586: Do a Barrel Roll!

1:02:40Setting aside the nanotexture thing, which we'll get to. Obviously, this works with Apple Pencil Pro, but not the Apple Pencil 2 because of the landscape camera. Yeah, I mean just like – just before we leave the screen, like I think the screen is a huge part of the Pro story. It is by all accounts a really great screen and what they've had to do with the dual layers to make it. And there is no question, like, we are all going to just be waiting and waiting and waiting for these screens to come to the other products in their lineup. Like, we cannot wait for this screen to come to a MacBook Pro.

1:03:15We cannot wait for this screen to come maybe eventually to a desktop-sized monitor. Like, this is going to be, like, the thing we're waiting for because it is, by all accounts, just such an amazing screen. So I'm really happy to see, like, they are still leading the industry in really good screens. well i mean it's the samsung screen or whatever like people always attribute this to apple apps not making this screen they're just but yeah no one else is selling them like i don't see anyone else yeah i mean i mean they they have they have the power of the money to say we want a screen that works like this i mean the companies have been trying to do these dual layer uh oleds for a long time and it's been very difficult and apple is gonna you know apple gets the good stuff first because they pay the money right so they you know and i do hope this expands to other products and to to review for the people who don't know why we care about oled i heard i heard gruber on dithering say he was looking for blooming and didn't see it you're not going to see blooming an oled like the reason we are excited about oleds is because each individual pixel lights up individually and you may think isn't that how all screens work i have an ipad and each individual pixel lights up well lcd screens are done with a backlight where there is there are lights behind the pixels and then like color filters of various kinds that color it or whatever but the lights behind the pixels are not one pixel in size the lights behind the pixels are huge compared to pixels there's often like you know there's millions of pixels but there's like a few hundred backlight regions of you know the the backlights are like one inch by one inch or one centimeter by one centimeter huge number of pixels especially retin resolution are behind that and so the like the worst case scenario for that is like a star field in space it's perfectly black with these pinpoints of stars each little pinprick of stars is a couple of little pixels at very high brightness on an lcd display on a quote mini led display you have to light up the backlight region behind each one of the stars the star is a pinprick but the backlight is like one centimeter by one centimeter or one inch by one inch or like whatever size the backlight regions are you have to light up that entire thing behind that pinprick so what you end up with is the blackness of space pinpricks of light but around each pinprick of light there's like a little you can even see the shape of the backlight region sometimes it's like a little square glowing right and for years manufacturers have been trying to figure out how can we make it so you can't see the backlight behind that because lcds can't block all the light like when you turn off the when you make an lcd black and you tell it block all the light from the backlight they block as much as they can but they can't block at all and that light that leaks through where it's not supposed to be there where there's supposed to be black space but now there's gray space that is bloom around those those pinpoints of light or whatever.

1:05:49OLED doesn't have that problem. Every individual pixel in OLED lights up all by itself. There's no backlight region. There's no how many different regions of backlights, how many individual backlights. There's essentially one backlight for every pixel. That's why we love OLED. There is no blooming in OLED other than the natural blooming of a pinprick of light. When you look up at the sky, you see a star. It is a point source because you can just light up that one pixel. That's why everyone goes gaga over OLED. Our phones are OLED. You can buy OLED televisions. uh there are OLED screens on laptops and so on and this is Apple's introduction to larger than iPhone size uh OLEDs and of course OLEDs burn in so now they've got a dual layer one where you can run them at lower power to hopefully combat burn-in and you can make it very bright and very colorful and so anyway yeah this is this is a great screen as I said last episode I think this will be the best screen Apple has ever made I think Apple itself made that pitch and like Marco said that means we want screens like this to be on all our devices assuming they don't have any bad burn-in problems but we'll again we'll find that out as these enter the market what is the i should know this but i do not what is the longevity for oled because don't they eventually it's organic light emitting diodes right so something every time you use a pixel it wears down a little bit cool yeah so i mean like ideally what you want to happen and the televisions do this as well as they as they wear down you can they do like essentially a compensation cycle where there's like a computer that figures out how much each one has worn down and it tries to level them because they could say okay this one is worn out so we got to give it a little more power than that one they want to make it so that it's even but inevitably what happens is over time if even this if these compensations are working perfectly the max if you just put the whole screen being white that will just slowly get dimmer over time because you will be slowly wearing out the pixels what you want is for it to get dimmer uniformly and not have like the logo that's in the corner of the screen burned in or whatever like that's what the compensation cycles are trying to do but yeah they wear it over time but they'll and all it should last the normal usage lifetime of an ipad i mean look at our phones like same deal these we've had oled phones for years and years right and if you buy like a five-year-old phone maybe you could detect some kind of like you know image retention burn in worn out pixels or whatever but in general they work oled phones work until nobody wants to buy them anymore right until they're so old that they're obsolete so the same should be true of the screen fingers crossed no promises though all right so let's talk performance there were some rumors which i think we discussed last week that oh you know what this might have the m4 and when i first heard this i was like nfw and then after hearing a bunch of our friends talk about on various shows and if we talked about i was like well i'm still really skeptical but maybe and so So sure enough, Tim Millett comes up and says, we're going to four M4 time.

1:08:39And this is the second generation three nanometer technology. And I'm just going to step aside and give you back the floor, John Syracuse, to tell us about this, please. N3E. They didn't say it in the show, but the closest they're going to get to having a slide that says N3E. Because, yeah, that's second gen three nanometer technology from TSMC. uh and like as we said last week the rumors of this once the the ipad model numbers and the part number things were dug out like ipad model numbers were dug out of ipad uh ipad os 17.5 beta right that's hard evidence and you could say well you don't know that they're going to keep the numberings they're they're they were you know they were increasing the numbers by one for each m1 right and they skipped over m3 and so that was pretty much hard evidence so like with so many of these things it's a rumor you don't know maybe kind of and then as the date approaches of the announcement things solidify and since we had the luxury of recording just one week before the event they had solidified pretty much i really expected to see m4 and lo and behold we did uh what is the m4 apple says that has 28 billion transistors to give a comparison the m3 has 25 billion transistors so this does have more transistors than the m3 not by a lot but it's different so if you just think this was oh this is just the m3 but on the m3 process it's not it's a different soc as we'll see as we go on here uh and again the m3 is the comparison because the m3 pro has 37 billion and the m3 max is 92 billion so this is the little one they're just the plain old m4 no suffix it does have 128 gigabits per second memory bandwidth which is up from 100 on the m3 m2 and m1 so this is a bump you know we went three generations of the plain m series chips so they all had 100 gigabytes per second now we're up to 120 they're either using faster ram or i mean that's what it's got to be i think there's like a lpddr standard that's slightly faster so that's good so we've we've made kind of like a the first generation of leap in the baseline smallest m-series chip memory bandwidth it has a new display engine which apple didn't elaborate on i imagine it's i don't even know like they didn't say oh we need this new display engine to drive the two layers of the the screen maybe that's true i would imagine there's some display firmware that does that and they don't have to i don't even know what they mean but anyway new display engine there's a new media engine which is like the thing that does h264 and h265 and pro res decoding encoding and stuff apple didn't really talk about that but if you look at the specs only the m4 models say hardware accelerated 8k h264 blah blah blah that 8k is only in the specs for the m4 ones so i guess the other ones couldn't do hardware accelerated 8k they had to fall back to software or something i don't know but anyway it does have a new media engine so that's good and that's and that's also good because m1 m2 m3 whenever someone tested any computer with that thing in it and they do like let's see how fast it can you know encode or decode h264 that was just running on the media engine it didn't matter how many cpu cores it had how good the gpu was there's dedicated hardware in these socs to do stuff like h264 encoding and decoding right and that dedicated hardware has not gotten faster or better that quickly i'm not sure if it's changed at all from the m1 to the m3 but it has changed in the m4 kind of like the memory bandwidth this may be i can't say this for certain but this may be the first time that the media engine hardware decoder encoder thing has gotten substantially faster um at a certain point in the presentation i forgot who it was but the person on screen said uh the m4 has up to four performance cores and i said wait what now up to four performance cars anyway uh and six efficiency cores um and so the m3 had four performance cores and four efficiency cores so you got two new efficiency cores same number of performance cores compared to the m3 are these the same cores as the m3 well apple says that the m4 cores have they all the cores in the m4 come with quote next generation ml accelerators not the neural engine not the gpu the cpu cores all have next generation ml accelerators i have no idea what that means but what it does mean is these cores are not the same as the m3 cores the power cores aren't the same the efficiency cores aren't the same they're probably similar in size they probably have a close to the similar of transistors but they are different enough that they have whatever the hell that is i'm sure we'll find out as time goes on but just to be clear uh and then apple throughout this entire presentation does the thing that they love to do which is only slightly more justified in this case which is uh let's compare it not to its predecessor but to its predecessor minus one which makes some sense in this one because there's never been an m3 ipad so what are you going to compare it to you're going to compare it to the ipad pro that it's replacing and the one it's replacing came with an m2 so they say it's 60 faster than the m2 and uh as we always uh say in the uh when we talk about apple's comparisons to multiple generations old people like well that just makes sense because people have old stuff no not everyone has the latest and greatest we want to know how fast it is compared to the old thing that most people have and i will explain again our reasoning it's not that we think everyone has to have the newest stuff it's because what you want to know at least if you're kind of a tech nerd enthusiast is is this the one to buy is this a year where we make a big leap is this a really good one right and the way to know that is how big a leap is this one over the one that came before it and again the one that came before it is m2 i understand that but just just talking about the m4 as as an soc like is m4 just like barely better than the m3 or is it twice as good as the m3 right even if you don't have an m3 what you want to know is is this the year we make a big leap is this a good one to buy i haven't bought an ipad in six years is this the year for me to buy because we've just made a big leap like you don't want to buy if you've been waiting years and years to buy a new one you don't want to buy when they come up with a model that's one percent better than the previous one you want to wait for that year when it's five percent or ten percent or twenty percent because it gives you the most bang for your buck that's the point of the comparison with the with the predecessor right and again i know the predecessor only had an m2 because there never was an m3 ipad so it makes this a little bit tricky but there are devices that have m3s in them right and so setting aside the ipad if you just want to know how good is the m4 compared to the m3 apple does not want to tell you we will find out shortly but apple's not interested in that comparison so uh anyway it has a 10 core gpu which is the same as the m3 although the m3 is bin sometimes because sometimes you get one with eight cores active instead of the full 10 because binning right um apple bragged about how much better it is it has the same performance as the m2 at half the power that's great it's two generation newer chip thumbs up we like it uh but the binning continues and binning we use that term to be like when you make a cpu or make a silicon chip and some parts of it don't work you can just turn off those parts and sell it anyway for a cheaper price because every time you make silicon some parts some of them don't work at all some of them have parts of them that don't work and instead of throwing them out you can just tell them sell them at a lower price and then save the ones where everything is working and sell them at a higher price because you get fewer of those right uh that's binning apple is binning and that's the term for the silicon silicon industry apple has always been to silicon in the Apple Silicon age.

