MacBook Neo, iPhone 17e, and iPad Air: The Vergecast Livestream

10:48David Pierce:Instead of starting at 512 gigs of RAM and I believe 6 – or sorry. Instead of starting at 512 gigs of storage and 16 gigs of RAM, it's 256 and 8. So meaningful downgrade on both sides. I get a check from Nealai for that one. You get a magic keyboard that I would say, did you type on the thing at all? I didn't spend any time really typing. It felt fine. It's fine. It's like Apple keyboards are Apple keyboards at this point. They're all pretty good. You don't get the haptic trackpad. You get the thing that actually clicks, which I assume is a noticeably cheaper piece of equipment than the thing that they're trying to do with the MacBook Airs.

11:23David Pierce:It has two USB-C ports. one seemingly very fast and one much slower, which is interesting. There's been some specs running around that they're actually very different USB-C ports. There's no MagSafe. There's no Thunderbolt. There's no Thunderbolt. It has two side speakers. So when I first saw it, like...

11:43Nilay Patel:By the way, MagSafe in this context means the power connector, not the phone MagSafe.

11:48David Pierce:Right. I mean, listen, give it a minute and Apple, we'll call it Apple TV. Do you know what I mean? Like, but there are two sort of slits on either side kind of like level with the trackpad that are speakers that are side-firing. And in that room we were in, it's very hard to tell what it sounds like.

12:06Nilay Patel:No, I know what it sounds like. It sounds bad. Yeah, I suspect that's correct. When John Ternus looked me in the eyes and said, it supports Dolby Atmos, I thought to myself, John, you're in line to be the CEO of one of the richest companies in the world. Don't start by lying in this way.

12:19David Pierce:They're supporting Dolby Atmos and there's doing good.

12:21Nilay Patel:It was weird that I interrupted the entire event and addressed him by name. And Eli walked up and said, take Dolby Atmos out of your mouth. They're fine. They're going to be fine for what they are, but they are side-firing speakers that will, when you add the unbelievable amount of Atmos music processing to them, will sound even tinier than ever. I guarantee it.

12:41David Pierce:Which I think is a small bummer because I actually think as laptops go, MacBook speakers are pretty good. The MacBook Pro speakers in particular are pretty good. The Air is like fine. But so it has the speakers. I thought they were SD card slots at first. There's also a headphone jack near the front, which I hate. It's an odd place for it. But I get it because... Don't like it. Not a fan. Why would...

13:02Nilay Patel:Because in schools, you got to plug in like the weird splitters and stuff. You need space.

13:06David Pierce:I guess that's true. That kind of makes sense. But yeah, so it's up towards the front. That's weird. The thing weighs about the same as the MacBook Air, but is a little thicker and a little smaller. So it's smaller in the like depth and width dimension, but a little thicker. and it feels, I don't know if you picked the thing up, it is like, it's a dense

13:25Nilay Patel:little thing.

13:27David Pierce:Like, you sort of want to swing it at somebody. Like, it is a real piece of metal. So it's great for schools in that way. Yeah. I wonder if they did go out of their way to make it more durable. They didn't really talk about that.

13:38Nilay Patel:They didn't. I'm imagining it's more durable and I think it's also probably more repairable. Like, just the way, we didn't get a lot of big lecture about unibody construction and all this stuff. I imagine this thing is made for a context where kids are going to beat it up. Yeah. And that's fine. My disappointment, such as it is, it's not a huge disappointment, is I wanted it to be a little bit smaller. When they announced there was 13 inches, I kind of went, oh no.

14:01David Pierce:You want like the old 12-inch MacBook. Yeah, or the old 12-inch PowerBook.

14:06Nilay Patel:Oh yeah. Right? Like there was a size, there's one tick smaller of size that I think just lends itself to being a really compact computer, really great for travel. It's like the old sub-notebook class that used to exist is kind of gone now. I had a 12-inch PowerBook, I had that 11-inch MacBook. I love that size of computer. It's just gone. And, like, I was sort of hoping we would see a return, but it's 13 inches. It is basically the size of a MacBook Air. The way to think about this is that it's not a new ultra-portable. It's a cheaper MacBook Air.

14:42David Pierce:Which I think is really interesting, because the comparison a lot of people have made is to the iBook, which was a like last generation swing at this same kind of thing like how do we make something that is geared more towards young people is a little more fun like it wasn't sort of a power book it was it was a different kind of device but that one was bigger it was more colorful and it was very specifically in a lot of ways designed to do this particular job right whereas this just feels like it is in almost every meaningful way a cheaper macbook like it is not a different

15:18Nilay Patel:device for a different kind of person one thing we the one compromise you haven't talked about is the fact that it has a a19 in it a18 pro 18 pro sorry a18 pro so the iphone 17e has a 19 in it it's weird that it's a different chip in the it is weird than that happened um uh a18 pro chip in it instead of an m series chip yes and the word on the street is that when they were designing the A18 Pro, they knew they were going to put it in a MacBook. Oh, really? This is a very sketchy rumor. But like, you know, Apple likes to be like, we integrated up all the plans from the very beginning. So, it's unclear what the true performance compromise here is going to be, but that is the main compromise.

15:59Nilay Patel:And my sense of it is, you get so much more scale making iPhone chips, that you can bring that cost down compared to any M-series chip.

16:08David Pierce:Yeah, I think that's probably right. And that is one enormous way to save money is to just coast on smartphone scale for anything. I have a hard time imagining that for most people, this will be underpowered in any meaningful way. Like if you put those two things next to each other, right? The like, it has a smartphone chip and it has eight gigs of RAM, which of those is more likely to cause users problems? Like I would sort of say neither, but my guess would be it's the eight gigs of RAM. It's more likely to be a problem than like the raw horsepower, the A18 Pro.

