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29:48Welcome back. We've been covering Right to Repair a lot on this show over really the last couple of years. And it turns out just in the last couple of months, a lot of stuff has been happening. Oregon just passed what is probably the strongest right to repair bill we've seen yet, which includes a ban on parts pairing. Apple is slowly and somewhat sketchily starting to change some of its repair practices, especially around parts pairing. There's just a lot going on. And the right to repair industry is changing really fast. Will Pour on our team has been looking into this for a while and is now back, I think, after breaking several phones.

30:22Will Pour, welcome back. Hi, thank you. Yeah, I have a growing drawer full of really brutalized iPhones after doing this story, and we will get into why, but I'm now going to be a used iPhone broker myself after all of this. So we'll see how that goes. So what have you been up to? So I have been following all this legislation that you're talking about and the companies changing policies, all this really high level stuff, and it was starting to just feel abstract to me. And so as I have been following it all, wanted to just take a break and get some stuff fixed to just see what these repair practices actually look like in real life and see what repair issues bubble up over the course of doing real repairs.

31:09So my idea was to just collect a bunch of broken iPhones, take them to the Apple store first for kind of an official diagnosis, and then take those same phones with the same problems to an independent repair shop and see what repairs each store offered, how knowledgeable the Apple store was and an independent store was, how much the repairs would cost. I just wanted to see what repair advocates are fighting for specifically and why they're fighting so hard for these independent shops. So that was the plan. And for the record, I know a lot of the issues we're going to talk about here are not unique to Apple.

31:43But as we've talked about, Apple products are just so ubiquitous that so many of these repair shops literally live or die based on how repairable Apple devices are. And the company has just fought against repairability so hard for so long that Apple is just the center of this story. So lots of iPhones in this story. Yeah, that's a good caveat. I forget who it was, but somebody a while back said to me, basically, Apple is not the only company that matters in right to repair, but none of the other companies cumulative matter as much as Apple does. So it is the center of the story feels like exactly the right way to describe it.

32:18It's not the whole thing, but it is the most thing. Yes. And every repair expert I talk to will say the exact same thing and then all the examples they'll use are Apple. Okay. So I love the first task of this, which is that you had to find a way to have a bunch of broken phones. How does one acquire a bunch of broken phones? I mean, I started with the company Slack. I started asking friends and family. It was like a really weird thing to go looking for. Turns out eBay. The answer is eBay. There are one million phones that are broken in very specific ways on eBay. What's the lineup that we ended up with?

32:52So I saw a ton of broken screens and dead batteries. I wanted to skip those because we know the Apple Store will repair those. They've got the prices listed. They have this DIY repair program for those. Independent shops will do it. That is the most common churn for repairs. So I went looking for, I don't know, slightly more interesting repairs than that. The things that I found, one, I bought a working iPhone 8 with a broken charging port that I hear happens a lot. We're just going to call that one the charge port phone. The second one was a second gen iPhone SE with a cracked screen that also for some reason the listing said just rebooted itself every few minutes.

33:34Oh, weird. So that seemed interesting. We're going to call that one the boot looper. Okay. And then one wild card that I could not resist buying was a really nice looking iPhone 14 Pro that the listing said was, quote, in saltwater for a while. I had to see what everyone would say about that one. We're going to call that one rusty. In saltwater for a while feels like a euphemism for how terrible this thing is that I'm now very worried about what's going to happen to this phone. This is the thing. It looked really nice. It just had this like kind of artful corrosion along the metal rim of it. it actually like it looked really nice.

34:09I was really hoping that I could get it fixed just that I could use it myself. What was the total budget for the broken phones here? What did you end up spending for these three phones? Too much because I fell into the eBay trap. I like one I like saw these phones and I wanted them because I thought that they would be like fun storytelling devices. The first two were fairly cheap in the I think I spent 40 bucks on one and 60 on another or something. The 14 Pro, I think I spent like$75 on. Oh, that's not bad. I mean, that's last year's phone. I almost expected it to be significantly more than that, actually.

34:45Yeah. All right. So we're a couple hundred dollars in. You've got some deeply busted phones. And what step one was you said you're going to take them to the Apple store, right? Yes. Step one was just walk into an Apple store. So I made an appointment. I showed up at the store with these three phones in my bag. I didn't even try to get permission to record at the Apple store because I didn't want to be like, I'm a journalist doing an experiment. So I had to just go in and go out and then just record some voice notes. But I can tell you exactly what the Apple techs said about each one of these phones.

