715: Diner Lobster

Do we have a pre-show or do we want to just jump into the administrative? I know we don't typically do that. We always have a preview. Whatever pre-show we have, it has to be short. All right. I think that was just it. No, come on. Well done, John.

Well done. Hey, Marco, I hear there's some rumors. There's some rumbling in the streets that you might have been able to come up with a toy for yourself. That sounds really disturbing. Oh, come now. Behave.

No, you're not making it better. Are you talking about a duo? Yes. Oh, yeah. I, okay. I didn't know what he was talking about either. Golly, y'all. Y'all dirty. Gracious. Wow. Every listener is going to, okay.

All right. All right. All right. Anyway, moving on. Did you procure an iPhone duo? Is that the toy that you've procured? I do have an iPhone duo. I'm mad about it, but I do have it. Do you want to expand on that or do you want to save it for later? Ever since Saturday morning, you know, when it said, when the Apple said like, check back on this day for in-store pickup.

I've had one of those stock checking sites that like pulls it every few seconds and eventually like, you know, something will pop up and it'll alert me and it makes, you know, all my devices make sound and everything's, you know, blinking and sirens are going off in case the garage door is closing and like all these different things happen.

Then, of course, I rushed to the computer and go, go, go. You know, I have everything preset and then, oh, it's gone. Oh, God. And then that happened all weekend. So all Saturday, all Sunday, all like that was just every, every, you know, couple hours one would pop up in stock somewhere in the New York metro area.

I had a very wide search radius that covered 12 different Apple stores. It would get to the cart and it would, you know, try it and then, oh, it's gone. Like, and it, after living like that for, you know, 48 hours and continual failures, I finally got one, except it had to be the two terabyte model .

Oh, no. For, uh, after tax, $3,400. Oh, my word. There was a time that I would look at a $3,500 laptop and be like, woof, that's expensive. Oh. Oh, and by the way, the, the business reps.

So the business rep I was, I was dealing with is very nice. Um, but kept saying, you know, oh, I'm going to see if I can, you know, hold something aside or figure out something for you, you know? And, and of course, like the, every day the answer was, nope, sorry, nope, sorry, nope, sorry. Um, meanwhile, I go to pick up this phone and it's a business expense because this is literally all of what I do.

But, you know, in order to get the fastest checkout possible, I just put it on my personal card. So the first thing I ask is like, hey, as I'm picking it up , can I put this on a business card? Nope. Can't change it. Of course. And then the person I was picking up on was like, oh, you 're buying it for a business. Why didn't you just have the business reps hold it for you?

Oh, yeah. And I, and I, of course, I, you know, unloaded the entire story on this poor woman who was just trying to check me out. And, uh, and she was like, oh, well here, the business reps here have been pulling stock aside for their customers since launch. What? Uh-huh.

What? To hear again, another way that this entire process has been like tilted and a little unfair and a little irregular. It just irritated me so much. I'm so frustrated. I'm frustrated. And I, this doesn't even affect me and I'm frustrated.

All right. We have some administrative to take care of. First of all, let me remind you that the ATP store is open for the holidays. I will do my normal spiel in a moment, but John, can you give us the nickel tour real quick? Oh, sure. The products that we've got. So we've got our, uh, two pride t-shirts that are, uh, pride and trans pride variations of our logo, uh, where all of our profits are going to charity from those, for those shirts to, uh, Trans Lifeline and the Transgender Law Center.

So you should check those out. Uh, we've got our A18 Pro shirt for the chip that we forgot from the MacBook Neo, which we sold shirts for last sale. And then of course we've got the M5 Ultra and the N5 Ultra Interposer shirts. We brought back the Palm Graffiti shirt as well. And then we've got our usual stuff. Also, don't forget that if you have a zip hoodie and you always want one that's not black, now you can get ones that aren't black.

They come in white and gray and bluish and so on and so forth. Uh, and finally the ATP Polo, which we're basically selling for costs because the cost of it has gone up so much and this may be the last time we sell them. So if you want an ATP Polo, get it back. And the one thing I want to say about the sale question for you two, hopefully you have not looked at the sale pages.

Uh, what do you think our best selling products are and what do you think our worst selling product is? For best selling, I would guess it's actually the Pride and or Trans shirts because we got notifications almost instantly that we had printer, uh, pre -ordered enough that they will get printed.

Printed is probably not the word I'm looking for, but you know what I mean? Um, which I was very, very excited by. That was the, I think the first two products that we crossed that threshold, which made me very happy. Um, worst selling project product, uh, probably the Polo because it's a fortune and nobody likes them but me.

