea and Apple should stop it. Face ID is so much better than Touch ID that going back—this happens to me all the time. I use Face ID on an iPad Pro just like in my day-to-day life and then I get the new iPad Air every year to review it and it has Touch ID and the amount of time you spend on a device that sort of moves in aspect ratio like that figuring out where to put your finger and how to—it's awful. And going back to that after having your face just sort of make your phone feel like it's unlocked sucks. And it will make this supposedly very premium thing feel annoying to a lot of users.
I'm curious if that rumor is real. I mean, that's the rumor. But if they do it, they're going to do it the same way as the iPad, right? They'll put it in the power button or the sleep-wake button on the side.
Which is maybe not the worst thing on a phone because you got to hold the phone.
Yeah. But you're holding what amounts to a double-sided phone and trying to reach—you like it just—that's bad. No, don't. I don't want that.
And what if the power button moves depending on how you open it? Where is it going to be on that? Like—
There's just a lot of questions.
And I think not knowing where to tap the thing to unlock my phone is bad. I will say I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro and having both is awesome. It has both the under-screen thumbprint reader and Face ID or whatever face unlock, whatever they call it. That combination is awesome because—
Oh, what if they go with an under-screen one?
That would be fine. That would be fine. I could live with that. But the fail gracefully from Face ID when it works to Touch ID when you're wearing sunglasses to passcode if we can't figure out how to do it otherwise is exactly the correct graceful scale down. And just starting with Touch ID, every time I get on an iPad, it annoys me all over again.
I mean, we'll see. I have many more questions about this than Face ID. I mean, if the grand failure of the iPad is you won't just let it run Mac apps, the grand failure of the Fold is you won't just let it run iPad apps.
Yeah, there's a line in Emma's story that she wrote about it. Emma Roth and our team wrote about this. This is again from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. And Emma writes, 'Still, Apple is reportedly trying to take advantage of the phone's larger screen real estate by updating its core apps with a sidebar on the left side of the screen.' Like, oh, a sidebar. Look at us. That's what my thousand dollars is for.
The problem is all these projects started, you know, 500 years ago.
Again, you know, under one Alan Dye.