1:16:09Now they're essentially doing the equivalent of binning with the entire product. But for the CPU itself, they are binning that. So if you buy an iPad and you want a M4 with all the parts working, you have to buy, let me know if you've heard this one before, the one terabyte or the two terabyte storage model. And what does the storage have to do with the SoC? Nothing. It's separate chips. it's not related in any way price that's what it is it's price that's that's it because they they want you to buy the visok package right oh you want to step up to the you want the good stuff well you can't just get the cpu with all the stuff working if you want the cpu with all stuff working you have to buy into other stuff whether you want it or not maybe you don't need a terabyte of storage you have no choice so they have tied those two things together so if you get the 256 gig or the 512 gig model you get an m4 with and i think this is the first three performance cores instead of four that you're missing a performance core not in gpu cores which i've done many many times oh you don't get all the gpu cores you're missing a performance core i don't know enough about silicon manufacturing to know like is it because like the cores are new or trickier or something why do they usually bin based on gpus why are they binning based on a performance core Why aren't they bidding based on efficiency cores?

1:17:32Is it because the performance cores are harder to make? I don't even know. Well, I think it's probably about just surface area. You know, the performance cores are always much larger on the area diagram. But I think the GPU is, the total die area spent on GPU is bigger than the total die area spent on CPUs, right? You're probably right. But keep in mind, when they bid in GPU cores, usually they lop off two of them. So it could be like, you know, like where is the defect in this area? you know like it odds are it's going to land you know within you know one of these blocks the odds are this this percent and so like they you know they work the numbers they optimize it's like all right well we can we can bin based on the loss of these like large zones of like if it's if it's somewhere in this zone we can still sell the chip because we just disable one or two gpu cores or we disable one of the performance cores or whatever so i'm guessing it's all about you know area and the the odds that it will be there or not yeah well they didn't bin based on gpu cores because no matter what storage you get you get a full 10 core gpu i believe and they also been this is not binning again i'm using i'm overloading this term uh if you buy the model with 256 gigs or 512 gigs of storage you get 8 gigs of ram and this is something done in the past as well if you buy the one terabyte two terabyte you get double the ram 16 gigs i believe they started doing that last ipad pro i think even the one before that i think that i think that might have been in the a12z generation the 2020 update yeah and again those things are they're a little bit more related because the ram is on the soc so i kind of there's a little bit of an excuse for like well that's part of the package the you know so i anyway uh if you want any of the good expensive stuff you must get all of the good expensive stuff which you know that's that's a business for you like they they've got you where they want you this is not an a la carte thing where you just spec it out exactly how you want uh things are bundled together to a degree they've never been uh and so the you know comparing this so the m2 had four performance cores and four efficiency cores and the m the the m4 that you know that the m2 is the predecessor in the ipad line the m4 has four performance cores and six efficiency cores but if you get a binned m4 you are getting an soc with one fewer performance core than its predecessor so the question asked by rick williams which i think is a good one uh rick williams on mastodon is there some benchmark where the m2 ipad pro will beat the lower end m4 ipad pro because it has one more performance core you know what i mean like i think there could be a constructed benchmark where that might be the case or at least i thought that might be until i saw the preliminary geek bench numbers for the m4 which may be same because remember that we're comparing to the m2 because there is no m3 ipad pro to compare it to and that would have been like a closer fight but the m2 is kind of older here this i don't know if these are true because geek bench scores come in at this stage we don't know if they're like official or just random people trying things or they're fake or whatever But anyway, here as of Wednesday, May 8th, is the Geekbench scores for M3 versus M4.

