The war for Reddit, new MacBook Air, and Meta's Twitter competitor

22:59So for that existing paid user who naturally uses more, that's closer to 360, I think is the math like that I would get for a bill for each of them every month in its current state. And if I discharged$5 to them, you take off Apple's 30 % or whatever, and you're down to 350, you're already 10 cents in the red per user per month. So that's kind of the calculus there is already pretty tricky. That being said, if I had more than the 30 days, there's a possibility that I could go in and like some of the stuff where I check your inbox every so often, or I preload a page for you that I think you might scroll to, I could kind of cut down on all those and maybe cut that 400 down to, I don't know, 300, 200, like if I had more than 30 days.

23:38But even beyond that, there's even a subset of users where like approximately 5 % of my users use between 1 and 2 ,000 API requests a day, where at the low end, those would cost$7.50 a month. And you can imagine the users who use the app the most are kind of the most likely to pay for things. So they'd be kind of like the most obvious ones that would want to pay for the app. And when you're looking at them costing like$7.50 a month each, it's kind of like, do I have like a$5 tier that hopefully covers most people? And then once you expire that, is it like a phone plan where I call you up and say like, do you want to top off for the month?

24:11And it's like, and that's not fun. So, but that's like, that's one facet of it. Like say I, that's a big if, but say I solve all that. The other issue is that like with the very short notice of 30 days from when the pricing was announced to when we start incurring charges, I've got about like, say, like 50 ,000 yearly subscribers who have already paid for a year of service. So say like before this announcement, based on the fact that back in January, Reddit told me they wouldn't be changing the API at all this year. I sold David a year of Apollo Ultra for, say, back in April. You've got still like nine months left on that subscription that you're owed because you already paid for it, as you should be.

24:44And that was based on operating costs that I had for design services, server fees. I have a part-time server engineer. I was like, for a dollar a month or whatever it was like that, I can make a profit on that. But suddenly, I've got a dollar or two extra, like a dollar minimum, if I can get those API requests really far down, for those 50 ,000 people who have already prepaid. I can't monetize them anymore. They've already paid. So starting July 1st, those people will start incurring a bill of$50 ,000 a month for me that I have no way to monetize because they've already prepaid. And that's where the calculus got really difficult, where it was like, okay, I have a bill of, yeah, 50.

25:20And then like maybe the next month, some of the people who are close to expiring would expire and it would go down to 11 months. Maybe it would only be 45 ,000. And then the next month would be 40. But you're potentially looking at like hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills I would get for Reddit from people that I can't make a single more dollar off of because they already paid my old operating costs. And that's where it got really tricky, where when Reddit only gives you 30 days to like try to transition those users or have them age out and there's no like grandfathering in place or anything, that's where it gets really difficult.

25:48And you almost do the math and you say like, it would be cheaper just to like close up and refund all these people than it would be to just pay Reddit like hundreds of thousands of dollars for these users. And that's where it got really tricky. Yeah, so it's like you combine those two things and it was just like everyone I talked to was kind of just like, I don't see how I would make this work. And then when you add on the extra fact that like Reddit's kind of like saying these like bizarre things around like threats and blackmail and like they won't answer your emails anymore it kind of becomes a thing like I can't pay for this how to make a profit out of it is very difficult and Reddit seems like they have no intention of wanting to work with me or third-party apps anymore it kind of becomes like what's the future here if that makes sense and that was kind of where I landed on it I was staying at an Airbnb with like seven other people for uh dub dub and was just kind of like talking with them over and it was just kind of like that that Wednesday night, I was just like, I don't see any other route out of this.

26:40Like, it's just kind of, it's gotten dire. And that was kind of when I started typing up my post and being like, yeah, this is kind of. There's an alternate universe in there where the next thing you do is like, leave Cupertino, go to Sand Hill Road and like convince Mark Andreessen to give you a bunch of money to get you through this. Is that, is that ever a thing that occurred to you? Um, honestly, no, not so much because like, I, I still don't see how like the path forward would be working. If I said, Reddit, I can pay your$20 million or$50 ,000 a month or whatever it is, I still feel like there's this target on my back where almost they're going to say, we don't want to work with you anymore.

27:14Or the APIs that you do have, they're just suddenly going to start to break down or something. Or it just suddenly felt like the relationship was a lot more sour all of a sudden. And I've kind of always loved that Apollo was self-sustaining, that I didn't need venture capitalist money, that I could just say this simple concept of, if you want something, pay me for it and I'll give it to you. And that's the whole business. I kind of like the simplicity there. It felt like something from 500 years ago where it's an exchange of services. And I really like that. And I kind of didn't want to muddy the waters with VC money at any point.

27:40So yeah, I mean, it's a great question, but it just wasn't really anything I was looking to do. There's the other piece of that, right? That direct relationship. I pay you for software. You give me software. We're done. Reddit can barely monetize its own users, right? Like they're not making money. And the way they've chosen to monetize is mostly advertising, which is not exposed in your app. If Reddit had come to you and said, all right, you can use our API, we'll lower the cost, but you've got to start serving our ads. I don't know how I would have felt about that as somebody who has used Apollo.

28:10I would have been like, oh, that's pretty icky. Now I'm paying you for software, but I'm getting their ads. Yeah, but that's one of those things that I felt like if they did, it would have shown a little bit more effort to include third-party apps insofar as they'd have to build that integration in. And yeah, it's tricky because if that was a path to survive, I wouldn't like it either. I prefer not to have ads and I don't mind paying for an ad-free experience. But if that was the only way to survive going forward, that's something I also would have entertained, like a revenue share where you make X amount of money, we want half of it off the top.

28:42That's something that would have been fine. There was a lot of arrangements I think they could have gone with that just weren't quite as killer, for lack of a better term. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about that a little, actually, because I think one of the questions I've had following all of this is what do you want from Reddit? Like, if you could sort of rewind back to the beginning of this, I'm sure the less animosity in all directions and also less money. But like what what could have happened in that phone call on May 31st that you would have just hung up and been like, great, cool, perfect, sounds good, win, win, everybody.

29:14Let's move forward. I think it would have been a matter like in an absolutely perfect world. It would have said like, OK, we're also going to maybe like half the price. because that would have taken like my$2.50 a user down to like the about$1.25, which I charged to new users$1.50. So it would have been something that like, hey, my existing users, I can at least afford to keep like them around like those. They won't put me in the red. That would have been great. And that's when$5 a month becomes a reasonable thing. Right. Exactly. And the existing users who have already paid would suddenly like the calculus there would be a lot easier to keep them around.

29:46But like they sound like they're very adamant on the price, which I think is unfortunate. But like, I don't think they're going to budge there. So at this point, it would just kind of be a factor of like, A, we're going to give you more time to transition this. Like if you have existing users, we'll give you a few months to kind of make sure that you can transition them to new plans or figure out an arrangement where they feel like they're made whole. And you have sufficient time to kind of adopt the new payment model, try out these new APIs, test everything, and have the proper time to do that.

30:15I think time is almost like the biggest thing that they could have committed to that they didn't seem like they wanted to. and then beyond that kind of just to like i'd love for both parties to come together and say like man things kind of got worse than they were here like is there a path forward where we can just say like can we make this amicable going forward like there was some things that reddit said that i i think were proven to be incorrect that i think it would be great if they said like even if it was just a matter of saying like we were incorrect we were under false understanding of what happened it happens yada yada yada let's talk but yeah just kind of like like a like an olive branch to try to have both parties come to the table and just feel listened to again, because just like kind of the stone wall they've put up over the last few weeks has kind of just soured things to an extent that I think like, even if they were to say like, we're cutting the price by 10, we're giving you a year.

31:00It would make it hard to say like, yeah, but are you just giving it to the community? Or do you actually like want us around in any capacity soon? So it kind of feels like that bridge is burned now? I honestly don't. If I got an email today where they were like, hey, we'd love to hop on a call and give you a little bit more time to make this transition. And we'd like to say, we could have handled this better. I'd honestly be open to talking. I'm Canadian. I don't hold a lot of grudges, I don't think. I think it would have been... I'd honestly still be fine talking. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it's burned at all.