And that's not literally true. People write me all the time and say they like them, but compared to the other things, I think nobody likes them. And the Polo is also a jillion dollars. That's what I'm saying. And it's again, we apologize. We wish it wasn't, but unfortunately that is the case. What do you think Marco? Because we're not selling a short sleeve version of the regular ATP logo that normally that's almost, that's almost always the top seller.

So yes, we are. What do you mean we're not selling a short sleeve version of that? Yes, we are. We are selling that. Where? Oh, oh, I was just, okay. I was looking at slash store. I thought it was only the long sleeve one because that's, that's the graphic being displayed there. The graph, the pictures change. Watch. Oh, okay.

All right. Well, is this your first time dining with a smart coat? Yeah. I was going, so, okay. That's probably number one, but I think Casey's probably right for this time. I think I'm guessing the ATP pride, the rainbow version, I 'm guessing that is number one. And I'm guessing last place is the A18 pro.

My second guess for last place is graffiti. All right. So our top sellers are in fact, the pride shirts. They've been close to neck and neck, although I do think the regular pride one is out ahead now. So that's a good guess because those are the, you know, the most special shirts and people want to support charity. And by the way, as many people noted, you can just click the links in the store page and donate directly to the charities.

They get way more money if you just don't hit directly to them than buying a shirt. Of course, you don't get a shirt then, but just saying, if you want to donate, you can just donate directly. Um, the worst seller by far, by an astronomical amount, by so much that I think the shirt may not get printed, although we'll see. A18 pro.

Nobody likes it. Nobody likes it. They don't like an A chip. And even though it's got the A in our logo and everything, A18 pro, the MacBook Neo was so three months ago, whenever the hell it was, uh, we have currently sold six. And one of those is me. Why did you buy one?

I buy one of every shirt. Yeah. Or not every shirt, but like anytime there's a new design, you'll get one. Same. So I'll probably be in for one as well. Yeah. But anyway, A18 pro, unloved, very unloved. People are liking the polo because they're trying to get it . Graffiti is doing pretty well. Um, yeah. Um, A18 pro.

So anyway, just like I said, with the gray, uh, MacBook Neo shirt, if you want an A18 pro shirt, go get like six of your friends to buy one. Otherwise it's not getting printed. If you are listening to this and you think to yourself, man , I would love to have some ATP merchandise for the holidays to either gift, gift myself or gift someone else.

What you need to do is if you're in the car, turn on your blinker. Cause you're not a jerk and pull over to the side of the road. If you're walking, scoot yourself to the side of the road way or sidewalk that you're on. Go to ATP.FM slash store and go and take care of it.

Now. Don't be the person that says, Oh my goodness, I missed it. I can't believe I'm that person, but this time I'm that person. Don't be that person. You're better than that. ATP.FM slash store. Sale ends November 8th. November 8th. Do not wait until November 7th.

Do not wait until November 8th. And by the way, don't forget if you're an ATP member, go to your member page, get the code for 15% off. If you want to become a member, you should do so and get 15 % off. All right. The other bit of administrivia. We have a new member special. So, hey, if you were interested in joining as a member, you can do that at ATP.FM slash join.

And not only will you get a little bit of a discount on the merchandise, but you'll also get this member special. And John, do you get other member specials or only the new ones? You get all the member specials all the way back in time. All the way back in time. So this member special is ATP Insider Time Management, which was the classic Casey episode where I didn't come up with the idea.

A listener did, but I said at the beginning, because I'm an idiot and I never learned from my mistakes. Oh, we don't really have that much to say about this, do we ? And I think this might've been one of the longest ones we 've done so far. So we're bad at time management. That's why. Yeah, it turns out. So if you're interested in that, ATP.FM slash join.

Check out ATP Insider Time Management. Turns out there's more there than we thought. And I believe that was our 47th member special. So there's a big back title. Was it really? Yeah. Holy jamoys. I would have guessed half that. Great. Well, Q&A was our 46th and I think the Q&A was the previous one. So, yeah. Wow.

Today I learned. All right. Let's do some topics. And obviously there's a bunch of new things that we need to talk about. There's also some fun things from Marco in the after show. There's a little teaser for you. But we have something important to talk about, which is Marco and I have gotten iPhone duos.