16:40Nilay Patel:Yeah, but my sense of it is that Apple's sort of mobile chips in iPhones and iPads have been limited by their OS more than their capability for a long time. Yeah. And so when, you know, the M1 was not a huge leap forward from any of the A-series chips that we were seeing at that time. I'm still using an M1 Pro laptop. It's fine. Yeah. I use it every single day. It's still one of the greatest laptops ever. So I suspect, you know, A18 is way ahead of that M1 Pro. I think it's going to be fine in this context. I think it's going to choke on that RAM.

17:08David Pierce:Yeah, that could be.

17:10Nilay Patel:And Apple made a bunch of promises about all the things it could do, right? It can do whatever Apple intelligence it can do. They showed it running GarageBand. They showed it editing photos. Like, you're going to hit the RAM way fast. And then because it's unified memory, if you play a game, you're going to hit that RAM real fast. I'm unclear how fast the storage is. So if you end up in swap, which is a real problem on 8 gig max, a lot of times they can cover it because their storage is fast. but if you end up on swap in swap on 8 gigs of RAM with slow storage on a computer like this am I really we're going to see we're going to have to review the computer but that's the sort of trade off that I think they're making

17:43David Pierce:yeah this is going to be a fun one because what we normally do with MacBooks is like the benchmarks get predictably better and sort of a set of new things becomes better to do on your MacBook this one is going to be a real test in the opposite direction right like what what starts to fall apart as you lose this processing power is a very fun yeah bizarre question to try and figure out in the year 2026. The other thing that has come up a bunch, to your point about the M1, is that up until very recently, you could just go to Walmart and buy an M1 MacBook Air for this price or very close to it. And there are a lot of people, including in our Slack, running around being like, that's still the better deal.

18:24David Pierce:You should just buy an old MacBook Air. Old refurbished MacBook Airs are not hard to find. You can get them pretty cheap. Maybe that's the better deal. Do you buy that argument?

18:35Nilay Patel:I think it just depends on who you are.

18:37David Pierce:Yeah.

18:38Nilay Patel:But yeah, I probably buy that argument.

18:40David Pierce:Yeah. I think, to me, the thing that this has going for it is the colors. Like, if we're just being honest, right? Like, the thing that this has that no other MacBook will sell you is the fun colors, which I was, I confess, slightly underwhelmed by.

18:57Nilay Patel:They're very pale. Yeah. in the citrus, the yellow, like a pale yellow. The looks of a wee, let's call it stained.

19:06David Pierce:Yeah, it just, it's one of those things that like the, I have this blue iPhone 16 that I'd love. The orange iPhone 17 Pro was like hugely popular. People really liked it. And you just can't figure out why Apple refuses to properly bring that to its other devices, right? It keeps doing with the iPads, these really pale light colors. The people in the chat love the colors. Listen, the people in the chat should see them in person. I love the colors too. And I think I'm a fan in general of the existence of these colors, right? But it's like you have the opportunity to either like be bold and vibrant, which keeps working for Apple.

19:47David Pierce:This is the thing. Every time Apple like really pushes on color, people love it. They sold an orange iPhone and people went nuts for it. Sitting right here. Yeah. Yeah, and they just, for some reason, with the iPads and with the Macs, just refuse to kind of go all the way down that road.

20:01Nilay Patel:Yeah.

20:02David Pierce:Which I find odd. But I still think tons of people are going to like this thing.

20:06Nilay Patel:I'm very curious to see how many of the other ones I saw. Once you see it in person, you're like, oh, that's neat.

20:10David Pierce:Yeah.

20:11Nilay Patel:And then you will probably buy Indigo or Silver. Like, that's the way it's made.

20:13David Pierce:And there's just a couple of other, like, they said that they color matched the keyboards. And it's possible that we were in this very specifically lit room that makes it very hard to tell anything. This is one of the strange things about any Apple event is they light it so intensely and so aggressively that it gets very hard to see certain things, right? Like, oh, you look pretty good on the webcam because it is professionally lit by a large team of people whose job that day was to make sure you look good on the webcam.

20:41Nilay Patel:By the way, 15 years into running The Verge, no other company has figured out that people with cameras like well-lit rooms. You go to other companies' events, they're like, the whole room is pink. And it's like, well, that is no fun at all.

20:51David Pierce:Yeah, they're like, welcome to our cave. would you like a hands-on and it's like, I can't see anything.

20:55Nilay Patel:So Apple, it's true. It's a very well-lit room. They understand who the audience in those rooms are, but it's hard to see anything for real in that specific way.

21:02David Pierce:Yes. Yeah, but so they said they color matched the, and you can even see in the pictures Antonio took for the site that it's even paler still than the colors. Where it's like, I look at this keyboard and it's like, color matched the whole thing. Like, do the whole job and I'm into it. I will buy the hell out of a purple laptop. Like, are you kidding me? sell me a purple laptop and I will buy it. But like light, it's like they sat it next to a paint can. And it's like, that's the colors.

21:32Nilay Patel:A lot of questions about the name here.

21:34David Pierce:I'm seeing fly through the chat. I asked this before we started because I'm genuinely torn on Nia. I honestly thought it was a code name. I didn't think there was any chance this thing would be launched as the Nia.

21:46Nilay Patel:I think they've got it right with iPad, iPad Air, iPad Pro.

21:51David Pierce:I think that's right.

21:52Nilay Patel:And I think iPad Air is still somewhat meaningless, but they've managed it. I think in that product line, you buy an iPad for your kids, most everybody should buy an iPad Air. And then there's like iPad sickos who are like, I don't have a computer anymore. I use an iPad. I don't know what they're doing. Right? And like that's all. Look at all this processing power I can't take advantage of. Exactly. Real estate professionals everywhere are like, I have a 12.9-inch iPad Pro. We're going to look at Matterport together on it. Like whatever's happening there is happening there. But that makes sense because that market is segmented.