31:30But at this stage, I'm not sure they want to reconstruct from the little bit of charring that maybe did occur. So you're now the symbol of a much larger thing that's happening on Reddit. Right, like there was a post about Apollo shutting down and that spiraled into an ongoing series of subreddit blackouts there are other asks in the mix now and they're important to note most of them around accessibility right which i think even steve hoffman has said yep right it's got to do a better job of this and then there's a set of asks around not safe for content which it feels like they don't know that apple has rules and like red reddit can't just like put porn in the app in the way that maybe they're being asked for But you're now like one part of a series of asks from a pretty disparate group of especially moderators on Reddit.

32:21Do you think that if they fix the API pricing situation and Apollo got back on track, that that would soothe the community at large? I think it would go a long way, honestly, to at least making them feel heard. because like in this whole saga, I don't think I've seen Reddit kind of offer to give an inch on like any of the things. I would say Reddit's political skills at operating their community are negative, in fact. Well, and it's weird because like prior to this, like I almost always understood that Reddit as a company understood that they're like a very community focused and they kind of didn't do the bullshit corporate speak.

32:57And it was weird to kind of see this week where like they engage in a lot more of that than I've historically ever seen them do. And it just, it went over, but as well as I thought it would. It's tricky. Yeah. Like I, I think giving like a gesture of goodwill that, Hey, we're listening. We understand that there's some things we could have done better. I think honestly would go a long way because I think kind of just the general, while there's specific demands, the almost general thing I hear is that like Reddit is like plugged its ears and refusing to listen to anybody but themselves. And, and I think there's some very minor concessions that they can make to make people a lot happier.

33:30Like even if you take the not safe for work stuff, which I've almost committed to them saying like, that's never going to happen. But like, it's so strange. And so far as like, there is like a it's still available through the API, it's just not available through third party app API access. And beyond that, they already have things like quarantine subreddits for some of the like the more gruesome, shall we say subreddits where you have to kind of like go in through the official app or the official website and like kind of like rubber stamp it and say, I'm willing to see this. And only then is it available through the API.

33:57And they've already got mechanisms in place like that, where I kind of understand why users are frustrated and saying, you've already got these mechanisms where users can explicitly opt into this content through first-party tools and then access it through third-party tools. Why don't you employ such a system for explicit content, for instance? And they, to my knowledge, haven't really given a clear answer there. Wait, I can give the clear answer to that. Okay, please. It's because they found a number of loopholes that let the app slide through app review, and they're terrified of changing anything such that they might not get through app review anymore.

34:27I mean, that's the answer from every social network that I've ever heard is like, once you have ticked enough boxes and said enough secret words or magic incantations, you just never mess with it again. That's fair. And that's kind of been my experience with Apollo where like there was, I think a while back, like a bunch of Reddit apps were pulled for not safe for work stuff. And like the app store rules are pretty clear in that. Like if there is content accessible in that way, to my knowledge, like you can't expose it by default. The users have to explicitly opt in and they have to be able to opt out.

34:59And insofar as like that's the system I've had in Apollo and I've never touched it since either. But it's just one of those things where if they have that system working in their Reddit app and in some capacity, they have a system for that. I don't see why that same system couldn't apply to the API at large. You know what I mean? Like I'm totally for a system that guardrails all that content and make sure that it's like incredibly difficult to get to and Apple doesn't get angry. but just extend that system that you've already built to the API, I guess. Yeah, this is what I mean about the politics of it, right?

35:29Like you can send that message like, hey, we don't even want to talk about this too much in case Phil Schiller is listening. You just have to trust us. We're doing everything we can. And that's kind of the vibe from a lot of social networks. But you need the chips to cash to say you just have to trust me on this. And it feels like you have more of those chips with the Reddit community. You have more trust from the Reddit community. than Reddit itself. And I'm wondering if you see that playing out in this dynamic between you and the company right now. Maybe. And I think if I do have those chips, it's just because I've been communicative through this whole process.

36:04It's very simple. And that's all I mean. Like there were so many talks on the phone with Reddit where I was just saying like, can you make this pricing make sense to me? Like how you arrived at it. And they just never would. And like, it's the same thing with the not safer work stuff where they kept saying like, we're going to ask some people and see if we can get back to you on that. And I still have not got back to on that. And I think if they just communicated to the community that we think not safe for work content is an ongoing, really sensitive thing with app stores in general. And we want to make sure that we have absolute control over how that's accessing.

36:36And we feel that third-party apps, we don't trust them not to accidentally mess up and get us in trouble. And that would be an unfortunate answer, but I think it would almost go over as being appreciated for the honesty. Yeah. Rather than kind of just not saying anything at all and just saying it's gone, like stop whining. But it's like the not safe for work thing for me personally, like while I get there's a lot of moderators of like not safe for work communities who are going to like be affected by this, that I get why it's a big deal for them. But like for me building an app, like if I lose that, it's not the end of the world.

37:04It's kind of, it's kind of everything else. Like that's one of those ones where I'm willing to drop if need be. All right. So I think that we are in a absolute moment of change for what you might call the web 2.0 era, we are seeing these social web companies. Most of them, save for Facebook, never figured out how to reliably make money and grow. That's Twitter, that's Reddit, that's all these companies. They're shutting down their APIs, they are pissing off their users, everything else is turning into a TikTok clone. There's something happening here, right? And it seems like the open social networks could potentially have a moment.

37:43I don't know if they're going to or not. But you see the activity around Blue Sky, around Mastodon. We have pictures of the new one from Instagram that's coming out called P92 that should interoperate with Mastodon, we think. Have you thought about, I'm just going to take my users and go build a Reddit that works with ActivityPub? Well, even more specifically now, this week, one of the things a lot of users have been saying is we're leaving Reddit, we're going to go to Lemmy and Kbin are the two that I keep hearing about. Lemmy's been around forever, right? Yeah. Is there a move that way that you think is real that you might want to be part of?

38:18It's tricky because to a certain extent, yeah, that does sound really interesting. But it's like with Maston, for instance, I love it. But I've seen so many people, even in the tech community, who totally have the means to make that move if they want to, who have just been too intimidated or just can't get off Twitter for some reason. In the back of my head, I'm like, if these people who are much smarter than me can't make that change um is that something that like is this just like a short-term thing where um we all had our time in the sun and it's going to go back to centralized services or like it's hard for me to like insofar as like build another thing that like if it just evaporated again it would be like a double breakup um especially where it's like this has been so exhausting for the last few months that like the amount of work it would take to like port all the api endpoints over to like lemmy or kbin or something like that would be a gargantuan amount of work that like, I'm not sure like at the moment I have like the capacity for, and then for like just the complexity of making it work long-term is just like, it's, it's a big question mark for me that like, I'm at this stage, I'm not sure I'm totally interested in pursuing, but like, I, it's also one of those things where I completely wish it the best.

39:27And if something that was decentralized kind of became the norm, I think that would definitely be a win for everybody. You're just saying you don't have the energy to do it yourself. I get it. I feel that too. yeah that's a long way that's real yeah yeah that's fair so as it stands right now you're set to turn off the api token and basically shut down apollo june 30th what what percentage of you believes you will actually shut down on june 30th at this moment in time oh gosh like 90 percent 95 really so you're you're fully prepared for this to happen oh i would like i've talked to like my reps at apple to like get the process started like i i like as much as i would love to say like this has been a big bluff and I'm hoping Reddit will like it was literally a matter of like Reddit hasn't answered my emails like in a while like every public statement I've seen seems like the CEO is quite angry over this like they don't seem to want to budge on the timeline at all like I don't see how I can make this work and there's certain like things like when Tweet Aud and Twitterific shut down like there is there's processes you can do with Apple where you can say like a you can opt out of your refund or something like that and that's kind of something you want to get started before the apps actually shut down and everyone deletes it so they can never see that kind of offer.

