MacBreak Weekly 1014 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on MacBreak Weekly, I, Mikah Sargent, am subbing in for Leo Laporte, and Apple has released a bunch of new products. We've got Andy Ihnatko here, Christina Warren, and joined by Shelley Brisbin. We break down what you need to know about the iPhone 17e, the new iPad Air, the new M5 chips, and the new Macs from Apple, plus some rumors of things to come. All of that coming up on MacBreak Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:38]:
This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 1014, recorded Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026. iPhone 17e, the enough phone. Hello, you're probably wondering what's going on because you do not hear Leo Laporte's voice. Well, that's because Leo's out. Hahaha. And I, Mikah Sargent, am subbing in for him today. I believe he's in the very humid, uh, very humid Florida. Yes, it is humid, humid.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:10]:
And so I am excited to be joining you today for this, the show known as MacBreak Weekly, where we talk all things Apple all the time. Uh, very excited, uh, to be here here today in the new era of MacBreak Weekly. Uh, let's kick things off by talking to my neighbor to the north. Hello, Christina Warren.

Christina Warren [00:01:37]:
Hello, hello! I'm so happy to be here. Happy M5 Day to all who celebrate.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:41]:
Oh yeah, that's right, it is the M5 Day. Uh, yes, and we are also joined by my neighbor to the south, Shelley Brisbane. Hello, Shelley.

Shelly Brisbane [00:01:53]:
I was wondering what you're gonna do that, Mikah. And happy, uh, Pi Day in 3 days for those who celebrate that, including me.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:02]:
And last but not least, my neighbor to the east, it's Andy Ihnatko. Hello, Andy.

Andy Ihnatko [00:02:08]:
I am very, very proud to be this show's first and primary line of defense against any incursion from Hessian mercenaries. We stand ready to defend these borders once again.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:22]:
And you should be proud that you're there to do it. Thank you. Uh, this of course is our opportunity to talk about what we have heard from Apple. Yes, this morning I wake up and I head to apple.com/newsroom and I see that Apple has made it very difficult for me to, uh, do the shows that I need to do because there are a bunch of new, uh, products out and I mean, look, we expected this, right? We've heard about the rumors. We knew that Apple was going to start rolling out products, that it was likely that these products would be rolled out not in some huge news event, but instead from the press releases of it all. And I think we should kick things off by talking about the new iPhone 17e. Of course, we were expecting that Apple would upgrade its E line. Have we decided, by the way, what we think the E stands for? I want to hear everybody's take on what the E stands for.

Andy Ihnatko [00:03:22]:
I was writing, thinking about this and writing about this last night. And I decided that E stands for enough.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:29]:
I like it.

Christina Warren [00:03:32]:
I love that. I love that. That's great. I think you nailed it. I don't think anybody can do any better. I mean, I was going to be like economy, right? Which is really what it is. But I think it's enough, right? Because the C was cheap. Or China or color.

Christina Warren [00:03:48]:
It was cheap is what it was.

Shelly Brisbane [00:03:49]:
I was going to try everybody or emerging or something, but yours is so much better.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:57]:
Yeah, enough. The iPhone 17, enough. And I think that that does a good job of sort of encapsulating what we've seen with this model. One thing that we've seen from Apple, I think lately, I think it was the Apple Watch where I saw it happen first and maybe then AirPods after that. Apple has been doing a really good job, I feel, of getting, uh, a relative amount of feature parity across its lineup such that there are perhaps not as clear distinctions between the line, which makes some of us who talk about this stuff regularly a little upset. But for the average consumer, really good. And in some ways, I think, Christina, good for us. Whenever someone asks us what device they should get, we can say, oh, it's much easier now to say which one to get.

Christina Warren [00:04:49]:
No, I totally, totally agree with you. And I think that this year, the enough— Andy, thank you for that because I am just— this is just going to be the enough phone. That's what this is, I think, becomes a fairly easy to recommend item if somebody is really on a budget. I still feel like— and this isn't true every iPhone year. Some years, the basic iPhone is just not great. This year, the basic iPhone 17 is so good at that price point that I do feel like it is difficult for me to talk to people and be like, okay, well, do you have— is there a way you can either finance or get $200 to go to, you know, the, the full phone? But if you don't, for whatever reason, and there are plenty of people out there who maybe they need a work phone, maybe they need it for a kid, maybe they, you know, just don't have the ability to spend the $200. I feel like to your point, Mikah, they have done a really good job of the feature parity that, okay, you don't have the front face, the really good selfie camera, which was the one of the biggest upgrades this year. Okay, you know, the MagSafe isn't as fast.

Christina Warren [00:05:49]:
Okay, you have one camera instead of two. But by and large, you're going to have a best-in-class processor, you're going to have, you know, fast enough Wi-Fi, you're going to have a good screen, you're going to have like a, you know, water resistance. Um, and, and it's going to do what you need it to do for a long time at a price point that, you know, we— and I think this is going to be a theme of things we talk about, um, this, this show— that we used to be begging for Apple to kind of be in this realm, right? Like, I think since the iPhone X, when they really went to that $1,000 price point, it's been really difficult to be able to be like, oh, there's like a good, reliable, every-year iPhone that we can recommend. Like, when the SE was out, the first year it was out, it was a best-in-class value, especially at $400. But as it was on the market for 2 or 3 years, so at a certain point, you're like, I don't know if I can really recommend you buying this. Now I feel like the enough because to your point, the features have been so similar across the line for the average consumer. And this is true in the iPad as well, which we can talk about a little bit. It becomes harder for us who try to draw those lines, but I think much easier to just tell the average person, yeah, you can just get the basic and you're still going to have a great time.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:00]:
Yeah, and you don't have to have that maybe opportunity for regret or worry or concern, like, OK, but you're missing out. I think too, to some extent, it gives us an opportunity to learn what Apple almost considers perhaps table stakes. I find it interesting that MagSafe is a component of this phone, for example. Uh, you know, I was an early skeptic of the wireless charging technology in the sense of, I always felt like, well, it still has a wire that's connected to the charger, so it's not really wireless. And so it really bothered me when I, whenever, you know, wireless charging first took off, but now I'm a wireless charging person everywhere, MagSafe everywhere. It's great. Andy, go ahead.

Andy Ihnatko [00:07:45]:
I'm sorry, I was going to jump in because that's such a good point that the thing is like MagSafe offers benefits beyond wireless charging. Like it is now the de facto standard for how do you attach an accessory to this device. Apple probably— hey, here's a battery, it just simply clips on. How do I, uh, how do I attach this to a stand or, or a tripod? Well, MagSafe will just click right on.

Christina Warren [00:08:05]:
It's—

Andy Ihnatko [00:08:05]:
and it's interesting to think about if Apple is Putting this forward as here's what we consider table stakes for an iPhone. Here is what— here's everything that has to be included in the package in order to be able to call this an iPhone. Because this is— I mean, this is never going to be a budget phone, not even— not for $599, not for $499. It's more like the least expensive buy-in to the platform. And Apple has to really carefully navigate at what point do we— at what point can we economize on this so much that people no longer really accept this as a part of the iPhone line. Uh, they know, they, they know who's buying this. They have, they, they have all the marketing data. I personally, when I see $599, I'm thinking, okay, but what if you made the base storage 128 gigs and you had a $499 option? I would love to see a $500 version of this.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:01]:
But the thing is, as Christina pointed out, they had an SE model that was even less expensive than that. Apple, I'm not saying that that was a bad idea. I love the idea of the most affordable iPhone possible. But the thing is, they have all the data that they collected during the sales of that phone. So if they decided to position this as a $599 entry model phone, it's because they are informed by what happened when they really, really super broke the $500 barrier and they decided that either A, that's not necessary, or B, a phone that we can build at that price is going to break people's perception of, oh my God, I can't believe I finally own an iPhone, or a kid thinking, Oh God, I'm so glad that I no longer have like that sort of like Walgreens brand Android phone and now I have an iPhone. I'll, I'll, I'll, I can't, I can't wrap this up without mentioning that. Okay, we, we, we, I seem to be making a good case for yes, consume, become a fan of the brand, be ashamed of not having the best phone. Like, and hopefully we can teach kids better than that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:09:57]:
But nonetheless, there's something about an iPhone that has to satisfy us to have that umami feeling when you use it. Says, nope, this is an iPhone. This is not a, this is not a really great Motorola $250 phone. This is not a really great a $200 Samsung phone. This is an iPhone.

Shelly Brisbane [00:10:12]:
I want to go back to what Christina was saying about the SE because there's another way that that's a really good comparison. The SE came out and was left fallow for a couple of years. And so I always imagined the every person, the not me and not you, walking into an Apple Store or probably more likely a carrier store and they're saying, I want an iPhone. And they're pointed to the SE because it's the budget phone. It's the most affordable. Here it is. It doesn't come in any colors, but it's affordable. And somebody says, because they may not be fussed about high-end cameras or screens or some of those details.

Shelly Brisbane [00:10:45]:
They may be willing to make those compromises. But the minute they say, so how old is this model? Oh, it's been around a little while, a couple of years maybe. But Apple has made a commitment, it seems, and they can change on a dime. But by coming out with the SE last— sorry, the 16E last year and a 17E this year, they seem to be indicating that they can make a commitment to this level of phone. And we can argue back and forth about whether the features that were missing from the 16E or even the ones that are missing from the 17E are ones that would be deal breakers for us. But the fact is, if you can sell a phone that has come out even more recently than the fancy phone over here that you can't afford because it's $1,100, there's going to be a subset of customers who's going to be reassured by that. Even if they're not the people that get a new phone every year, this is brand new. This is the 17E.

Shelly Brisbane [00:11:37]:
This just came out last year. It's the 16E. Oh, it's the SE. Let me get the dust off of that for you. I think I think that's going to make a difference. And as Andy said, it would be nice if it were lower. I would love a $400 version of the phone, a $500 version of the phone. I don't get my way, but at least it's something that I can very easily recommend.

Shelly Brisbane [00:11:58]:
And I should say, I recommended the 16E to a few people and I told them the limitations were MagSafe charging basically, because I don't think many of those folks cared about ProMotion or Always-On Display to the extent we might. The 17E is really going to be a good recommendation, as is the whole 17 line if they— if people have more money to spend.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:17]:
One of the things I want to talk to you all about to get your take, um, I was thinking this morning about my use of my iPhone camera, and while I don't necessarily think about, um, switching between lenses, what I have noticed when I really think about my behavior is that I do regularly use different zoom levels, which means that I am using different lenses, but I just didn't, I didn't really think about it that way until I was sort of really focused on it. And so the lens system on my iPhone is something that I have found to be valuable and worth what it offers. What do we think? This is sort of like a, there are two ways to think about this. I think this is this question, which is what do we think is the actual practical difference between having this one lens and having multiple? And does that matter? But then also, what about the perception of, oh, you've got the one lens camera. Do we think one of them, could end up sort of impacting the other, where, okay, it doesn't really matter that you have the one camera because there's a lot of magic happening in the background, but someone lays down their iPhone and it's got one. Oh wow, you only have one on yours. You're right, it doesn't matter.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:49]:
It does telegraph that you have the cheap iPhone, and—

Christina Warren [00:13:53]:
or that you have the iPhone Air.

Andy Ihnatko [00:13:56]:
Oh, okay. Well, well, True. I was about to say, but the iPhone here has that big camera bump. But then again, I don't think most people would be sophisticated enough to think about that. So yeah, I think you're right. Uh, and we— but we just came up through like a sales cycle in China in which one of the, one of the reasons why analysts are sort of attributing the runaway success of the 17 Pro is that it— the, the orange is such a flashy color that it really telegraphs people who maybe could have waited another year to get a phone can now— but everybody will know I've got the brand new iPhone. So there's definitely something to that. But I think that I have two observations.

Andy Ihnatko [00:14:32]:
Number one, I'm glad that they have— Apple has backed off a little bit from the marketing, like, fall to roll that they did with the 16E, say, oh well, it's a, it's a virtual two-lens system, with virtual in the tiniest type possible. It's like, okay, the fact that you've got a 48 40-megapixel sensor and that you're going to use that as a really great digital zoom does not make it a virtual two-lens camera. It means you've got a really good digital zoom. Be proud of that. Revel in that. But the thing that I would really, really miss is the lack of the ultra-wide, because you don't know how valuable that is until you've backed up as far as you possibly can and you still can't get everybody at the table inside the picture. So that's— that would be the thing that I would miss out on.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:18]:
How's everybody else feeling about it?

Shelly Brisbane [00:15:19]:
Yeah, a couple things. I think there is a large group of people, both younger people than myself, who, who observe things like, oh, how many lenses does your phone have? Talking about civilians, not, not just Apple nerds, who would absolutely look and see how many lenses you have. And then there are people who are motivated by, by status. A lot of those folks are in China, a lot of those folks are right here in our, our country here, uh, and, and so those are not me. So, so for those reasons, I can absolutely see why Apple Apple would differentiate the lenses in that way, whether it's actually in marketing or whether it's just the status symbol says you have 2 or 3 lenses as opposed to 1. But I also think that once somebody gets, say, a Pro model or any phone that has multiple lenses, even if they don't perceive themselves as, oh, well, I bought this phone for the ultra-wide or for the telephoto lens, once they've had the experience of it, they're going to be expecting it. And so if— so you hand them a 16E or 17E, they'll be surprised and disappointed in ways that they can't really quantify because like, well, why can't I zoom the way I could before? Or why can't I just zoom really quickly but with the press of a button? I had the experience because I got a 17 Pro— a 16 Pro last year, and I had not really bought the Pro phones. I've had them around for testing and that sort of things, but my daily driver was usually the mid-level phone.

Shelly Brisbane [00:16:39]:
Uh, and, and so last year I got a 16 Pro and my husband got a 16. So whenever I pick up his phone, I expect his camera to do the same thing mine does, and it doesn't. And so rather than talking, quantifying how many lenses or how many different kinds of cameras my phone has, as somebody who is a fairly, uh, low-level or low-impact kind of photographer, you definitely do notice when you pick up a phone that is less capable than the one you have every day.

Christina Warren [00:17:06]:
Yeah, I, I would agree with that. I mean, I think that if you are going from one phone that had more features to one that has less, that can be more noticeable, especially in your camera. Although I also think that it kind of depends on what you wind up using your camera for. Like, my mom has had the, the Pro Max series for a couple of versions. I think she had the 13, um, or 14 Pro Max, and then she had the, the 16 Pro Max— or the 15 Pro Max, rather. And maybe she had the 12, maybe then the 15, and, and then And this year she opted to get an iPhone Air, which is actually ironically the same camera that I can tell. They might claim to do a few other things in the backend, but I think this makes the iPhone Air an even worse value for a lot of people because it's essentially the same optics that are in the $600 phone, but it's, you know, a $1,000 phone. It's super thin and it's great, and that was honestly why she bought it, and I think that she did like send me.