Obviously, we just talked about that to a degree a little bit ago. Asterisk. Well, kind of, sort of. But Marco and I have iPhone duos and we have some things to say. Marco, would you like me to start? Would you like to start? Or how do you want to handle this? I'll start because mine is going to probably be shorter. I actually just decided to set it up as a test phone only.

To be honest, my initial impression of it is not that I want to use it as my personal phone. I will see if that changes throughout the year because there are things about it. So, and I'm sorry if I step on what you were going to say about any of this stuff, Casey.

That's fine. What I thought was going to be an issue with it is an issue with it. It is heavy. Touch ID sucks. It really does want to be used right-handed when it's closed. It is weird that you have basically three different sized software keyboards that you have to learn to type on.

Although I do enjoy the additional space of the front screen keyboard because it's so wide. But also, it is a very, very difficult phone to use one- handed. And the kind of lifestyle I have, first of all, I keep it in a pocket. As I mentioned last episode, I think if you keep it in a bag, it's substantially more compelling.

But if you keep it in a pocket, it's going to feel more burdensome because it's just so much heavier. Unless you are already a Pro Max user, in which case, go ahead because that's about the same weight. But if you were just a regular Pro user, it's going to feel really heavy to you. One-handed use. If you just want to quickly take it out of a pocket, do something, and put it back in.

That is really not what this phone is made for. This phone will fight you on that. And you're carrying around a big brick for that privilege. I'm definitely afraid I'm going to drop it. But also, I don't want to put a case on it because that would make it even bigger and bulkier. That being said, I did get to play with the Apple Folio case, the one with the kickstand and the front cover on the screen.

It felt very nice. And I saw somebody online who just cut it on its spine. So it was only the back half, which that's, you know, $130 thing to cut. But that honestly looked pretty good. And I think would actually improve the grips potentially without too much bulk.

And the kickstand would be useful. So if I carried a Duo, I think I would probably try that. But ultimately, it feels like I'm going to drop it. I think the ergonomics of it are all wrong for me. And that's not to say it's wrong for everybody, but I think it's all wrong for me. That being said, I also am tempted to try it because it is fun.

It reminds me in many ways of the very first MacBook Air, which everyone rags on because it was really slow and it did overheat. And the SSD was stupidly priced and slower. But I had that first MacBook Air and I loved it, even though at times I hated it.

And I think I think it might also evoke similar feelings as the 12 inch MacBook. That was a computer that was very frustrating in a lot of ways. But also people did love it in other ways. And I think what the Duo is doing, it's putting a lot of novelty and fun into the iPhone, which has has gotten pretty boring.

And not to say that that's bad, but the iPhone is just a very mature product. You know, the regular, you know, slab phone. It's a very mature product. It doesn't change that frequently or in very big ways. We've had the same thing forever. It very much feels like like a foundation of our technology lives.

It just never changes. This changes it in a big way. People are doing fun stuff. People are having fun with it. So I think if you look at it rationally, almost no one should buy this thing. But sometimes you can do things for irrational reasons.

Sometimes you can buy something because it's fun. And sometimes being on the cutting edge of something has a lot of sharp edges and downside. And I think this is one of those times that this phone, if you want to live with this phone as your phone, there's going to be days where you regret that choice.

It's also so different and new and exciting and fun that I think many people will choose to take that trade off. And I don't know that I will. But I am honestly tempted just for the fun alone.

But boy, is it heavy and awkward and lots of other challenges. Writing with a pencil on the table is useless because the whole thing rocks so much. The camera box.

There's a lot of things that I thought would be great about it that aren't. But there's other stuff about it that I didn't even know or realize but that ends up being kind of cool. So it's fun to play with. I don't, again, I don't think it's going to be for me. But I think that having just a year of disrupted fun, just like that first MacBook Air, even though we all knew its shortcomings, a lot of us still bought it and used it and liked it a lot of the time.

That's what this is going to be like for a lot of people. And it's not that you are denying the shortcomings or blind to them. No, we see the shortcomings. We accept them and we use it anyway. That's what this kind of feeling is. I think that's really largely going to happen with the Duo.

It's already happening. But for a lot of people, including, again, probably me, for a lot of us, we're like, you know what? My phone is not a place where I want to have that level of disruption. And the fun is probably not worth it for me. But I'm glad it's there for the people who decide differently on that.

I'll give you my quick take, too. I tried them out in the Apple store for a little while just to see what they're like. It's an impressive piece of hardware. I would take one for free in a second if anyone wants to send me one. It's really cool looking.