1:20:41I'm not even doing M2. I'm doing M3 versus M4. Single core M3 score, which is currently the maximum single core score for any Mac in Geekbench, is 3 ,131. That's a 16-inch MacBook Pro M3 Max, right? 3 ,131. the m4 single score single core score as if this is true is 3 ,767 which is 20 percent higher in single core than m3 that's not a small number 20 percent higher in single core oh my god so that's like okay maybe these power cores really are difficult to manufacture and extend 28 billion transistors compared to 25 it's not a massively bigger chicken this is single core who cares how many cores there are this is single core that's a big if that's real that's a big leap in single core which makes me think a three performance cores in the m4 will crush four performance cores in the m3 and m2 with numbers like this um again it depends on the the algorithm or whatever and then the multi-core this is an m3 imac which is the fairest comparison plain m3 imac is multi-core is 11 ,702 for the m3 and 14 ,677 for the m4 so it's a 25 % gain in multi-core and again this is the the multi-core i believe is the same no no because you have the extra efficiency cores anyway 25 % higher multi-core not that big as i think you have the two extra efficiency cores but 20 % higher in single core that is significant that tells me that aside from the media engine being new faster memory bandwidth 20 higher single core the m4 is not just a warmed over m3 if these benchmarks are to be believed obviously we have to wait until people get this into their hands and start testing them but i am optimistic that the m4 looks to be at least as good a leap over the m3 as the m3 was over its predecessor oh and then one final thing uh the 256 gig model if you get the smallest amount of storage the default smallest amount of storage and the ipad pro the specs that apple has say that you can only do pro res video recording at 30 frames per second at 1080p instead of 30 frames per second at 4k and the speculation is that's because everyone's favorite there's only a single man flash chip in there so you get the half speed of course we won't know until there's a teardown or a benchmark but apple's own specs say oh and by the way video recording is slower on the one with 256 so that makes me think they cheaped out on that as well that is bananas the difference between the m3 and the m4 like if it's real if it's real that's what i was going to say like this seems almost too good to be true but credit to apple they've done such an incredible job with apple silicon that i could believe it like it is definitely in the realm of possibility that the difference is that strong i'm speaking of if it's real this is the final bit here uh the neural engine um it's there uh it is a 16 core neural engine just like the previous one was they say it does 38 trillion operations per second and they did some comparison of like look how much faster it is than the one in the a11 bionic thanks apple it's great um that's a really old 60 times faster right how much faster is it than a 486 yeah exactly how much faster is it than our last intel ipad oh we didn't make those um here's the thing i tried to look this up i'm like 38 train that number seems big i tried to look up the m3's neural engine score and the number i found was 18 trillion operations per second but then i also remember something about how apple is changing what they're measuring and previously they were doing like 16-bit floating point or previously they're doing 32-bit floating point operations and they changed it to 16-bit and they can do twice as many of those because they pack you know what i mean like i don't know if this is an apples to apples so i can't tell you whether 38 trillion versus 18 trillion is a massively better neural engine in the m4 or whether apple has changed what they're measuring and they're doing 16-bit floating points that are 32-bit so that's the jury's still out on that one but that's another interesting thing of like the media engines have mostly been similar the neural engines have been getting faster they've been adding more cores they've been adding more die space and they're getting better at what they do um but apple didn't make any specific claims about amazing ai stuff because i feel like as we'll get to in a little bit about the ipads in general there's a software story to these ipads that apple is not ready to tell until wwc so you know they said all this is great everything's great for ai you know the neural engine is great for ai we've been putting neural engines or whatever but they don't have any features to show us because they haven't announced those yet so it was a little bit of an awkward intro but i would imagine that when they do announce all the ai features of their various software products they may revisit how amazing the m4 is at them but here they just said it's great it's got a neural engine then some other interesting pieces there there is graphite sheets in the main housing and copper in the apple logo for thermals which apparently gives you 20 better thermal performance i like this by the way because the cooling thing for years people have been complaining about essentially all of apple's fanless devices that they are stupidly not thermally conductive enough and as we've discussed on past shows there are limits to how thermally conductive you want it to be and there are like actual legal limits like you can't let the outside of your device get too hot because it will burn people so sometimes apple is not conducting heat away from the soc to the outer world because they don't want to burn your legs essentially right they're like legal safety reasons why they can't do that but various youtube channels are forever tearing open apple's fanless devices whether they be phones or ipads or macbook airs putting in literally any kind of thermal anything the world's cheapest two cent thermal pad slapping on a macbook air wow it doesn't thermal throttle anymore right and again we say okay well is it because apple can't do that because it'll burn people's legs or whatever but like we've always you know all these rumors like the next iphone's gonna have a heat pipe and it's gonna have you know this cooling thing or whatever finally finally apple includes and brags about a thing they put in one of their flat fanless devices that helps it to be cooler and graphite cheaps they use they use these televisions as well to help cool them so thumbs up apple you see you can brag about cooling technology it's not admitting your things are too hot put better cooling in there so it spreads the heat more so it doesn't get too hot i am a graphite sheet fan and i give that a big thumbs up wow all right cameras and my oh no i'm sorry i've got ahead of myself uh it is apparently four times faster than the m2 and 10 times faster than the original ipad pro march of progress baby cameras and microphones 12 megapixel back camera same as previous model but no ultra wide camera that is gone they have removed it uh four studio quality microphones the lidar scanner remains there's a new adaptive true tone flash that apparently makes document scanning better than ever when i think it was turnus said this i was like okay and then i saw the little video demo that they did and i was like okay yeah that actually sounds pretty great i as soon as he said that i was like yes somebody somebody actually scans dot you know how much i you know you would know like anytime i scan anything i have to try to carefully arrange it to the shadow of my phone yeah yep and i was like yes they can solve this for me in software and i think there's a hardware component to this i don't haven't seen this confirmed yet but if you look at the camera bump on the back of the new ipads obviously they're missing the ultra wide camo which is oh well um but i think there's a new thing there like the the true tone flash thing i think there's like a a ambient light sensor that lets them helps them do that i don't know maybe that hardware was already there but anyway the result they showed in the demo was perfect he takes a giant ipad hovers it over a piece of paper it casts a giant shadow on the bottom half of the thing and they fix it in software love it i want that on every i want that on the the on the new iphones too yep as was foretold the front-facing camera is on the landscape edge which is true for anything they announced today unless i'm mistaken and they have a quote completely new charging and pairing system for the Apple Pencil.

1:28:45And we've kind of been bouncing off this all episode, but basically that's why you need the Apple Pencil Pro for all of these new devices or the Apple Pencil that charges via USB-C because the one that, you know, you and I have in our houses today, that one, the magnetic one, the magnets and whatnot and the charging apparatus is in a different spot than it needs to be for the new iPads where the camera is kind of in the way. so other changes from previous ipad pro no millimeter wave 5g antenna this is very sad news for me i did go to my uh my picnic table don't call it a park bench john my picnic table just a week or two back but it turns out that the tree cover was not conducive for the time of year and very quickly it ended up that i was in full sunlight which was not desirable and so i didn't go for long but i will i honestly i'm skipping ahead here but i don't plan on picking one of these iPads up because my, you know, my M2 iPad is just fine for me.

1:29:44But that is a bummer. Like that's genuinely a bummer. I get why Apple has done it because there's really not that much millimeter wave deployment here in the States. And I think it was only ever in the States to begin with, but it's kind of stinky. No ultra rod camera, which we mentioned four microphones instead of five and e-sim only. So e-sim only for everyone. So interesting decontenting here, dropping the camera, like the camera, the one they did include is exactly the same as it was. so there's no camera improvement and they ditched a camera which probably you know it's the lesser used camera or whatever but they they got rid of that they got rid of the five millimeter uh the the 5g millimeter wave it makes me wonder if the next iphone will have the millimeter wave but anyway yeah they're removing some stuff here presumably this is to preserve margins with the more expensive new screen right because remember we have those rumors like the new ipads are going to be thousands of dollars and yes you can spec this up to be like three thousand seven hundred dollars or whatever but because the screen was so expensive so there is some decontenting going on here and i think they made pretty wise choices like cutting out the ultra wide camera on an ipad probably not that big a deal although it does hurt their demo that we're going to talk about in a little bit of like uh controlling a multi-camera like uh device things well you can't do multi-camera on the ipad anymore because it only has one camera so no multi-camera uh ditching five five microphones instead of four that maybe that's just the arrangement of stuff inside the thing maybe they didn't need five that's fine e-sim only is the way everything is going um and then the final thing on the camera bump it looks smaller than unlike every other device apple makes the camera bump on the ipad i think got smaller this year which is a welcome change i mean the whole thing is thin um and obviously apple when they compare the thickness they're not comparing the camera bump if they did that it would not be but the whole rest of the device is super thin but the camera bump looks like it is thinner than the previous one and it is certainly not growing like the camera bump on iphones are so i'm i don't care about the camera on my ipad i would have liked it if the one camera they did include got better but it didn't but oh well but i do like a less prominent camera bump but do we know that for certainty or is that just a theory based on pictures i just looking at the pictures i don't know for certain but i'd be surprised if it's not smaller all right so we've got some software updates uh final cut pro 2 and logic pro 2 are a thing now uh final cut pro 2 is two times faster final rendering than m1 and you've got live multicam, which you just made mention of.

1:32:03And there's actually its own bespoke app now called Final Cut Camera, or I believe maybe that's on the iPhone side, I forget now. But basically the way it works is you can connect and preview up to four cameras all at once in one spot on the new iPads. You can even adjust those remote cameras, exposure, focus, white balance, and more, which is really, really neat. And you can do, they mentioned direct editing of, this is separate from the multicam stuff. You can do direct editing if you have a Thunderbolt drive plugged in, you can edit the project that is stored on the Thunderbolt drive. So that's pretty neat.

1:32:35Logic Pro 2, they did a lot of stuff for music and, you know, forgot that any other kind of audio exists, but that's what we expected. Session players, bass and keyboard players, now they have like AI or, you know, machine learning generated automated bass and keyboard players. They talked a while about Chromaglow, which I guess is to fake the sound of the warmth and depth, if you will, but especially the warmth of analog equipment. And they also have stem splitters, so you can drop in a complete track that has everything in it, and then it will cut out or separate, really, the bass, the drums, the voice, and then everything else into four different tracks, which that is super-duper cool if it works.

1:33:18So yeah, a little bit of software. I think this is a good way into AI here. The rumors were they were going to lean heavily into AI. The headline in tech for the last year or two has been AI everything. And what you see last year, what was interesting about last year's WWDC presentation is that even though the entire industry was saying AI every five seconds, Apple didn't mention that term once. You could tell like that was a choice they made that it seemed like Apple's opinion of the term AI was not maybe that high back then. And now what we see is them leaning into it because I think at this point they have to.