40:37So like there's certain things I need to kind of get into motion that I can't just sit around forever hoping that Reddit will email me back or Reddit will listen to the community. And it's tricky because like I've loved building Apollo and like even at the$3 ,500 that headset costs, like I was kind of excited for the opportunity to like what could Reddit on that thing look like. And I was really excited for that. So it's kind of like hard for me to say that but at this stage like it's just hard for me to like see a path forward where they're like reasonably willing to like meet me even a quarter of the way here um it just seems like they're they're so angry for lack of a better term that i kind of just feel like it's better for me to be honest with myself rather than hold on to the hope to the last minute and then just completely fall apart but but i really do that 10 of me really hopes that like i'll be able to say like i hopped on a call with Steve, like we talked it out.

41:25Like there was, um, some pleasantries exchanged about like misunderstandings. We're all good now. Like they're giving us more time to adopt the API and we're sticking around. Like I would love that, but it's, it's one of those things where it's like, it's totally in Reddit's court. Um, and I'm happy to like talk whenever, but I just haven't been able to reach them, I guess. How much is that 10 % of you hanging on sort of the size and scope of this revolt that has taken over Reddit the last couple of days? I mean, Because it really, it went from like a small thing that a few people were mad about to like effectively the size of Reddit.

41:58Like everyone is aware that this is a thing now. And you, I keep thinking of like Jennifer Lawrence and the Hunger Games with like everybody holding up the Mockingjay, except now it's like the Apollo logo. Do you have some hope that that might make change? Do you have hope that they'll kill all the other third party apps except for you?

42:17Just to take that to its natural conclusion. Well, it's funny. we've like a lot of us third like to my knowledge pretty much all of the third party devs like when this started going down on april 18th like i reached out to them and was like why don't we put a group chat together and kind of just like talk and figure this out and like to my knowledge like the vast majority of them won't be able to survive this um and for the ones that are kind of like testing the waters to see it's very much like this might be possible i don't think it's going to work very well but i'll maybe give it a shot especially like with the timeline stuff being as it is like I'll like it's gonna be tricky so so it's kind of like I think at this point it's it's not like is everything gonna die it's like is there a way to unkill everything and honestly a big part of me is because like honestly I think Steve has historically been like a great CEO like he's he's not like he founded the company so he's not coming in here as like a Wall Street business guy like trying to you know finagle the numbers like he deeply understands Reddit and I think he's in tune with that community aspect where you can't just bullshit them and they'll eat it all up.

43:15Like he knows Reddit. And I'm hoping that like over the weekend and seeing kind of the feedback here that he sees that and says like, the community feels very passionately about this. And there's a way to kind of heal this where I can come up the good guy and just make everyone happy just by giving like a few concessions rather than having this kind of like explode further and get out of control. Like it's, to me, it feels like there's a very clear, easy win for him and Reddit that they can make that a small part of me is like, it would almost be silly not to just because it would be so easy. But I'm also going into this blackout, like no expectations.

43:48Like if it happens, it happens. But I kind of don't want to set myself up for like hyping this up being like, yeah, I'm going to have a job again. When that might not be the reality. Have you thought about what happens next? If Apollo goes away, you're going to go build a Twitter app. And just because you're a masochist. Yeah. No, I was thinking if the Verge had any junior journalist positions open or anything, like I might be able to get into that. I have a unique aspect on Apple, maybe. But no, I think like last year when the Dynamic Island stuff came out on the iPhone, I built like a little almost like digital virtual pet app thing that I caked into Apollo and then ended up spinning off into a different app.

44:24And that actually makes like a little bit of money on the side that's actually really nice. So I think I'm going to kind of take the summer and see now that I've got full time to spend on that, if I can kind of give that any legs and see where that would be like in September or October. But yeah, other than that, I think it's kind of just relaxed a little bit. I kind of haven't like had any like long-term time to relax in like nine years. So it would be, I guess there's some upsides to losing a job. My greatest regret in life is that I never took a year to be a bartender. I'm just putting it out there.

44:51Everyone else can live my dream. I don't think I'm allowed to go be a bartender for a year anymore. Kids got to graduate college before I can do that. And then we'll both be bartenders together. But that's my advice. As a long time Apollo user, I beg you not to follow that. What is Reddit, but a bar without poos. There you go. So, all right, we should let Christian go here. Christian, anything we should have asked you about? Any other rude things you want to say about Reddit employees? No, I honestly think like very highly of Reddit and I just really hope they listen. All right, well, Christian, Neelai, thank you both.

45:22We got to take a quick break and then we will be back to talk Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, The Vision Pro, Twitter, and whether anyone is really scared of Apple's new headset. We'll be right back.

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47:36We're back. So as I'm sure you know, Apple launched its Vision Pro mixed reality headset last week. And when it did, everybody immediately started comparing it to one very specific competitor, the MetaQuest, which is kind of the default headset in the market right now. meta even tried to beat the vision pro to the punch it pre-announced the quest 3 a few days before we got the vision pro it's not coming out till this fall but we heard about it way in advance then not long after apple's announcement meta held a huge all-hands meeting to talk about a lot of things as it turns out including the vision pro and a new twitter competitor that the company is building the verges alex heath heard that meeting and is here to talk about it Alex Heath, hello.

48:20Hi. So I want to talk about Meta. Two different things going on here in one meeting. But just to set the scene a little bit here, Apple's about to launch the Vision Pro. Meta launches the Quest 3 in an effort to front-run what Apple is about to launch. And then Apple launches the Vision Pro. And then Meta, coincidentally, maybe not coincidentally, has an all-hands meeting basically right after the launch in which they talked about it. Was this a coincidence, do we think? It was a coincidence, actually. It was a wonderful coincidence for me as a meta reporter who also was on hand to try the Vision Pro, but a coincidence nonetheless.

48:58Okay. And so I would imagine there were a lot of people at meta who had been very, very, very curious to see what Apple was going to launch. And as far as I can tell, or at least as far as you reported Mark Zuckerberg saying, not afraid. This does not feel like it's going to run them out of business. They're not out here. Like, all the journaling apps are out here being like, oh, this is, we're probably screwed now because Apple launched a journaling app. I don't get the sense Meta feels that way about the Quest. Yeah, I mean, I think the context of when and how he was making these comments is important here because this was the first big company-wide meeting that Meta had done since before the pandemic started.

49:35They used to do these in the area of the campus in Menlo Park called Hacker Square. It's kind of the original famous Facebook campus. And this was the chance for thousands of leaders across the company to come together in person for the first time in almost three years. And it was Zuckerberg's moment to really address everyone after all the layoffs that Met has done, the really rough couple of years it's had. And so you got to think in his mind, this is a rallying cry moment. This is a moment to get the troops excited about the company's vision and also, of course, talk about competition. And, yeah, I would say you could hear it even in his voice as he starts to talk about the Quest 3, which was the headset that they pre-announced right before Apple.

50:19And as he's talking about the price, he starts to really get into the Apple comparison. You know, we made some major advances here. And a lot of those advances, you know what they do? They go towards making the device$500.

50:35And you can hear in his voice that there's definitely a view inside Meta that their ability to price this thing at$500 is going to be a real competitive advantage, at least for the next couple of years. And I think they're right. You know, Zuckerberg talked about, you know, we've already sold tens of millions of quests. We're going to probably sell millions of the Quest 3. And meanwhile, Apple is rumored and I've heard to sell maybe only a million of the Vision Pros in its lifetime as a device. So for the next couple of years, the headset market is still met us. Now, we know that Apple has a history of coming in at the high end with new product categories and then iterating, bringing down the cost curve, releasing cheaper devices.

51:18They're already working on a cheaper Vision device that I've heard about that probably won't come out for at least a couple of years, but they're going to be coming down in price over time. So, you know, ask Zuckerberg again in a few years how he feels. Well, that's the thing I'm kind of wondering is the other thing that Apple has a habit of doing is launching a product and then its primary competitor says something to the effect of we're not scared. This is nothing. BlackBerry said it. Nokia said it. Bill Gates said it. Like, this is a thing that Apple keeps doing. I mean, Steve Ballmer, David, that's the most classic.