It's fun to play with. I could definitely find a use for the screen. Both screens look really good, both the glossy one on the outside and the matte one on the inside. And it's nice being able to compare the two different approaches. In an Apple store, the matte screen does amazing. Of course, the sun is not in the Apple store, so there's that.

But even in the Apple store with all its point light sources and everything, it looks really good. I love, as I said in the last program, I love what they did with the very constrained environment for two-part multit asking. If you've got a phone that splits in half, it just naturally, the interface flows right out of the fact that the phone bends in the middle.

I think if I had one, it would be more of like an around- the-house phone. And when I left the house, I wouldn't want to take that with me for all the reasons Marco mentioned. But I came away very impressed with the hardware and thought the software was pretty good, too. All right. I got thoughts. I picked up mine at 8 a.m.

At Short Pump. I think I was the first person to walk out with one. There was a very long line for walk-ins. I would guess at least 50 people, maybe upwards of 100. I'm terrible at estimating crowds, though, so take that with a grain of salt. I was the third person in line.

The first person I overheard being told, I'm sorry, your pickup appointment isn't until January 25 or whatever. And I felt very bad for them. But then there was one person in front of me and me. And I'm pretty sure I happened to walk out with mine first. And so I've been using it since then. And I think my executive summary is something I said to my friend Adam on Mastodon.

And his reply, I think, was also very helpful. My executive summary is, and this is what I said, this device is mostly me being annoyed by things I didn't expect and not annoyed by the things I did expect. To which Adam replied, I'm serious when I say I haven't had this much fun in a long time.

I think that's the summary. So let's talk about it. First of all, I nominally do this sort of thing for a living twice over. I am an iOS developer. And I flat my gums about Apple stuff for a living. I have yet to figure out the right f***ing way to transfer phones.

And it's a Casey problem. I think it's a Casey problem. No, that's an Apple problem. Oh, my word. So this year, what I thought I would do, because the last several years, I did a phone-to-phone transfer. And I've tried all sorts of cockabamy schemes in order to have Ethernet connections between them, where I get a USB-C pass-through Ethernet thing so I can power them and have Ethernet.

I've tried that. I've tried using a Thunderbolt 5 cable. Maybe it was 4, but you get the point. Like a really, really nice $100-plus Thunderbolt cable. I've tried that. I haven't done iCloud backup because I don't like that, because then you get this phone that you can nominally use, but then you can't do anything with it for like two hours, which arguably is what I ended up doing anyway.

We'll get there. But I probably should try iCloud backup the next time I do this, but I don't typically care for that. So this time what I did was, is I did a backup the night before to my computer and restored the day of. And I just want to point out that every time we tell our phone transfer stories, whatever method we didn't use, everyone writes in and says, you should have used method you didn't use, because I used it and it works for me.

And a very popular one is, hey, you guys used to do iTunes backup, and then you stopped. You should never stop. You should definitely do that. So you're taking a tour of all the things. Eventually you'll do an iCloud backup, although Marco's done iCloud backup too. I think we have had iCloud backup represented in our cycle. Here's the problem. Like no matter which one we do, if it screws up, that's our experience.

And even though people say you should have used other method, next year we'll use other method, and then people will say we should have used the method we used previous year. So it's just, all I'm saying is this should be much more reliable. Concur. What I did was I did a backup and then I did a restore. And that, for the most part, went really well.

The problem I ran into is because I'm out of shape when it comes to this dance, and I didn't do the backup immediately before the restore. And that's what I should have done. Let me tell you why. What I should have done is unpaired my watch and then done the backup.

And so then when I restore the backup, I repair the watch. I didn't do that. And holy beep, that was a complete goddamn nightmare. Getting my watch to go from one phone to the other ended up being, I had to unpair it from the old phone, repair it to the new one.

And then when I did that, what I ended up seeing after I did a restore, which is what should have happened, and everything looked like it should have been good. But then I start, you know, it says your watch is restored, you're good to go. But then I go to use the watch, and every app, including every system app, except like settings and a couple, maybe one or two others, every single app, including the system apps, is trying to download again, which I assumed meant something was screwed up.

I later found out, nope, that's just how Apple watch restore works these days. I had no idea. So again, some of this is on me for sure. I get that. But it's just bad, Apple. It's just bad. I want to have one phone turn in to the other phone.

I don't want to have to redo 800 freaking prompts about location services, and this, and that, and this, and that. No. One of these ways, one of these ways should be, I would like my new toy to look like my old toy.