1:34:00Like the industry has gone that direction. The media, the markets, like everything is going that is like wanting to know what's Apple's AI story. And they didn't make up their own term for it as people thought they might. Like Apple's not going to call it AI. They're going to call it something else. They said AI like dozens of times in this presentation. They're just calling it AI. They're not making up their own thing. And what's interesting too is like what they described as AI is many of the features that have already existed that were previously called machine learning. And before that were called Siri briefly in a weird time.

1:34:34But obviously we're going to hear a lot more about this at WBDC. And so this is kind of a weird in-between time when they had a big product launch. They want to market it with the hot terms. And I think this isn't just them doing like a term grab. Apple, I think, legitimately – and again, this is – talk about figuring out Apple's talking points from the event. Everyone who was at the event has a story about how Apple has been ahead of this game forever. And you could see it in the presentation too. Like Apple wants everybody to know that they think we're already shipping AI capable hardware. Look at our amazing neural engines and our amazing processors and our amazing GPUs and all the amazing software features we've had for years.

1:35:19And they do deserve a large amount of credit for that. Like Apple really has been shipping really great hardware that has a lot of ML acceleration features. They've been doing this for a long time. What we didn't see, though, today is use of large language model based features or generative based features that are really what people are mostly talking about today when they say AI. We saw Apple rebrand ML features they've had for years as AI features. And I don't think that's completely unfair, but it's also not what people are asking them to do. so I think two things are simultaneously true I think it was totally warranted for them to co-opt the term to apply to stuff they're already been making because first of all that's what everyone does that's marketing like that's what everybody does and the term AI is being used all over the place anyway but also true at the same time they didn't really answer the question but this wasn't the right time to answer the question the right times to answer the question are WWDC and this fall's iPhone event.

1:36:34And between those two, I hope to have a better answer because what people actually want when they say AI, I think largely is generative AI features and LLM based features and how that can possibly integrate into better Siri and better like phone assistant features built into your phone. That's what everyone really wants to hear from Apple. the iPad Pro event was not the place for that. So given what the event was and when it was and what Apple had to work with, I think they did a good job managing expectations around AI for now by basically kicking the can down the road while also, I think fairly, touting that they're already making really good chips capable of what people mean when they say AI already today.

1:37:24But I don't think the M4, I don't think we have enough information yet to know like is this really meaningfully different is this like quote the ai focused chip no this is continuing the path they were already on but the path they were already on was pretty good and interestingly for the rebranding of it you know they said ai tons and tons of times like they i think they even called like one of their like three-year-old features like this uses ai even though it was three years ago right like that the image dragon thing but like interestingly on the cpu cores when like the m4 cpu cores what did they i'm trying to find the text so they said the The CPU cores have, what is it?

1:38:01Next generation, they used ML in the CPU cores. They didn't use AI. They said that the individual cores have next generation ML technology or something. Yeah. Next generation ML accelerators. ML accelerators? What the hell is ML? Next generation AI accelerators. That's what your CPUs have. I don't know if the silicon team didn't get on board. Obviously, again, I don't know what they mean by that. but they made a point of it to saying these cpu cores are not the same as the m3 cpu cores they have next generation ml accelerators so yeah maybe not everyone is on the same page with the ai branding but they were so close to being able to call that ai and by the way on the final cut pro and logic pro things like it wasn't clear from the presentation because they were showing them on the ipad but there are mac versions of these same apps with the same features that i think were announced simultaneously or apple said are coming or whatever so these are not like ipad only if you don't want to use the ipad version of final cut or the ipad version of logic you want to use it on the mac you'll also get these features i believe oh that's cool all right i don't know if the multi-cam thing is coming to the mac but otherwise i believe you're correct uh so new magic keyboard uh this was a series of ups and downs for your boy casey over here because uh it looks really great.

1:39:17I really want it for the function row because that's one thing. Cause I am a magic keyboard person on my iPad pro and I really like it. Although I think I said last week, it's not aging terribly well, but be that as it may. Um, I really wish it had a function row. I wish the trackpad was a little bigger. Yes, but I really wish it had a function row and holy crap and escape key. Oh my gosh. What I wouldn't give for an escape key. Um, but unfortunately the new magic keyboard officially anyway, and I suspect this is probably a physics problem. So it's not just, uh, and apple like you know gating it sort of thing but anyways officially it only works with the new ipad pro it does not work with any other ipad yeah that makes sense for for two reasons one thickness the the new one is thinner and this thing accommodates exactly the thickness of the whether it's the 11 inch or 13 inch that fits between it they could have added a little bit of slop in there i think i've done this in the past like oh you can kind of wedge it or whatever But the second thing that's less easy to deal with is the fact that the screen has all the weight in it.

1:40:17And that's why it has to be kind of cantilevered over the keyboard a little bit to keep it from tipping over when you tilt the screen. And the new ones weigh less and have their weight distributed differently. And the tilt is different, I think, partially to try to leave room for the top row of function keys because they added a new row of keys on top of the existing keyboard. and you do from the reports of people who are there you do kind of have to sometimes reach like under the ipad depending on how you have it tilted to get to that function row right because they like they could there's no you can't get there's no extra space to be had so they they tried to make it so it doesn't cantilever out as much because it's lighter so you don't need to it's hard to explain but if you look at it from a side view and look at the the one that you have casing inside but you can see the one that you have has to stick more of the weight of the ipad out over the front of the thing to make it all balanced so i think this this magic keyboard would not work for the thicker heavier models just like you said just because of physics right so i don't begrudge apple making this ipad pro m4 only because it's just it wouldn't work and i do think this one is better i think they have made as much room as they can by making it not have to stick out as much over the keys and you know with the thinner ipads yeah yeah no i mean this thing looks really good uh so yeah so you've got two colors you got a function row the palm rest is now aluminum and again you've got a larger trackpad and interestingly it now uses haptic feedback so it's not a like diving board scenario as far as i can tell uh it's got haptic feedback again uh m4 ipad pro only also you get a increased pass-through charging power this was stated to mkbhd was the first place i saw it and you can get up to 60 watts past your charging.

1:42:01I don't recall what the number was. I think it was 20-ish watts on the one that I have. But, you know, if you're really running low on your battery, you definitely want to plug directly into the iPad on mine. Now it looks like it really doesn't matter. And then Gruber noted that, hey, the total weight of the 13-inch iPad Pro plus a magic keyboard is within a couple of grams or something like that of a 13-inch MacBook Air, you know just as is and so they really are effectively equivalent once you put the ipad pro in a magic keyboard well one of them is a bunch of pieces that'll come apart and it's all floppy and everything and interestingly like about the aluminum the the aluminum is on the side that faces you when you're using it like it's the palm rest or whatever but the whole outside of this magic keyboard i'm led to believe is continuing to be whatever that gummy like other material is which is interesting because i i mean i guess the part like you can tell me the part that's wearing is that the part that you touch or is that the part that touches the the surface that the thing is sitting on no it's more of the like corners in particular the outside corners um so like i'm looking at it right now the corner nearest the camera bump the rubber on the outside or whatever this is maybe it's not rubber but you know what i'm saying like that that material is peeling away on the corner really really badly it's this aluminum is not helping you with that.

1:43:22No, it's not. Yeah, you're exactly right. But yeah, and the surface that you actually touch, I mean, mine isn't spick and span because I haven't, you know, cleaned it in a little while, but I wouldn't say it's wearing particularly badly. The left, actually, I guess the left-hand side, it feels just tactilely, it feels a little bit different than the right-hand side. I guess maybe because my right hand, my right hand is doing a lot more mousing than my left hand because I basically don't mouse with my left hand at all. So there's less contact on the right-hand side. I don't know. That's just a theory.

1:43:50But, you know, I don't think it's wearing poorly on the interior, although aluminum would certainly be welcome. But it's the exterior that's the problem. And to your point, it doesn't seem like that's going to get any better with this one. Yeah. Some people have had problems with like the keyboard and the membrane that's around it and all sorts of other things with the various gummy iPad accessories. So we'll see how this holds up. Yeah. The trackpad is a pure win, though. Like having having a haptic trackpad instead of the little diving board thing is great. And I think having aluminum on the surface will be good.

1:44:16But like when this thing is closed up, you're not going to confuse it with a MacBook Air because it's all soft and gummy on the outside, like an iPad. All right. So tell me one of you, because I'm not trying to be funny. And this is not just, you know, me playing dumb for the purpose of the show. So the Smart Folio, the one that has a keyboard, whatever that's called, that's gone. The Smart Keyboard Folio. Yeah, I think I just mean the Folio. Yeah, I'm talking about the one where you get an iPad and you just want a thing to cover it. No keyboards, no trackpads. Yeah, that's just called Smart Folio.