51:49Absolutely. I think after I reported on these comments that Zuckerberg made about the Vision Pro saying basically, you know, we're going to be okay, everyone was sharing those clips of Steve Ballmer laughing at the introduction of the iPhone all those years ago and the price of the thing. That's exactly right. And I think there's kind of two genres of that, right? There's the one that's the kind of we're not scared, rally the troops thing even though you are scared. And then there's the other thing where you genuinely aren't scared. And historically speaking, those have a tendency of not working out super well for the people who don't think they need to be scared.

52:22Which do you think is true of Mark Zuckerberg right now? Was that a thing to kind of, you know, be good for morale within meta? Or is he actually not worried about what the vision pro is at this moment? I think it's too early for them to tell. No one at Meta has tried the thing. You and I are only one of the lucky few that have, actually. And Zuckerberg made a note about that. You know, he hasn't obviously tried it. I think where he felt some solace, and I'm not quite sure I agree with this interpretation, but where he felt, you know, okay, was that Apple is really positioning this device as a general purpose computing personal device.

52:57It's not really something that they're seeing, at least initially, as a gaming platform or a social platform. If you noticed in their keynote that you and I were there for at Apple Park or in their promotional materials for the Vision Pro, pretty much everyone is by themselves wearing the thing, right? Staring into space with their eyes peering through, which I think was actually a little bit bizarre on Apple's part, but that's a whole other tangent. And Meta, meanwhile, is the social media company. And whether they're doing it right or not, I would say that Horizon, their 3D social world experiment for the Quest, has been an utter disaster.

53:33And they know this so far. But they're trying to position it as a social, you know, Zuckerberg has talked to me and others about really the magic of this technology is the feeling of presence, feeling like you're with someone physically even when you're not. And, you know, I will say like on past Quest demos I've done with him and other execs, like even as the legless, you know, early Sims looking avatars that they have, it's true that like this medium does give you that sense of presence. And Apple's going at that as well. They're just they're doing it in a slightly different way, in a way that's a little more broad.

54:05And I think Apple is going to do its classic thing where it's going to let developers come up with the killer use cases here. And Meta is way farther ahead on that track. They've already got dozens of premium game titles for the Quest. They've got a whole fitness category with supernatural and social experiences as well. So and beyond all that, I think if Apple had come out with, say, a thousand dollar vision device that wasn't a pro device, that was a mass market direct Quest competitor that was maybe just like double the price, I think you would have a very, very different tone from Zuckerberg and Meta.

54:39Yeah, that's when we would have gotten Mark promising everyone that he's not scared for sure. Like not, I'm definitely not scared. Not at all. Nothing to be scared about. Everything's totally fine. It's not a problem. That would have been the tone if this thing had been a thousand dollars. But I do think like, to your point, there were two things that he said that you reported on that really jumped out to me. One was that the thing he took away from the vision pro announcement was that Apple hasn't come up with magical solutions to the things that make this really hard, which I thought was really interesting and really true because the thing that Apple did was say, we're going to make all of this really good, and it is going to cost$3 ,500.

55:14And the sort of vibe coming from Zuckerberg in that moment is like, yeah, sure, we can make a good one of these too. It would also cost$3 ,500. And so for him to say, you know, they have not found a magical solution to the problems that we're all trying to solve in this space, I thought was really interesting. And then the other piece of it is exactly what you're saying, and it's the social thing. And I think there's a whole other podcast we should probably do at some point about how Apple talked about this, but it is so bizarre to me that Apple came out and was like, we don't want to sell you a device that goes into the metaverse where you put on a headset and disappear from the real world and it's totally antisocial thing.

55:48And then they just showed people sitting on couches alone. And then meta comes out and it's like, we don't want you sitting on couches alone. We just want to strap you into a headset through which you totally disappear from the real world and go somewhere else. And it's like, both of these companies are sort of saying the same dig at each other from completely opposite directions. And I kind of think they're both right. And I just cannot wrap my head around this. And this goes back to, I guess, like you were saying this all last week when we were in Cupertino is like, these companies are trying to do the same thing.

56:15They're just coming at it from totally different directions. They are. And like, you know, as you know, we've gotten to experience the vision pro you and I, and most people have it. And yeah, you're right. Apple's marketing materials position it as this thing. And they talk about the spatial awareness and letting people come in and out of the frame. And that's a really cool experience. You know, we both saw that and experienced it, uh, the pass through The Quest 3 is going to have full-color pass-through as well, and it's going to have a heavy emphasis on mixed reality, so not full immersion, more so than any device Meta has done to date.

56:46It's not going to have as high quality of pass-through as Apple because it's not$3 ,500. You can see the contrast in how Apple approached the product, and that was what Zuckerberg was talking about, where they clearly were going, we want to achieve a level of visual fidelity, richness, latency that feels as close to the real world as possible. And, you know, in my demo of the Pro, I got that, right? There were no pixelations on text on Safari, whether it was way up close to my face or way on the corner of the room, right? The Quest is different, right? You're not going to be, like, reading a long article on the Quest.

57:19It's not a good experience because the graphics aren't that good. So Apple guided towards this experience, and it turns out that in the year 2023, if you want to have that experience, it costs$3 ,500 with Apple margins. So Meta, on the other hand, is going, how much technology can we pack into a lightweight, you know, the Quest 3 is going to be 40 % slimmer than the Quest 2. How much technology can we pack into a headset that we can sell for as cheap as possible? And this is ultimately where all this goes, is Apple is a hardware company where they make money by selling devices primarily, at least for now, that's going to change over time.

57:55Meta is an advertising company. and they see seeding the world with these devices as part of that long-term strategy to eventually just make money the way they always do through software, through services, through advertising. You know, can you imagine like the Facebook ad system, but over your reality, right? Which is like as dystopian as you wanna think of it as, right, but that's where they're going. So that's where they ultimately are approaching this differently and what I think was giving Zuckerberg a little bit of that confidence that you hear from the meeting that I listened to. But again, like talk to me and him again in three years, and it's going to be potentially a very different situation.

58:32I will say, and this is something I just noticed being at Cupertino and then listening and watching the meta meeting the week after, is there's a real palpable difference in conviction from Zuckerberg about this technology and about the importance of it to his company's future versus Apple. I think for Apple, it's going to be perfectly fine if the Vision Pro in that entire category just doesn't work out. I think Tim Cook wants it to be his legacy, but I'm not sure he's really sold on the device as it exists today. The rumors at Cupertino were that he just isn't a big fan of the device, frankly, and that he's waiting to just see what happens with the category.

59:08And he is really looking ahead to AR glasses, which is that lightweight, everyday pair of wearable computing you put on your face that you can take out with you. That's potentially a much bigger market. And that's exactly what Mark Zuckerberg thinks as well. So they're both going at that direction, but like you said, in very different ways. Yeah, it's not nothing that we didn't see a single Apple executive wearing a Vision Pro. And you talked about this in Command Line, your newsletter, whichever they should go subscribe to. And when Meta announced the Quest 3, it was along with several pictures and video of Mark Zuckerberg wearing a Quest 3.

59:42Like, that's not nothing. It's not nothing, but also that may be not a good marketing decision based on how you feel about Mark Zuckerberg. Like, I'm not going to say that they're making the right call there necessarily. I mean, he's wearing like a tactical vest and a Quest 3. Like it's not the greatest look of all time. It's not the greatest look. But at least he believes in his product. Yeah, you've got the CEO being very excited. And it's just a very rich tech business rivalry story because the reason he's so passionate about this is really because of Apple. And because of how Apple has had its thumb over Facebook during the mobile era with things like app tracking transparency, all these app store sagas that they've had with Facebook.

1:00:21You know, it's well known at this point that Apple and Facebook are kind of ideological opposites. And that's been a real point of pain, I would say, for Zuckerberg and Facebook over the last decade plus. And what really drove a lot of this work he's doing on headsets and the metaverse and wanting to shift to, you know, mixed reality computing is let's try to come up with the next computing paradigm that may eventually supplant mobile and be a leader in that category and have our own platform. so that we're not beholden to Apple this time again. You know, I think back to when I interviewed Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth probably in 2018, 2019, and he told me something that has stuck with me about all this Apple stuff where he said, we don't know that if whenever Apple eventually comes out with a headset, if they would even let us on it.