Please and thank you. That's all you need to know. That is everything you need to know. Which like is probably a pretty common need. Right? Like, doesn't everyone face this whenever they upgrade their phone? Yeah, it's just so, and I know everyone says this every year, and here I am again, and now it's October, not September, but here I am again, doing this slightly delayed September tradition of Apple, for the love of Christ, can we please put a little bit of effort into this?

Please, please, can we put some effort into this? Real-time follow-up, I just got a text from Aaron, what are you yelling about? I am not kidding. Oh, my word. Anyway, so, once the watch transfer was done, then that was mostly, you know, a decent time after that.

So, let's talk about it. I'm going to hit this kind of all, this is going to be a little scattershot, and I apologize about that, but I did take a bunch of notes, I want to go through them. First of all, this is not a one-handed device. It just isn't. I'm a devout pop socket person, which I've actually mostly stopped doing on this phone, because why?

Because it's a two-handed phone. You say to yourself, oh, but Casey, the outer, the closed version is so wee, and so little, and so squat, and all of those things are true, except it's really freaking wide. And reachability, top to bottom, is wonderful now.

It's what I've wanted for years, but reachability side to side now sucks. Yeah. So, you're really stuck with this being a two-handed device, no matter how you slice it. So, if you- As Nelly Patel said, you can try different moves, and one of the things I did when I was in the Apple store, I said, can I open and close this with one hand?

And the answer is, I can, but it's really hard. Yeah, it's not something you'd want to, like, rely on. Like, I'm just saying it's like a move. You gotta, like, learn a move. It is, it can be done. Don't say it can't be done, but, boy, is it hard. To be clear, I'm not talking about opening and closing, which I, I don't think I've tried doing it one-handed yet.

You should try it. It's tricky. I'm just talking about using it, just using the device one-handed. Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. I thought the reachability wasn't that bad from the way I hold the phone with my right hand, but it's certainly worse than, like, a quote-unquote regular phone. Well, it's worse laterally, but it's much better vertically. Yeah, yeah, that's what I meant laterally.

It's the first, I was trying, like, can I reach, can I reach upper left corner, upper right corner, holding it right hand? I can reach. I have a pretty long thumb, but, like, and also the way I grip the phone, but it is harder. Yeah, so, the reachability problem is different, but it's still a problem. For me, this is just my personal opinion.

I am not trying to negate anyone else's, especially Marco's opinion. I don't find it to be that egregiously heavy. It's, it's not light. I'm not saying it's light. You've had a Mac phone before, right? I have, but not in a couple of years, but that is a very fair point. But I did, for a little while, carry a Mac phone, or for a year, I carried a Mac phone, but that was like two or three years ago now.

And to reiterate, the Duo is five grams heavier than the current Mac phone. Yeah, so, when it's closed, I wouldn't say it's light. I'm not trying to say it's light when it's closed, but I don't feel like it's egregiously heavy. Like many others, other than Marco, have also said, Marco is not standing alone in this. In fact, I think I'm the one by myself in this particular opinion.

No, I didn't think it was that, I expected it to be heavier, honestly. Now, I've never had a Mac phone, and I think it is bulky, and I wouldn't want it in my pocket, Apple Store. They had it set up right next to the Macs. They had a display with it right next to the Macs, so I could pick up both of them and go, can I feel five grams?

The answer is no, I couldn't, and I didn't think it was egregiously heavy, but again, I wouldn't want to put it in a pocket. I mean, for whatever it's worth, I've handed this test phone to a couple of other people in the last couple of days. It's the first thing everyone says. Well, you got to hand it to them open. Weighs less that way. That's true.

Because the Macs is always open. I mean, you hope. You hope it's always open. That's true. No, that is really true. That when it's open, and I had this written down, literally what I wrote down in my notes yesterday, the day before, is the following.

When open, it's impossibly light. I understand conceptually that is literally impossible, but the way the weight is distributed, it feels impossibly light, and as someone who has handled but never owned an iPhone Air, impossibly thin.

I love the feel of this when it's open. It's fine, closed for me, but I love it when it's open. I realized around the time that I got the device that if you're curious what it's like when it's open, it is almost exactly the same size as an Apple Magic trackpad when open.

So that gives you a rough idea of about how big it is. I was of the opinion that I was going to friggin' hate Touch ID. I was primed and ready to be furious about it. I prefer Face ID, but Touch ID's fine.