1:44:50But what they've made, what was like the first style of iPad Pro keyboard that did not have a trackpad, that was called the Smart Keyboard Folio. And that's always been my preferred iPad keyboard. And even after the Magic Keyboard came out, I actually briefly bought one when it first came out and then returned it because I really didn't like it on the 11-inch because it added so much bulk to it. And I didn't even like the keys of it. I actually really like the Smart Keyboard Folio. Compared to the Magic Keyboard, it is way less bulky. So it's lighter. It's probably thinner, but it's definitely lighter.

1:45:28It is like two-thirds the price. It's$200 instead of$300, both of which are ridiculous prices. but you know they really are it's at least cheaper or less expensive um and because and it didn't have the cantilever design because it didn't need to shove the keyboard all the way back to make room for a trackpad so if you only need a keyboard and you don't want a trackpad it is i think the better product in many ways and unfortunately there is no smart keyboard folio update for the new ipads and it probably won't work even if like you could maybe try to make it work but it probably won't be very good because the way it mounts the iPad has to rest in these slots in it and the new iPads are thinner so they're not going to really fit and mount properly in those slots.

1:46:13I think maybe Logitech or somebody some other third party might try their hand at replacing that product. Oh they might try but people have had, I mean how long has this keyboard style been the case? It's been since the 11 inch. That's 2018. So from 2018 to 2024, zero other companies have made an iPad keyboard that looks, feels, and works as good as that one. Well, that's because the Apple had one, but now Apple doesn't have one, so there's no competition. I guess, but I mean, honestly, this really disappoints me. I'm not surprised at all that they went this direction because it was very clear that the Magic Keyboard is where they wanted to go, but the Magic Keyboard is heavier and bulkier and more expensive and more mechanically complicated.

1:46:55I don't love that trade-off for my own purposes, but we'll get to my purposes in a little bit so it just just pour one out for the smart keyboard folio i think the magic keyboard the new magic keyboard is actually lighter than the previous one it is but it's it still has a lot more in there and it is still heavier than the smart keyboard folio yeah so the smart folio the reason i put this in here is because i think in their copy and maybe in the presentation as well they make note of more viewing angles for the for the again the smart folio is just like it puts a cover on the front and back of your ipad pro that's it there's no electronics or anything in there right um and it folds up kind of like into a little triangular wedge that you can prop it up or whatever i can't for life when you figure out what the more viewing angles are it looks exactly the same as all smart folios for ipad so you can make the little triangle you can prop it up this way you can lay it flat and that's what it does so i don't know we'll see oh and by the way one more thing on the smart folio with the uh with the new ipad pros getting so thin especially the really big one i feel like we're approaching the point where adding a smart folio again the cover that has nothing in it no keyboard no trackpad no nothing is coming close to doubling the thickness of your ipad now yeah having that stupid cover not that i'm complaining it's just a little bit absurd that is bananas i mean i would argue that it it substantially improves the utility of the ipad to have a keyboard yeah um i even though i i will i strongly regret the loss of the smart keyboard folio line if i'm going to make good use of an ipad at all it needs to have a keyboard it's simple as that like that that is no longer an optional thing for me when i'm when i'm like that's like i when i briefly owned the ipad mini that was one of the biggest problems with me trying to use it for anything was that there were there were no good keyboard options for it i need a keyboard and apple makes the best keyboards for the ipads by a mile and it's it's just a shame my favorite one's gone now but uh if i was going to get one of these ipads no question i would get it with the keyboard yeah and by the way logitech does have a new keyboard for this that i don't i mean it's it's different than the the magic one the cantilever one because it uses a kickstand which is you know the microsoft surface stuff do that if you can deal with the kickstand thing you get uh you know an arrangement where the key the the the ipad doesn't block any your function keys you get a trackpad you get a pretty thin keyboard but you have to deal with the kickstand which might be a little bit awkward i'll try to put a link to that one in the show notes there.

1:49:18So there's a new Apple Pencil Pro. There is a new sensor, which allows you to squeeze it to bring up a new tool palette. And then third-party developers can do something else with it if they so desire. There's a haptic engine for feedback. So you know, when you've engaged, you know, a squeeze or what have you. And you know what you should do, John, you should do a barrel roll because now there's a barrel roll gyroscope to allow you to roll the pencil. and that's very useful, for example, to change the orientation of a shaped pen or brush. So that's pretty neat. And it also supports Find My, which holy smokes, I would really love that.

1:49:59It's only been a handful of times that my pencil has walked away, but then those times it would have been convenient. And so Procreate CEO James Kuda, whatever came out and said that among other the things developers can create their own custom interactions using this new Apple Pencil Pro and the new sensors and whatnot, which is really cool. And so you can use this with the iPad Air and the iPad Pro, right? The new ones, that is. Yeah, let's give Apple some rare props for reasonable naming. This is called the Apple Pencil Pro. Instead of increasing the number, like Apple Pencil, Apple Pencil 2, then the Apple Pencil USB, calling this Pro makes so much sense because it's the expensive one uh and the only thing adjustment you might have to make in your mind is this is not the apple pencil that only works with the ipad pro it is the pencil itself that is pro it is the apple pencil pro and so this will this is a good name for what will be the slot for the expensive pencil so again the goal state in the future will be every ipad can work with a pencil and you can pick the expensive one or the cheap one and the expensive one is called apple pencil pro and that makes perfect sense of course now we have to deal with apple pencil pro second generation apple pencil pro generation but apple pencil pro with two usbc ports right right yeah we'll see but anyway good kudos to apple to not increasing the number by one and making it confusing it's the apple pencil pro so that's the ipad pro the keyboard is 300 or 350 depending on what size the pencil pro is still 130 which uh i would have expected them to raise the price and they didn't And$130 for the pencil feels like a lot at first, but then actually, especially this one, I feel like there's a lot of tech in there, even more than there was before.

1:51:42So I'm not really that bothered by the pencil. Very bothered by the price of the keyboard. Not that bothered by the price of the pencil. You can already order the Pro. It is available sometime next week. And the pencil, Mac Rumors has discovered, has five different box designs, which are all very cute. And so I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And the original iPad has been dropped. I shouldn't say original, excuse me. but the the what is it ipad 10th gen is that right yeah uh that is now 350 bucks so that's the same that you can get an entire keyboard or you can get an entire ipad take your pick and the ninth gen is gone now right yeah well you know except for like education discount channels but what this means is like for in most channels the home button is gone from the ipad we still have the iphone se to deal with but from the ipad the home button is gone and everything has oh not face id but well we'll get there we'll get there so that's that's the event um for me i think the ipad pro looks great it's expensive because it starts at 900 we didn't actually talk about that did we it starts at 900 uh for the 11 inch and it just goes up from there is that like a 200 increase from i believe that's right yeah i mean to get the more expensive screen we've worried how much more expensive it would be it's more expensive they decontented some to keep it but it's still more expensive than it used to be.

1:53:01And honestly, for what they are giving you, they're giving you a MacBook Air class processor. They're giving you MacBook Air levels of RAM. They're giving you way better than MacBook Air screen. Right. The screen is way better than any Mac screen. So what they're giving you, that is a reasonable price for what these specs actually are. So I actually have no problem with this price for the product that it is. Until you start adding storage, obviously, right? Yeah, and the accessories. I mean, because the reality is, like, you know, the MacBook Air comes with the keyboard without charging an extra$300.

1:53:35But the thing is, like, once you actually add the accessories, the cellular, thank God, and other things, you know, you end up in, like, you know, the$1 ,500,$1 ,600 range at least. You know, if you need a lot of storage, you might be even higher than that. Yeah, you can push up against$4 ,000 if you really deck this out. Right. I mean, but almost no one's going to be doing that. but i think a lot of people are going to be in like the the the 1200 to 2000 range and and that's those are laptop prices good laptop prices too like that's that that isn't like you know some base level crappy pc thing those are good laptop prices that's either you know macbook pro price or it's a macbook air with decent storage right and so that brings up the big uncomfortable question is like well how many people are first of all using an ipad in ways that can even use all of this hardware power?

1:54:26And then second of all, how many people can justify paying this much for an iPad? And that market exists for sure. Apple has shown over the years that the iPad Pro market is there. It does exist. People do use iPad Pros. My wife uses one, but they keep pushing it higher and higher in both price and in hardware specs. And what I'm not seeing is a lot of software that can push those needs. I'm not seeing a lot of actual use in the real world of people who are really burning up that processor and really using all that RAM, using iPadOS. I've said many times before, I think it's unwise for tech people to condescend to other people by saying, you don't need this benefit, this resource.