Christina Warren [00:17:58]:
Me some photos, one that she took with my dad's camera, which I think is like an iPhone 14 Plus, so it has two cameras, and one on hers. And she was like, why does his look different? And I was like, well, I think they both look great, but you do have a better single-lens camera. But to your point, Shelley, if you're used to being able to, you know, adjust things more— and he didn't even have a Pro, he just had the standard camera, which I guess, um, you know, gave the, the, the the wide angle, you know, you can get different types of views for the types of photos that she's taking. It doesn't demonstrably matter, and I don't think it does. And I think that by the time she upgrades her phone again, if they do still have an Air model, they will have figured out how to put multiple lenses in that camera. As far as though people noticing, you know, being a status symbol thing, I don't know. I feel like it's definitely a thing for the Pro models, like either by color or in this case with like the 17, like the fact that the camera array is different signifies I've got the latest and greatest. And so some people really want to show that off.

Christina Warren [00:19:02]:
And look, I bought the orange phone and I definitely noticed when people, you know, have them in cases, other things, I'm like, oh, okay, you know, you get used to the new camera array, whereas you couldn't immediately tell just by looking at what Pro Max do you have or, you know, now I guess you can tell if you look at the regular model. So if it's diagonal camera or, or, you know, vertically stacked, um, what, what year it might be. Um, but I don't know how much that will matter. Uh, someone in, uh, Joe in the Discord said that he thinks that the, um, front-facing camera matters more to a lot of people, and I would actually agree with that. I think at this point that's the camera that a lot of people use just as much, if not more, than their rear-facing cameras. And that is the one area, and it makes total sense, because if you— if they did put the good front-facing camera in this phone, you would have zero reason to buy, you know, the, the regular 17, that this would be the one thing I think for anybody who's like looking at getting the 17e, it's like, okay, how much are you using FaceTime? How much are you doing selfie videos, recording for TikToks and Instagram Reels, other things? Because if you are, the upgrades are good enough in this new version that it might be worth spending the $200. If you're, if you're not, and if you're like, look, this is— I'm fine with what my camera was— what the system was on my older phone, I don't think it matters. But I don't know.

Christina Warren [00:20:20]:
I mean, school kids are mean, and they'll find ways to other people. At the same time, I don't feel like this is one of those things like, oh no, you only have the $600 iPhone.

Andy Ihnatko [00:20:30]:
Like, come on. At least my parents are still together.

Shelly Brisbane [00:20:34]:
Going back to my example of our civilian who goes into the Apple Store or the carrier store, that selfie camera is a good opportunity for them to compare. You pick up two phones and you open up the selfie camera, you don't even have to do anything, you just open it up and there it is, and you can see the difference. And that might tip somebody over who would buy a better phone than otherwise would. Of course, you can point the other camera and show the wide angle and the telephoto and stuff like that, but it's less compelling inside of an Apple Store than it would be on a mountain peak or at your family reunion dinner.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:07]:
Yeah. Um, there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to the new iPhone as well as we'll get to the, the new iPad Air, but I do believe it is time for us to take a quick break for Leo to tell us about the first sponsor of today's episode of MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:21:25]:
Hey everybody, this episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Space Mail, the professional email service from our friends at Spaceship. A business email is the easiest way to look professional in every message you send and give your emails the best chance of reaching the inbox, not the spam folder. That's why over 2,000 users switch to Spacemail every month. Switching is easy. Spacemail's super-fast unbox process links your domain and email in seconds, and once you're set up, Spacemail keeps everything running smoothly with built-in spam detection and a 99% uptime guarantee. New features are shaped by you, user feedback, and built around your needs. There's a built-in calendar, an AI email assistant. There are great iOS and Android apps for email on the go.

Leo Laporte [00:22:11]:
All of that chosen by Spacemail users with more to come. Spacemail is a key part of the wider Spaceship universe. We love Spaceship, and I know if you're a regular user, you know Spaceship offers some of the best prices on domains plus all the add-ins you might need, including VPNs, website builders, hosting, and more. So whether you're building something big or launching your first idea, Space Mail gives you a pro email address without the pro-level price tag. And with a 30-day free trial, you can start today at zero cost. Yes, visit spaceship.com/twit to see the exclusive offers and discover why thousands have already made the move. That's spaceship.com/twit.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:52]:
Now back to MacBreak Weekly. Hello, hello. Thank you, Leo. We are Joined today by a wonderful cast of characters, Andy and Natko, Shelley Brisbane, Christina Warren, all here for today's episode of MacBreak Weekly. Apple just revealed a bunch of new products and we're in the midst of talking about the 17-inch iMac. Uh, you know, we talked about MagSafe, we talked about that camera system. One other place that I want to look to is Apple's ongoing push toward its own connectivity options, its own connectivity hardware. Um, I'll be honest with you that when I first heard about the iPhone 17 and the, uh, C1X and the, the, the modem that we would have in it, I was a little worried.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:44]:
I thought, okay, I get that Apple wants to move to its own hardware, but we haven't had an opportunity for this to be a tried and tested thing, which made me At times when I was having issues with Bluetooth or I was having issues with cellular connection, obviously the first thing I'm going to think is, is it because Apple's new modem is causing these issues or Apple's new connectivity chip is causing these issues? Or is it just genuinely, you know, that something's going wrong as often happens? So there's been a little bit of skepticism on my part, but we're seeing Apple roll out its connectivity and its modem across the entire lineup. And I just wanted to get everybody's kind of, uh, take on where things are as far as that goes, and if we think that Apple having, uh, sort of control over the design of this chip is going to have an impact over time on things like the reliability of the battery life expectations that we have when it comes to these phones.

Andy Ihnatko [00:24:48]:
Well, it does seem like everything, everything Apple does pretty much across everything that they've announced yesterday and today, you could really smell how important battery life always is, uh, where all the way through like the choice of CPUs, all the way through the choice of memory, there's always that sort of subtext of, and this is more power efficient. They don't— they want to make sure they, they always go forward, never backwards. Like some of these, we'll talk— I mean, we'll talk about other things later on, but like even with some of these devices, it's like, no, actually we've extended battery life. And so It really is the, the core philosophy of if we design every, every widget inside this thing, we can optimize the entire, the entire widget from, from start to bottom in ways that we couldn't when we were relying on Qualcomm to give us our modem. So I think that that's always going to be like the premier like advantage of, of switching to a custom modem, a custom Bluetooth chip, custom Wi-Fi chip. And thank goodness it's like if there were any sort of a widespread issue with this brand new, first generation, never released to the public before modem chip, it would have exploded by now. We're not even seeing like pockets of difficulty, which is what— quite a neat trick for Apple to pull off, or anybody to pull off, shipping something as, as important as a modem chip that A, has to work 100% of the time, also has to work without necessarily violating patents that Qualcomm owns that they don't have licensing access to. I mean, Apple Silicon in general is a success story, but that specifically gets its own little lifetime achievement award this year, I think.

Shelly Brisbane [00:26:25]:
I think it's interesting that they rolled the modems out into the lower-end phones first, and that— in the Air. And the Air, yes. Uh, though I think 16 had it first, but then the Air got it.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:35]:
Let's not—

Shelly Brisbane [00:26:35]:
justice for the Air, absolutely.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:37]:
The ones that are going to be the backbone of the iPhone line, right?

Christina Warren [00:26:41]:
Right. The lower sales volume units.

Andy Ihnatko [00:26:44]:
Yeah, millions instead of quadrillions of sales.

Shelly Brisbane [00:26:46]:
I think, I think it is interesting because it means that it put Apple at a kind of a risk where if you had problems with it, you're going to have not as widespread of problems, but you're going to have problems among a user base that might be less tolerant of the iPhone, of iPhone devices getting their sea legs, so to speak. The other thing from a simple sort of pundit class point of view. I'm sorry, I always have to get into these sorts of conversations, uh, but I wonder if the modems have been tested. I'm not talking about the connectivity chips because I think that's a totally different story, but I wonder if the modems have gotten as much rigorous testing with as many carriers and as many circumstances as they would if they were in the Pro and the Pro Max phones. I'm glad that there haven't been any problems to report from people who may not be pundit class testers, but as somebody who follows this stuff and who reads a lot of news, I just didn't see all that much detailed testing of performance with the modems with multiple carries. I think Jason actually was one of the few people who wrote something about the 16E and the modem, and maybe the AR2, I can't recall, but because he has some carrier connectivity issues in his area and he was able to sort of test those out a little bit. But I do sort of wonder whether it would have been put through its paces differently if it was in the Pro and Pro Max. But fortunately for Apple, it seems to be faring pretty well where it is.

Christina Warren [00:28:09]:
Yeah, I mean, and I have to think that they did this by the design, right? Like, they've been wanting to move to their own modems for years. They've been wanting to get out of this relationship with Qualcomm for quite some time. Um, they acquired, uh, I believe it was like Intel's, you know, modem business to help build this out. This is clearly a thing that they want to be able to own the full stack so that they're not reliant on Qualcomm in this way. And I think that it does make sense that as you test this out, to your point, Shelley, like, yeah, I mean, I think if you're going to put this— your best-selling, um, product from, from what, you know, we've heard is the iPhone Pro. And so before you put it in that best-selling model, I think you need to do testing. And so you start with the, the lower end, the 16, then you go to a, a more niche product like the Air, you put it in the iPad Pros, where if people are going to buy an iPad with connectivity with 5G, it is almost certainly going to be the Pro. Yeah, you can do it with the Air, but almost everyone who's going to shell out that extra $200 is going to be getting an iPad Pro.

Christina Warren [00:29:06]:
And then you kind of look at what your data is. You can get refined things. They've already, with the C1X, are claiming that it's twice as good as the one that came out a year ago, better battery life. And then we will see when Apple feels like— I feel like when they do put it in the Pros and the regular models, models, that will be to me kind of Apple saying, okay, we feel confident enough that this can go in our flagships and that we're not going to run into issues. Um, one other point I want to make though, I mean, because Apple can own the full stack, one of the advantages here— and granted it does require carrier participation— but in iOS 26.3 and later, they added a new feature that says limit precise location, which basically allows you to limit some of the information that like the cellular networks can use to determine your location. And from a privacy perspective, I think this is great. In the United States, I think it only works on Boost Mobile. So like, again, like carriers have to opt into this, but this would be a feature that I would, especially if like, you know, the carriers that I use right now, I'm on T-Mobile for one phone and Verizon for another, you know, if they would support this and Granted, they probably wouldn't want to, but if they would, that would be a feature that I would enable immediately.

Christina Warren [00:30:20]:
And that I think that Apple can only do this sort of feature where they can still sell their brand of privacy. We're not going to give all of your location data and let people track you and sell this and do all this other stuff to the same level that others can. And they can only do that if they own the full stack, if they own the hardware and the software. So there are some upsides, I think, even for end users potentially from these modems too. But so far, I've been a little bit relieved that I haven't had to try out the new modem, I think, to your point, Shelley, because I've been like, OK, is this going to work though? And I'm glad that Jason has tested it in some areas that have connectivity issues. But it is always kind of that question like, OK, is this actually going to be an Apple Silicon moment, or is this going to be like the BT modem? And that, I just don't think we know yet.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:12]:
Yep. That's worrisome. Yeah, again, I think that's the big thing. We just don't know yet. And so knowing that it is an important aspect of Apple's, you know, design plans going forward, seeing the success we've seen with Apple Silicon, right? Like Apple can make its own chips and can design its own chips and do a good job with that. But it is certainly something that, you know, there are times where the, we build it all, we design it all, we run it all. Is positive. And then there are times where you're going, now what if maybe we considered that someone else might be better at this specific thing and we don't want to mess up something that's— or we don't want to fix something that's not broken?

Andy Ihnatko [00:31:58]:
Uh, that's certainly my concern. But I think that Apple has proven that they're actually good at identifying their own frailty. Again, they're— that you just have to point to the deal they made with Google to say, you know what, what if you build us a foundation model to specifications because we realized that we, we are in the middle of a whole bunch of IKEA furniture parts and we lost the instructions and the little L bracket things. We just need help. So I feel, I feel as though if they, if they were buried, they would, they would not, they would not rely on their own technology if they did not feel as though it were up to the task. And they don't—

Leo Laporte [00:32:32]:
they—

Andy Ihnatko [00:32:33]:
I don't think they've had— they've had— I can't think of another— okay, I was, I was about to say I can't think of an incident in which they decided to basically experiment on its own users to figure out what's wrong with the technology. But of course, we're all using iOS and macOS 26, so that, that's—

Shelly Brisbane [00:32:48]:
that argument goes away. I, I think they might feel more confident with reason in their hardware prowess.

Mikah Sargent [00:32:57]:
I certainly do. Yeah, so let's, let's go ahead and talk about the iPad Air. Um, again, I'm curious to hear everyone's take on what it means for a product to get the Air tag. And pardon the pun there, the Air nomenclature. What is it that makes a device an Air versus a— and for anyone who's listening, that was just a stop because there's nothing after it. So iPad, uh, or it gets the Pro designation. Where does the Air fit in this?

Shelly Brisbane [00:33:39]:
Shelly? Well, the Air used to be, and when we think about MacBook Air, we thought about thin, light, bottom of the line, but that hasn't and probably will not for very much longer be where the MacBook Air is. And the iPad Air, especially with the last revisions when we went to the M2, it really became the sort of big middle. So Air is not that light, fluffy thing over here. It's in the middle and it might have some special features, but it's kind of the every person's device. That's not consistent though. The iPhone Air is not quite that. And the MacBook Air is still perceived as, and it's certainly cheaper, and it is the sort of lighter duty machine, but I think both the MacBook Air and the iPad Air can be argued that those devices really are for the every person that doesn't need the absolute power features and who might want something that's a little lighter weight in terms of price and in terms of features. So that's a really interesting transformation.