1:01:10So we have to create the hardware to give us space for this next medium. So they were already looking ahead to this moment all those years ago. and thinking about this. And I really do think that animates a lot of the tension between the two companies today. Yeah, that's super interesting. And speaking of companies with whom Meta has a lot of tension, let's talk about Twitter and Threads, which is the other thing that you learned from this meeting where Chris Cox, who runs product at Meta, told the audience a lot more about this Twitter competitor that we've been hearing about for a while. Walk me through it?

1:01:45What did we learn? Yeah. So there's been reporting on this from our friend Casey Newton and others kind of leading up to this, that Meta has been quietly building some kind of social media app that's going to directly compete with Twitter. It's going to be text-based. Interestingly, be based off of Instagram. So you'll be able to bring your Instagram network with you to the new app on day one. And I would say probably most interestingly, it's going to integrate with ActivityPub, which as we've talked about on the Vergecast and on the verge a bunch, and you wrote that great feature about, David, is this decentralized social media protocol that powers Mastodon and a bunch of other apps.

1:02:23Think of it like email for social media, where you can take your data with you between different email apps. And so during this big meta, all hands, it was the first time that leadership had acknowledged that this new product was coming to employees and really gave the high-level pitch for it. Chris Cox, the head of product for all of the social media apps at Meta, framed it directly as the company's answer to Twitter, is what he called it, and had this little line kind of throwing shade at Elon Musk and how he's handled Twitter that got a pretty good reaction from the audience. Based on a lot of research we've been doing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon distribution, safety, ease of use, reliability, and a way of paying attention to what they care about and making sure they have a stable place to build and grow their audiences.

1:03:16So here's my question about this. Why on earth would Meta do this? Because there have been people saying Meta should just eat Twitter alive for forever. And Twitter has been a mess for forever. Twitter has never made any money ever. And we're still in this position where Twitter is a disaster of a platform and has been for a very long time. Everything Meta makes is more popular than Twitter. Twitter is just a hellhole. Why on earth would Meta decide this is the moment when Twitter is collapsing and the world is looking for something else? This is the time they want to get into this. And not only that, they want to integrate with ActivityPub, which is this new thing that everybody thinks is going to replace it, but is also presumably going to be much harder to really scale and really monetize because it is decentralized.

1:04:01I just don't understand if I'm Chris Cox, why this is worth spending time on right now. It's a good question. Before I answer it, did you all see Zuckerberg talk about this on Lex Friedman last week? No. Zuckerberg was interviewed by Lex Friedman recently and was asked about this, and I thought his answer was pretty illuminating. You know, I've always thought that sort of a text based kind of information utility is just a really important thing to society. I always thought that, you know, Twitter should have a billion people using it. And that is something Instagram and Facebook have never really competed with.

1:04:35It brings up its own challenges, as we've seen from Twitter over the years. But that is something like the thing where cable news is basically just anchors reading tweets. I can see why if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, I would have been jealous of that for a long time. Yeah, you know, Facebook has had this really long, interesting, I don't know what the right word is, fascination with trying to copy Twitter. And it's never worked. So I'm not sure it's going to work this time. Meta also has a pretty disastrous track record of launching standalone apps on its own. The app name that there is the current working name for this new Twitter competitor is called Threads, which was another standalone Instagram app that was launched.

1:05:14I don't even know when, semi-recently, at least within the last five years, and was shut down because no one used it. So it's kind of poetic in that way. Next thing, it'll be IGTV again, competing with YouTube. We're just going to recycle all of these old ideas. Yeah. I mean, I've been covering Facebook long enough to remember when they changed the news feed, gosh, probably in 2012 era around then, to focus more on real-time updates and public figures instead of your friends and family. And that was because Mark Zuckerberg was seeing the rise of Twitter. Twitter was in the process of going public and people thought, wow, maybe this is the next billion-plus user platform to rival Facebook.

1:05:50And so Facebook changed the feed to focus more on news. Fast forward to today and Facebook is actively trying to downrank and deemphasize news and public content in the feed. So it is an interesting time to be doing this. And I would say that everyone in the social media industry is just looking at Elon's handling of Twitter and going, can we somehow slide in here? Is there an opening? And, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, if nothing, is very competitive and wants to take opportunistic shots. And I think that's really all they see this as. They're calling it Project 92 internally, which is the year that the first text message was sent.

1:06:30And it's kind of bold, I think, for them to even try this right now just because, you know, I don't know if, like, people want the Twitter experience anymore. It seems like there's a lot of companies trying. None have really taken off. And then on the decentralized side, ActivityPub is growing, but it's still not mainstream. Blue Sky, which I'm also interested in, which is a rival to ActivityPub, is even smaller. So on day one, Meta coming in here will make ActivityPub at least 10x bigger. They'll be the biggest server on ActivityPub immediately. What that does for the rest of the ecosystem is interesting.

1:07:05I think it's important to explain maybe why they're even thinking about this app working with ActivityPub. If you look at what happened with Twitter, all of a sudden, I think a bunch of power users of Twitter, myself included, went, oh, wow, like this can just be taken away. Like the company can just be bought and either shut down or Elon can start banning people or banning links, banning your ability to monetize. It started to feel really fragile. And the promise of ActivityPub is that even if one server on the network goes down, you can take your entire following graph, your account information with you to another server.

1:07:40So if you're a public figure, if you're, you know, I reported and they said in the meeting, they're talking to Oprah, big celebrities like that to come onto this app on day one. I would imagine that part of a good pitch is, look, even if we decide, you know, meta the company that we're not going to support this app, you know, five years from now, for whatever reason, you're at least going to still have all that, you know, account and follower information and posting that you've done built on activity pub, and you could take it to Mastodon, you could take it to another app, it's not locked into our ecosystem, right?

1:08:10In a sense, it's actually like a really confident swing from Instagram. Because they're saying the bet then is that just by virtue of having a big network, lots of people already use it, and they have really good monetization tools that they can be like, yeah, we're an open platform, we're still going to win, because we have all of these other tools around it that we can offer. And even as I'm saying this, that's a kind of a really compelling pitch. It might work. Yeah. And you know, even outside of ActivityPub, I've always found it fascinating that like the largest social media company in the world still needs to go to Twitter to like announce things, right?

1:08:41You know, Zuckerberg famously doesn't tweet from his at think account anymore, though I know he lurks on there. But you've got other top meta executives posting there all the time, sharing product announcements, the kinds of things that we come to expect on Twitter. I think that kind of annoys them. And it has for a long time, that people don't come to their properties for those kinds of updates. And this is, again, the largest social media company in the world by a wide margin. So I have to imagine internally there's also just this feeling of, man, it's probably going to feel great to finally just have a bit of this energy that we've never been able to capture with Twitter.

1:09:16They're definitely going to try. You know, whether it works, I don't know. I think using Instagram is actually really smart because if you think about the kinds of celebrities and social graphs on Instagram, and when I say social graph, I just mean relationships between who is following who. It actually probably mirrors Twitter more than you would think. And it's definitely met as closest Twitter-like social graph. So I think it's smart for them to use that instead of WhatsApp or a whole new account system for this. So they're going to have a lot of advantages going into this, and it's really just going to be on them to execute and build something that, like Cox said in the meeting, is, quote, sanely run.

1:09:55Totally. Well, it seems like this is happening fast, so we're going to have to keep talking about this. Because I also, there's a whole, like, Fediverse response to this that's been really interesting. We're going to have to come back to all of that. For now, we need to take a break, and then we're going to talk about Apple's new computers and whether a 15-inch MacBook Air is the magical laptop we've been hoping for. Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it, as always. Thank you.