1:55:17You won't use this. And it is something that tech people do a lot, kind of down-talking the less technical people that they know of in their lives. They're like, oh, you don't deserve to use high-end hardware. I deserve to. You don't. So I'm trying to avoid that, but it does seem like the iPad Pro continues on the path it's been on for a long time. Amazing hardware, ridiculously high-end capabilities for a tablet and for, honestly, for almost any computer, but there is still just the huge question mark of what are people who actually buy iPads and who are using iPad OS actually doing with this thing that will take advantage of any of that power and I'm not saying that that there is no market that will use it but I think that I think the market is really small yeah so obviously as we said before the software side of this it's just obviously the biggest problem that's wwdc we'll we'll have ample time to complain about it then right but we're not gonna with we had no expectation that in this the ipad event that they would roll out the new version of ipad os early and show us all the things they've done or whatever but like this there is the software side of this and a lot of people see this and they see the amazing hardware and setting aside like how big the market people almost get kind of resentful they're like oh the last thing the ipad needed was better hardware or like they they map things on to Apple and you think Apple thinks the problem with the iPad is hardware no Apple doesn't think that Apple for whatever problems the iPad has that Apple acknowledges or knows about or whatever they're just doing what they're supposed to do is which is make the hardware better there is a software side of this where we all agree they're dropping the ball right but just because they make the hardware better doesn't mean they think that's the problem they don't think that they're just making the hardware better that's what computer makers do so kudos for Apple for making the hardware better and we're setting aside the software conversation until WWDC right but I do want to say when we're talking about the hardware there is one thing about this the hardware that is essentially not allowing users of this product to take advantage of the power and then no one ever talks about it they all talk about how the software stopped people from taking advantage and that is a thing but the hardware at this point especially now that they skipped a generation to give it it's like the only product they have with an m4 right the ipad pro needs more ports that's a hardware limitation now you can use external drives with final cut pro you can have thunderbolt or whatever what it's the macbook one with a freaking m4 in it right what if i want to power my thing but also connect with thunderbolt drive but also connect the usb sorry you can't do that does it mean 50 ports no but it needs more than one i don't know what the solution to this is i don't know where you put the port or whatever i'm just saying this is the rare hardware feature that is letting down the power of this device the power of this device is constrained more every year by the fact that it has a single port that single port has gotten better great it's thunderbolt we love it it's good you need more than one like think of it if the macbook one the 12 inch macbook had one port and it was apple's fastest thunderbolt port no it had one port and it was cheap it was a cheap model it was like usb it wasn't even good this has you know fast port for using your video 8k video streaming to the thing blah blah but there's just one of them that is one area where the hardware is is letting this thing down which is kind of a shame and as for the software stuff like setting aside all the issues with multitasking whatever we'll talk about wwc steve trout and smith were recently complaining on mastodon about sort of like a software like model thing that's a problem like say oh final cut pro on the ipad it's amazing you got all this power here's here marco here's an application takes advantage the final cut pro on the ipad can burn everything that the m4 has to offer it'll use it if you use the ipad as your video editor with final cut pro that's what you need this hardware for and he says well if you do that and you start like a long-running operation to final cut and then you switch to like springboard or go back to the home screen your your final cut pro job uh gets canceled yeah because like oh now you swap something out and it doesn't get canceled because 16 gigs of ram and an m4 aren't enough to run a final cut pro job in the background just get a macbook that has those same specs someday you can run final cut pro in the background it doesn't cancel itself when you switch apps but the the software model the application model the environment on ios like setting aside like multitasking and file system access or whatever just like the overall like how does ipad os work it works in a way that is fundamentally unfriendly to pro apps fundamentally unfriendly to letting people take advantage of the of the power of the things to at the level of like well yeah on ipad os um if something else wants resources and you're not the front most application we just kill you take the resources away from you cancel your job and that is not a pro environment so setting aside all the other software things that we will surely talk about there are fundamental issues fundamental essentially invisible non-ui related issues to how ipad os works that are at odds with the hardware that apple is shipping it's just the bigger story like we're seeing this from a lot of people today like if you were already able to do significant tasks on an ipad like if you were already using an iPad Pro substantially, then this is a great upgrade for you.

2:00:30This is an awesome product for you. If you were not already doing that, you probably still can't. Look, I would love to buy this thing. I would love it because it's so cool and so new and so shiny and so thin and light when you pick it up and it has the awesome new screen. I would love a justification to buy this thing, but I'm not one of those people. There are times in my life where I have used an iPad more or less I've gone in and out of it. Recently, I've been pretty far out of it. I haven't actually used an iPad in, I think, about six months. But there are certain things. If I went to WWDC this year, I would definitely plug in, dig out, plug in my iPad, run all the updates, and bring my awesome smart keyboard folio.

2:01:17because it is the best device to bring into like a small place to take notes on in your lap with that keyboard with cellular like it's great for that but i have found that in most of my life the ipad is not for me and you know when i look around the tech business the tech business is really big and and we've obviously never been able to cover all of it we don't even cover a small amount of it the tech business is huge we cover the parts of it that we are closest to mostly around the products and services we use ourselves. Apple has grown so big recently. One person used to be able to cover Apple and Apple products fairly well.

2:02:00I think Apple's big enough now that that's actually not really reasonably possible anymore to really have any depth to all their stuff in one person. It's a big company. They make a bunch of different product lines. And I think it's okay for us to specialize and say, you know what, this product and this product I'm going to use like crazy. This one and this one, I don't really have a need for that in my life or it doesn't fit my needs well enough. And for me, I realized over time that I wish I was the kind of person who could use an iPad more. The same way as we talked about recently, I wish I was a notebook person.

2:02:35I wish I used fancy pens and cool paper notebooks. I wish I was that person. I'm just not. For me, I'm finally realizing the iPad is that for me. And so I think it's worth accepting that about oneself. Even though many of us are gadget hounds, we would love a reason to buy this thing. It's so cool. It's so new. The cool pencil. And I would use it for like three days and then I would never use it again. And so I'm giving this a pass. But the great thing about having this breadth of products is that there's other products that I love and use constantly. I love the Mac. I love the phone. I've even started to really enjoy the watch in recent years, and I love certain ones.

2:03:18This one's not for me, but for everyone out there who's like, I got to have my MacBook Air, there's also people out there who are like, I got to have the iPad Pro. Now, I don't think there's as many of them by a mile, but those people out there. And so if you're one of those people, this is a great update. I'm personally just giving it a pass though because for me, I would be running to the nearest Apple store if even half of this stuff came to a MacBook Air. but unfortunately that's probably not in the cards but that's ultimately what i want is to continue getting really awesome mac laptops for these needs but if you're an ipad person this is awesome and go for it yeah you know the ipad for me is fits an odd space in my life because i desperately want it to be more for me than it is but i do enjoy using it for what i use it for It's a very, very good couch computer.

2:04:13It's a great, you know, passenger princess computer if Aaron's driving somewhere and I just want, you know, to goof off in the car. Because what does it have in it, Marco? You've mentioned this already. Cellular. Mm-hmm. So it's a great, you know, kind of toting around computer. And actually, as you said, you know, if you want to take notes or something like that, I don't even necessarily mean with a pencil. If you just want to have a small computer that's on your person that you can use here and there, like at a conference or whatever, it's great for that as well. I really – I enjoy my iPad enough that I don't think I would want to live a life without it.

2:04:49Although between just the three of us, I've had some really bad thoughts about getting a bumming around laptop, which I'm really uncomfortable with. But we can explore that another time. Oh, are you saying that maybe having a desktop laptop and a laptop laptop is a good idea? Hmm. We're not going to go there. We're not going to go there. What a surprise. Oh, my God. I'm having very impure thoughts. All right. So anyway, so with regard to the iPad, though. Get the MacBook Air. It's so freaking good. I'm telling you. Stop. Look, I shouldn't be turning the iPad celebration episode into a MacBook Air sales pitch.

2:05:18But I'm telling you, for the price of this iPad Pro, you can get a MacBook Air. And for your purposes, Casey, definitely for mine, definitely for yours, that's the better computer for a lot of what you want. No, it really is. And honestly, all kidding aside, and I really am not trying to make a whole topic out of this, but if I could have a MacBook Air with cellular, I probably would already have one because it genuinely is that important to me. And if you don't agree, you know, you, the two of you and you, the broader listener, that's totally cool. But cellular is that important to me. And for the like bumming around on the go kind of computer.