35:16So first, the iPhone 8 with the bad charge port, just not repairable by Apple. Charge ports are not a thing that they fix. Instead, their best offer was$350 for a refurbished iPhone 8 if I traded this one in, which didn't make a lot of sense. Walmart sells the same model and the same configuration refurbished for like$125. And then their other option was a new SE for$430. So that's the charge port phone. The rebooting SE2 with the cracked screen, I explained what was going on. They did try to run a diagnostic on it, but the phone kept rebooting before the test could finish. So instead, they poked around in the settings and they saw that the phone had a third-party battery in it.

36:01And that was kind of it for them. They decided that must be the culprit. They didn't say why a battery would cause a boot loop. They were just like, ah, third-party batteries cause problems. And that was the end of the conversation. So they said that they could replace the battery for$89, but they also said that the screen would shatter when they tried to remove it. so I'd need to pay another$269 for a new display. So grand total for that phone was$358, and fingers crossed that the battery was actually the problem and that it would fix it. Or again, I could get a new SE. They really, they kept on trying to sell me a new SE.

36:36So that was that one. And then the iPhone 14 Pro was just a full nah. The guy checking me in at the store told me that they just don't repair anything with water damage, which was a little surprising to me because like water damage is a repair category on the Apple repair website. So long story short, that was the Apple store. I was in and out in 10 minutes with zero phones fixed. So on the one hand, I'm not shocked by that. On the other hand, I'm starting to think, what does Apple fix? You know, you mentioned batteries and screens. These are fairly straightforward. Is there a list sort of official or unofficial of the repairs Apple actually will do at an Apple store?

37:19You can't really tell from their website. Whenever I ask an independent repair tech about this, they tell me to just go to the schedule a genius bar visit page because it has these big buttons for selecting the repair that you need. There's a cracked screen button, a dead battery button, camera problems. And they basically say if there isn't a button you can press, then they're not going to do the repair. So this is a successful case potentially for why there should be other people in the world repairing these things than the people at the Genius Bar. And that's where you went next, right? Yes.

37:53Yeah. I basically, I live here in Seattle. I poked around on Yelp. I landed on a place called Jet City Device Repair. They've been around for more than 15 years. They've got a couple locations in the area. They've got good reviews. So I just, I made an appointment to bring my phones in and chat with the owner. Somebody responded to Julia and let her know that if If she's close enough and can make it in by five, we can still take her in. If not, we have plenty of time tomorrow. So the shop was like the opposite of an Apple store. It was a little cramped, a little messy, a little scrappy. There was this cushy front of house where customers can hang out on a couch and wait for the repairs.

38:28And in the back were three or so people working at desks that had mats and lights and microscopes and some tools. and then in the back there was a storeroom with like a million tiny little bagged parts for every major cell phone that you could really name. Jet City's owner, Savas Popal, brought me back to the storeroom to check out my phones. So I brought a couple of things to look at. I figure I can just show you what I brought and tell you what the Apple Store said about each of them. That's exciting. So first, the charge port phone. The Apple store said it was a non-starter. But Jet City fixes charging ports all the time, in a lot of cases because the Apple store won't.

39:12Savas quoted me$90, which is getting kind of close to a similar used phone online, but I don't know, it'll keep one more phone out of the garbage dump, so I said go for it. So Savas took the phone and used his microscope to look at the tiny little pins inside the lightning port. What are you seeing? I'm seeing all the pins are damaged. They weren't great to begin with, though, because they have a little bit of corrosion on them. From what Savas has seen, the Apple stores just aren't built for a repair like this, even though it's a really common one. Instead, he says Apple has this wildly over-engineered process for just a few select repairs like screens and batteries.

39:54It's like extra with like extra X's. You know, it's just so much. What do you mean by that? They have like, they have this one device that sort of holds the whole phone together so it doesn't move around. There's another device that holds the screen open for you while you're removing the screen. It's like so much going on that you don't really need. And you see my kit is this tiny little thing. His toolbox is one of those pencil cases you used in grade school. I see a toothbrush. I see an X-Acto knife. Yeah. So for the repair, Savas took two little screws out of the bottom of the phone, then slid a little plastic tool around the edge of the screen and popped it off to reveal the guts of the phone.

40:36And then he just starts removing screw after screw from different components to get down to the charging port. So why do you think a charging port is something that is just outside of Apple's supported repairs? It's complicated. There are a lot of screws. God, those are tiny. Yeah, they're very small, and you don't want to mix them up because most of the screws are different from each other. I actually just combed through an iFixit repair guide for this model of iPhone, and I counted 14 different sizes and kinds of screws for this charge port repair. You have to remove the entire motherboard to get access to the port.