Christina Warren [00:34:40]:
Yeah, it really is. I mean, when you think about when the Air was first introduced 18 years ago or whenever it was, Steve Jobs pulling it out of an envelope and it was very much this high-end aspirational product and that failed. And then they immediately pivoted and said, okay, this is going to be a little bit lower end, and more priced more affordably and kind of replaced the MacBook in a lot of ways. We'd had the plastic MacBooks and really the drop-in for that. I think they still sold an aluminum MacBook maybe for a year or so, but the MacBook Air essentially became that. To Shelley's point, I think essentially became kind of like the everyman computer. That was the one that you got at your office. That was the one you got for college.

Christina Warren [00:35:20]:
That was the laptop. Then they abandoned that for a while and stopped kind of updating it. Kind of, you know, woofed it a little bit at the end of the Intel era, in my opinion, when they did the iPad or the MacBook Air Retina, and then really came back screaming in the Apple Silicon era where I think that especially as— and we don't have any, you know, specs or any review embargoes, I'm sure are going to be, you know, saved until next week or so on the M5 iPad or MacBook Air. But, you know, when you look at the M4 numbers, There were a lot of cases where you could say, depending on what you're doing, there is absolutely no reason that you need to actually spend more money on a MacBook Pro, even for higher-end tasks, because it's just a tremendous laptop. I think the iPad Air is a little bit trickier because in some ways, yes, it is kind of that middle everyman iPad that everyone can kind of aspire to get. It's good enough. It's better than good enough. It can still support some of those higher-end features.

Christina Warren [00:36:22]:
It annoys me that Apple continues to basically hold back the high refresh, 120Hz screens from the iPad Air. In a lot of ways, I don't want to buy another iPad Pro because the way I use my iPad is frankly not really commiserate with needing to spend $1,100 on an iPad. It's just not. Having said that, because I've had an iPad iPad Pro since 2016, and then the 2018 model was the one that really kind of redefined everything. I can't go back to a 60Hz display on my, on my, you know, tablet. I just can't. And so I think that they make weird demarcation lines between what is what that doesn't quite make sense. And maybe part of that is just because they haven't done enough to differentiate on iPadOS to make sense why you should be spending paying, you know, $1,100, $1,200 and up, you know, on those devices.

Christina Warren [00:37:18]:
So I think that it's— but I agree with that. I think that it's almost like the phone notwithstanding, because the phone I think is a completely different thing. And I think that's why the nomenclature around the phone is probably off. I feel like Air is just like, yeah, this is the one that if you just needed to go in and buy a MacBook or you needed to buy an iPad, for a lot of cases, this is going to be the one. I might argue that the base iPad is still better for some people, but, you know, in terms of laptops, I mean, this might change tomorrow. It's just like, no, just, just buy a MacBook Air.

Shelly Brisbane [00:37:51]:
It's funny what you're saying about the iPad Air because I had an iPad Pro primarily because it was available in 12.9-inch size. I wanted a big iPad, and when it came time to upgrade that to an Apple Silicon version, This was for work, so I was getting it paid for. They offered to get me an iPad Pro. I think it was the M2 at that time, M2 or M3, I can't remember. And I said, no, you don't need to do that. Just give me an iPad Air. It's not that I'm a magnanimous, wonderful human. It's just that I really didn't need it.

Shelly Brisbane [00:38:21]:
And I mean, I work for a nonprofit, so why not? But I love my M2 iPad Air. I love it. I love it. I love it. I personally don't have an issue with the refresh rate. I get it for people who do. I absolutely do. And I know that that would add cost.

Shelly Brisbane [00:38:35]:
And I like the idea that I have the two things I want most, an iPad Air with a good processor and a large screen. So for me, like I have a very old, I think it's an 8th or 9th generation iPad living on my living room couch just as a consumption and a looking up things device. I wouldn't use that for any sort of work, but this M2 iPad Air and any upgrade that I might get in the future is very satisfying for me as sort of an everyman computer.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:03]:
Yeah, I think the— I think one of the challenges for Apple is that everybody defines their iPad in a different way. Like, is it— if I— there's so many think pieces about, uh, writing about, oh, is the iPad really— can you use that as a notebook? Like, no, I choose to use it as an iPad. As an iPad. However, there are a lot of notebook sort of things I can do with it. Um, the— it's, it's— but it's interesting to look at the demarcations between, like, all of the different iPad models, because it's not When I see Air, I mean, uh, you're right, Christine. It's like you, I see, you see the Air and it's like, oh, so that's like the ultra compact, ultra thin. It's like, no, that's kind of the mid-range model right now. It's more of the Air, kind of how the MacBook Air became actually not even the mid-range but the, the entry model.

Andy Ihnatko [00:39:51]:
So even that, even that kind of collapses. You look at the specs of this new iPad Air and you see like, okay, so they decided that because Probably because, uh, iOS is now doing a lot more in-your-face multitasking and multi-windowing. Lots of people are going to be wanting to run lots of apps side by side, so let's up the RAM to 12GB.

Shelly Brisbane [00:40:13]:
Great.

Andy Ihnatko [00:40:13]:
Uh, 128GB of storage, not 256. That, that's kind of a disconnect between the idea of people are going to be using this for a lot of stuff, so we better give them a lot more RAM. Uh, the 60Hz, like, it, it's the only consistent thing across the board on Apple products that makes them look old-fashioned and out of step.. And because I don't think that Apple is unaware of that sort of thing, I have to assume that this is getting back to power. It's like, how much, how much will it cost us in battery life to increase it, to get 120Hz variable refresh rate display? And are people going to be happy about the 120Hz? And we're not just talking about the pundits and reviewers or the gamers. We're talking about the people who are going, coming to the Apple Store to buy something for their kid to have as their like main computer. And they probably did the math and realized that no, 60Hz is fine so long as we can preserve the battery life that we're promising everybody. Like even the, even the, even the Air is like the CPU, it's an M4, but it's a binned M4, meaning it's kind of like, I don't want to say the rejects off the pile, but that's kind of like what binned means.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:15]:
It means that, okay, some of the cores on the, on these M4s are not functional or not up to spec. So therefore we're not going to put them in like the MacBook Pro or the Air or something like that. But if we have a lower— we have them, they're manufactured, the rest of the cores work, so they're still more than powerful enough for, uh, for an iPad. It's just a— it's just in a weird space. Uh, I, I've— again, I had to kind of refresh myself in the last minute. Again, what is the difference between the iPad Nothing and everything else? And of course, the big difference is that the iPad Nothing is A-series CPU, which is fine for a lot of people. And also, it's the— it's the It's the $329 price point, which to me is the most spectacular bargain that Apple offers anywhere. And nothing can challenge that.

Andy Ihnatko [00:41:58]:
Nothing can be allowed to compete with that. Excuse me, nothing can taint that, no matter what Apple might be proposing. But it does get confusing. The longer a product line goes, the more you type saying, well, we need something that's between this platform and this platform. What do we call it that makes sense? And you go from something that was very simple. There is the base model, then there's the Pro model. There's the base model, then there's a Pro model. And now across every line, it's like, do I want the Mac Mini? Do I want the Mac Studio? Do I want to wait for a Mac Pro? Do I want the MacBook Pro? Do I want the MacBook Pro that has the weaker intro version of the same processor? Do I want the MacBook Air? Or do I want what's probably going to be announced tomorrow morning? Uh, and we'll, I'm sure we'll get to that later because that was an interesting leak that came out of, uh, of an Apple, like, legal filings that— great, they decided to give this a brand new name that can't be really confused with any other product line.

Andy Ihnatko [00:42:56]:
I hope that they take that and make that into a kind of a policy moving forward, that if we're going to insert a new product into the product lineup, we are not going to create confusion by making people think, oh, it's the Air, which means that if I know— if— please try again. I know I went— I was talking too long, Siri. I'm very, very sorry. I mean, this is a shared experience where I can now see I see the screen around my iPad flashing, I know that, oh God, I hit a trigger word and at some point it's going to interrupt me, isn't it?

Mikah Sargent [00:43:26]:
And you called it. And honestly, now with the— if you had the new iPad Air, maybe it would have been a little bit smarter and known that you were not actually talking to it whenever you were doing—

Andy Ihnatko [00:43:37]:
it's an M1, but it's a real M1.

Shelly Brisbane [00:43:43]:
Gosh darn it. I guess it's worth pointing out that the iPad Air, unlike the MacBook Air, did come out in the middle of the line to begin with. And the Air at that point was to do with its thinness. And it, you know, it's not— it's still— it's more on an iPad Pro form factor. It's not as— it's not— it is thinner than the basic iPad, but it's pretty much the same as the iPad Pro.

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:04]:
So it's like, wait, what does Air mean? Yeah, exactly. And yet when you look at the spec— when you look at the physical specs back to the, uh, the MacBook Air. I think it's been a couple years since I checked it out, but it's thinner at its— it's thinner, definitely thinner at its thinnest edge than the MacBook Pro. But at its thickest edge, meaning how, how can you— how, how thick a thing can you wedge into your bag, it's still not that much thinner than a MacBook.

Shelly Brisbane [00:44:24]:
And the weight is not that much different. I have an M1 iPad Air— sorry, M1 MacBook Air and an M2 MacBook Pro, and they're very physically identical in terms of weight and just heft.

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:38]:
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not advocating like a merge between the, the iPad platform and the Mac platform. No, no, but, but imagine, but I imagine like that you talk about super, super— don't start that stuff, Andy, come on.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:49]:
I won't.

Andy Ihnatko [00:44:50]:
No, no, again, people get freaked out. That's why I wanted, I wanted to, I wanted to preclude people in the Discord like immediately leaping on— no, I'm not, I'm not advocating that. All I'm saying is that when I use my, uh, my, my 12.9-inch Mac iPad Pro and its Magic Keyboard, that if it were running macOS, that would definitely be a MacBook Air, emphatically and unquestionably the Air version of this platform. And I'm kind of hoping for some kind of a redesign of the MacBook Air that makes it look a little bit less— I don't know, stick this, stick this under the, under the table leg at the coffee shop to keep the chair from wobbling sort of thing.

Christina Warren [00:45:25]:
The, the interesting thing though, you say that like, Andy, like about like the you know, the 12.9-inch, you know, um, iPad Pro and a keyboard is basically a MacBook Air. You're not wrong, except— and I think this is kind of an important thing like that Shelley like pointed out— like the, the amount of storage you're getting. This is the interesting thing. In all the other products that Apple released this week so far, the iPhone 17e now has 256GB basic storage. They've upgraded like the basic storage on, on all the MacBook Pros to 1 terabyte, the MacBook Air to 512. But on the, uh, on the iPad Air, it's still 128 gigabytes. That's weird. Which is egregious.

Christina Warren [00:46:06]:
Very weird. Which is egregious because I like— I was gonna buy my mom an iPad Air, um, for Christmas. We wound up getting the regular iPad for a couple of reasons. One, because she was coming off of an 8-year-old iPad, so for her anything was going to be A really nice upgrade. But two, this was the real thing, I didn't want to get her the 128GB version and then to get the 256GB version, we're now talking $700 for an iPad that she's only going to use to watch Netflix on. And I can't do that. I'm like, no, I will spend $500 with a case, but I'm not going to spend upwards of $800— $500 with a case and AppleCare. I'm not going to spend upwards of $800 because that is MacBook Air money.

Christina Warren [00:46:52]:
That literally becomes MacBook Air money. And so that is where I sometimes look at where this line is. And I'm like, OK, once you add a keyboard, once you add other stuff, you actually are priced much higher than a MacBook Air would be to get all the accoutrements for whether your iPad Air or your iPad Pro. And that, I think, is interesting. And I think that's a problem with the iPad line in general. General, except for the base model, which I agree with you, Andy. I think that's one of the best deals in tech, $329. But everything else, it's like, by the time you add in all the accessories that Apple claims you kind of need to really use this thing, you're using a subpar operating system.

Christina Warren [00:47:27]:
And it now costs more than a very good and non-binned, you know, like laptop that has, you know, an actual operating system. Granted, it has a touchscreen, it can do things that you can't otherwise. I understand all that. But I'm like, okay, if you're gonna go as far as buying the keyboard and buying all that other stuff, I, I, I, I don't know, guys. You know, if that's the primary use case, you're probably better off and saving more money getting a regular iPad and getting a MacBook Air.

Andy Ihnatko [00:47:54]:
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I spent, I spent as much on my MacBook, my iPad Pro, and the Magic Keyboard, even though I bought the Magic Keyboard on Drop like for like half price after I found whatever. Uh, even so, that's about the amount of money for this 512GB machine that I could have spent on certainly a mid-range Windows laptop, a really hot mid-range Windows laptop, or a very, very good MacBook Air. And again, it's so weird that you cannot quantify what is it that draws an iPad owner to having an iPad. And I won't, I won't go get into a rathole about that side quest, but it's like for everybody it's such a completely different thing. Some people really want to Hey, I love my Kindle, but I wish it were color, and I wish I could watch HD movies on it. So great, you've got the, you've got the iPad. Nothing like, I really, I don't need a laptop so much, I just need something for like weekends when I'm away from the office, or weekends where I need to keep in touch, get a few things done.

Andy Ihnatko [00:48:53]:
Great, maybe the, maybe the iPad Air. Only it'll still cost you as much as, again, a low, an inexpensive mid-range Windows notebook, but it can, it'll, it'll do, it'll be more, more stable and less less trouble with it. It's just really, really weird to try to quantify that. And I think that that's probably the reason why there are so many damn models of these things, because Apple knows that— again, it knows its customers, it knows that's selling to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. It has to put the chips on the roulette table and cover as many bets as possible.

Shelly Brisbane [00:49:21]:
Well, I'll give you one use case for the iPad Air that makes an iPad specifically helpful to me, is that I need a device where I can physically move the keyboard and the display away from one another. And so I put my iPad either in various stands, or I have the Logitech equivalent of the Magic Keyboard, which is a case that you can set— it's a Bluetooth keyboard, and you could separate it from the case even though the keyboard is magnetically stuck to the case during storage. It's a brilliant thing. And I don't have to have the two pieces together. I have my iPad right here in its stand separate from its keyboard. And so I use the iPad as a teleprompter also when I'm talking into microphones. And so that's the kind of a use case. But Christina's absolutely right.

Shelly Brisbane [00:50:02]:
It's really frustrating that a device that I want to use for work and for creativity, I'm going to have to invest more money in it if I want the storage that I really need. Plus, I have actually purchased 3 keyboard— not keyboard cases, but 3 cases for this iPad Air because one of them has a handle on the back that I use when I go to make presentations. And so I hold it in a way that's more secure for me. So I've invested all this money in cases for this iPad Air. Here, which is, you know, it's not everybody's use case, but it's mine.