2:05:57And if the MacBook Air had cellular, I would probably already have one. but that's neither here nor there. Let's move on. Um, I don't want to get one of these cause I just got this iPad, what, like a year, year and a half ago, something like that. Um, and it's, it's serving me perfectly fine. It's an M2 iPad pro. And even though the keyboard is wearing in a way that I don't love, it still works. And so for now I'm sticking with it. I don't have any needs in the house to like pass down my iPad or any other iPad. So, um, I, I'm not in for this one, but I cannot state strongly enough how impressed I am by this hardware.

2:06:34I mean, not having seen it in person yet, just by looking at the specs and seeing the reviews and seeing the introductory video, it's incredible, incredible hardware. And I don't want to derail us on another why is iPadOS the way it is discussion, but I just wish for more for my iPadOS for my needs. Maybe not for your needs, but for my needs. And I just can't get that yet. And so for that, for all of those reasons, I'm not in for this one. But John, I am hearing that you are probably going to be in for this one, huh? Yep. So my iPad, I probably watched like half of my television movies on my iPad.

2:07:09And it's all about the screen. And I am a TV snob. And I love OLED. And I was absolutely 100 % going to get this one. So I ordered one. What did you buy? It pained me a little bit to 11 inch. It paid me a little bit to see the the SoC things. It doesn't matter for TV watching, obviously. But it's like, oh, I kind of like to get the silicone with all the parts working. But there's no way I was going to pay for it. It's just it was hundreds of more dollars that would be pointless for me. I don't need that to watch TV and movies. I barely I need I don't need any of that thing. I just need like the H.264 decoder.

2:07:44Right. It's all I need. Right. So I got the 11 inch when I was picking the storage size. I have I have an M1 iPad Pro right now. so i'm replacing the m1 with the m4 and again the only reason i'm replacing it is because of that screen that's it i don't care about anything else right um and so when i picked storage i looked at my m1 and said how much storage are this about using and i have a 256 i think and i'm using like a little bit more than half so i'm like oh i can just get a 256 again but i thought about it a little bit and i said you know if the screen is as good as i think it is i'm going to be much more likely to take some of my big honking blu-ray rips and put them on my ipad like not you know put them like copy them to my ipad so i can watch them with like infuse or whatever um so i got the 512 that doesn't give me anything the soc still has one performance core disabled like that that storage size upgrade i guess i i didn't know this at the time but i guess it gives me the faster storage instead but i don't i don't need the faster storage either it's like it's all pointless right but i got it for the storage space anticipating that i may want to put more actual video file big video files on the ipad which i haven't done with my current model because i think i'm gonna like this screen so much so that's what i did i got an 11 inch 512 space black i got the folio case that's just you know no keyboard no trackpad no nothing it's just a gummy little case um it will even out the camera bump and you know i actually use that case to prop my ipad up when i watch it in bed like that's what i actually use it for so it's an important accessory for me um I did I was like oh you know I should try to buy this through my son's college to get that educational discount and there is an educational discount and it's okay but for whatever reason the educational discount I don't know if this is also discounted or whatever and I googled for a little bit but the educational discount if you buy apple care plus they make you get the one where you pay for two years up front and that's it you can't get the monthly one literally can't at least in my son's college store.

2:09:45And I wanted the month-by-month one because the month-by-month one, it goes until you stop paying. It doesn't stop after two years. And I plan to use this iPad for way more than two years if I possibly can. Again, the only reason I'm ditching my old one is because of the screen. And if the screen is good, screen's never going to get any worse other than getting a little bit dimmer, but it doesn't matter because I watch in the dark anyway. I'm in for the long haul. I want the, and if I drop it and break it, i want to get it replaced so i got the monthly apple care paid full price for everything get any kind of discount the monthly apple care i i set aside the educational discount and left probably hundreds of dollars on the table just so i can get the month-to-month apple care plus because i couldn't figure out or be bothered to figure out how to somehow do that through the school or whatever anyway well why didn't you you could have bought it without any sort of apple care and then in the settings app you can actually enroll in apple care in there yeah there when i was googling for it there were some people who are buying through edu or have some difficulties with that for like getting the like it was there was enough things about like oh it turns out you couldn't buy after the fact if you bought it through edu or some crap and i was like i just don't want to deal with that no like that's fair it wasn't like it wasn't that big a difference by some of a couple hundred dollars or whatever but like i'll survive so so that's what i got um and i'm looking forward to it uh again i use i use it like literally every single day uh and what i'm just using it as a glorified tv but not just as a glorified i'm gonna say like oh you just use a glorified tv i i've said this before i do the multi-screen experience on a single screen when i watch tv i'm sliping in slide over things of like ivory and i'm sometimes doing it like picture in picture and using that newswire while the thing i'm watching is in floating like picture in picture in the corner so i'm using my ipad yes as a tv but as a tv where on the same tv with my fingers i can dork around other things if it's you know something that i don't have to pay too much attention to so i'm i'm looking forward to it hopefully i can get the brightness under control so my wife doesn't kill me for watching things in hdr people telling me that i should have got a 3500 vision pro or whatever but but yeah that's what i got um the my my folio has already shipped i believe and i should have the uh the ipad and they went oh and i also got the pencil pro not because i use the pencil a lot because i don't but i do have the apple pencil 2 with my m1 ipad pro and i do like it for the few times that i've used it yeah i feel the same i mostly got the pencil so i can talk about it on the show uh because i don't really need a pencil and also because when i hand this down like i i'll probably hand it down to my son who does do like digital art stuff with the pencil and i want him to have a pencil that goes with it so there you go that's exciting john and so it arrived do you know when it arrives are you sure uh i think that like is it May 15th or something, whatever day one is for the arrival of the new iPad Pro.

2:12:39Cool. Well, that's super exciting. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Compiler and Squarespace. Thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm.com. Today's member-exclusive bonus segment in ATP Overtime is on Apple Silicon in AI servers. This is a story that broke, I think, just today that Apple is allegedly developing AI chips for data centers to run in custom servers. We're going to be covering that in ATP Overtime, members exclusive. Join at atp.fm slash join to hear. Thank you so much, and we'll talk to you next week.

2:13:31and Casey wouldn't let him cause it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into Mastodon you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S so that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M and T-Marco R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long.

2:14:19Outside of my neighborhood, there was a house that was sitting vacant for literally five or ten years directly across the street from the exit I used. to get in and out of our neighborhood every day. Before it sat vacant, there was actually a Z32, a 300ZX, that parked there for a while, like I used to have many years ago, and it always made me so happy to see it. Then it sat vacant for forever, and then all of a sudden, somebody moved into it or whatever. It's no longer vacant, and there are like two or three Wranglers that park there all the time, and that just kind of makes me smile a little bit.

2:14:53I still think that the Wrangler was probably not the right choice for me, and I'm glad that you two numbnuts were apart in talking me out of it. But that house is now dead to me because in the last few days, would you like to guess what is now parking in the driveway of the house that I see every time I leave my neighborhood? Is it a Cybertruck? A yellow Rivian? Oh God, I would much prefer to see a yellow Rivian. A yellow Cybertruck? Yeah. Well, it's going to be yellow when I pee on it. No, not really, but it is a Cybertruck. and oh no it is i'm trying to be gentle it is not for me like it you know what it's i don't get it i don't get it it looks ridiculous it it screams i am very not confident in myself and i am compensating for my lack of confidence no does it scream that any more than the typical pickup truck that's 20 bazillion feet high?

2:15:53I don't think it does. Oh, yes. Honestly, I would much rather see a Cybertruck than one of those giant new regular Ford trucks that is just like the giant block. I don't know. So the Cybertruck, okay, look. Let's disclaim a couple things up front. Elon Musk is a turd and a horrible person, okay? I'm not going to defend him at all. I don't like him at all. I sold my Tesla in part because of how much I don't like him. So this is not about him in particular. I think the Cybertruck is ugly but I'm glad they tried something I'm glad they actually made something that was noticeably different and an opinionated design now that opinion was bad but at least it's an opinionated design that's fair well I'm going to say it's bad but like you know so that's what everyone says about the Cybertruck they're glad that someone tried something new but when someone tries something new and it really is bad nobody congratulates them nobody congratulated Pontiac on the Aztec no one said well I don't like how the Pontiac Aztec looks, but I'm glad Pontiac tried something.