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1:12:48Welcome back. Last week, in addition to the Vision Pro and all that new software at WWDC, Apple also announced a couple of new Macs. A 15-inch MacBook Air, a new Mac Studio, and a new Mac Pro. The Verge is Monica Chin spent the past few days reviewing the MacBook Air and I think just got the studio and the Pro in office to test them out. So we should get into all of them. Let's get her in here to talk about it. Hey, Monica. Hello, hello. How is it? I feel like every once in a while, a few times a year, you're thrust into what I like to call like pure MacBook hell. Are you deep in it now? How does it feel?

1:13:22Yeah, this is one of those things where like in the morning in our Slack, everyone posts like a long list of what they're working on. and I just write Apple for two weeks straight, and no one questions me. It's kind of wonderful. That's about right. So there are three computers coming out. One you've tested, two you're about to test. I want to talk about all of that. But let's start with the 15-inch Air, which is the one you've had a chance to review so far. The wrap on this when it came out was, it is a MacBook Air. It is all the things you think about a MacBook Air. It's just bigger now. Is that true?

1:13:52Is that kind of how it came out in the review also? So that is entirely correct. It is a 13-inch MacBook Air, but it is now 15 inches. Okay. It is really remarkably similar. The experience using it is very, very similar, but the screen is a lot bigger. Okay. So we've been debating on this show now for, what, like 10 days, why Apple took so long to launch this thing. But I haven't asked you, and I'm curious. As someone who pays a lot of attention to this space, this is the kind of thing Apple could have done many years ago. It's not like there is some earth-shattering new idea about 15-inch laptops in here.

1:14:24Where has this thing been? Wait a minute, guys. Yeah. So I think there are kind of two things. And of course, I can only really speculate. One is that in the past several quarters, PC shipments have been very slow. It's been a much better story for Apple than it has for pretty much every other PC manufacturer that we cover here. But Apple has still seen a large decline in its sales and its shipments since like the golden age. And I hate to call it that, but for these companies, it kind of was in 2020 and early 2021 when everyone was buying this stuff. So a lot of companies, companies in the PC space writ large have sort of been tasked with how do we convince people to keep buying stuff when the stuff they bought in 2020 is still like not particularly old, like it's not falling apart yet.

1:15:13How do we keep this market exciting? And companies have tried various different things. Like we've had companies that are trying to do fancy AI stuff. We've had like HP's doing this whole customer service thing and calling itself a solutions provider now. And I would not be surprised if this was like, you know, Apple's trying to figure out how is it going to reach new audiences and how is it going to release something that is going to create a news cycle around the products that it's putting out right now. Yeah, it's an interesting thing because I think one of the things you did in your review was basically make a list of all the weird things PC manufacturers are doing to try to get people to buy laptops.

1:15:50Some pretty weird stuff out there. Oh, my God. It's insane. And seeing it all listed in a row is pretty wild. All the new screens they're trying and they're like, what if we put the keyboard in a new place? And it's like, don't do that. It's fine. We figured this out a long time ago. Yeah, we got invisible touchpads out there. We got dual screens. We got all this stuff. So that's I sort of made this clear in the review, but I personally I'm glad that, you know, they released their VR headset that was, you know, big and flashy. And, you know, no one's going to buy. You guys have talked about that to death.

1:16:18I'm glad they released this as well, because this is a thing that people actually want and have been asking for and that they need that they weren't meeting before. So I hope that this was partially response to to that need. The other thing, in terms of like why it took so long, I do think this is a more niche product than the 13-inch MacBook Air. I think there are probably at the moment in the current market fewer people who want something like this than who want something like a 13-inch MacBook Air. And so I think it kind of makes sense that they did this one last. I think it's probably a smaller market, but that doesn't mean there aren't tons of people who want it.

1:16:53I think there very well might be. Okay. Yeah. So let's talk about kind of the pros and cons of 15 versus 13. Because if I'm just thinking about it off the top of my head, it would seem to me that the two best reasons to buy a 15-inch laptop over a 13-inch laptop, if in fact they are essentially identical otherwise, is just more screen size, right? Like I can just do more stuff on the screen and battery life. That because the thing is bigger, there's more space to put battery. Those strike me as like the two most obvious things. Did those both pan out in your review? How much difference is two inches of screen in actual life?

1:17:30So the screen is definitely the major reason. The screen is huge. I've been sort of going back and forth between this and the 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro that work gave me for the past couple days. And after having used this 15-incher over the past weekend or so writing the review, I really did get used to it being able to just have two tabs open and zoom out maybe once or not at all. And just be able to see everything and not have to scroll that much and really have – when I write reviews, I tend to have a ton of things open because I have my spec sheet. I have the product purchase page. I have our hands-on.

1:18:08I have my draft, and then I have my other draft where the stuff I cut goes. I have a ton of stuff. I really like to be able to see as much of it as I can and get between it all really fast. And a lot of the stuff I'm reading is really long and requires a lot of scrolling to get to where I'm going. It was just a lot less work to do that kind of thing on this gigantic screen. And I really got used to being able to have two, even three things over time that I could just really quickly reference. And to sort of being able to see my entire draft without having to scroll. And then when I went back to the 13-inch Pro yesterday morning, I was like, oh, this sucks.

1:18:46I was like, oh my goodness, I have to zoom out like seven times to be able to see the whole Verge homepage when it's in Snap Layout. oh, this is the worst. Yeah, two full-sized windows or very close to it sounds pretty nice. Like I always think about, I've been using a 13-inch laptop basically exclusively for many years. I've kind of forgotten what it's like to have a 15-inch. But then I sit down next to Neelai who has like a 16-inch Pro and it is like the biggest, roomiest looking thing. And I don't have to put Google Docs down to 70 % just to see the whole text column. Like two inches does, I think, make a big difference.

1:19:19Yeah. It's massive. And for multimedia as well, you really get it feels more immersive to me and that might not be the case for everyone but like when I'm watching like my YouTube videos or whatever I watch at night like I'm just like oh I can really see like details that I wouldn't necessarily see watching on a 13. Totally. So it does I think it's significantly it's a lot more room it feels like a lot more room if you're someone who wants like as large of a screen as possible on a MacBook but you don't want to pay for the 16 like this will level up your experience. In terms of battery life, I do get more out of this than I get out of the 13-inch Air.

1:19:55It was not like a massive difference, and I would say the testing I have right now is kind of in the margin of error, so it does have a bigger battery. It has a bigger screen that it's powering as well. I would not buy the larger one just for the battery life over the 13-inch Air or the 13-inch Pro at this point, but I did get like a little bit more. What I would say to that, though, also, is they all just have such long battery life. I don't know that I think for a lot of people, it's probably going to be a diminishing returns situation. Yeah, that's that's very fair. So and actually, we were debating this on the show.

1:20:26I'm curious what your your take is. Would you make trades in other ways, like if it made the laptop a little heavier or a smidge slower or whatever, in exchange for like six more hours of battery life? Would that would that mean something to you? Or have we kind of hit that plateau where it's like it lasts all day? You really don't have to think about it. That's good enough. So at a certain point, I think that, you know, that's totally subjective. And it's like what you like. I'm firmly in the good enough category. But like Neil, I felt very strongly that like give that man three days of battery life and he's a happy man.

1:20:54Yeah. Like, I mean, if you look at if you're asking about like my personal preferences, like you look at what I use. I use 13s in my personal life. And that's because for me, there's a point at which the battery life is fine. It's probably around like 12, 13 hours. And after that, like portability is super, super important. So like I don't own a 16-inch MacBook Pro even though that is like some of the longest battery life that I get because that's just – it's too expensive and also it's just – it's really, really heavy. And I like to carry things around with one hand and I like – also I have to carry like seven laptops around at any given time.

1:21:27So I need the lighter, the better for me and my back. But, you know, I think if you, you know, some people want a super, super light thing that's like a Windows laptop that has only like six hours of battery life and more power to you. But that's that's not enough for me. I need to not have to think about my outlets that much. Yeah, I buy that. OK, so were there any other sneaky upsides to upgrading from 13 to 15? Yeah, the speakers are fantastic. Oh, interesting. They're really, really good. the bass is like very like you know i listen to the audio on this stuff all the time the bass is usually like inaudible or super tinny this bass is really good um when i i mentioned this in the review but when i first started playing like my apple music on this i like thought it was coming out of a speaker i was like where where is connected to it's really good it has a nice surround quality i think in terms of multimedia consumption this is like probably one of the best devices you can get.