41:14Then the port itself has a bunch of screws. Does it just feel like it's just not worth the time and effort if you're Apple? I think they're incentivized to focus on selling rather than repairing. So if they can say, hey, we provide repairs for batteries and screens, then they can say, we do provide repairs, but if it's anything else, you're just going to have to buy a new device. They're incentivized to do that because it's a sales conversion. I asked Apple about charge port repairs, and Brian Nauman, who is the VP of Apple's repair business, told me that the company does offer them. if you have an iPhone 12 or newer, and if you mail the phone directly into Apple.

41:56He didn't explain why they don't work with older phones. Which is interesting, because as we got deeper into the repair, we ran into a hint that Apple might not want anyone fixing this part. So, this connector, when you remove it, there is a tape. A tiny little piece of tape. Well, the neoprene actually hides a screw underneath this, so you don't even realize that there's a screw down there. We didn't realize it until like we couldn't figure out why the board wasn't coming up. Yeah. And these are delicate boards. So if you don't have experience, you're going to apply a little bit too much pressure and it's going to end up cracking.

42:33Gotcha. And is there, can you think of a design reason for that little piece of tape there? No, because it's not coming into contact with any metals. Yeah. Or any like anything exposed. So the only reason is to hide that screw. Brian Nauman from Apple disputed that the tape was meant to hide anything. He said it was grounding tape there to, quote, protect the electrical circuitry. Anyway, Savas fished a new charge port out of his wall of bagged parts. He connected it to the phone, tested it, and put the whole thing back together again. So just like that, we're up and running again. What, 90 bucks later and you have a working iPhone 8?

43:12Yeah, absolutely. How long did this whole thing take? It took us like an hour, but that was because I was literally like looking over Savas' shoulder and asking him questions every 30 seconds. He says he can swap a charge port out in like 20 minutes because he's done a million of them. I'm sure he loved you during this whole process. He's like, leave me alone. Let me do my job. I know. It's a very Zen process of keeping track of all of these screws. And I am not a Zen person when I am just on the best of days, but especially not when I'm interviewing. So I can't imagine that went well. Yeah, fair enough.

43:41All right. Well, repair shop one, Apple store zero. What's next? Yes. So next is the boot looper. This is the phone that just reset itself for no reason. I explained the problem to Savas and I gave him the Apple store's diagnosis. Their best guess was that it was a battery problem. No, it's the charging port. It's either the charging port or the power volume button. Wait, Will, is everything a charging port? Like is the secret to repairing your phone just that the charging port is always the problem? I mean, apparently this is this is what happens when you like genuinely buy broken phones and don't know what it'll take to fix them.

44:17Sometimes you just end up with a bunch of broken charging ports. The deal here is that it's not the charging port per se. It's the sensor that sits on the charging port. The quote charging port is actually a whole bunch of different components that are all bundled together. There's the port. There's the sensor. There's some speakers. There's the vibration motor. So that's all one part that you can swap in and out. Got it. So it's basically like that sort of bottom stripe of your phone is all one thing. And whatever breaks, the whole thing breaks. That's the replaceable thing. That's the thing that you can buy replacement parts for.

44:50Got it. Anyway, as soon as I told Savas that the phone was rebooting, quote, every few minutes, he said, oh, it's every three minutes. This is a thing that he's seen a lot. And it usually means there's a bad temperature sensor somewhere. What happens is when the device shuts off every three minutes, There are temperature sensors around the device that report what the temperature is. If one of those sensors fails and it can't report, then the device as a safety precaution will turn off. It'll turn back on and then the same thing happens and it checks every three minutes. He booted up the phone and he found the device's analytics files, which I had no idea existed.

45:31And for the record, the Apple tech did not do. The files are actually not that hard to find. They're in the privacy and security settings screen. But you've got to know what you're looking for when you look at them, because it's one of those walls of gibberish text. And then you want to find where it says panic. Okay, that's the panic is the reset. Yeah, and then when you go there, in that first big block of text, it'll say missing sensors. The panic log told him that, yep, the culprit is probably a sensor on the charging port. So yes, we needed to replace this phone's charging port too. and just see if that stopped the reboot.