Mikah Sargent [00:50:31]:
It's very annoying. Yeah, use case. All right, um, we have a lot more to talk about here. Apple didn't just stop at the iPhone and the iPad. Uh, the company released some more hardware, and we are likely to see even more of that. But it is time for us to take another quick break for Leo to tell us about the next sponsor.

Leo Laporte [00:50:54]:
This episode of MacBreak Weekly brought to you by Pebl, P-E-B-L. Here, here's a quick question. If you're hiring, your company's hiring in another country right now, maybe you already know this. We found out once you do, things get complicated fast, but that's where Pebl can help. You can send offers to anyone in the world in minutes, get them onboarded fast. Pebl is an AI-powered global human resources platform built for founders, built for HR leaders who don't want the headaches of a global employees and operators who are hiring and supporting teams all around the world. Some of the best people aren't here. Pebl helps you hire, pay, and manage talent in over 185 countries with fast onboarding that can be done in minutes.

Leo Laporte [00:51:39]:
Instead of juggling separate tools for contracts, payroll, benefits, and compliance, Pebl brings everything together with built-in guidance and local expertise to support you. That's especially helpful if you're managing teams internationally or planning to grow. The fastest growing companies in the world use Pebl to stay organized and reduce risk, and founders use it to scale faster without having to become HR or compliance experts. Rated number 1 in compliance on G2, the customer testimonials speak for themselves. I'll give you an example. Paige needed a global talent to align with its bold mission as a digital diagnostics company revolutionizing cancer pathology using AI. Paige's VP of Finance and Operations said, quote, over the past year, we've doubled, if not tripled, our global headcount. That growth has been largely thanks to our partnership with Pebl.

Leo Laporte [00:52:31]:
Bottom line, it simplifies global people operations so you can spend more time growing the business and supporting your team. Pebl's new standard discount pricing is $399 USD per month per employee. It helps you contain costs. Go to hipebl.ai to get to get a free estimate. That's hipebl.ai for a free estimate. hipebl.ai. Now, back to MacBreak Weekly

Mikah Sargent [00:52:54]:
Here we are. Thank you, Leo. Of course, Apple has revealed by way of its newsroom several bits of new hardware. We've talked about the iPad Air with the new M4. We've talked— well, new to it, M4. We've talked about the iPhone 17e. But the company also debuted the M5 Pro and M5 Max chips.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:23]:
And Andy, I believe you said you were, you were doing some homework leading up to this and looking at the architecture here.

Andy Ihnatko [00:53:29]:
What, how much of your homework were you able to complete since this was announced? Uh, basically like they went to a lot, a lot of detail on it as, as they sometimes do. They actually gave it its own like new newsroom release on its own, like, landing page for everything. Uh, because I think they— I think it was very important for them to land the concept that, again, it's really just like we were talking about a moment ago, that yes, it's a MacBook Pro, but there is the MacBook Pro, and then there's the MacBook Pro, and this is the MacBook Pro CPU. But you just— because it has an M5, okay, but it's not the— is it the M5 Pro or the M5 Max? Because those are the ones that are Hessian aggression, like, as powerful as you can put on something you can pick up and carry with you. And so there are some interesting details here. Most of the— most of my notes, like, from reading it is that compare and contrast how they used to promote, like, the most powerful MacBooks in the lineup 5 years ago with how they're promoting it now, where it would also always be about, hey, look, you can actually— look, look how well it works with Final Cut Pro, how quickly can can build and compile like your project. And of course, here in 2026, it's all about AI, because these are the people who are, who are spending up to $7,000 to $8,000 on a laptop. If you, you can configure this, uh, like up to what, 200, up to 64GB of RAM.

Andy Ihnatko [00:54:52]:
Uh, they has a little bit more battery life, but they don't care about battery life. All they care about is really, really real, real performance. Uh, and they're hitting all the bases. They're making, they're making sure they hit the points —like, here's the most powerful GPUs we've ever had, up to 20 cores, up to—in the lesser one, up to 40 cores GPU in the Max, which is not just for GPU processing, better ray tracing. Our RAM has been optimized for large language models and large 3D datasets, again, on the Max. We said the—I mean, the bandwidth is twice on the M5 Pro—as on the M5 Max, it is on the M5 Pro. Something like, I'm not gonna say, but 600 versus 300, which basically shows you that they just want these pipes to work extremely, extremely well. And the broadness of this is that this was actually in a caption on one of the illustrations, but I thought that it was significant that they were saying— they're basically talking about, if you are a developer, you are— we know that you're probably going to be interested in a genic code generation in Xcode.

Andy Ihnatko [00:55:54]:
This is this is the CPU you want for basically agentic assistance in developing software because these are the people with the money and the budget to basically max out pretty much anything. As far as technical stuff, again, this is definitely beyond what I can talk about intelligently after only about 90 minutes of research while brushing my teeth this morning. But at least the thing that they're trying to make sure that everybody knows about is that something that actually we knew about because of rumors a few weeks ago, where they're calling it the Fusion architecture, where they put 2-3 nanometer dies on the same system on a chip. So, and this was kind of feeding into discussions about why the Apple Store no longer gives you sort of like a range of baked goods for each model, and now everything is pretty much built to order at a very, very low like level of CPU and stuff like that. I mean, as, as it is, it becomes really, really tempting to decide that But again, if you have that kind of money and if you are— if this device is being paid for by somebody else and it's not a nonprofit and you have a soul, you might— I mean, it's— you're looking at what can this machine do that a Mac Pro could not— couldn't be able to do like 3 or 4 years ago. And the idea of a $7,000 to $8,000 MacBook that is designed for us— really, when you look at it, it's designed to run features that don't exist yet, that haven't been promised and won't be delivered for another year or two. This is the ultimate future-proofness. It's just— it's—

Mikah Sargent [00:57:30]:
it goes like stink. Now that's an interesting thing that you say. It's sort of future-proofness, right? I, I'm curious what Mac buying habits look like overall. Um, the reason I say that is because When we hear from people in our community, it does seem like buying happens perhaps more often than you would see from, from, you know, the, the average person. Right. And so there is, I mean, I'm, I think my, my MacBook Air is an M1 and, or no, it's an M2. It's an M2. My Mac Studio is an M1 and these machines are still fantastic.

Andy Ihnatko [00:58:13]:
They still, I'm running an M1 MacBook Pro and I'm. This is— I've been waiting for a really, really good performance excuse to upgrade because I've been sort of, in my own books, it's— I've been upgrade eligible for the past 2 years, but nothing I've looked at has said that this is going to be a transformative experience on my 4 or 5-year-old M1 MacBook Pro. I think the M5 series, even the base model, might be the reason why I upgrade this year, but not necessarily even.

Mikah Sargent [00:58:36]:
Now, Christina, you were on Clockwise recently, um, and talked about your, you know, perhaps experimentations around what Mac you would be purchasing. Has any of that changed since we last spoke? Or maybe you could, uh, clue for people who don't watch that show or listen to that show.

Christina Warren [00:58:56]:
So I had been, I already had a, an M4 Mac mini, but I didn't know, and obviously they didn't introduce a new one. I'd been concerned that if they introduced any sort of refresh to that device, that it would be priced higher than it currently is, um, especially if you get it in the education store. And so I was like, uh, that's a a really good kind of all-around computer. Should I go ahead and buy one? Um, leading up to this, I did not. Um, but I do have an M3, um, Max M3 MacBook Pro Max, M3 Max MacBook Pro 14-inch, and I replaced that with an M1, um, uh, MacBook Pro, uh, M1 Max MacBook Pro 14-inch. And I have to, I have to be honest with you, I, I wish in some ways that I'd kept that M1, uh, Macs because I think that it was, it had 64 gigs of RAM. My current machine has 128. Um, I don't know in some of the LLM stuff that I've, that I do, and I do do a lot of local LLM stuff.

Christina Warren [00:59:52]:
I don't know how much that would have mattered, especially as I've had access to other devices that have, you know, more memory. Um, and the battery life on it has been not as good, you know, because it's a beefier machine and whatnot. Like there, There are these, these things that I'm thinking about. I just, I don't know if the M3 was a great year. Let me just put it that way. I feel like the M1 was like a fantastic year. And I think the M4 year was really strong. We'll have to wait to see like what the M5 year looks like.

Christina Warren [01:00:20]:
My only critique or only thing I would kind of warn people about, if you are going to be spending $4,000, $5,000, whatever it was, because I think my MacBook Pro that I got it unit was, was over $5,000. By the time I, you know, got it all done, and I was able to sell, you know, my other unit that was 2 years old, for a decent— well, I gave the guy a good deal, but it was still very expensive. Let me put it that way. If you were looking to do that, and it is not because you can immediately write this off, and like, money is not an object, I would actually say get the 16-inch if you're going to be going for the Max chips, especially those higher core counts, um, and, and the higher RAM counts, because the 14-inch chassis just doesn't have the heat, um, it just doesn't have the cooling. Oh, that's interesting. That, that would, that would, that would be like my own kind of lived experience is that the battery life is significantly worse than what you expect it to be. And what I'd seen with my M1, um, Max, which I loved about it, was, oh, when I'm not really using this that heavily, I can kind of use this almost the same way if it was a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, and I can get great all-day battery life. That is not the case now.

Christina Warren [01:01:36]:
And the smaller chassis, I think, just limits it because of how powerful those chips are. Now, it's possible Apple has, with the 3-nanometer process, has been able to really refine things. The M3 was the first attempt at that, and maybe they've gotten better. But I could even just tell you, looking at the difference between my— I had an an M4 MacBook Pro. It was a 16-inch last year that was great and had all-day battery life. I now have an M4 MacBook Pro 14-inch that is— if it's a Max chip, then it's the lower-core one. But it has less RAM. It has 64 gigs of RAM.

Christina Warren [01:02:11]:
And that one has significantly better battery life than mine. And I think it's just because of the core count. And so that's my only kind of thing is to say, get the bigger model if you're going to be spending the $5,000 anyway. If you're going to be needing the smaller model, look at, look at not going completely all out because for me that wound up at least in terms of using it like a laptop being kind of liability. If you're going to have it plugged in all the time, maybe it doesn't matter. But at that point, like maybe a Mac Studio is the thing you should be looking at. But if you're going to use it as a laptop, I would actually recommend if you're going to go for like that super high like 40-core machine, get the 16-inch, even though it's more of a pain to carry around.

Shelly Brisbane [01:02:49]:
I was fascinated with these announcements that we didn't get a Mac Studio with the same or similar specs. And I am aware that the laptops are the number one thing that Apple sells, especially the MacBook Air. But on the pro side, the MacBook Pro is very, very important. And I can see why they would go out with the M5s, the bigger chips for the M5s for the MacBook Pro first. But why not the Mac Studio at the same time with similar specs? Because those are very expensive machines too. You have some opportunity to expand them if you want to. Now, obviously not change the CPU. And if you're talking about a machine that you're gonna primarily use at your desk, and if you don't need a laptop, or if you go and get a MacBook Air, for example, I think a Mac Studio or even a Mac Mini, but they're not gonna come out with something beyond that right away.

Shelly Brisbane [01:03:38]:
I'm just really surprised that the Mac Studio has not been something that has been kept right up to date with the chips as quickly as the MacBook Pro, especially since we're promoting this Fusion architecture that Andy was talking about.

Andy Ihnatko [01:03:52]:
I imagine that it has to do with production quantity, that if you can only make so many of these M5 Pros and Maxes, you want to put them in the machines that you sell as many as you can possibly make. But of course, that's just a guess. But it's— I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who, again, has some money under the mattress for an upgrade to a MacBook. And I don't think I've ever been more confused as to what I'm going to do. I mean, one of the things I wanted to ask you, Christina, like, just initially, just in the context of a MacBook Pro, is that do you— what is the benefit of— if I have a fixed— not that I have $5,000 to spend on a notebook, but conceivably if I If that were my budget, or $4,000 for my budget, how do you navigate the difference between I'm going to get the hottest CPU I can, figuratively and literally, I can possibly get without money, and then whatever RAM I have, whatever storage I have, I'll just deal with, versus I'm gonna set— I'm gonna settle for a less cooked machine like the entry-level CPU that's in the MacBook Pro M5 and have the money in the budget to max out RAM and max— not max out, but get so much storage that I never really have to worry about SSDs. Uh, it's even— and then when you add on the MacBook Air, and now I'm looking, there are so many features in there that I would have ascribed to the MacBook Pro, right? Now I'm like, maybe I could take even less money than that and say I'm going to buy an absolutely maxed out MacBook Air. Given that my, my experience with LLMs, I'm mostly doing stuff on servers. I'm, I'm okay with not having local, local performance on, on that.

Andy Ihnatko [01:05:34]:
It's like, where do I, where do I put all of this money? And can I just max out something versus get the cheap version of the best?

Christina Warren [01:05:41]:
Like, yeah, I mean, I honestly, I think it's, it's a great point, right? It's, it's confusing. And I think for— it depends on what you're doing. If you're primarily doing, you know, kind of day-to-day work stuff, maybe a little bit of video editing and other things, like I honestly say, depending on the number of displays you're going to connect to, I mean, that has to be a consideration. A base MacBook Air could— or not base MacBook Air, but maxed out MacBook Air could be very good. But I actually feel like maybe the base MacBook Pro and having it at 48GB, that could be a fantastic machine. And then spend more money on the storage if that's what you need to do. And if you have leftover money, hey, get another iPad or get something else. Put it aside for something else.

Christina Warren [01:06:21]:
For me, I specifically bought the machine that I bought because the local LLMs were starting to become a thing. And I knew that I wanted to work with that. And so that was a primary use case for my thing. And that's why I was like, I want as much RAM as I can get. And that's what I'm going to do. And it's been useful for that. But I also have a framework computer and I have access to servers that I can use GPUs on. But for me, for doing local LLM stuff, I was like, I'm just going to max it out and do what I can.

Christina Warren [01:06:47]:
And what I found is that yes, it's great. But if you're doing that, my only piece of advice is, you know, really look at like the reviews and on the thermals on that 14-inch because I don't feel like that the chassis is up to par for what that needs to be. And it's not that it can't run it, it's just that your battery life is going to be trash. Whereas the 16-inch, yes,— yes, it's more of a pain to carry around, it's a little bit more expensive— is going to have a lot more headroom. So that's my only advice on that end. But for someone like you, yeah, I think you're kind of in a mixed spot. But I feel like just doing like a, you know, the M5 Pro chip, you know, with like the 18-core, you know, 20-core and, you know, 64 gigs of RAM would be like amazing., right? And then you could spend presumably some of that money— like, I, I just put this out there, um, now granted this is the education pricing, so this is probably $100 less, but, um, but you're, you're, you count as a student. So it's for the standard display, the M5 Pro chip with the 18-core CPU, 20-core GPU, um, uh, 64 gigs of RAM, um, and 4 terabyte SSD.