22:24Nilay Patel:The problem with the Mac line is the MacBook Air is the only computer most people should buy. The MacBook Pro is very well defined and there's not any space left on the bottom.

22:37David Pierce:Right. Well, because Apple for what many, many years now has very deliberately not occupied that space.

22:43Nilay Patel:Well, they've not occupied that space, but the Air was supposed to be like the sub notebook. Right. It was supposed to be thinner and lighter. and the problem is that it's the default. So I think if you brought back the MacBook, you would confuse everyone into thinking that it was like the default MacBook and no one would buy it. Sure. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to sell a$500 computer to the education market or kids or whoever. And so you need to do it the same way as the iPad where the base model iPad, everyone understands this device is for Disney Plus. Right, right. This is the cheap one.

23:14Nilay Patel:This is the cheap one. Yeah. And I think there's just too much history there. I think they wanted, literally, I think it's called Neo because they wanted a clean start with this product instead of ever being like, do you start with the MacBook? Because the reality is, and it has been for over a decade now, everyone starts with the MacBook Air.

23:32David Pierce:Right. Well, and the 12-inch MacBook was decidedly not an entry-level machine. Wasn't it more expensive than the Air? Yeah. Yeah, so, like, they lost that thread a long time ago.

23:42Nilay Patel:Yeah, and that computer just, like, didn't work. Yeah. There was a time when they made, no, even the black and white plastic MacBook Pros, I believe were, no, they were just MacBooks. That's right. I think that's right. And those were great. But like the Air was meant, the cost of the Air, the additional price premium was to make it smaller and that time has come to an end. Yeah.

24:02David Pierce:I think the Neo thing is particularly interesting to me because it is like, and Ternus said this in introducing the thing, like they are very clear that this is for people who have not previously owned a MacBook. This is not, if you own an Air and next time you upgrade, they are not interested in you saying, oh, should I buy this or should I buy the Neo? Like, this is Fisher Price, my first MacBook. You know what I mean? And clearly that's what Apple needs, right? Like this is, we're seeing Apple do a lot more price point chasing than it has in the past. Like you can sort of see this company being like, we need to sell things at this price, this price and this price, which is not normally how it is operated.

24:43David Pierce:They've just been like, here's a thing we made. it costs what it costs screw you it's$3 ,500 enjoy uh but i think if you're gonna do that the name like the name neo does make sense to me i still don't know that it's a great name but i i i see the thesis behind it do you see the thought no what

25:05Nilay Patel:boy do i have feelings about how they're typesetting the words macbook neo wait hold

25:09David Pierce:and now I have to look.

25:10Nilay Patel:It's like a chunky, lowercase... I don't know, man. It's like your dumb friend. I don't know how else to describe this font. What? Hmm. See what I'm saying? Are they trying to do a Matrix-y thing? I mean, you gotta do it a little bit.

25:27David Pierce:Like, it says, hello, Neo. Yeah, obviously. They're like... Does anybody get... If you... Okay. If you are a child in school who might buy this to go to eighth grade, Do you have any idea what The Matrix is?

25:41Nilay Patel:Well, no one can be told what The Matrix is.

25:44David Pierce:Then it would be too late.

25:46Nilay Patel:You have to look at citrus yourself.

25:49David Pierce:I don't know about this font, guys.

25:50Nilay Patel:I'm just saying it's a font. It's a font. It sure is a font. They made some choices with the font. This episode is brought to you by Venmo. With the Venmo debit card, a taco in one hand, and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking your rewards. Nice. Get up to 5 % cash back with Venmo Stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. Pick a bundle with your go-tos and start earning cash back. Do more stash. Get more cash. Visit Venmo.com to learn more. Venmo Stash Bundle Terms and Exclusions Supply. See terms at Venmo.me slash stash terms. Max$100 cash back per month.

26:30Nilay Patel:So, everyone knows our politics are divided. There's left versus right and dividing lines on age, gender or race. But maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity at all. It's insiders versus outsiders. At least that's what Congressman Roe Conner would say. The real issue is two tiers of justice in America. The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and escape even investigation or prosecution. And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months. as issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else.

27:08Nilay Patel:California Congressman Ro Khanna takes on the Epstein class. Today explained in your feed every weekday and now on Saturdays too.

27:22Nilay Patel:All right, we should talk about the rest of it because the only thing we're talking about really, this nonsense MacBook, is the Studio Display XDR. Yes. Which I'm going to buy.

27:29David Pierce:Yeah?

27:30Nilay Patel:I don't know why. It's wrong.

27:32David Pierce:It's$3 ,300.

27:34Nilay Patel:Yeah. It's almost the price of a Vision Pro. I stood there with Phil Schiller. He was standing by the studio displays. And I said, well, I'm going to buy this. And he goes, yeah. And I said, I don't need it. And he goes, I don't either. And then we both looked at it and agreed that we were going to buy it.

27:48David Pierce:I mean, it is gorgeous.

27:50Nilay Patel:Yeah.

27:50David Pierce:Like, I am not, as you know well, a display guy, particularly. But, like, even standing there. So, they had a row of four of them. and it was an XDR and then two regular studio displays in the middle and then another XDR. And you just look at them next to each other and you can see the difference between a terrific display and something even better. You can see it with your eyes.

28:15Nilay Patel:So the studio display, which I believe is still$1599, they've left it alone. That panel is effectively from 2012, 2011, 2012 era panel. It's the same LG 5K panel. I am sure that over the past 12 years, the colors are a little more saturated than right like they've made it a little bit better but from everything i understand you're still looking at this the same fundamental edge lit lg 5k panel from 2011 2012 i max and i still have an old ass i max sitting on the floor of my office staring at me dead to the world the hard drive clicks when you plug it in and every time i think I should buy a new 5K monitor, that thing is like, no, your destiny is repurposing this display.