46:08So same process as the last phone. Although one notable detail, this is the phone with the cracked screen that Apple said, oh, if you open it up, it'll totally shatter the screen. So you have to replace that too. But I don't know. I watched Savas pop the screen off without any problem for whatever that's worth. Anyway, we plugged in the replacement part and we turned on the phone to see if it would stay on this time. We'll make it a five minute timer. All right. So now we've got five minutes to figure out if that is the culprit. But after exactly three minutes, the phone reset. Oh, a little phone.

46:43We tried. That meant that the problem might actually be in the motherboard, which for a phone that's worth maybe$100 is probably too much trouble to fix. But we wanted to rule everything else out. So just in case the replacement part also had a bad sensor, we tried a couple more identical parts from savasha's inventory all of those failed too we also verified that the battery was fine since that was apple's guess it was fine at one point we actually lost track of the timer and we thought that we had a working phone for a second oh we're it worked oh there you go but it reset again motherboard motherboard so that was it for the boot looper so we gave we gave up on this one.

47:27It was it was the end of the boot looper. It was the end of the line for the boot looper. Yeah. Mother motherboard problem is bad news. Right. And in this case, I suspect it ends up just being a pretty straight financial decision. Like, yes, you could replace the whole thing and sort of like ship of Theseus your phone into a new phone. But at that point, it is probably a lot more expensive than just taking whatever deal Apple would have given you. Yeah, exactly. Or even if you don't take Apple's deal, there are cheaper phones online. Just just walk away. Yeah, go buy a different broken one on eBay and just try the whole thing again.

47:58Fix that one. Yeah, just go through it all again. Have better luck. Okay. All right. So we're at one to one. It's tiebreaker time. Can we fix these phones? We have one that works, one that is broken forever. How are you feeling at this point in the process? I feel like at the very least, you've been given access to a lot more information and process with the independent repair than you were at the Apple store. Totally. That is absolutely true. You know, walking out of the store that day, I was like, well, I found a good stumper on eBay. I was sort of hoping that we would go through this process and triumph at the end.

48:35But the utter brokenness of the phone revealed a lot more along the way. So, yeah, on the one hand, it was funny that the end result is the same. Both the Apple Store and Jet City were like, this is not a phone that's worth fixing. But as you say, the journey to get there was just totally different. As soon as Apple saw that there was a third-party part in their phone, they were like, case closed, and that was the end of it. Whereas Savage found the log files, he opened the phone up, he tested like four different parts. He really worked the problem, which was what I was looking to see, and it drove home one big argument for independent repair shops, which is that they'll repair things that manufacturers never intended to be repaired in the first place.

49:19There's one really wild case in point while I was there. While Savas and I were chatting, over his shoulder I noticed this industrial-looking device next to his workbench that was shining a bunch of lights on an iPhone that had a totally shattered back glass. And I asked Savas, what is up with that? That's the laser. Oh, shit, what is that doing? It's lasering off the adhesive from the back glass. No kidding. Yeah, that's a bet. You don't want to stare too long into the white. I'll let you wear this. He handed me a pair of tinted glasses. And then you can stare at it while it's lasering. So for most iPhone models, there's no official way to fix that back glass.

50:00It's glued to the phone. But that's where indie repair shops are like, okay, challenge accepted. You buy a laser and you zap the phone to loosen the adhesive and then you manually scrape the glass off and install a new plate. And that's just what it takes to repair something in spite of the design of the thing. Did you buy this laser specifically for this kind of repair or does it do other things? No, just for this. First of all, that rules. Everyone should have a laser in their house that just does one job. Yeah, it's a single purpose laser. I have one for my cat and I want more now. Yeah. So that was really notable.

50:35The other notable thing to me about the repairs that I brought in is that as much as I was looking for stumpers, they were actually pretty simple in one regard, which is that the parts that we replaced were not programmed by Apple to resist the doing of the repair. Oh, is this the part where we get to talk about parts pairing? I've been wanting to scream parts pairing ever since you said third party battery like hours ago. Yeah. So this is the parts pairing part of our program. This is the parts pairing part of story. It's like when we talk about the smart home and we have to get really upset about matter for 15 minutes.

51:08Like this is the part of the right to repair story where we have to talk about parts pairing. Yes. And I like I was very naive. I was like, OK, I did a parts pairing story last time. This story isn't going to be about parts pairing. I'm going to talk about other stuff. But I learned very quickly that you just can't talk about iPhones without talking about parts pairing. Any repair of just about any part of an iPhone will eventually lead a repair tech to talk about parts pairing. So without doing a whole other segment, parts pairing in brief, your phone can basically sabotage your repair if it figures out that you didn't use Apple Parts installed by Apple techs.