Christina Warren [01:08:00]:
So 4 terabytes, you're looking at $3,679. $999. Nice. Which is, you know, still a lot of money, but like, you know, not— it's not— it's not insane for what— not insane. And that is with a chip that, if, if it goes based on history, unlike the Max chips which do run really hot, is still going to give you really good battery life if you are in a space where you can't be plugged in all the time. That's a really good point. Um, you know, I feel, I feel like that's probably— that, that's— again, we need to wait for the reviews and, and talk to Jason based on what he's gonna see. But that would be kind of like my my, my first kind of like go-around would be just kind of getting, um, doing the step-up upgrade of that MacBook Pro chip that's not quite the Max, and, and then, you know, spending some of the money on the RAM.

Andy Ihnatko [01:08:44]:
And it's a really itchy situation because, like, again, I'm very, very happy that I, I take good care of my, of my hardware because I pay for it myself. And so again, I'm very, very pleased with Apple that they've made a MacBook Pro that, again, 4 or 5 years later, I'm still not really seeing reasons for me to, to upgrade, certainly not because of anything's broken on it. Again, the The keyboard's great, the screen's great, everything's great. But the thing is, like, now there's, with AI creating so much uncertainty, like, what if, like, I decide, you know what, I'm gonna max out something with lesser onboard neural engines, and then 2.5 years into this machine's life, something like OpenClaw comes on. But imagine something like OpenClaw, but it doesn't stink, it's not terrible, it's not dangerous, it's actually useful, it's actually productive, it's cheap to run, and I can run, but I have to run everything locally. I don't want to be the person saying, oh gosh, it must be nice to have, like, to be able to, like, start my day 8 minutes after I wake up instead of 2 hours after I wake up because I don't have a magical assistant that's doing things for me.

Christina Warren [01:09:47]:
Oh well, I'm glad I got that 4 terabytes of storage instead of the better CPU, right? Right. No, I mean, I think that's a great point, but at the same time, like, OpenClaw runs really well on a base MacBook Mini or Mac Mini, right? So, so I think, you know, it kind of comes down to local elements again. And obviously, because it's not local, it's— but yeah, but if you're to have a local one, and you're right, that could happen. What could also happen though, I mean, I, you know, I always feel like it's my, my going philosophy is always like buy for what is today, not tomorrow. And I do feel like I maybe got a little ahead of myself last time where I probably would have been better off waiting a year to upgrade my laptop, to be honest with you. I feel like this is probably a much better year to upgrade and if you were going to go all out, go all out. My only advice would be if you were going to, you know, do the full max chip to get the 128GB, because you've got to do that to get the maximum RAM, yeah, consider that the— it's going to get—

Mikah Sargent [01:10:39]:
it's a much hotter device. That's super, super healthy. Um, all right, we should talk about the kind of full gamut then of hardware, given that we've talked about the chips, we've talked about some of the possibilities there. Look, there, I think people, if they've taken a cursory glance or a cursory listen at the rumor mill, they will have heard about Mac that features touch. Where is that Mac that features touch, everyone? Let's explain to the people who may have heard about this and thought, okay, I'm going to come on MacBreak Weekly and they're going to tell me that Apple released a new touch MacBook. Where, what's going on? Why is the MacBook Air the touch one?

Andy Ihnatko [01:11:24]:
What's going on? It's weird. So Gurman had a piece today that was— we, he's been reporting all along that, yeah, Apple's definitely working on a touch version, Apple's definitely worked with it on a touch version, which to me, I don't know about everybody else on the panel, but was like, that's weird because you really can't put touch on an OS that has not been engineered with touch points in mind. There's, there's Windows does a really good job of it, Android does a really good job of it, of saying we've created sort of a hybrid where if you're using it with a keyboard and a trackpad, you don't notice that this is touch optimized, but if you're using it as a tablet, it feels like a natural touch optimizing. And that was the residue of years and years and years of working on this. And that Apple can't just simply say, okay, guess what? Okay, you babies, guess what? We put a, we put, we put a, we put another layer on the screen so that now it responds to touch. Uh, so I was, so my feeling has always been that unless there is like an amazing huge like 2-day festival palooza at WWDC teaching developers of here's all the stuff that we've redesigned for touch, and here's how your apps are gonna have to respond to it. I'm kind of— I was kind of wondering if this is something to really be believed in. So his update this week basically says— what was the, what was the quote he put in here? Basically he said, uh, uh, uh, basically he said that it's going to be like the most minimal sort of thing ever.

Andy Ihnatko [01:12:42]:
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, uh, the point-and-click interface will remain at the forefront and touch will be completely optional. Which gets me blinking hard because that does seem to mean that we are not going to be really— we did, we snuck some things into Liquid Glass that will make sense once we release this machine. But if all, if all it is is that great, so now like if I'm scrolling, I could just be holding with my thumbs like a Nintendo Switch and scroll that way. Again, I would much rather have the extra storage or the extra RAM than have this touch version. Give me— I really feel as though they missed that bus 8 years ago at minimum, and now they just have to be happy with the fact that they've got us buying two different pieces of hardware depending on whether we want touch or not.

Shelly Brisbane [01:13:22]:
And if they're going to do it, shouldn't it just be a developer kit? Because you're obviously going to have to get developers bought in in a big way for this to work.

Christina Warren [01:13:31]:
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that maybe, maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think that when you look at the hubris with the Vision Pro, which I don't know if they learned their lesson from. Apple very much expects that they can just release a new product and the developers will come. Vision Pro, they did not. I think the Mac is a little bit different. And I think depending on— I never expected us to get touched this week. I was like, that seems far off. If they're going to do it, that would be a thing that they would have to show off, I think, with probably a developer kit.

Christina Warren [01:13:57]:
It would be a moment in the history of Apple. Well, for sure. It would never be, oh, we're going to do press releases and invite the press some cities, be like, no, this is going to be like an actual huge, massive event. And so to me, I'm like, okay, you're either going to release it in, you know, maybe announce some aspects of it at WWDC and then show off, you know, maybe even a redesigned, you know, iMac, because that would be like a really ideal touch computer, to be honest with you, for kiosks, um, far more than, than even the laptops. I feel like that was one where the screen is the, is the computer, and you could make a very good argument to be like, like, okay, this, this is one where even if this is more optional, you know, we can really show it off. Um, but yeah, I mean, I, I do feel like they would probably expect developers to just be on board, but this might be a thing where, yeah, they might have to have some sort of dev kit. But I would expect earliest would be WWDC. Um, I have no reason to doubt the reporting and it's, it does make sense, but I do also agree with you, Andy, that it feels late.

Christina Warren [01:14:53]:
The only thing that for me makes me feel like it probably is coming is when I looked at the way macOS has evolved over the years, but especially with 26 with Tahoe, I feel like some of the reason there's all this extra white space, which I personally loathe, is it seems like that is their way, especially if they're going to half blanket, is to be like, okay, well, we will have bigger grab points on the bottom of the windows. It doesn't work super well. For people with a trackpad, but it'll be good enough for a fat finger to be able to grab and adjust window sizes.

Andy Ihnatko [01:15:32]:
Say nothing of gesture tracking, which is going to be on a whole new class of devices that maybe don't cost $3,500 that are actually practical.

Christina Warren [01:15:42]:
Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, I mean, it does feel like they've done a lot of work in that regard. I feel like it's late, but I also feel like it's probably inevitable to some extent. I feel like the way that people will use it will probably just depend on how they grew up and what their interaction model is. Like you, Andy, I've used touch devices on Windows and Android and things like that.

Christina Warren [01:16:03]:
I typically, when it's locked into a keyboard, I don't touch the screen unless I'm trying to scroll something. I just don't even realize it exists. That said, if I turn it over because I have an HP laptop that also I can draw on that capability, if I turn it over, or when I had a Surface Book and I could detach that, that then becomes like a completely different type of, you know, experience.

Andy Ihnatko [01:16:23]:
Yeah, Yoga-style devices are just— that's where I absolutely mourn Apple not jumping on board because I have— I— one of my favorite laptops ever was the, was the Google Pixelbook. Yes. It was just a Chromebook, but it had a 360-degree hinge. It was great. And it was my first daily— not loaner, but a daily driver where the number of times I'm at a diner, I'm like, okay, guess what? I'm just here to like read the, read the comics. I'm going to fold the screen over, use it as an intent format, and just be able to scroll by tapping. Or I'm actually sitting in a, sitting on the commuter rail, I just want to read a book and scroll. All the different ways you can, it can conform to what you want to do, and the keyboard is out of the way because it is irrelevant to this moment and this thing now.

Andy Ihnatko [01:17:01]:
I would so love it if I could do that sort of thing with my Mac, and I agree, I don't know how they would do that.

Christina Warren [01:17:07]:
No, I mean, it'd be great because it would actually, in a lot of ways, like, it would do what Shelley is already doing with, with her iPad, um, Air, right, where she has like the, the large iPad and has the multiple, you know, cases and keyboards and whatnot for presentations and whatnot. I agree with you, I wish that they would give us a device like that that could be more of a convertible and whatnot, but it doesn't seem like that seems— that I don't feel confident in. I don't, I don't think the rumors have indicated that's— no, they haven't. They haven't. We're gonna get it. No, no, they haven't. I, I— and that's what I'm saying, I don't feel like that would happen. I wish though that if they were going to to, you know, get into the Touchway that they would actually be like, okay, let's think about the ergonomic differences and ways that we can actually adapt things based on use case.

Christina Warren [01:17:48]:
Instead, though, I think it's just going to be another layer that, to your point, Andy, I would much rather have more base storage or more RAM or have those prices be a little bit better personally than paying extra for it. But at the same time, you know, it's hard. I think you're talking about, Andy, like you are a couple of years out you've had money tucked away to be able to buy a new laptop, it's been hard for you to because they made such good ones. So at a certain point, you almost have to like— I'm not going to say invent features, but you know, you have to do certain things to be like, okay, what's the next level for us to actually get people to buy a new phone or a new laptop? I mean, this is the problem when you make really good devices is that people keep them for a really long time.

Shelly Brisbane [01:18:28]:
So now I'm interested in hearing that conversation about phones. For a long time. What is the next killer feature? And what continues to happen is the cameras keep getting better or there keeps being something like ProMotion or Always On or whatever those things are. But I don't know that we know the answer to that question on the Mac side unless it's touch. And what's tantalizing about it is what Andy was saying before about the gesture interactions that Vision Pro has sort of hinted at. Also the voice control accessibility feature has already created places on the screen that could not only be interacted with by voice but potentially by touch. But then you still have all the scrolling and all the other interactions that touch requires that even, even though those are, those are sort of like way off in the distance and you can see the beginnings of those features, but it doesn't seem like they've coalesced into a full-function touch interface for the Mac.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:20]:
Yeah. And also I think that if they're going to be— if their enthusiasm for reinventing or inventing a new interface is about gestures and not about out like multi-touch, because again, I just don't see how that really works really, really well unless, unless this is— unless they are actually more serious about foldable, uh, foldable notebooks than we think that they are. Because if you—

Shelly Brisbane [01:19:44]:
that's the ultimate in, uh, transformation. I mean, not tomorrow, right? I mean, perhaps they will be, but I know, but that's the point I make. It's like, well, whatever's coming out tomorrow is something that they want us to be excited about and anticipate. Hey, but that's clearly not what's happening.

Andy Ihnatko [01:19:58]:
But does, does something we get tomorrow point us in that direction? I don't know. It's not likely. I don't think so. I mean, my, when I, when I saw the $1,099 base price of the MacBook Air, my heart sank a tiny little bit because to me that's, to me that, that thought though, again, it's not unprecedented. They've made $1,099 entry point MacBook Airs before, and this one is far more capable than what that, that iteration had. But when I saw the $1,099 price, I saw that discussion in the conference room saying, well, you know what, our quote-unquote entry-level MacBook isn't going to be $599 or $699, it's only going to be like $799 or $899. So now there's a lot— some elasticity in the base level of the MacBook Air. So it's still going to be great.

Andy Ihnatko [01:20:44]:
Again, cheaper is always better. We— it's easy for any of us to poo-poo, oh God, but it's only like $150 $200 less, why wouldn't you just spend $200 more? But there are people that are just barely able to get at that $999.

Shelly Brisbane [01:20:58]:
They're just barely able to get the $800 one that's available at Walmart.

Christina Warren [01:21:01]:
Well, look at those M1 Airs that Walmart sold. Exactly. Yes. They went great. They did. They did. And I would go one step further. I was disappointed to see the $1,099 price point, even though I'm glad that they raised the base storage.

Christina Warren [01:21:13]:
But what I'm hopeful about—— and we'll have to wait to see if the margins are similar to what they were, I guess, on previous models. Almost immediately you had Best Buy, you had Amazon, you had other retailers selling them far below the retail price and far even below the education price. And granted, that doesn't help businesses who have to maybe buy in bulk. But for consumers, that, I think, changes things. And that's a thing that I think Apple hasn't quite wanted to address necessarily directly is the fact that their MSRP, at least on the base models, is tangible. It's fungible, rather, especially on the MacBook Air. And Walmart— not Walmart— Amazon was selling the M4 Air for $849— no, $749— around Christmas time, which is a ridiculously good value. I was able to get an M2 Air with the 16GB, you know, for my sister on a Cyber Monday special for $600.

Christina Warren [01:22:11]:
I almost got that one too. Oh, yes. I saw that. That was like one of the best deals. I went to Best Buy, and I was like, I don't care that this is 2 years old. This is 16GB of RAM, which is actually what I do care about. You have a 10- or 11-year-old MacBook that, you know, doesn't have enough space. You know, like, this is going to be great.

Christina Warren [01:22:29]:
And it was like she cried when I gave it to her, right? Like, it was one of those things. And again, for someone like her and for the way that we were looking at budget, there was people like, oh, we'll spend the extra $200 and get this. I'm like, no, actually, this is what our budget is and this is what is perfect for it. So I'm really crossing my fingers that they do actually not do $799 for the MacBook Neo. I would really hate that.

Mikah Sargent [01:22:52]:
I would hate that because I think that that kills the entire premise.