29:02Nilay Patel:Yeah. And it sits there and I don't buy a new monitor. Yes. Because I cannot bring myself to buy the same panel that's literally sitting on the ground that if I just had a little more liquid courage flowing through these veins, I would extract and turn into a real monitor. You've been threatening this

29:16David Pierce:for like years.

29:17Nilay Patel:I'm going to, one of these days, I've done so much stupider stuff and I still haven't done this. Anyhow, that's one thing. That's, and I think the studio display is just a mess for that. The XDR is very expensive. $3 ,300. But it is local dimming backlight, micro LED. It looks beautiful. The colors are vibrant. It's only an eighth of an inch thicker than the Studio display. That is a remarkable packaging job. And if you believe that you're going to have a monitor for a long time, you can, maybe you can liquid courage your way into buying that one. Do you know what I mean? Yeah.

29:54David Pierce:Well, it was very funny because I was getting a demo of it and they're talking about, you know, who is this person? Who is this for? Who is the kind of core use case for this? And one of the things they talked about is like print designers, people who are like, you know, they have to they have to lay out the magazine. And I was like, well, there aren't any of those anymore. So what else you got? And then they're going through, you know, architects and people who make billboards. And like, this is a sort of like reference display for a lot of people. Right. So it's very important that it is accurate.

30:20David Pierce:And they have the Adobe RGB color suite. Like it is clearly aimed at a specific kind of person, not just somebody who wants a really great monitor, which I think is frankly what the studio display was. Do you know what I mean? It's like the studio display initially was like very good computer monitor with shitty webcam. It was like that was the story of the studio display. This feels like it is actually like pointed more directly at a set of people with a set of professional needs. You are not one of those people.

30:49Nilay Patel:No, no, no, no.

30:50David Pierce:You just want really good monitor.

30:51Nilay Patel:I can leave extremely brutal comments on David's Google Docs drafts on almost like any display that exists. Including your flip phone. This is bad. Yeah, right. So, yeah, I don't need it. But, again, the regular studio display is so overpriced for the thing that it is. And I know Apple sells them a lot. I get notes from our listeners and our readers apologizing for buying the studio display in like a weird turn of events. because I reviewed the first one. I gave it a miserable score because the webcam was so bad and so overpriced. And so people send me notes and they're like, I just need you to know that I had no choice but to buy a studio display because it looks so nice next to my Mac and the weird BenQ thing does not.

31:39David Pierce:Yeah, the odd thing I bought on Amazon for a third of the price.

31:42Nilay Patel:You can buy reject. You can buy monitors made of reject LG panels now. 5K 27-inch monitors for$500. And they are, I guarantee you they're not nearly as good. I'm going to do that. I guarantee you that their colors are going to be all kinds of crazy. I guarantee their reject panel, like something's going to be wrong with them. But you can just go on Amazon and buy a 27-inch 5K display with effectively that same LG panel in it for$500. And Apple's like, what if? $1 ,600. So that thing is just like, it's occupying a different space. I think the XDR for the audience that it has is, I mean, And it's just the step up.

32:19Nilay Patel:And then because it's modular, I am going to personally convince myself that I will have it for a decade or more and then be like, it's just$300 a year. And that's just it's paid for. For a dollar a day, you too can have one of these. That's right. It's like every single day I'm going to not go to Starbucks and I'm going to look at my extravagant monitor that can be calibrated for use by medical professionals. And I'm going to open Slack. And it's going to be awesome.

32:47David Pierce:But you're going to open like the blacks in the Slack theme are going to be so sick.

32:51Nilay Patel:I can't believe I'm going to buy this thing. I'm super going to buy this thing.

32:56David Pierce:Yes. I mean, I do think it was just very funny to see this next to the MacBook Neo, which is because this is pure Apple just being like, we put all of the technology into this thing. Here's what it costs. And Apple is actually making an argument that$3 ,200 is extraordinarily expensive for a computer monitor, but next to a lot of the stuff that other people buy and use. Like you talk all the time about this TV thing that you judge where like the reference monitor costs a million dollars.

33:24Nilay Patel:Yeah.

33:24David Pierce:$3 ,200 in this kind of professional setting is not that absurd a cost.

33:29Nilay Patel:my belief and no one agrees with me anymore is that it's just true it's just no one agrees with me is that you should overpay for displays because you spend so much of your life looking at them and they last forever and not in the context of phones because everyone gets a new phone every two years or whatever but like anything that's just going to be in your house for a long time the premium on this is beautiful is worth it david's like i bought a 12 tv that has ads on it

33:55David Pierce:I couldn't even tell you the brand of my monitor. No, I feel the same way about screens that I feel about wine, which is like you should never develop a taste for the good stuff because it's just a waste of money. If you think$6 wine tastes good, hell yeah. Live your life.

34:12Nilay Patel:This is like an AI slop rendering that's appeared in my brain of you just chugging the Franzia out of the bag in college. Like I know this happened to you and you never moved on.

34:19David Pierce:It was Trader Joe's two buck chug. Sure. And yes. When I was in college, this is how old I am.

34:24Nilay Patel:I just want to say this. It's a studio display under here. I'm going to tell you a story about Franzia. When I was in college, the bag was silver foil. Now they're plastic and they look gross. But when I was in college, the Franzia came in a silver foil bag and you would pull it out of the box. And my friends and I would call it space wine. And then we would just walk down the street chugging the space wine.

34:44David Pierce:Anyway, I think you should buy a$3 ,300 monitor. I love this. I love this for you. So wait, back to the MacBook Pro for one second. One thing that has come up a bunch in the chat is a thing that you were talking about. which is people who have more powerful desktop machines wanting basically a road computer. Yeah. Which is a very funny use case because Apple makes one of those and it has been desperate to convince you that the iPad is your road computer, that the correct way to live your life is Mac studio and iPad. That is, that is the future Apple wants you to believe in.