51:45So if you replace the screen, it might lose the True Tone feature. If you replace the battery, it might not track its health over time anymore. Replaced Touch ID or Face ID components will just fully fail. Again, we've talked a lot about this. But being in a repair shop made me appreciate just how much parts pairing has undermined them over the years. These bugs have been popping up in iPhones generation after generation. And it's not like Apple announces them to everybody. They have to get discovered and shared. And it happens when repairs just start going haywire for no reason at all. So just to name one example, a few years back, a YouTuber named Hugh Jeffries noticed something really weird when he replaced the cameras in an iPhone 12.

52:29After changing the camera, two functions are now completely unusable. Portrait mode only works for the front camera, with the back one only flashing still images and a black screen. You can see panoramas also don't work when using the 0.5x zoom. There was no warning about non-genuine parts. The new cameras were just flaky, which is a thing Savash noticed. So it mimicked a quality control issue rather than an intentional interference with the functionality on Apple's part. And so your immediate gut instinct, even as a technician, is going to be, man, there's no reliable parts for them. With serialization, you can actually program failures that are intermittent and mess with people's heads.

53:12Wait, hang on. How did they know in this process that it wasn't some sketchy part causing the problems here? Well, he knew because the YouTuber took the part straight out of another brand new iPhone 12. Oh, that would do it. Yeah. He actually took two phones right out of the box and swapped their components, and both the phones had these issues. So Apple eventually fixed that specific bug with a software update, though they added that non-genuine parts warning instead, of course. And actually, just last month, Apple did announce some plans to relax some pairing restrictions on used Apple parts, though it's only on select models of iPhones, and there are just a lot of specifics that they haven't talked about.

53:54But it does mean in the future, you might be able to pull a screen off of one iPhone and drop it in another without any problems. So we'll have to see about that. But even if that happens, aftermarket parts are probably still going to cause problems. And this is the thing. Maybe some of those problems will be genuine. Aftermarket parts don't always work perfectly with the original hardware, and you can make a mistake during a repair and that can cause a problem. But the repair techs just feel so gaslit by Apple after this history of bugs. Now there's like this healthy paranoia. Yeah. Where you don't know if that was something else or if it was intentional sabotage.

54:34Over the years, the community has found some pretty clever workarounds. There are ways to restore True Tone if you're comfortable physically moving microchips around. There are aftermarket home buttons that are explicitly built to get around the phone security checks. Savage can even make a third-party battery play nice with an iPhone, but it is a process. You see that tool right there? The red thing with the... Yeah, that's a welder, spot welder. Okay. And so you have to cut the battery electronics from the old battery, and then you have a new battery without the electronics. Yeah. And you spot weld those two points back on and then roll them like a cigar and then tape it up again and then put it together.

55:19The upshot is that shops constantly have this really tough choice to make. Either they have to jump through all of these absurd hoops to outsmart the devices that they're fixing, or they have to ask their customers to live with bugs. And that choice, more than anything else, infuriates Savage. We do better work than Apple. Jet City Device Repair does better work than Apple. We've done better work than Apple for a very long time. But because of these limitations, sometimes it appears as if we do worse work.

55:57All right. I feel Savas' pain. I really do. But Will, you have led me up to what I hope is now the grand finale here, which is our good friend Rusty, the iPhone 14 that has spent, what was it, some amount of time in saltwater? I actually reached out to the eBay seller after I bought it. And it turns out they just found it in a bay in Florida. So some time is really putting it lightly. Somewhere between 10 minutes and two years in saltwater. Between 10 minutes and the release of the phone. Love it. So Rusty, what happened with Rusty? So I, you know, I told you I had really high hopes for Rusty.

56:34And Savas, again, to his credit, was totally happy to open it up and see. But it's like leaking corrosion. the guts of the phone were just totally coated in this toxic looking white and brown gunk it was disgusting oh my i can hear i mean i can hear the sound that it's making guys you want to see a record breaking like a coral reef in there yeah corrosion phone there's nothing we can do with it but i gotta i can share it with this with the company they're gonna have fun with it it was so bad that he posted a photo of it to the company slack i'm just gonna say can we fix this 14 pro mac so so that was rusty moment of silence for rusty i will say though huge success on your part in a certain sense that you managed to bring this person a phone that they then shared with the rest of the company it was so broken so spectacularly like yeah if the goal was to find interestingly broken phones like oh boy did you do it i knew on some level you know that's making me feel better for spending the amount of money that i spent on a phone that was never gonna be fixed because I just I knew that it was destined for something great it will live on rusty lives on at the repair shop it's probably he's probably in a in a frame on a wall somewhere just oozing corrosion so foul so what do you feel like you learned from this experiment you went in trying to get kind of a real sort of tangible sense of what the right to repair fight is like what what do you feel like you learned so I I feel like I learned a couple of things the first thing is is maybe obvious for people who have spent any time in this world, but as a consumer and an Apple device owner, it was new to me.