Christina Warren [01:22:55]:
Because the whole reason that the MacBook Air at Walmart worked and the whole reason the lower-priced things worked is— we talked about this last week a little bit—

Andy Ihnatko [01:23:02]:
was it gets in a brand new audience who hasn't maybe been able to get into Apple. They learned that it made the tent bigger, and it did not make the people who were spending $1,000, $1,500, $2,000 feel as though the brand had been cheapened. That was just a success.

Shelly Brisbane [01:23:16]:
And now there's no reason not to charge.

Christina Warren [01:23:17]:
No, not in any way. It was beautiful.

Mikah Sargent [01:23:18]:
If anything, I think we all got excited because we could bring more people into it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, when you really like a thing, And I think when you really like a thing and you give up on the, the hipster mindset of I have to gatekeep this, then yeah, you do. You want to share it with more people. You want to, and honestly, there's also a selfish aspect too, because then you're not trying to do support across multiple platforms, which is nice. So all of that comes together to make it, you know, a fun experience to have everybody join you in this space. We need to talk a little bit more about this Neo, right? You go to apple.com and you go to the newsroom, there's no mention of a Neo.

Mikah Sargent [01:24:07]:
Apple seemingly has leaked its next product.

Christina Warren [01:24:09]:
This is at least according— I don't think seemingly is the word. I think they did.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:14]:
I think it's out there, right? Like they had to file a regulatory document with the Apple in Europe and they posted that to the place where they publish these things postedly on apple.com. Of course, they don't put any information that is advance of release date, but unfortunately they put in the URL the name of the product. And that, and that, and the fact that they quickly like changed it as soon as it got noticed suggests that, okay, they managed good. You had a good run.

Christina Warren [01:24:39]:
You managed to keep it secret until just the day before. Don't— these things happen. They do. Hey, look, look, at least it didn't get like leaked, you know, fully intact to somebody in, in Russia.

Andy Ihnatko [01:24:49]:
—like happened to a couple of laptops.

Christina Warren [01:24:50]:
Along with the entire code base of the firmware, yeah. Exactly. So yeah, I mean, and I think the photo came from the regulatory thing that people were able to grab. I'm not sure. That might have been a mockup. But we know the name. I mean, I really think probably by the time— if you're not watching this live, the time if you're listening to this on Wednesday, I think that we will have a MacBook Neo.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:12]:
Yeah. It's just something that Apple does such a good job of keeping these things locked down tight that even the most trivial thing of the name less than 24 hours before release. It's like, oh my God, this is— we gotta—

Mikah Sargent [01:25:23]:
why didn't we talk about this at the start of the show? It's incredible. And I don't know, this is of course the, the MacBook that has a lower-powered chip, uh, in theory, and is supposed to be in that line, as we've talked about now, of the accessible, budget-wise accessible, device. Then a new nomenclature, a new naming system, is an interesting choice.

Andy Ihnatko [01:25:55]:
It always ends up being so confusing. For, for the, for audio listeners, uh, Mikah is now rubbing his forehead and face. I don't know.

Christina Warren [01:26:02]:
Look, the first movie, the first Matrix movie was great.

Mikah Sargent [01:26:09]:
We can't pretend that was the only good one. Right. When we're talking about this this, we've seen now iPadOS, um, continue to take on qualities of macOS. And one would say, as we've talked about, you know, Shelley's talked about using an iPad as a sort of a laptop replacement. Um, is the MacBook— I remember back in the day, the very, very, very small MacBook, and sort of coveting that little tiny MacBook and thinking, Ooh, this is, is that who this is for? This feels like a sort of strange product at this point because we've got iPads that can do what this underpowered device would be able to do. So is it just like the few macOS lovers that are out there who just want the lightest, lightest, lightest little thing?

Shelly Brisbane [01:27:02]:
I think it was when the rumors of this product began, it was pivoted at education. It was, you know, we're, whether we're fighting the Chromebook directly. Or whether we're just saying Apple wants to continue its role in education and here's something for both the budgets and the little hands of youngsters. So that's part of it. I think there are— iPads do have windowing. They have more and more macOS-like features, but they're not a Mac. And so if you are somebody who likes macOS, who prefers it, hasn't dug into 26 yet for whatever reason, and your last experience with iPadOS was before 26, you won't have incorporated windowing into the way you think about iPadOS. Plus the availability of apps for particular areas like education is not— I'm not going to say it's greater on the Mac because I can't prove that, but apps, computer-based apps in an education context.

Shelly Brisbane [01:28:04]:
And I thought, well, I can't say the ability to run AI better because it's going to have iPad-level chip. But I think education is a big part of it. I think for people who just are not into iPadOS the way those of us who have all these devices are, I think that's what Apple is hoping will be the market for this.

Andy Ihnatko [01:28:23]:
Yeah. It's an opportunity to play in a price point that they've never found any use for. Again, we live in the Apple universe. We think that $999 is just how much a cheap laptop costs. But no, that is absolutely a mid-price, very nicely built name-brand laptop in Windows space. A cheap laptop in Windows space, if we're eliminating everything that is pretty much you don't want to use it, would be a little less than $600. And Apple has never seen a reason to try to compete with that because I don't think they have really any experience trying to engineer down to a price point and create a product that they're going to be happy with. But this is the, the Windows, Windows 10 going end of life and sort suddenly legions of people who just want a meat-and-potatoes-level laptop are now shopping for something brand new, something to replace something that they were happy with that's 5 or 6 years old.

Andy Ihnatko [01:29:13]:
This is such a great entry point for them, such a great opportunity for education. I don't, I don't think it's going to be successful in the sense of a school system buying like a 200, 200-unit blister pack at Costco, because that's still the king of the $300, $200 Chromebooks, but we're talking about a family can now maybe afford to buy a dedicated laptop for their kid or their— or a group of kids. Like, no, you don't have to— you don't— you don't have to be stuck with the Chromebook that, like, you're forced to use at school. We can actually give you a decent, useful, powerful machine that will actually engage your creativity as opposed to at least partially beat down your soul. And all the people who are— that you have to release this, this thing, like, in the spring because that's when a lot of buying decisions are being made for people who are going to be going off to college. Again, people who maybe are— has said, look, I, I really want to get to buy a MacBook, but I can't afford it, so I'm gonna have to settle for whatever I can get at Best Buy that costs no more than $600, $700. Now they can go to school with a really well-made MacBook. It's going to be looking like a MacBook, not like a cheap—

Shelly Brisbane [01:30:16]:
like a cheap book. I want to say one more thing because I was remembering that when we were covering the news during COVID people, experts were reminding us that there is at least, if not a whole generation of people, there are an awful lot of people, particularly with limited income, but also for a variety of other reasons who don't have computers. They just use their phones. And that can be done, but there are severe limitations if you're relying on a phone. And I think there are probably a lot of people, families, probably chief among them, where having a computer to share or having a computer that the kid can have to do their schoolwork is a big deal. And $999 has just not been reasonable. And certainly they could buy that Windows device, but if for whatever reason they're macOS friendly already, or if it's somebody who's young and new to computing and has some familiarity with iOS and even has Apple ecosystem services and accounts, this might be a good choice for them.

Christina Warren [01:31:16]:
Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, I think that's one of the things, right, is that the primary computing device for young people is a phone. I think it is for everybody, but especially for younger people. In the United States anyway, iOS has a higher market share than Android does, and it's very coveted amongst the youth. People have iPads. They might not upgrade them as frequently because they last a really long time, but people have that familiarity. But the thing is, especially I think as Apple is wanting to get deeper into services, there's a business case to be made for having a more, you know, um, uh, economical, like, I'm gonna say entry-level MacBook because it keeps people in your broader ecosystem, right? Like, it's relatively easy to get them to get a phone, but then you have a lot of people who are still going to, you know, have that Chromebook for school. And I agree with Andy, I don't think this changes that, that, um, calculus at all. I think that Apple lost that when they tried to sell the iPad iPad as their education thing and that they did that a decade ago, that was a failure then, that was a mistake then.

Christina Warren [01:32:22]:
Instead, everybody went all in on Chromebooks, not only because they're less expensive, and in some cases they're not because they have to get big support contracts, but because they're much easier to manage the fleets. There are just many other features that Google has done to really make that. They didn't just kill Apple in education, they killed Microsoft too. To, right? So I think that the Chromebook is going to remain the education device. And maybe they're going to pretend, oh, we still care about educators. But come on, the schools aren't using MacBooks. But if you are somebody who is going to be getting your first laptop and you have an iPhone already, what a great way if you have something that is not going to cost $1,100 and I can now get into this ecosystem, stay in it. Continue to buy Apple services, continue to link all my things together, continue to then as I get older, you know, maybe make more money, continue to go up the product line, right? Versus, you know, the situation now, which might be, well, maybe I don't get a laptop, or if I do, I'm going to be, you know, the most recent RAM price stuff notwithstanding, you know, getting something, getting a Windows device or something else and having to wait much longer before I, you know, go into the Apple ecosystem.

Christina Warren [01:33:33]:
So I don't know, I feel like it all depends on what the price on this is going to be. I love the fact that we might finally get like another pink MacBook. I will buy it immediately. I was wondering, 1000%, I don't care. Um, but I, I just hope that they get the price right, especially if this is— I don't have a problem with them using an iPad chip, like an A-series chip. I think that's fine. I think we all know that those are basically just kind of, you know, less core counted M chips anyway. That's, that's not an issue for me.

Christina Warren [01:34:00]:
Um, I just, I just hope that they can get the price right. If they can get the price, you know, $599 would be ideal. $699, I'll deal with. If it's $799, I think that's a problem. But I think that, you know, it would be like somebody in, in the Discord linked to a comment that Steve Jobs made, you know, probably 15 years ago about, you know, pricing strategy and how they saw things. It might be older than that. Because Tim Cook had much darker hair and I don't remember exactly what he said. I remember the gist of it.

Christina Warren [01:34:33]:
I think though that in 2026, a lot of those types of core things like Apple, "Oh, we don't do low market on this," I think goes away, especially when you look at the fact that Apple for a long time, then they got up market, but they'd sold the Mac Mini for $500, $600 and been very successful that way. The desktop is essentially dead. And so I think that it would be very good to once again have something in that, you know, far sub-$1,000 price range that can bring people into your, your desktop ecosystem.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:06]:
Very well put. The other thing that I wanted to mention, of course, is Apple has released its latest, uh, round of displays.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:19]:
And I think that you—

Mikah Sargent [01:35:21]:
well, we're all trying to yield the floor to Christina. We all love them. We will talk about the size, but I want everyone to know very importantly that don't worry, Apple has made sure that when you unbox your new Apple Studio Display, that you will be able to collapse the box out afterward and fit it into recycling bin.

Andy Ihnatko [01:35:43]:
I thought you were going to say that it comes with a stand that you don't have to spend $2,000 for.

Mikah Sargent [01:35:51]:
No. Oh, that's just a minor change. That's a desire and a wish that's not happening. Now, Christina, now when I did introduce this topic, I do believe if we were to play back the tapes, there was a very loud sigh.

Christina Warren [01:36:03]:
Would you care to tell us what that's about? Oh my God. Okay. All right, so I've been going through a journey with wanting to get a better upgraded like Apple displays for a while. So I got the Studio Display the second it came out in 2022, like literally the second it came out. And even then I was like, okay, this is $1,600, although I got the, the VESA mount version. So then I had to, you know, pay for the Ergotron, which, you know, added another $300 to that. Um, uh, and, uh, I was like, okay, so this is, you know, $1,600 and it's not that much better than my LG UltraFine 5K that I had, you know, for years earlier than that. But, but this is, this is great.

Christina Warren [01:36:39]:
This is going to be a good display. And it's been fine. Um, I think we can all agree the camera on it is garbage. Um, and, uh, it was overpriced then. The fact that we are now getting the same display but with a slightly less garbage camera and slightly less, you know, anemic, you know, A-series chip on the inside for the same price. What are we doing? This is when finally 5K displays have been— or Retina quality display, 6K displays have been difficult for anybody to get if it's not from Apple. LG had made, you know, the 5K. They stopped making that.

Christina Warren [01:37:15]:
But within the last year or so, there have been a couple of Chinese manufacturers who've started to sell them that look just like the Studio Display, which are really good. And then LG Um, ASUS and Acer have all kind of gotten into this too. Samsung also did, but their— Jason, I think, reviewed, uh, their, their display and it was pretty bad. Now, I— disclosure here— I won a Reddit contest in November and I won two 32-inch 6K displays from LG.

Andy Ihnatko [01:37:43]:
Nice. And they are—

Christina Warren [01:37:49]:
yeah, I know. Was it an S test? Yes. And, and, and so I, I I am very happy with that. But the only thing about those displays, and they're $2,000 apiece for 6K, is that it has 120— it has 60Hz panel, but it has a 5, um, uh, Thunderbolt 5 KVM built-in. Very nice displays. They're not glossy. I wish they were glossy. I have a few niggles, but by and large, um, you can also get a 32-inch from, from Acer, I think, which is, um, a few hundred dollars less.

Christina Warren [01:38:16]:
And so this is why I'm frustrated with the Studio Display. It is $1,600. You currently have models that are either not much more expensive that are bigger in 6K, or models that are less expensive and bigger and higher resolution. Then we move into the Studio Display XDR, which is $3,300 for a 5K 27-inch with 120Hz panel. Now, CES, we saw a lot of these panels. In The fact some of these panels have already existed on other displays, they should— the fact this is $3,300, it was $2,500, okay, this is the Apple tax. $3,300, what are you doing? Yeah, this is— who is this for? Like, and here's the thing, if you're gonna charge $3,300, it needs to be 32 inches in 6K. Like, I'm sorry, like, this is just— it is absolute to me, and I'm the target market for this.

Christina Warren [01:39:08]:
I'm someone who has disposable income and clearly has obsessed with getting the right source of, you know, serious places. Christina, it's got DICOM medical imaging. Doesn't that mean something to you? No, no, this should be $2,599 at max, and that would be expensive.

Andy Ihnatko [01:39:23]:
The fact this is $3,299 is insane to me. I don't— I can't afford the screen.

Mikah Sargent [01:39:29]:
Why do you think I can afford medical school, Apple? Yeah, the, the price on this is ridiculous. And I, this is the problem that I've always, look, I remember, uh, absolutely coveting back in the day, the Thunderbolt display. And I did get the Thunderbolt display and it was at the time pricey at $1,000, but $999. But that thing was everything to me being a MacBook Pro user, because I would come back to my apartment. I would plug in my MacBook Pro. It would sit behind the, uh, display. And then that display had my Ethernet connected. All the stuff in the back connecting everything.