35:20Nilay Patel:Right. And that's when, if you have like a, if you have like an Apple marketing job where you spend half, your day like making assets and the other half of the day presenting assets right yeah that's what

35:30David Pierce:you do but you're are very you're a mac studio guy right that's like your main machine you're very compelled by the idea of being a mac studio macbook neo guy if it was smaller when when i

35:41Nilay Patel:thought this thing would be about the size i keep calling it a plain computer the that macbook that 12 inch macbook with a single usbc port the 11 inch macbook air was 11 inch that one the 12 inch powerbook i used these computers on planes primarily and they were terrific on planes uh because you know the seat back is small you don't want to lug around all the stuff like i traveled with those computers almost exclusively and whatever trade-off i would make at now i have a slow computer wherever i've just totally worth it for the space saving this is like again this was the subnet book category you know we it like live in new york like we are on trains all the time like yeah having the small computer really really played uh i don't think the neo is small enough.

36:22Nilay Patel:I think that's probably right. There's just not a part of this from like, I should just get an Air. That Wenshift M1 Air is still going to do the job.

36:31David Pierce:I'm not sure small enough exists, right? I think this has been the problem. As you get to like 10 inches and you start to make a bunch of other really ugly sacrifices, like you get a smaller keyboard, which causes all kinds of problems. It's right between 11 and 12. I think that's probably right. I mean, I will say the closest I've seen to it was that 12-inch MacBook, which again had a series of other problems, like a disastrously bad keyboard. Bad keyboard, miserable Intel processor. Like if you could just put a good computer inside of that shell, I'd buy the hell out of it. Like that, the size of that thing was right in a lot of ways.

37:03Nilay Patel:Someone helped me repurpose the guts of my iMac so I can use the display and then I will dig out. It's actually the one I have is Dieter sold it to me. Nice. It was Dieter's and he sold it to me and I still have it. So if anyone wants to put an iPhone in my 12-inch MacBook, which at the time had an Intel i7, like mobile i7 in it. That's right. It's a horrible processor.

37:26David Pierce:A lot of weird decisions from that era of Apple. All right, we should all talk about the iPhone.

37:32Nilay Patel:Do you want to talk about Franzia?

37:33David Pierce:Very telling, by the way, that the iPhone is the third product we're talking. No, wait. Yeah, the third product.

37:38Nilay Patel:And I'll give you two pieces of supporting evidence for the fact that it's the third product. One, we all rush into the hands-on area and everyone stops. And it's like organized in stages. so it's like the MacBook Neo the iPad the studio displays and the iPhones and I was assigned go get the hands-on of the iPhone Antonio and Owen or you gotta get the MacBook Neo and then David is like I'm the editor at large I'll just wander around making small talk or whatever it is that you do no he also did the MacBook no no no that's precisely correct so I run to the iPhone because you know your job here is to run there's a real thing when you're at the live event and I was the only person there for 10 minutes seriously i just hung out with all the people i met the product managers i took photos of all the colors so i just was there by myself for a while and i they're like you know we sell a lot of these right i rush to get the photos up and i come back like loop around look at all the stuff i come back to the site i look at the iphone 17e hands-on zero comments oh brutal i mean the i don't Look, the old man still got it.

38:44Nilay Patel:I had those photos up before anybody else. With your 35-year-old DSLR. Yeah, with my 2014 Nikon D7500, the 40-millimeter macro, the single greatest hands-on camera ever made.

38:55David Pierce:True.

38:56Nilay Patel:But no one cared, I think, is what I'm trying to say.

38:58David Pierce:Yeah. I mean, I forget what your headline was, but it was something to the effect of like, yep, here it is.

39:04Nilay Patel:That was actually the first draft. Yeah.

39:06David Pierce:I mean, I think, I don't know. Apple seems to be on the same grind with the 17e that it is with the MacBook Neo, which is like, how do we make the right set of trade-offs to sell cheaper phones? It used to be smaller phones.

39:22Nilay Patel:So this trade-off is almost verging on unacceptable for me for$600. Why? Here is the trade-off of this. It's not the camera. It's not whatever else. It is a 60 hertz LCD.

39:34David Pierce:That's bad.

39:35Nilay Patel:It's bad. And I'm so not used to shooting LCDs anymore. That's another thing that's great about the studio display, by the way, 120 hertz. See, I think you should spend$3 ,300 on the display. Okay.

39:48David Pierce:Can I offer you a studio display or a Vision Pro? This is like... You know how bad that makes the Vision Pro?

39:54Nilay Patel:That's a personality test. You have$3 ,500. Is it going to be a studio display or a Vision Pro? Like, there are two worlds.

40:01David Pierce:Or like a souped-up Mac studio. I know.

40:04Nilay Patel:There's one right answer, and there's a group of suckers. And you can just sort them out and be like, you're on the one ship that's going to the special planet and you're the future of humanity yeah that's about right i'm just saying anyway uh six years lcd uh so i'm not used to shooting lcd somewhere because almost all the phones we shoot are oleds so i'm taking photos i'm realizing that it's banding because you i'm shooting faster than 60 hertz it's just like i felt like i was going back in time like this is a problem that i don't have anymore because there aren't 60 hertz LCDs around that are like you're often shooting in this.

40:38Nilay Patel:So that is the compromise of this thing. They compromise the display. They're calling it a Super Retina XDR display, which 100 % means LCD, 60 hertz. Everything else is fine. Everything else is iPhone. Yeah. It's an A19. It's a 48 megapixel fusion sensor on the back. Apple loves to just sort of like say camera words as loudly as they can to make you not question if those words mean the things they're supposed to mean. so that you can crop that 48-megapixel sensor down to optical quality to zoom.