58:16And it's just that Apple is not the authority on its own phones in this context. It's people like Savash who are. I've talked to a lot of independent repair techs over the course of this reporting, and they have all just put in the time to get to know these devices inside and out. And they literally have to, to understand them better than the Apple geniuses. If they want to do all these repairs that either Apple doesn't care about doing, or actively doesn't want them to do, that's the thing that sets them apart from the Apple repair internal ecosystem. And that's what right-to-repair advocates are trying so hard through these laws and all these other things to protect.

58:58So that kind of turned my thinking around on the sort of internal external repair ecosystem. The thing that keeps jumping out to me as you talk is there's such a different incentive here, right? Like Apple, even if you believe Apple would like to fix the things that it sells you also would like to sell you new things. And so what you get, I think my sense of your Apple store trip is very much that you sort of ran into a script. And when you said third party battery, or they discovered third party battery, or it became obvious that it was water damage it just immediately is like jump to end which means we can't repair it whereas if you go to a repair shop the one and only thing they are there to do is repair it and so you just have set yourself up in a very different sort of adventure from the very beginning just by the virtue of like who these folks are regardless of their talent and resources and ability just having this other thing where the only thing they are there to do is try and fix your gadget totally changes the way that they're going to work with you Yeah, that's just their whole deal.

59:57The more people keep more older gadgets going for longer, the more that they need to be repaired and the more of those repair shops are in business. So it's like it's absolutely a difference in incentive more than anything else. Totally. The other thing that I just found funny and weird is just how adversarial a relationship Apple has with these independent repair shops, given what they're actually doing. Like, you would think that Apple was battling these super intense hackers who are trying to take the company down based on the way that they're acting and all of these bugs that they're putting into the phones.

1:00:31And these repair techs are not not hackers. I mean, you can look at what they're doing with these batteries and their touch ID buttons to get around everything that Apple is doing. Like they're they're really scrappy people, but they're not trying to destroy the company. They're just trying to fix the company's products. They're literally just like, we're going to fix your phones. Try to stop us. And I think that is a very strange group of people to pick such an intense fight with. And it sounds like not a group of people you want to mess with. No, very resourceful, very committed. And they have lasers.

1:01:06And they have lasers and they know how to use them. Will, thank you as always. Thank you.

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1:04:42All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. We love getting all of your questions, and we try to answer at least one of them on the show every week. Again, especially in this gadget-y season we're about to have, we're going to be reviewing tons of stuff. We're going to be testing tons of stuff. I want to know everything you want to know about all of this stuff. That is one of the most fun ways for us to talk about products is to talk about the stuff that people actually care about. So keep all those questions coming.

1:05:10We'd love to hear them. This week, we have a question from a listener whose name is Lava Lova. I'm really sorry. I'm pronouncing your name wrong, but we got an email and it says, why do people think the iPad should be a MacBook replacement? A lot of people have been waiting this for some years. And so far, the only argument that I've seen for this is that the processor is overpowered and the software is not. Apple has added some features like stage manager and pro apps like Final Cut over the years, but this move only blurred the line between the MacBook and the iPad even more, which is weird since they used to be different product categories for specific purposes.

1:05:38MacBook for productivity and iPad for entertainment and maybe some easy tasks. Sure, the new M4 processor inside the iPad Pro is way too powerful for the current iteration of iPadOS, but I feel like the same argument could be made about the A17 Pro processor from the iPhone 15 Pro. Would love to hear your thoughts since this has confused me for a while. Unbelievable question. Love it very much. And this is actually, as I've been reviewing the new iPads, kind of the main question I've been thinking about. The short version of both iPad reviews is that they're excellent iPads, right? The iPad Pro is thin and light and just lovely to hold in a way that it's been a long time since an iPad has felt like that to me.