Mikah Sargent [01:40:11]:
It was my dock and my one-cord system that made it possible for me to like compute on it. And I feel like it's the, the promise that Apple provided with that sort of all-in-one design has gotten worse over time because now my Studio Display has just some USB-C ports on the back. Like it's not what it used to be with Ethernet and with like audio in, or I can't remember what all it used to have. And yeah, it just feels so ridiculously expensive when you could get something very similar without that sort of Apple blessing around it. And that's just frustrating to me. Now, 120Hz, let's talk about that for a moment because we are getting used to the faster refresh rates across the rest of our devices. Um, do you, do we, do you feel it? Do you see it?

Christina Warren [01:41:05]:
Do you experience it when you're on macOS? I don't. It's a weird thing. So I'm very sensitive to it on an iPad. And because I use an iPad the way I use an iPad, I think that I would be very— and I noticed this when I was using my mom's iPad, which has the lower refresh screen. I was like, oh, the fluidity is not the same as what I'm used to. Now, if I use it day in and day out, I'm sure I'd get used to it again. I don't know. I guess because I don't play games as much.

Christina Warren [01:41:29]:
I have 120Hz TVs. And so when I play video games, it it has a higher refresh screen. I don't care as much about it for the work that I do on a Mac. But it is one of those things where, again, if you're selling a 5K display in 2026, you know, I feel like when 120Hz options are available, you could at least have it be variable the way that you've done other things. You could even say, like, I would even be happy to be like, for 120Hz, it'll be 4K, for, you know, 5K, 60Hz. And there have been some manufacturers who've done that. Like, I would take that trade-off. Different people have different trade-offs.

Christina Warren [01:42:05]:
I don't feel like macOS has the need necessarily to have that higher refresh. At the same time though, this is, I mean, this was Andy's point earlier, this feels like everybody else is doing this. So it just feels cheap. It just feels like nickel and diming when you don't have some of these basic features. Now I understand that for a 6K display, you wouldn't be able to do 120Hz and I'm not gonna debate that just because of the bandwidth necessary. But for 5K to charge that sort of premium for a refresh, especially when you can only use this screen reliably with a Mac, it's not even like you can plug in your PlayStation or something else to it. Right.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:38]:
That's the thing that's so egregious. It's like— You also can't plug in your older Macs.

Christina Warren [01:42:42]:
Right. This is with Intel Macs.

Andy Ihnatko [01:42:46]:
Right.

Christina Warren [01:42:46]:
Exactly. So I'm like, so what's the point? I mean, I know what the point is, but it just feels like a slap in the face for people who waited a really long time for, you know, a display upgrade. And it's like, Apple makes some of the best displays.

Mikah Sargent [01:42:56]:
Unfortunately, they make it really hard for me to want to give them my money. Yeah, yeah, I, I— that, that perfectly summarizes the way that I feel about it as well, because I— you could quote me, I talked about the display being something I was excited to see how they were going to differentiate, what they would do differently, um, what was going to make them, make me give them my money. And in this case, uh, I was thoroughly underwhelmed by what I ended up seeing, uh, in the end. It's, you know, it's, uh, it's one of those categories that we've talked before. It's sort of like Apple got out of the game, then they got back in the game, and we're happy that they're in the game, but then they let us down. Now I'm kind of like, maybe I don't want them to do anything with routers. We talked for a while about what if they go back in the router game now?

Andy Ihnatko [01:43:43]:
I'm like, maybe I don't want to do that. There's a difference between this product. The thing is, a display is something that sits on the desktop. Okay? Everyone who goes into your office is going to see it. And I'm not going to connect this to, oh, it's a prestige, high-profile, I have the latest, greatest thing. There's a reason— I think that maybe part of the reason why Apple makes this display and made it the way they did is the same reason why they have the Apple Magic Mouse. It is— I'm not going to say objectively a terrible mouse, but I've never once in my life recommended to anybody that you buy a Magic Mouse. I've always said Logitech makes some awesome mouses that cost half as much and are twice as good, has twice as many features, are more comfortable to use, etc., etc., etc., etc.

Andy Ihnatko [01:44:23]:
But the thing is, there are a lot of people who are like, I like the style of this, I like how it looks, I, I, I do find it usable, and I like the way it looks on my desk, and I do like the aesthetic that Apple drops down with. In the case of these displays, it's like, God, it's got Thunderbolt 5, it could be— I can daisy chain these things, it's got like It's got an array of mics and speakers so that I don't necessarily have to be wearing, wearing headphones and having a mic in front of me to give— don't encourage that. And well, there are people that are just like talking, talking to their mom or talking— that's fair— talking to underlings. You have to stick with whatever they're saying. These are the little things that says that I have enough discretionary income that I do— it's okay for me to buy this. I just like this thing. Whereas at Apple— I like— maybe this is being charitable, but I like to think that Apple, as with the mouse, they decided that, you know, there are lots of people making great displays. Anybody who just wants a great display for the amount of money that is appropriate to spend to pay for a 5K display, we're gonna pick— we are not designing this for those people.

Andy Ihnatko [01:45:27]:
We're designing those for those people who want what Apple would do with a display, including make it look like a million damn dollars, especially if you got two of them side by side. Side. God, I don't— I, I want to see the LinkedIn of the person in that, in that photo that's on, uh, that's, that's on the promo page of— okay, you can afford two of these side by side.

Mikah Sargent [01:45:47]:
You, boy, you, you did not choose freelance journalism as a, as a career, did you? Um, let's talk for a moment about, uh, the current state of Apple AI, because AI, of course, did— Apple Intelligence made its appearance in all of these announcements, and part of the, uh, sort of drop that came with each of these was how does the chip help make it so that Apple Intelligence is even better than it would be otherwise, right? And so one would think that We have a situation where Apple is, you know, seeing that lots of people are using Apple Intelligence. These features are getting, you know, regularly, regularly used. And well, according to, I believe it's The Information, right? It may not be the case. Some Apple AI servers are reportedly sitting unused. Used on warehouse shelves due to low Apple Intelligence usage. That makes me firstly want to just ask the three of you, when was the last time you used an Apple Intelligence feature and what feature was it? And I'll give you a second to answer. I will go first so that you have a second to think because the last time that I used an Apple Intelligence feature picture was 2 days ago. And I'm still not even sure which one it was exactly because it was an accident.

Mikah Sargent [01:47:33]:
I selected some text and I was just trying to copy the text, but instead it went into an Apple Intelligence window and was trying to proofread it or something. I say that because my body reacted before the rest of me did to be like, no, get out of the screen. Because I didn't, yeah, I'm like, don't try to change the words that I'm using. I've never trusted, you know, like the grammar features anyway, whenever it comes to that. So I didn't want it messing around, but yeah, that was the last one I used. And I was able to go in and, as I said, sort of cancel it before it ever stopped spinning and thinking about what it was trying to do with that animation up on screen of all the different colors doing all the, going, why would I sit here and wait for this? So anyway, that was mine. Before that accidental usage, I do not recall the last time I used Apple Intelligence feature. I'm not saying that I don't use generative AI.

Mikah Sargent [01:48:35]:
I have and do use generative AI elsewhere, but specifically Apple Intelligence, I have not. And I want to also say this doesn't apply to testing. We are all, you know, covering this stuff or talking about this stuff, need to know about this stuff. And so of course, uh, there are times where on my, my work devices that I'm using for specific testing to try and, you know, learn this stuff, I have used Apple Intelligence. But yeah, I'm talking about in a personal capacity.

Shelly Brisbane [01:49:04]:
Uh, who wants to go first? Okay, I guess it doesn't apply to testing.

Mikah Sargent [01:49:08]:
I'm not sure whether I have a story because— yes, exactly.

Shelly Brisbane [01:49:09]:
Okay, if testing is the last time you used it, that's okay. Well, I I actually, I think the last one was probably visual intelligence because I'm very interested in its applications for accessibility. And there are a lot of other apps out there and tools, including the Meta Ray-Ban glasses and including just standalone apps that run on the iPhone that will do image description, will tell you what's in an image. If there's text in an image, not only will they read it, but interpret it in a way you ask. And so I was curious about how close visual intelligence came to that sort of thing, and I needed to to explain it for some things I was writing. The experience was just, I was able to describe an image, but it was a pretty mediocre experience. I never thought to myself, "Wow, this is more convenient because it's as close as my capture button," or, "It's because it's Apple." It was just, "Okay, well, this is the tool I use today. Let me try the next thing and move on testing-wise." Probably the most close real-world experience I can remember, I probably made some sort of a fun emoji mashup at some point just to send my husband a weird text with a picture of a tiger doing something that tigers would normally do.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:21]:
And I can't even remember it, but I send him a lot of weird things like that. Yeah, I can't think of anything specific for a couple of reasons. One is positive for Apple, one is not positive for Apple. I am a big, big user of Gemini. And that's not a blessing, says I have strictly evaluated every single assistant that's available. And after coming out of my bunker, after 3 months of applied testing, I have decreed that this is the best one. It is the one that is most suited to my interests. It's the biggest help.

Andy Ihnatko [01:50:55]:
It's most reliable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the problem for a company like Apple is that you don't just have to ship AI features. You have to get me to stop using Gemini. You have to get me to— it's getting me to break the habit of immediately turning to Gemini when I have a quick, damn it, this AppleScript is not running. And okay, you know what, Gemini, why is the system events thing not working? Like, oh, oh, damn it, I forgot. Okay, thank you, Gemini. That sort of thing. It's gonna have to be so good and so well integrated that maybe it will seem clumsy for me to click out into a Gemini window in order to make this happen.

Andy Ihnatko [01:51:31]:
So that's the big, but the good news for Apple is that. And I still stick by the claim that I can't remember the last time I used Apple Intelligence. However, I have used a bunch of my favorite apps that have been released in the, or updated in the past year that are actually using the AI Apple Intelligence API. So there, if there's nothing that is forward-facing to the user with the Apple logo on it that here's a wonderful AI features that justifies the $37,000 you just spent on the M5 Max with the max amount of memory. The fact that one of my image editors, one of my outliners, one of my text editors is now a little bit more sparkly when it comes to applying a transform or something like that, that is a benefit that I'm not going to see. And so before I have great sport and slamming, oh gosh, Apple intelligence, what a joke. The thing is, I think that the second part of Apple's job is to give APIs that are powerful and useful and practical for developers so that they can make their own apps better, even if it doesn't necessarily elevate the brand. It elevates their own apps.

Mikah Sargent [01:52:41]:
But the thing is that in turn does indirectly make the Macs and makes iPhones, makes iPads look better.

Christina Warren [01:52:49]:
Christina, you, have you used Apple Intelligence Assistant? I mean, okay, so here's the thing. I use Gemini. I pay for Gemini. I pay for ChatGPT. I pay for Claude. Obviously, I use GitHub Copilot every single day for my Gentec work and coding work and other stuff. I don't— I'm trying to think what the last time I used it was. It was probably an accident.

Christina Warren [01:53:06]:
I think what it was is that I opened up the mail client on macOS, which I actually use MimeStream more frequently on. But I opened up the mail client. And it summarized, or at least, auto highlighted some important emails. And I have a bunch of inboxes. And it actually didn't do a terrible job. And I was actually kind of impressed. I was like, oh, this did highlight some mail messages that I might have missed. So this is OK.

Christina Warren [01:53:31]:
So in that regard, that would probably be the last time. But to Andy's point, I don't trust it. And I wouldn't ask it anything. There's nothing that I would ask Siri. I have probably accidentally, like you invoked it when I'm trying to copy and paste something and instead, oh, I'm going to say, summarize this. It's not good. And I think the problem is that Apple's going to face, and other companies have faced this too, is that— but this is the thing that Apple's really going to face when it comes to AI stuff, is that everyone's first impression was so bad and so lackluster that they are going to have to work 3, 4 times as hard to make it good. And I mean, that was something that Google struggled with Gemini too.

Christina Warren [01:54:11]:
I mean, the reason it's called Gemini is because Bard was not good. It flopped. And they worked really hard. I worked there for a bit when we were— I worked on the developer side, not on the consumer side. But there was a lot of perception issues that Google was having to deal with on that. And with enough work and making the product better, I think that that has started to dissipate a little bit. It gets harder when you had different versions of the product servicing different areas. So the Gemini, you chat with is not the same as the one that's on Google and whatnot.

Christina Warren [01:54:45]:
But it takes a long time to overcome something being bad. And I think that that is the challenge Apple's going to have to face with Apple Intelligence and Siri is that it was so botched and it has been so slow to roll out and it has not done anything that was promised to do that this is going to be similar to the original Siri, which was a joke and a punchline years later, even after it got slightly better. But it never really redeemed itself from that kind of punchline moment when it launched. And so I think that's a thing they're going to have to overcome to make— the fact that all of us on this panel, we can't really remember the last time we knowingly wanted to use a service. That says a lot because we are people who use Apple products day in and day out and like to stay up on these things. But there's no— let me put it this way. I pay for all the other major AI tools. I would not pay for Apple Intelligence if it was a standalone service unless it was simply as part of my job where I have to compare all these things.

Christina Warren [01:55:42]:
But it would not be something that I would want to pay for if it were being like, oh, this is a standalone thing and I'm going to pay for Apple Intelligence. Absolutely not.

Mikah Sargent [01:55:50]:
It is not a viable product.

Shelly Brisbane [01:55:52]:
You couldn't pay me to pay Apple Intelligence. I agree with you. It also doesn't really have a killer app. I can tell you what I use Claude for. I can tell you what I use ChatGPT for. What I can play with in Apple Intelligence, I obviously do Siri queries occasionally, but not AI-based Siri queries. I had to do some serious Mac troubleshooting the other day at a really weird problem where I had an internet connection, but I couldn't use Safari. Why? Claude fixed it for me, helped me fix it with a lot of command line work.

Shelly Brisbane [01:56:24]:
And it was great. It was a really positive experience. All of the things that it showed me how to do what to do. It explained. I could obviously go and check before I entered all the sudo commands, but it was really a pleasant experience. But there's no Apple intelligence tool that I could call on to do the same kind of thing. Or even, as I say, with visual intelligence or even making silly emojis, those aren't apps that I think to myself, you know what I really need to do is do that. There are better tools for most of the things that we think of as AI.