41:07David Pierce:It's one camera. It's still just the one camera.

41:10Nilay Patel:It's like you're just cropping the sensor. What does optical quality mean? Also, because the optical quality of the 48-megapixel sensor, by default, is doubled up 24-megapixel photo. So, anyway, this is just a lot. But we'll test it. But all that's, like, very familiar now. The tradeoff here, it's$600, which in Android world will definitely get you an OLED, is a 60 hertz LCD.

41:33David Pierce:Yeah. Well, and I think the way people buy phones is just not the way people buy MacBooks, right? Or laptops or any, really any other device. Like, I think you're in this position now where people are holding onto their phones longer and longer.

41:49Nilay Patel:The chat is extremely telling me it's OLED. I asked them very directly if this thing was an OLED or LCD and they made the noise at me that said LCD. I don't know.

41:59David Pierce:There's a real debate. bugs and stuff has you has your back on it being an LCD you did come out of your demo saying it was an LCD I mean I

42:08Nilay Patel:so either somebody told you wrong I looked the person in the eye before I was doing the hands on and said is this an OLED or an LCD and they went it's a super retina and they wouldn't say OLED hold on let me this is

42:19David Pierce:welcome to the portion of the first cast where Neelai reads the fine print on the Apple website

42:23Nilay Patel:I mean you don't see this when you don't do these lives I check all the time at any rate oh okay they say Apple's official page the Zoled. So I was misinformed at the event because I asked very specifically. In any case, the 60 hertz refresh, I think it's$600. It's still a problem. I'm sorry, we're going to have to edit this when this goes out live.

42:42David Pierce:It's true.

42:43Nilay Patel:We're going to censor ourselves.

42:45David Pierce:It'll just be a long bleep sound as Neelah reads. But I really did.

42:48Nilay Patel:I looked at the person who handed me the phone and said, this is Zoled, right? And they went.

42:56David Pierce:Like, how dare you? Yeah. I think the 60 hertz thing is real.

43:03Nilay Patel:I think— Wait, can I— A lot of people are telling me that liquid retina is LCD. Can I tell you the— You're right. I know liquid retina is LCD. And I once, in a briefing with Apple, spent a long time being like, what do you mean by liquid? What does liquid mean? And they finally caved, and I'm like, it just means rounded corners. That's it. That's what that means.

43:22David Pierce:I mean, that's the liquid glass story. Rounded corners of unknown radii radii that are never the same across apps liquid glass yeah this is what we're doing here great

43:31Nilay Patel:job apple okay so i don't see this on the apple website anywhere uh because there's no tech specs page for this thing yet oh there is here it is okay i was wrong it's an OLED there you go i again i looked the person in the eye and they straightforwardly were like fair enough well

43:47David Pierce:still i think i think it would be worse if it was an lcd for sure yeah um but i remember so when i last reviewed the iPad mini, there was this big sort of long-running controversy about the jelly scrolling effect on the iPad mini, which is in part about screen refresh. And I said there, and I still feel the same way, that that is again in the list of don't ever taste good wine. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. And for somebody like you, who is coming from big screen, 120 hertz, boy, do you notice. Boy, do you notice the downgrade. And I think there are a lot of people who say you don't, you wouldn't see it if you hadn't sort of trained your eyes to see it.

44:31David Pierce:But I think increasingly, as people are starting to play games more and more in particular, you see it. Yeah.

44:38Nilay Patel:Like it doesn't demo games for me and you can definitely see it.

44:41David Pierce:Yeah. Like, I don't think it matters in the course of like, scrolling TikToks on your phone. I don't think you're going to see the tearing in a way that like sucks and makes you hate your phone but you see it in games and there there are wait i can see it i know you can but most most people who are going to buy a 17e are not coming from a pro max so so that's fine but like i do think that is a real like actual user experience sacrifice in that one particular way and that is such a core thing people do on their phones now is play games that like you you notice it's a it's a big difference that now people are confused about whether oled

45:17Nilay Patel:technology is also, no, I'm just wrong. I'm just like, I'll just admit it. I was somewhat misinformed of the event and I was in a rush.

45:24David Pierce:Well, the good news is once we, once we hang up this live stream, we're going back. We're going back. We will ask this question. We will look more people in the face. Well, no, I think the text exchange is right.

45:33Nilay Patel:I just didn't look before we did it because I, when someone tells you, you know, I think I was so struck by the 60 Hertz refresh, which I can definitely see. And I associate that with the other thing. Sure. So apologies for, thank you all for correcting me. I just think, when I see, it's$600, six euros is still on, okay. Right, and that's like, that is the compromise of this device. Yeah, again, especially because

46:00David Pierce:you're not, most people are not paying the$600. You're trading, like, Verizon will so happily give you a new phone for any reason. You just, you just call Verizon and you say hello and they're like, would you like a new phone? You can have, You can just have it.

46:14Nilay Patel:I don't think most people are going to end up paying actually$600 cash for this.

46:18David Pierce:That's what I mean.

46:19Nilay Patel:They're going to get a trade in or it's going to be free or it's going to be on sale.

46:22David Pierce:Right. And it's obviously different in other places around the world where people are more likely to plunk down cash. But I also think the way you feel about displays is how I feel about phones. I think you should overspend on your phone. Because it is, in almost every case, the device you use the most that does the most things in your life. and whether screen alone is a reason to upgrade. I think I've heard from a bunch of people already who are mad at not having two cameras. They put the text page up. Thank you. Now I'm being dunked on by the video switchers. Owned by Travis. Like I think when I went from the iPhone Pro back to the base iPhone, I noticed losing the third camera and you really notice losing the second camera and all the fusion sensor stuff is nonsense.

47:11David Pierce:It's just a camera you can crop and you will notice not having it. And so there is a real set of trade-offs you have to make to do this thing that aren't going to show up in the giant credit card purchase. And so for me, it's like I have an easier time telling somebody to buy a MacBook Neo over an Air than I do telling you to buy a 17e over a 17.