1:22:24Okay. Like the combination of the giant screen and like the really immersive speakers. Like I can't think of a better TV watching experience that I've had on a device if that's what you're looking for. Nice. So and the interesting thing about that is it seems like what Apple did is instead of just shoving all the battery possible into the bigger chassis, which is what a lot of manufacturers would do, they actually use some of that space to stick more speakers in. And I think to your point about diminishing returns, I think like good audio is worth that space to me more than like another couple hours of battery life.

1:22:56So that that makes me very happy. Yeah. And also, like, everyone else needs to figure this out. I feel like the fact that no PC manufacturers are out here pushing as hard as Apple on making the thing sound good. So I don't have to plug in headphones all the time is like, please, everybody else get on board. Yeah, it is definitely the best speaker experience I've had from this category this year. It's That was a treat. I was not even really setting out to test that functionality, but that is worth mentioning. Yeah, that's awesome. So, all right, so downsides. The downside, I would assume, is just that it's bigger.

1:23:30Like, both physically bigger and heavier and presumably thicker. And, like, how much bigger are we really talking about here in, like, day-to-day use? So, it's very thin. So, I wouldn't worry about, like, you're suddenly not going to be able to fit it in your briefcase when you can fit a 13-year briefcase. it is like it is very noticeably heavier and i know like people have been coming at me for this i understand i invite you to come at me i i deserve it to an extent i just i i this is i want to be clear this is not me complaining like oh it's too heavy for me this is me making sure i want people to be aware if they've never used a 15 incher before that they are heavier than 13 inchers and if you are buying this expecting that because it has the Air in its title that it's going to be like two pounds.

1:24:15It is not nearly as it is more than half a pound lighter than 13 incher. I meant I made this comparison in the review, but it is much closer to the weight of the Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop than it is to the 13 inch MacBook Air. Oh, wow. Okay. And yet in the 15 inch category, it is very light, though it is not the lightest 15 inch laptop you can buy, but it is it is light for the category. But I want to make sure people know that if this is sort of your first venture into 15-inch laptops, like these things, these are heavier devices than you will be used to. And the reason I think that's worth noting is that the Air, like a big part of the Air's value in the past has been it's really, really light.

1:24:57And that's one of my favorite things about the 13-inch Air is that carrying it around really feels like you're carrying nothing. And that is not the case with 15-inch Air. It's heavier. you feel it like I had to walk around with it in a tote bag for a while. That was not my favorite thing to carry in a tote bag. It is not quite the same experience. Again, if you've used 15 inches all the time, this might feel light to you. But if it's your first 15 incher, just be prepared. It's heavier. It's over three pounds. The thing that's very exciting to me about this is that trade-off feels like something that is going to be very obvious and people are going to kind of be able to self-select into, right?

1:25:34In the way that like, if I want to decide which iPad to buy it is immensely complicated and i have we have to ask a thousand follow-up questions before we can figure out what ipad you should have if you want to buy a macbook air it's like okay do you want the lighter slightly smaller one or do you want the one with more screen that's slightly bigger and slightly heavier like that's it that's the trade that's exactly how this should work right there's like a little more you know the 15 inch air like performed a little bit better in our benchmark testing than the 13 inch air did um there's more cooling it did not perform quite as well in most cases in most synthetic cases at least as the 13 inch pro which has a fan did so it kind of sat squarely in the middle between those two i also think like people who are shopping for the air like probably the synthetic benchmark performance like it's not as relevant to you all sure like i you know having used all these for like as i mentioned before like lots of internet things and like typing in my draft while referencing a spec sheet like there is not a noticeable difference between any of these when doing that they are all fast it is all fine yeah I like to think of myself as like the upper tier of the average user like I don't have any apps I use day to day that are like outside of the realm of being a regular person I just tend to have more tabs open than most and for me still the m1 air is like above what I need performance wise.

1:26:54Yeah. Like I have an M1 Pro at my desk that has like a hundred like YouTube videos minimized right now. Cause like, I'm just the kind of person who, when I want to watch a YouTube video, I minimize it cause I'm organized like that. And it, it works totally fine. I do not need an M2 for that. But if you're someone who thinks you might want to do like Lightroom on this or something, but not enough that you want to go up to the Pro, like that's a difference that's worth potentially looking into. Right. So, and this is what I was getting to with the comparison thing actually because i think the the air comparison is mostly pretty straightforward for people but the question of do i want a 15 inch air or let's say a 16 inch pro probably sorts itself just because it's still a gigantic price difference and you either want to pay for more or you don't but it seems to me now that the biggest single difference in terms of like what most people will actually experience between these two laptops is the ports right and the air still has the like woefully tiny number of ports that you get on the 13 inch air and the pro has at this point a pretty good complement of ports right like is that kind of the main difference between the two at this point i mean the pro performs it has significantly better processor so that's what i would say is the main difference in addition to the the many hundreds of dollar price increase but again i think for most people looking to buy these things they're both still going to be more performant than most people need so again like if you know you need what the pro is great it does matter when you're if you're someone who's thinking about the pro versus the air i'm assuming that you are doing some kind of photo stuff or you're coding or you're yeah doing premiere and in that case generally we would not recommend the air if you're doing that kind of stuff like regularly like we have people in our office who who like use lightroom and do a lot of raw photo stuff and they generally have gone for the pro and have said that the the air is not really adequate for what they're doing.

1:28:47So that is the main differentiator is the M1 Pro. And if you look at the benchmark comparisons of like our M2 chip, like I'm talking about like, I'm comparing all these M2 machines to each other. But if you look at this M2 Air model and you compare those benchmarks to the benchmark scores, especially on graphics stuff that the M2 Pro and M2 Max are getting, it's not even close. Like they are so far apart from each other. So that is the main differentiator. But I do think that similarly to how I, the experience I had on this, the positives of it are similar to the positives of the 13-inch air. I think many of my complaints are still there.

1:29:18The biggest one is the port selection. I know lots of people are totally fine with having two USB-C. I think having two USB-C, especially on the same side, is not my favorite thing. And I think I had hoped that maybe this bigger chassis would allow for at least some on the right side, too, because that does offer you a lot of flex. I mean, the headphone jacks over there, but in terms of where you can charge it or where you can plug peripherals in, And I think it offers a lot more flexibility when you have ports on both sides. For example, my desk, because of the way it's positioned relative to the power outlet, it's going to be very difficult to plug my monitor in on the left side.

1:29:55And that is going to – I'm going to have to do some reconfiguring. I don't love that. That is like my own personal thing to work through. But I would love – that is a downside for me when I think, would I buy this? I don't think this port selection would be adequate for me at least in terms of having them all on the left side. And I think there's fine for some people, but I think it limits the audience somewhat and continues to. On the other hand, this is the port selection Apple put on the previous Air. It seems like they have determined based on the sales that that did that it attracted enough people as is.

1:30:26So I kind of I, you know, I admire that they seem to have figured out what they want the Air to be. And they aren't trying to throw stuff at the wall to make it reach more and more people. And that's something you do see lots of companies do. so true yeah uh just like just maybe one more port apple just just one on the right side on the right side that's all i like my my wife has a galaxy chromebook and just the fact that you can plug a power cable into either side of that thing is such a it's such a lovely little like quality of life improvement people make fun of me for this all the time like there are always people in my comment section like oh like why you really need ports on both sides of all it's like i i don't think you understand like the freedom that you suddenly feel the weight that is lifted off your shoulders when you can plug a charger into either or martyr into either side it really it opens up your world in a way that is difficult to describe if you've been using macbooks your whole life you don't have to do that thing where you like turn it 20 degrees just to be able to get the thing to connect from the wall it's yeah no it is exactly literally life-changing in in like the stupidest way.