2:16:54Nobody said that. Nobody was glad they tried. But the Aztec was not, it was not like a strong opinion. The Aztec was like a mishmash of like design by committee. Oh no, it was a strong opinion. It was just a bad opinion. The thing about the Cybertruck is some people like how it looks, which is not true of the Aztec. Well, obviously some people like the Aztec, but there's a large number of people who think the Cybertruck looks cool. So although it may not be to your particular taste, I think it is more successful than many other ugly cars that have come out. So when people say, I'm glad they tried something new, what they're really saying is I'm glad they tried something new that enough people actually like, even if it's not for me.

2:17:34There are so many boring, bland car designs out there. There's a thousand car models for you to pick from if you want a really average looking, quote, normal looking car. I did see a Cybertruck on the road for the first time about a week or two ago. Yeah, me too. I saw my first one like two days ago. Yeah, same. I wasn't as shocked to see it as I thought I would be because everyone, you know, when you see everyone reacting online, like, oh my God, it's so weird. Like, it wasn't that weird to see, like, because I've already seen it online, I guess. It was fine. I commend any risk-taking in visual car design these days because it is so rare.

2:18:11And John's right. the Cybertruck is for some people. It's not for me, but it's for some people. Like the iPad Pro, it's coming around. Although the iPad Pro is probably a much better all-around product. Yeah, and the Cybertruck, enough people like how it looks. I don't know if it's 50 % or whatever, but it's not like the number of people, the percentage of people like the Pontiac Aztec. It is a pretty big number. There is a large contingent of people who think the Cybertruck looks really good. And I think it succeeds at its goal. The goal of the Cybertruck was to be a really bold design. It's a statement car.

2:18:48Yeah, and it is that. Setting aside thoughts on its founder and setting aside the various flaws it's had so far, like the terrible gas pedal thing. There's a lot of flaws in it, and I'm not taking the safety flaws lightly either because that's a huge – obviously, that's a huge problem. but as a visual design of a vehicle it succeeds in taking a bold statement and doing something crazy like recently my dog walk route one of the houses on it added a hummer ev and it's the first time i'm seeing a hummer ev in person and the hummer ev it is kind of striking looking but it's striking because it just looks a little bit wrong in its proportions like it looks like you're watching a movie in the wrong aspect ratio like it looks like it's being stretched wide but it looks like just a regular modern suv just widened it doesn't look like a bold choice in design it looks like a boring car wider well that widening thing is the hummer the hummer thing yeah that is hummer's thing but hummers always look more like you know a little more of the military like kind of utilitarian style but they look wider than you think they're gonna be yes but this doesn't look like a Hummer.

2:19:59This looks like every other boring SUV stretched out a little bit wider. Like weirdly wide. But it doesn't look like cool or good. Yeah, they didn't capture the distinctiveness of the actual original Hummer in the new one. Correct. Whereas the Cybertruck is very distinctive. It has this very divisive design. It is a bold choice. No one can look at the Cybertruck and say, that was designed by committee. That's so bland. Whereas the Hummer, the Hummer EV, I think when I saw one in person here, I think it looks really bland, big and weird and wide, but just bland. It doesn't it looks like design by committee, whereas no one would ever accuse the Cybertruck of that.

2:20:43The Cybertruck is kind of the perfect pickup truck for America because pickup trucks have long since not been judged by their utility. and the Cybertruck is perhaps the least utility of any pickup truck ever made because it's so so many parts of it are like sacrificed on the altar of that look and like it's like oh you're sacrificing practicality it's like no one buys well not no one so few people in this country buy pickup trucks for their utility they buy them for all sorts of other reasons and the fact that they've been slowly shrinking the beds and making them harder to maneuver and bigger for no reason other than to like make people feel better like that's what the pickup truck is in this country for most people who buy them right they're the best-selling vehicle right and so this is like oh a pickup truck where you don't care about how useful it is and everything about it is super weird and annoying but you just want it to look cool let's do that to 11 and they did it's got sharp angles everywhere the bed is actually bigger than it is on a lot of the other big pickup trucks but like it's it's you know and they did they did do some smart things by trying to make this big truck easier to maneuver than other ones but like it's just yeah i don't it's it's a it's it probably not a great choice for the company in terms of how many of these they're going to sell because it's a hundred thousand dollar pickup truck and yeah they sell a lot of pickup trucks so they don't sell a lot of hundred thousand dollar pickup trucks uh it doesn't have a lot of utility half the people or whatever the percentages think it is hideously ugly and the other half loves it uh but it's but it's iconic and uh we'll remember it in history the same way we remember the subaru brat.

2:22:12Oh, no, we will not. And the El Camino, I guess. Don't you even, you bite your tongue, sir. Both of those are way better looking and way better cars than this is. They were iconic. People said, this doesn't look like the usual car that I'm used to seeing. I don't even know what it is I'm looking at, and we remember them to this day. Look at the original MacBook Air. That was a terrible, believe me, I owned one. It was a terrible computer, but it was iconic, and some people loved the design of it. Like it doesn't need to necessarily be a great car in like, you know, the stats and the on-paper ways to be like an iconic success story in that way.

2:22:50It's more like the Lamborghini Countach, which is totally impractical, very difficult car to live with. But everyone knows what it looks like, don't they? Yeah. And I think if the Cybertruck was made by somebody who wasn't a total turd, you would not hear nearly as much negativity about it. Oh, well, until people start slicing people in half with those stainless steel panels and everything. because there are like yeah that's that's part of what i'm saying with like there are safety concerns with with its design yeah we don't well we don't know there are unknowns there are unknowns setting aside like all the defects in the pedal like things they didn't mean to do on purpose they meant to on purpose make it out of stainless steel and it is yet to be seen and they meant to on purpose put those sharp corners in it and i'm not sure what if there'll be any fallout from that but it is that is a direct consequence of the look they've chosen that look has ramifications in the real world for possibly for safety but certainly for things like practicality and that ridiculous windshield wiper and all sorts of other crap i did not have on my bingo card for today that i would be the only person that does not like the cyber truck and you two would be defending i mean i don't like how it looks either but like i think marco and i uh appreciate and like i said appreciate someone trying something new and succeeding enough that some people really love it and not letting you know concerns like you know regulation and safety water down the design well let's not applaud that too much not worrying about the the accelerator pedal staying attached to the pedal because that's not that important and then you just put a rivet in it and call it a day there are legitimate safety concerns but uh as a designed object i honestly when i saw it in person i did not hate it as much as i thought i would oh i hate it so badly speaking of design choices did you hear about this one you probably haven't if you're not super into the so when you saw the cybertruck when it was announced and everything there was like these wheel covers like the aerodynamic wheel covers that sort of essentially cover over the wheel to make it you know but they're removable right it was very often those wheel covers are removable because people think the wheels look better without the aero covers on them but the cybertruck ones i don't know if you remember i can go pull up a picture of it now they have these little things that stick out basically over the rubber like into the sidewall a little bit like it's part of the look right so it's not just a cover that covers the metal part of the wheel that cover also extends into the rubber part but and it looks cool in all the demos like wow it's a distinctive look for the cyber truck but if you notice how the rubber on the wheels are made the parts that stick out from the wheel cover sort of essentially mate with or line up with structures in the sidewall like it's you know oh yeah you can't just rotate it the wheel cover has to be lined up with the rubber of the wheel and that's not how cars work you may not know it but the your rubber tire does move within the wheel slip a little bit within the wheel whoa i didn't know that and so they thought they were going to ship this but they realized if you actually drive the car with these on it especially with the incredible power this thing has they quickly go out of alignment like the wheel the rubber goes out of alignment with the metal wheel that it's on which makes the wheel cover also go out of alignment and so they basically if you buy a cybertruck you do not get those covers that you ostensibly paid for and tesla said yeah those that doesn't work so i don't think they're going to give them alternate wheel covers that don't extend if they're going to give them all new wheels but there are a couple of things about the cybertruck that you know they didn't either didn't think through all the way or didn't quite work out the way they want and i love that one because it just shows the kind of like this is a young car company that no either no one thought of or was overridden perhaps by some other jerky person to say you can't make part of the wheel be forced to line up with part of the rubber and give you a car with a thousand horsepower that's not that's not going to work after like you know 10 minutes to a couple of days so no wheel covers for you cybertruck owner not yet anyway right well um i agree lightly that a bold statement was made and I admire that, but everything else about it, it's hideous.

2:26:47It's way too big. It's obnoxious. It's just, it's not a DeLorean. Like the DeLorean was wrong in other ways, but it was also adorable and delightful. There's nothing adorable or delightful about this monstrosity. I think it's adorable next to an F-350.