47:31Nilay Patel:Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

47:33David Pierce:Especially now because the base 17 is like a terrific phone that almost everyone should buy if you want an iPhone. and that hasn't always been the case, but now it is, and it is like handily worth the upgrade price over the 1780 for me.

47:47Nilay Patel:Yeah, I think that's right. Also, people hold on these phones forever.

47:50David Pierce:Yeah.

47:50Nilay Patel:And so it's the same argument to me with screens, right? Like if you're going to have this thing and you know it's four years, which is where people are stretching these phones out to. By the way, Taylor Swift has a 13. I saw a picture of her.

48:02David Pierce:Really?

48:03Nilay Patel:Recently, she's a 13. People have them for a long time. Taylor, if you're listening, and I know that you are, Taylor. It's a 13 Pro.

48:09David Pierce:It's time to upgrade. You'll like the orange one. Call me. We can talk about this. We'll go to the Verizon store together.

48:15Nilay Patel:That is an episode of The Verge, guys. That's the only way to dig ourselves out of this hole. My mistake here is to get Taylor on to talk about why she has an upgrade of her phone.

48:22David Pierce:I think David and Taylor go to the Verizon store is like an Emmy waiting to happen.

48:27Nilay Patel:It's either great or it's a car crash. Anyhow, you hold on for so long, it is actually worth the extra money. And I think that's why you see it's the pros that people are buying.

48:41David Pierce:Yeah.

48:41Nilay Patel:Right. Like the volume seller in this last round, I think, was actually the pro. And I think people understand the tradeoff of I want to have this for a long time.

48:49David Pierce:Yeah. Especially with the camera, I think, in particular, that it is like this is a thing worth investing in now that you are doing it less and less often all the time, which I think is awesome. I'm R.J. Decker, a private investigator uncovering the Sunshine State's darkest secrets.

49:08Nilay Patel:Tuesdays, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest new crime show. R.J. freaking Decker has that live and breathe. He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. It's someone bigger. And a public mess.

49:19David Pierce:Trying to get someone back to prison today?

49:21Nilay Patel:You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes. R.J. Decker, series premiere, Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu.

49:32David Pierce:Tax Act understands you haven't memorized the tax code. That's why TaxAct has live experts to help. TaxAct can even do it for you if you prefer. It's the easiest way to know you're doing it right. Well, other than going back to college and obtaining a bachelor's degree in accounting with a minor in finance, then interning somewhere and becoming fluent in all tax forms. But that might be hard to accomplish before tax day. So maybe just stick with TaxAct. TaxAct. Let's get them over with.

50:04David Pierce:um we should briefly talk about the ipad which i think we have waited this long to talk about correctly and on purpose yeah uh there's a new ipad air the end i told david he should just do

50:15Nilay Patel:the uh the hands-on with the ipad air that was already in his backpack and like see if anyone knows i don't i think it's wrong for us to do disinformation so like we didn't but like i i'm pretty confident that if you had just been like ipad air hands-on and published it before the event

50:30David Pierce:I have a stack of iPad Airs at home, and I'm very excited to add the new one to it and see if I can tell the difference. Like, which iPad is this that I'm getting out is an increasingly hard game to play at my house. I will say, I was really hoping the announcement this week would be a big upgrade to the base iPad, because that one is sort of slowly being left behind, right? All these chip bumps, they're not, like, individually all that meaningful generation to generation, especially now that Apple is revving these so fast. Like it used to be a couple of years between iPads and now we've had three and two years basically.

51:03David Pierce:But the chip bumps matter over time. And like you talk about how long people keep their phones. People keep their iPads for like a decade. They're one of the longest lasting devices you'll find, which is awesome. But what it does mean is that you should future proof that as much as possible. So like every one of these chip upgrades I think is good news for the iPad because when you need a new iPad because yours breaks. Like my mom is my favorite barometer. of this. She uses the absolute hell out of her iPad. And she will use it until the point where she comes to me and she's like, David, the Hulu app won't open anymore.

51:35David Pierce:And that's when it's like, all right, mom, it's time to upgrade. You have officially lost software support and now we can upgrade. And we're just going to get her the new one, right? And it's going to be fine. And with every chip bump, it's like, okay, I'm buying you another year of use on this thing that you will get out of it on the other side. It's a bummer that the base iPad didn't get it because it just continues to be like multiple generations out of date on that. And now I have to like, for years, it was like, well, an iPad is an iPad. And if mostly what you want to do is do iPad, you should just buy the iPad.

52:09David Pierce:And that's less and less true as the air gets further away from it.

52:12Nilay Patel:Here's my one. If you have kids, you buy them an iPad and then they discover that Apple Arcade exists. They download games from Apple Arcade. you will quickly run into the fact that the base iPad cannot play Dreamlight Valley. What is Dreamlight Valley? It's a Disney RPG. I don't know.

52:26David Pierce:Well, this is good universal advice that is definitely not just specific to your life.

52:30Nilay Patel:There's a category of games that if you want to hold on the iPad for a while, probably the base iPad can play it now, the new base iPad. But the one we have cannot play Dreamlight Valley. And so like your, the iPad is content viewing device can last for a long time. if you start to play games on this thing, that's when the base model does not last as long. Are you just Googling Dream Life?

52:55David Pierce:Well, there's a bunch of people in the chat saying the 12th generation iPad. And I was like, oh my God, did I miss a launch? And I believe the answer is no, but there have been rumors of a 12th generation iPad coming soon. So hopefully I will be proven right and this will be fine. And that will go back to being a good deal. But right now it's like, you need the one with the horsepower because A, like you said, you can do a lot of stuff. It is a gaming machine for a lot of people. It is, you know, you're going to do architecture drawings with augmented reality apparently. But what you want is something that is going to last you a decade because it should.