1:06:15The Air is everything you would want it to be. It's last year's Pro in last year's Air's body. The screen's very good. The battery's very good. The processor is very good. It gets the new pencil. It doesn't have a function row on the keyboard like the new Pro does, but it's a very good iPad. All of the iPads are very good iPads, right? And so I think the question is, really, what is the iPad for? And I think when you ask the question, why do some people think the iPad should be a MacBook replacement? I think it comes down to making a device that is good for everything is really hard. It might be impossible, but it's really, really, really hard.

1:06:49And if you're Apple, I think one way to think about it is that Apple has had a bunch of very versatile, but also sort of focused devices over time. Like the story of the Mac is easy, right? You can do lots of things on the Mac, but it is fundamentally a device for doing work. And you can define work as broadly as you want, but it is a productive, creative device. It's a device for doing things. The Apple Watch is a device that can do lots of things, but it has increasingly over time become a device about fitness and health. AirPods headphones. That one's easy, right? The iPhone is the exception.

1:07:21It is a device that is fundamentally all things to all people. And as a result, this is I mean, this is why smartphones have become so dominant, right? They are all things to all people. And thus, they are the most important device that almost everyone owns at this point. That's a very hard thing to replicate if you're Apple or if you're anyone. The smartphone won like it just did. And so trying to do something that does all the same things a smartphone does, that is as varied and broad and able to accomplish so many different goals all in one package, just puts you in competition with the smartphone.

1:07:56It's a bad idea. Most people don't do it. What we're seeing actually is that even things like AI devices that try to do lots of things fail because they're worse than your smartphone. And instead, what's cool and what's working is devices that take one feature of the iPhone and do it better. There's a bit of a resurgence happening in dedicated cameras, for instance, because you get more control and you get better images. But if your camera was like also trying to order you Ubers, that wouldn't make any sense. So what you're seeing, I think, in the best case here is companies that say, okay, we're going to cleave off part of what the iPhone does or a smartphone does in general and try to do it better, right?

1:08:35So they're taking, in many cases, smartphone chips. They can run smartphone apps. They can do things that you do on a smartphone while on a touchscreen in similar ways that you do them on a smartphone. But you can just do more and you can do them dedicated. The iPad has always been the opposite. It's trying to be incredibly versatile. It's trying to be a jack of all trades. It's trying to be all things to all people. And I've come to think of it like this over time. Apple basically sees a core set of what you might call iPad things, right? And that's playing games. That's watching TV and movies.

1:09:10That's checking your email and browsing the web. This sort of basic, simple use case stuff that people have always done in their iPads, the same kinds of things that even like Steve Jobs is talking about in the very first iPad introduction. It's a device for sitting on the couch, casually using a computer. That's cool. That has been very good on an iPad for a very long time. It's also true that most of those things are almost as good, and in some cases better, on your phone, which is a device you already own. It's a device you have to buy before you buy an iPad. and it's a device that is almost in every case more likely to be close to you than your iPad.

1:09:48So what you have essentially is an iPad is now more work for slightly more benefit because you have to go get it, you have to keep it charged, it has to be updated, all this stuff. Whereas I think a lot of people just say, why would I do any of that? I have my phone and I already do all that stuff to have my phone work. So what Apple has been doing over the last several years is basically adding bits and pieces of functionality that you can't do on the iPhone in the hopes that not all of them will appeal to you specifically, but maybe one of them will. Right. So this year you have things like the Pencil Pro, which has a new gesture called the barrel roll, which basically lets you preview the way that your brush tip is going to look on the screen as you move it around.

1:10:26And it lets you turn the brush as you're painting. This is the kind of thing that if you're hearing that and it doesn't mean anything to you, that's fine. It's not for you. But there are a lot of people for whom that gives them a level of control doing artistic work that is really powerful and really important. That's not how you get giant swaths of new people to use the iPad. It's not a mainstream new use case, but it is a thing, right? And Apple, I think, believes that over time with enough power and enough work and maybe enough AI stuff, which is what's coming at WWDC, and I think we're going to see Apple make some big swings at new features that only work on these super powerful touch-enabled ultra-portable devices that make it more compelling.

1:11:07And so rather than have one giant mainstream use case that appeals to everyone on earth, it wants to have a million different little ones covering sort of every niche at a time and hope that that adds up to everybody. So how does this come back to the MacBook question? I think the reason people talk about it as a laptop is because it is one obvious place for the iPad to go, right? You look at it, it's a 13 inch screen, I can drop it into my keyboard. It has a trackpad. It runs a lot of the same apps that are on my MacBook. So it's natural to say, well, okay, one thing this could do that it doesn't is be more like my MacBook.