Shelly Brisbane [01:56:55]:
Apple either needs a killer app that does something that these other tools can also do and do it better, or it needs to come up with something else that we haven't thought of as an AI function that nobody's doing and say, this is what you get Apple intelligence for because you can only do it with this device and with this software.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:13]:
And I thought Genmoji was going to matter more to me.

Shelly Brisbane [01:57:15]:
I couldn't even remember what it was called. I was like, Memojis, you know, where you mash them up.

Mikah Sargent [01:57:21]:
Emojis, that's what it is. It's like, yeah. And I'm so sad because it's like, yeah, I thought, oh, this— I'm gonna be— this is gonna be clever, I'm gonna use it all the time. And as Christina said, it disappointed me maybe 3 times, and I said, okay, I'm not gonna use that anymore. It takes too long to do one. You swipe through 4 of them, and then the third one kind of works, but then you are like, well, I need to add an extra word.

Andy Ihnatko [01:57:44]:
Oh great, now it's an entirely new— no, I don't know. I never got it. I tried to, I should probably go back and give it another shot, but I rarely have had an experience with an Apple feature where I'm struggling to figure out what I'm trying to accomplish, what the user interface is trying to help me to accomplish, what I would use this for. And I just basically after 3 and a half minutes, probably literally 3 and a half minutes, I was like, what am I even doing here? And you know what? We're all in a position where we get to try out really cool stuff just because we're curious and we download an app and then see 6 hours go by because even though we didn't know what this was for, the user interface and its methodology and its reason for being was palpable even if the best ways to use it were not. And then, oh, that's right, I did not have lunch today because I was having so much time, like, so much fun using this. So when after 3 and a half minutes I'm like, I don't know what these buttons do, I don't know why there's this picture in the middle and there are other pictures around it, and I don't know how I'm supposed to be able to express into this app what I wanted to do. And it's the most disorienting thing when you are using an app that Apple has created, because they're usually really good at that. This isn't a— this isn't like a high school student's like weekend code sprint project.

Andy Ihnatko [01:59:03]:
This is— a lot of people had to be convinced that this was a good idea and they should actually start to ship this darn thing, and everyone said Yep. Yes. Okay by me. This is-

Andy Ihnatko [01:59:13]:
they'll make us all proud. And I'm like, okay, what do I not get?

Mikah Sargent [01:59:17]:
Because maybe something I don't get about it. Yeah, I, I've been, as I said, thoroughly disappointed with that. It sounds like everyone else has too on this panel anyway, which makes sense why we might hear that some of those servers are going unused. We'll see if— yeah, they've got time and they've got partnerships, and perhaps things could improve. Improve from there. Uh, we are going to take a quick break so I can tell you about Club Twit, but when we get back, we'll have our picks, uh, of the week. So if you are not currently a member of the club, can I invite you to join? twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go to sign up. There's also a QR code in the top corner of the screen.

Mikah Sargent [01:59:58]:
twit.tv/clubtwit. When you join, $10 a month, $120 a year, you are going to get some awesome benefits first, you will get every single one of our shows ad-free, just the content. You'll also gain access to our special feeds. We've got a feed that is devoted to our kind of behind the scenes, before the show, after the show. We've got a feed devoted to our live coverage of tech news events and a feed that has our special club shows like my crafting corner. We've also got Stacy's book club, the recent D&D adventure that I ran for, uh, some of the hosts on the network, and so much more. If that's not enough, well, worry not, because I also can offer you an invite to our Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit. If you'd like to join, help support the work we do, and help us to keep making these shows we bring to you every week, twit.tv/clubtwit is where you go to sign up.

Mikah Sargent [02:00:54]:
All right, let's head back from the break and kick off with our picks.

Shelly Brisbane [02:01:00]:
I think we'll start with you, Shelley. Oh goody. Well, so I am a big fan of the Criterion Closet videos. Yeah. When some actor, director, famous person basically gets to go in the closet and, uh, choose movies that they like. And a fairly recent feature apparently is that they get to go in with a Criterion bag. And so they get the joy of shopping. They normally pick a movie, but they put it in their bag And some of them get so excited when they get to do that.

Shelly Brisbane [02:01:26]:
"I get to take this home!" It's like, you probably have the money to buy it. But anyway, I love it. It's great. But I wanted to call out two specific ones just because they're a lot of fun. First is Laura Dern, who she comes in and the first thing she says is, "I want to talk about actresses." So we're not going to talk about auteur directors, we're going to talk about actresses. But the first two people she mentions, she mentions in terms of their interactions with actresses, which I respect a lot. It's Robert Altman and Ingmar Bergman, not Ingrid Bergman, Ingmar Bergman. And so she talks about how both of those directors were very good for what actors, actresses needed.

Shelly Brisbane [02:02:03]:
And then she calls out Simone Signoret and Catherine Deneuve as actresses she likes. Just her enthusiasm, and also her knowledge of her own craft and what she's gained from these actresses. It's just a delight to watch. The The other one is Jamie Lee Curtis. Oh, is that a name on the floor? I seem to have dropped it. She drops so many names and it is so delicious. She's married to Christopher Guest, which I had forgotten. So she talks a lot about him and about his films.

Shelly Brisbane [02:02:26]:
She talks— this is my favorite part. So Jamie Lee Curtis is famously the daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. She refers to Janet Leigh as her mother. She refers to Tony Curtis, her father, as Tony Curtis. It's hilarious. I guess. And she tells the story about how on the set of The Manchurian Candidate, Georgette Leigh had a small part, Divorce Papers by Tony Curtis. And that was a story that came, you know, that made her want to get a copy of Manchurian Candidate.

Mikah Sargent [02:02:55]:
Anyway, both of those, but there are so many, many, many other wonderful Criterion Vault closet videos for you to watch.

Andy Ihnatko [02:03:04]:
Oh, now I've got something to do today. And every time I see one of those videos, I I can only think, but okay, if they— that, that cloth bag that they give them with a Criterion logo on it, if they just put like some cut vertical cuts from top to bottom, it would allow the sides to bulge out and I could get way more movies in there. That's all I'm thinking, because I would be like, there's got to be— there's no way I'm coming out here with just 4 or 5. Same. It's like, I need—

Shelly Brisbane [02:03:29]:
how do I choose? How do you choose? Yeah, every once in a while you see somebody that looks as if they take more than their share, or they say, I like this director, and they just grab a fistful of their money.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:41]:
I'm also— the two suggestions that I'm seeing for me are Jodie Foster and Mary Steenburgen, whom I love.

Shelly Brisbane [02:03:48]:
So now I haven't seen Mary Steenburgen.

Mikah Sargent [02:03:50]:
I gotta go back to that. She's doing it with, with Ted Danson, so it's the both of them together. But I— Ted Danson was second in my mind. He's great, but he's not Mary Steenburgen, whom I love. So anyway, um, Um, let's move along to Andy for your pick.

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:06]:
My pick is something that I'm trying to talk myself out of buying. Uh, it is the Selk Bag, which is— imagine like it's a wearable sleeping bag. It's like a jacket and pair of pants. If you imagine them being made out of a comforter or made out of like sleeping bag material, it looks like the coziest thing ever invented by by God or man. And we're coming out of a winter in New England where I can't remember it being this cold for this long. There was like a— this seemed like a 2 or 3 week period in which the highs, high temperatures did not get above like 15, 16, 17 degrees, in which like I'm working at my desk but I've got like a blanket sort of like over my shoulders, like I'm in La Bohème writing in my freezing garret or something. And the thing is, I'm thinking I'm thinking this is where I'm so vulnerable because it's a $250 thing. It's the end of the season, so it's down to $200.

Andy Ihnatko [02:04:58]:
But I'm like, if I had that in December, I would have worn the hell out of that all winter long. It looks very warm. It looks not just warm, but cozy. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It looks like you don't look particularly stupid. And it looks like if you're taking out the recycling, you could throw this on and go out. Out inside it and you wouldn't look particularly out of place. You don't want to go to a wedding reception in this, but unless you want everybody to say, oh my God, that looks so warm, where did you get it? So it's, again, it's kind of spendy.

Andy Ihnatko [02:05:28]:
So I'm trying to convince myself not to get it, but I'm remembering that for almost an entire month, like I was like wearing a couple of layers inside my house. I have a very, very old house, which is beautiful. It's great, but it's got high ceilings and big windows and not really modern modern heating and not really modern insulation. So it was like, you have the choice of either, okay, I can either spend $1,300 on heating this month, or I could wear like a couple of layers, uh, inside, uh, inside the house. And this would seem like I could just wear whatever I want, but through—

Shelly Brisbane [02:06:02]:
and I am golden, man. It might even pay for itself.

Christina Warren [02:06:05]:
So if you buy that M5 Max though, you could warm your hands on it.

Andy Ihnatko [02:06:09]:
You wouldn't need them. Excellent. But I could use it as a bed warmer.

Mikah Sargent [02:06:18]:
I could just like simply—

Shelly Brisbane [02:06:22]:
Yeah, you could. Very—

Christina Warren [02:06:24]:
But the penultimate, Christina, tell us about your pick. Okay, so this is great. This is called Spank, and you slap your MacBook and it yells back at you, and it uses the Apple accelerometer via IOKit. You can customize it so that it will, like by default, it'll just say ow when slapped, There's also a pseudo-spank --sexy to basically have, I guess, a sexy mode. There's also a Halo mode where it'll play the Halo sounds. You can even have a custom path to your MP3s. So I could do the Wilhelm scream? Yes, yes. And this is just one Go dependency.

Christina Warren [02:06:59]:
You can also make it more and less sensitive based on the accelerometer.

Mikah Sargent [02:07:05]:
This is just so dumb, and I love it so much.

Christina Warren [02:07:10]:
I love it so much. It's available on GitHub and it just, it already has like 1,200 stars and it's had a bunch of releases where they're like, they've added new features as it's come out. So Spank is my pick. My secondary pick, we didn't get a chance to talk about this, but there was an article in the New York Times this week about how the children are rediscovering iPods. And as luck would have it, a friend of mine, my friend Paul, sent me this iPod that a friend of his who is a an iPod Mini that a friend of his who's a, I guess, organizer found. This thing is 20 years old.

Andy Ihnatko [02:07:44]:
Its battery still works.

Christina Warren [02:07:46]:
It still has music on it. Mechanical hardware still works. That's amazing. Yeah. And so I'm very much enjoying this interesting music choices from this random person on this old iPod. So I'm going to be like one of the kids and go back to listening to music on an iPod. And then when I get upset about things, I'm going to smack my MacBook and it's going to yell back at me.

Andy Ihnatko [02:08:09]:
Does it have a Larry Fine or a Curly mode?

Christina Warren [02:08:12]:
Because that's the— It doesn't, but you could fill your own. Also, Andy, great news. It is open source. You could use Claude code and add that to it. There you go.

Andy Ihnatko [02:08:23]:
And I bet that that would be a PR that they would very much appreciate. Christina? Kenna, if you don't think that I'm capable of coding that by hand, then you know me extremely well.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:36]:
Thank you. Very good. Very good. Yeah.

Andy Ihnatko [02:08:40]:
So we're all going to be spanking our Macs and living in our kinky beds. No kink shaming in the message.

Mikah Sargent [02:08:44]:
No kink shaming here. No kink shaming. We're fine. None at all. My pick is actually a collection, and it's funny because when Spigen when first introduced this case called the Classic LS case for the iPhone 17 Pro, and I was immediately like, yes. Oh, oh my God, Christina, we're phone twins! Yes. So I was obsessed with this immediately, and then I was browsing the web the other day and I found out, oh, as I see on yours, Christina, as well, the beautiful lanyard. And what's great about this lanyard is it has a button and so you can remove it so that you can just keep your phone.

Mikah Sargent [02:09:29]:
So it's a little wrist strap that's adorable. And then I was like, you know what? I'm kind of curious what else Spigen's working on because this is so clever. And then I come to find out, oh, lo and behold, they've got two more products in the lineup, which I immediately ordered. There's a MagSafe wallet that matches, yes, and an AirPods Pro 3 case that looks like a mouse. That looks like the Mac mouse and it actually clicks.

Christina Warren [02:09:58]:
So, yeah, it looks more like the Amiga mouse to me, but that— well, fair. Okay, fair enough.

Mikah Sargent [02:10:04]:
I don't care. I'm getting it immediately. Yeah, that's basically what I said. What I love about the MagSafe wallet is it has those beautiful sort of like lines on it that are very like the corners of the first Macs. Yeah. Oh, and so good job, whomever created these, these— I just love every single one of them. And yeah, I don't think personally that Spigen's done a great job of sort of like marketing these things because I just came across them naturally and I was like, oh, I didn't know you also had a phone strap that I now have to own.

Christina Warren [02:10:34]:
Oh, I didn't know you had a cardboard. I, I saw, I saw their, their Twitter advertisements for the, the case, and so I bought it instantly and I was able to get it when they still sold the— I guess it included the strap strap for free. But, um, but, uh, but I didn't know about the, the AirPod case because if I'd known about that, like— and I guess that must be a more recent thing— I would have bought that. I think so. Yeah, instantly. But yeah, because I got this, I guess, like a month and a half ago.

Mikah Sargent [02:10:58]:
Um, and, uh, yeah, now I feel like I need to buy another one of the phone straps to put on the case as a lanyard because it has a spot for a lanyard. Uh, but anyway, very, very cool Um, and I think pretty cost-friendly as well. Um, none of the individual products is too spendy. Uh, of course, if you buy them all together, and because I'm a fool, then it starts to add up. But, uh, just on its own, it is—

Andy Ihnatko [02:11:29]:
they're all really cool individual products, and I think cleverly designed. So they make great protective cases. My— I have, I have a Spigen case on pretty much every new phone my own because accidents happen on a phone and I have never, ever, ever had a problem with a phone with a Spigen case on it.

Mikah Sargent [02:11:44]:
Nice. Well, folks, if you can believe it, we are here at the end of the show. First and foremost, I want to thank Shelley Brisbane for joining us this week. We appreciate you being here. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Christina Warren [02:11:59]:
Absolutely. Christina Warren, thank you for this week.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:01]:
Great, great to be here. Seeing you, Shelley. Nice seeing you. And of course, the tried and true Andy Ihnatko. Thank you so much. Echo, more Shelley equals more good. Oh, thanks, Andy. Amen.

Mikah Sargent [02:12:15]:
Folks, I have been and continue to be and will hopefully continue to be Mikah Sargent filling in for Leo this week. And so I guess that means that it's my opportunity to tell you all, get back to work because Break time is over. Bye!