1:31:29When I got my new M1 MacBook Pro, I have to say this now, I had to get another cord from IT because the one that I had wasn't long enough to reach all the way around the left side. That kind of thing does matter. It's difficult to explain if you're really used to having all your ports on one side or the other, but I think it makes a difference in your experience. Yeah. No, I'm totally with you. So compare this 15-inch Air to the Windows stuff that's out there right now. And I feel like we've hit a place where, to use a pun that I hate as a pun, it's all kind of apples and oranges, right? Like Apple seems to have just started playing its own game in laptops.

1:32:06But there are a lot of 15-inch Windows laptops out there that are kind of right around in this price range. Is there anything in the Windows world that stands up to what Apple's trying to do here? In terms of the combination of performance and battery life that this offers, I have not seen anything. The 15-inch lightweight space is already somewhat niche. There are some big models and there are some that are lighter than this. But generally, I think there is sort of a stereotype right now that the 15-incher is the big, powerful one and the 13-incher is like the weaker one for Netflixing. And if you look at – obviously, the 15-inch category itself is a huge category.

1:32:44But if you look at where a lot of that revenue is coming from for PC manufacturers, a lot of it is gaming laptops. and the lightweight sort of ultra-portable quote-unquote 15-inch category is a little bit more of a – I think seen as a little bit more of a niche thing right now. You have models like the LG Gram 15. The Galaxy Book Pro has a couple 15-inch models here and there. And they're fun to use. I like using all of them. But in terms of the battery life that this gets and compared with the performance that we've seen on these synthetic benchmarks, this M2 chip just like offers you a lot more.

1:33:21And I think if you're someone who's just like, oh, I just want a lightweight 15 inch laptop and 3.3 pounds is my ideal weight point. Like this would be the one I would suggest to you for the moment. Fair enough. All right, real quick before I let you go, the other two Macs are the new Studio and the new Pro. You haven't tested them yet, but I'm super curious. Both of these, the Studio in particular is just like a straight up chip upgrade, right? Has anything else about that thing changed? And the Pro is basically just the studio with some extra ports. So I'm curious, just walk me through the testing plan.

1:33:54People want to know, how are you going to actually evaluate these things? The first big question with the studio is going to be how much has it improved from the last studio that we tested? And so for that, I'll just be doing a really close, like, everything we did on the last studio, let's do it on this studio. How much improvement are we seeing? Then what does that say about these new chips, since this is our first time getting a look at those? Then we're going to look at that versus the Pro. Now, we expect the performance of the Studio and the Pro to be the same because they're, like, everything about them is the same.

1:34:25We'll sort of double check that and make sure there's no, like, surprise, this one's cooling is terrible or something. And then there's another question of just, like, why buy the Pro? Why buy the Mac Pro? I think a lot of people are asking that question right now. Yeah. Very, very good question. That's going to be a little less up to testing and more of like, you know, talking to people, seeing, you know, are you thinking about buying this? Would you buy this? How much does the PCIe stuff like impact your life? So those are going to be the those are going to be the three big questions going into it.

1:34:57OK, I suspect the studio has reached a point where it is kind of the default choice for this kind of computer, right? And Apple seems to see it that way, too, that it's like if you have a crazy system, you need a lot of powerful things for that plug into the ports that the pro has terrific buy a pro it's seven thousand dollars but if you want apple's most powerful desktop computer like most people that answer is the studio now right is that kind of the operating assumption yeah i mean insofar as these things have the same chips in them right like the studio is is nicer looking in my opinion it's easier to slot into places you don't love the cheese grater i love the cheese i mean maybe there are some people out there who are just like big fans of big fans of cheese graters and i'll pay five thousand dollars for a cheese grater right now then you'll be paying a lot more for it but so it seems to me like given how much more expensive the pro is like the burden should be on the pro to prove why you should pay more money for it and at the moment i don't really see intuitively like why it would be worth that much more um but we're gonna we're gonna dig in and we're going to try to find out.

1:36:04Fair enough. All right. Well, thank you. Good luck. I hope you're not in Mac hell for too much longer. Thank you.

1:36:15All right. Before we go, let's head up the Vergecast hotline and see if we can help somebody out this week. Our question this week comes from Michael. Hello. This is Michael from Nashville, Tennessee. My wife and I are starting to plan on having children, and I have found that trying to find actual good sources of information on baby tech is a minefield of SEO and just horrible to find actual recommendations on security for tech related to babies. I'm curious if y 'all have any recommendations on either specific tech, which would be great, but even more broadly, just how to find good sources of information about that and what to look for to be safe.

1:37:06Just any advice you have on that would be great. I appreciate it. Have a great day. I really like this question in part because as the parent of a six month old, I am deep in the middle of all of this right now. But I also like it because it's just a question about how do you trust things on the internet? I will say for me, two things have come in really handy. One is just finding a couple of sources you trust. This is just good advice for anything on the internet. For me, the website BabyList has been incredibly useful. I've just found myself going there and it's kind of like what the wire cutter is for gadgets.

1:37:38Like you can do a bunch of research or you can just buy the thing they'd recommend and it works out fine. BabyList is great. There's also a YouTuber called DadVerb that I really like. There's a lot of stuff on baby YouTube. But DadVerb for me has been somebody who I feel like I trust his taste and he has good ideas about things. and this is the weirdest advice i'm going to give you i have found chat gpt and other chat bots to be incredibly useful for finding baby stuff don't trust any of the information that it gives you but what it's very good at is figuring out like which products a lot of folks talk about so it kind of gives you a place to start you can just say like what are popular strollers or what's a bathtub toy that a lot of people like and it'll just sort of throw options at you and then you can at least narrow down your research to a handful of things instead of totally starting from scratch with everything.

1:38:25But Michael, mostly know that I feel your pain. It's awful. And you do things like Google, why is my baby coughing? And it's a total disaster. Just don't panic and find a couple of places you trust and stick with that. So that's my advice. But for more advice, I called Jen Pattizantui, who is both a parent and our smart home reviewer. So is well versed in all of the questions about tech in particular that you should bring into your house. Here's what she said. My sort of number one piece of advice, if you're going to use any kind of video monitoring, is only buy from trusted companies, companies that you know the brand name, you know the security and privacy, you can read their policies online, or abbreviated versions of them, you know how this company is going to manage your data.

1:39:11But if you're concerned, you can also do things locally. Apple HomeKit, for example, has a HomeKit secure video element that processes all video locally. So that's a good option. There are a lot of great dedicated baby monitors that are smart, but there's no reason why you can't just use a standard smart home security camera and adapt it to your needs if you want to do something like monitoring your child. But honestly, I think it's worse as a parent to have a video feed. I think watching your baby all the time is a little, you know, from my personal experience, I think audio is absolutely fine.

1:39:50I don't, you know, I feel like audio is probably the best way. You're more likely to hear something than you are to see something. So audio baby monitors, you know, those work locally over local frequencies. normally 2.4 gigahertz, which is, as we've discussed before, is a crowded band, but it's just as useful to alert you to problems. It's a bit of a minefield, parenting tech. The lists that they tell you, you need all of this when you have a kid. And then six months later, there's this pile of boxes that you never even opened of things. So yeah, wait for a use case and then look at specific devices and look into the privacy and security there rather than like trying to kit everything out beforehand, which can be complicated.

1:40:31All right, that is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show and thank you as always for listening. There is, as ever, lots more on all the stuff we talked about, especially the Reddit chaos at TheVerge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also, you know, read the website. We have a story stream on all the Reddit stuff. It's super helpful. It's a very confusing, weird story, and it seems to change all the time. Check that out. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or favorite subreddits that are still alive that you want to talk about, you can always email us at vergecast at TheVerge.com or keep calling the hotline.

1:41:03We're going to try and answer a question on here every week. I think we're going to do a whole hotline episode soon. So keep sending us all of your questions. 866-VERGE11. And as again, if you don't want to call, vergecastatheverge.com. That works great too. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk presumably more about Reddit, but also Instant Pots, Smart Homes, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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