53:32David Pierce:Your iPad should last you 10 years. And I think this Air has a shot at that in a way that the base iPad currently does not. But like, we'll run a bunch of tests. I think the one thing I am excited about with the Air is, so last year I reviewed the iPad Pro. which had the new, is it the C1X, the new wireless chip, and got, like, astonishingly good wireless speeds. Like, 50 % to 100 % faster than I was getting on other iPads, just sitting next to each other. And it's like, there are a million reasons that could be, right? That newer devices have less going on, that stuff gets old. Like, you never know.

54:11David Pierce:but if if this one can do that again a this is a huge win for apple's own chips and b um i think cellular ipad is one of the great things that exists and everyone should have one if you're going to buy an ipad i so firmly believe you should get cellular connectivity because it it a just works if you also have an iphone it just it just sort of eases between them super seamlessly the ipad is an amazing hotspot it's just like a forever lasting hotspot yeah uh so it just sits in my bag and I hotspot it from it all the time. And the thing where you can just pull it out and use it anywhere, like meaningfully changes your relationship with your iPad.

54:50David Pierce:Uh, and even little things like, you know, the Kindle app will always be in sync because it can just sync when you open it up. It's like that stuff adds up. Uh, this is why I want a Mac book with a cellular connection. Like that was one thing I was hoping would be in the Neo that it's not, uh, is, is 5g because it, that again, changes the set of things you can do with it.

55:08Nilay Patel:I had to do this grape surgery for my $600.

55:10David Pierce:Yeah. For what they're trying to do here, cellular wouldn't make any sense. Like, having a student device with cellular is a waste of money. This is really interesting.

55:18Nilay Patel:You know, Apple got in some trouble because they really had a contentious relationship with Qualcomm.

55:24David Pierce:Yeah.

55:24Nilay Patel:They were trying to go to Intel for modems. The Intel modems, they eventually bought Intel's modem business. They were underperforming. So they started throttling the Qualcomm modems they were using to make them perform as well as the Intel modems, which is not good. They got in a bunch of trouble for this. And I think the C1 was like, it performed as well as the Intel modems. They put it in a bunch of cheap stuff. I think the C1X, which is their modem that they're going to produce at scale, might be outperforming the Qualcomm modems. We don't, again, it's very hard to test this stuff. But if it's outperforming the Qualcomm modems, that's a big deal because they will just put it in everything because there's no reason for them to like make different versions of the modem.

56:03Nilay Patel:Like that's just scale. Just put it in everything. And they don't have to pay Qualcomm its licensing fees.

56:08David Pierce:Right.

56:09Nilay Patel:So if they've actually pulled it off with a C1X here, we'll see.

56:13David Pierce:Yeah, it puts Apple like even more in control of its own destiny in Silicon Valley. I'm saying we'll see

56:19Nilay Patel:because Allison is at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week where they are talking about launching 6G.

56:26David Pierce:We made it so far without talking about 6G. It's coming, baby. Not ready for this. All right, that's as good a thing to end on as any. We've been here a while. You and I have to go. we have to get back. Anything else in your mind before we say goodbye to the chat and get out of here?

56:41Nilay Patel:No, I will just say this to the chat from the bottom of my heart. One of my superpowers is no one can tell when I'm embarrassed because I'm brown. The blood rushed to my face and I was embarrassed and I have gotten myself out of a lot of trouble by just not, like people can't tell. I'm very embarrassed by getting that out. So I'm just admitting it to you. I usually do not get display specs wrong. Hopefully that you can trust me after all these years.

57:06David Pierce:We're just cutting it out of whatever is here. I was going to say, everyone should know that Neelai gets this wrong every single time. And we just normally cut it out of the podcast.

57:14Nilay Patel:There's like 13 takes of meeting display text.

57:17David Pierce:Every episode is twice as long, and then we cut out all the things Neelai's wrong about.

57:21Nilay Patel:The couple thousand people who have been on this live stream, they'll know that I duffed it. And it's going to disappear from the internet now. You'll just be like a whisper in the wind. Kilroy was here. You know what I mean?

57:32David Pierce:This is the last anyone will ever see of this episode.

57:36Nilay Patel:I'm actually discontinuing the iPhone 17. For decades. So we don't talk about this.

57:40David Pierce:People refer to this as LCD gate.

57:43Nilay Patel:This will be the end. I only said it because it looked me in the eyes, man.

57:47David Pierce:I will say you came away from a demo saying that. And it's like, this is what we do. We issue a correction and we move on with our lives. And your boss yells at you until you do better next time.

58:00Nilay Patel:There's no one that's like, you know. That's what the chat's here for. The chat's our boss today. That's our boss. Yeah.

58:05David Pierce:All right. All right. We should get out of here. Thank you to everybody who has been here watching, hanging out with the chat. We're going to do this a lot more often. This is A, very fun. Yeah, it's my time. B, it's a nice thing to do. It turns out we're in a moment where there's like, there's too much news for the amount of show that we make. So to be able to do this and then we can come back.

58:21Nilay Patel:We're going to start the Friday show. I have, it's been a heavy week of like politics in this world. There's a lot going on. We're starting a Friday show with me just experiencing pure gadget related joy.

58:35David Pierce:Whoa, that's a good, okay.

58:36Nilay Patel:I've never been happier with a gadget in my life. And it's like an extremely stupid, extremely Neil high situation. I'm probably gonna start the Friday show with that and then we'll talk about all this stuff. What a good tease. Yeah.

58:50David Pierce:All right, until then, thank you to everybody. Thank you to Travis and Denise and Eric and the whole team for getting all of this set up and running for us. We're gonna go back and yell at Apple about OLEDs. Neil, say goodbye to the people. Rock and roll.