1:11:42I actually have come to believe that that's the wrong answer, or at least it's the least interesting answer. I think Apple's strategy of trying to find a million small things that add up to one big thing is actually more exciting and means ultimately that the iPad can be a device that isn't just a touchscreen MacBook. I also think they should put a touchscreen on the MacBook, but that's what the touchscreen MacBook should be. It should be a MacBook with a touchscreen, not an iPad that runs Mac OS. I just don't think that's the right strategy. It's at least not the most interesting strategy. But we're in this position now where if you're looking at the iPad and you're saying, okay, this does a lot of stuff, but what would push it over the edge?

1:12:20What would make it an essential, important, game-changing, bring-it-with-me-everywhere-no-matter-what kind of device? work is one obvious answer to that that's why you see for creative people it very much is that kind of tool if you need to draw on a screen the ipad is the best thing that exists you can't replicate that on your phone you can't replicate that on your macbook you need an ipad for that and we're starting to see that for some filmmaking stuff that's happening people are doing interesting monitoring and editing work on their ipads it's a cool tool for photography for editing photos bits and pieces, like I'm saying.

1:12:53But if you then throw in, you know, this capital W work thing, whatever that means to people, whether it's I want to have a desktop browser so that I can use all my browser extensions, and Google Docs will be better. Or I want full bore full power Excel running on this thing, so that I don't have to go back to my computer. Or it means I want to use the accounting software that I haven't updated in 10 years, but desperately need in order to do my job. If you pull all of that stuff down to the iPad, I think it changes the iPad, but it also makes it more essential to some people in a certain way.

1:13:28And so I think that is why people have been pushing Apple to turn it into like a laptop is that it would make it something everybody needs, which I actually don't think is right. Again, because laptops exist and MacBooks in particular are very good laptops. And so that is just a tricky thing for Apple to get right. Again, if it wants to be this one all things to all people device, it's going to have to do a lot of that eventually. And I think Apple is sort of hoping that work apps will get better before the iPad has to worry about all of that old compatibility stuff. But I'm not convinced that's going to be true.

1:14:03So if I'm Apple, I'm saying right now that the versatility of the iPad is the point. And this is the thing that you hear from people at Apple. It's the thing that I've heard from people at Apple. The versatility is the point. They don't want this thing to be a device for anything. They want it to be a device for everything that everyone has a different subset of use cases for and that that is what makes it special. That is an incredibly hard thing to do. I think the Apple Watch is probably the most interesting comparison there, by the way, because for a time, that was the pitch for the Apple Watch too, that it was going to do all the things your iPhone did, but in a better, more accessible way.

1:14:38The iPad is a pretty similar case. And what we discovered with the watch is that actually my phone's very good, but the watch does this subset of other things very well that complement that. It does health and fitness stuff really well. And it's a very simple controller and I can use Siri. And so you're seeing Apple bet on those things more and more on the watch over time. Whereas on the iPad, it's kind of still stuck trying to be all things to all people you can focus on the pencil and that's great but the pencil market i think is much smaller than the health and fitness market same goes for some of the like ultra performant apps that you're starting to see whether it's like architects or 3d games or augmented reality i think all of that stuff on tablets is fairly niche so what apple needs is either one big giant use case and maybe it is laptop replacement or just countless more of these little tiny niches that all eventually give everybody a reason to need an iPad, even though it's not the same one.

1:15:33That's a hard, hard, hard game to play, and it's a hard list of tasks to finish. But I kind of hope that's what Apple keeps doing because that, to me, is the most interesting possible future of the iPad. That said, I do wish Google Docs worked better. So just give me that, and then I'll probably need an iPad too. All right, that's it for the VergeCast today. Thank you to everybody who's on the show. Thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about today, including my iPad reviews, all of Chris's Sonos scoops, and a whole bunch more on TheVerge.com. I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes.

1:16:05If you don't know, we've been doing much better show notes posts on the site recently. They tend to go up about nine o 'clock in the morning on the days that we publish the show. Go check it out there. Leave us a comment. Tell us what you think. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, if you have thoughts or feelings or questions or just want to yell at me about iPads, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. Send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas. Google I.O. is coming up. Microsoft Build is coming up.

1:16:35WWDC is coming up. I want to know everything that you're thinking about and interested in and want us to find out and want us to talk about. Keep it all coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about whatever is about to happen at Google I.O. and a whole bunch more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.