Now, most of the reason for that, to be fair, is because watch unlock. I have used it in the past. I guess maybe I never turned it on for more recent phones. I don't know what my deal is, or maybe it's different in this phone or with this iOS release. I don't know, but it's like astonishingly fast now.

It used to be that it would wait until Face ID timed out, and then it would finally be like, oh, yes, I can unlock your phone now. But now, I don't know what it is. Maybe they're not waiting for a finger. Maybe they know that there's no finger touching, so they don't even bother.

I'm not sure what the story is. But if you're wearing an Apple Watch, and I totally understand not everyone is going to wear an Apple Watch, or maybe you don't want to wear it all the time, totally get that. But for me, I basically always have an Apple Watch on, and it is astonishingly fast to unlock.

Is it perfect? No. Would Face ID be better? Yes. Would I prefer Face ID? Absolutely. But this was one of those things that I was primed and ready to be furious about, and it's really fine. The other aspect of that that I think we forgot to mention last time is they do this thing with the touch, setting aside watch, so you have no Apple Watch.

They do this thing with the Touch ID button on the side of the Duo where even if you Touch ID it, and unfortunately, I couldn't test this in the Apple Store because they have Touch ID disabled on the phones for reasons that make sense when you think about it. Yeah. it first pauses to let you see your notifications because it's kind of hard to like, what if I just want to see, like on your regular phone, you can just tap the side button and see all your notifications on the lock screen without unlocking your phone, but if that same button does Touch ID, if that unlocked the phone, you'd be like,

I can never see my notifications on the lock screen because as soon as I touch that damn button, it unlocks the whole phone. So by default, when you touch the button, it will be like, okay, here's your lock screen. keep your finger on that button and now we'll unlock. I could not test, I know they have a setting for this, like what is it like, hold to unlock?

Well, what it says on the screen is rest to open. I'm not sure what the setting is, but that's what it says on screen. Right. Again, I couldn't test that in the Apple Store because they have Touch ID locked, but if you have one of these phones, know that they're, that's why it does that. It's an intentional choice because otherwise, there would be no way for you to see your notifications on the lock screen.

And Casey, can you tell me, does that setting make it not do that and just unlock immediately? Uh, I don't know. I gotta find it first. Um, I'm not sure. I mean, I guess you're always unlocking with the watch, so you're not, you're not noticing this. I mean, not always. And also, you can always hit that button with a finger that is not registered for Touch ID, obviously.

But like, that's my understanding is that why that, that's why that preference exists. Because some people like registering like all five of their fingers. Yeah, I'm trying to find, oh, rest finger to open is the name of the setting. And it's on by default, I think. Which is within Touch ID and passcodes. And I just turned it off. So now I've locked my phone and I've sat and rested my finger.

Oh no, I have to press the button. You have to keep your watch away from it. Oh yeah, that's true. No, I mean, it doesn't seem that different. It just doesn't automatically unlock itself. So it doesn't, basically what Rest does is it does a swipe up on your behalf. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, so yeah, not having Face ID, again, I can't stress enough.

100% I would prefer it if I stick with the Duo for next year and if there's a Duo 2 and it has Face ID, I will be overjoyed. But this was one of those things that I was expecting to be furious about. It's a nothing burger. It's fine. Speaking of nothing burgers, the Crease.

It's a nothing burger. Like, I feel it sometimes, but not always. I see it occasionally but not always. Generally speaking, I really don't notice it. I really, really don't. And I don't think I'm being like super duper, I can't think of the word I'm looking for, but like I'm not grading on a curve here.

I really don't think so. I was expected to be like, ugh, that I'm going to notice this all the time. It's going to be really annoying. And I do notice it, but I don't find it to be nearly as annoying as I expected and I don't notice it nearly as much as I expected. Yeah, the matte surface really does an amazing job.

Again, maybe Apple Store lighting is more beneficial than being in the sun, but it's really, it does a good job because those ones in the Apple Store are getting an open and close a lot more than normal ones. So even though they're quote unquote brand new, they're not really like a lot of, I open and close it a hundred times myself, right? So they're getting a lot of opening and closing and I expected that the matte surface would hide it, you know, reasonably, you can still see it, but whatever, hide it well enough.

But I thought, oh, I'll be able to feel it really well. They did a good job of making it so you can't feel it that much. Yes, you can feel it, you can, you could, if you, with your eyes closed, you can find where it is, but I expected it to be way worse feel-wise just because there has to be like a gap there for it to go into, but they shore up that gap in a way that hopefully doesn't puncture your screen from the back more on that next week in a very beneficial way.

Yeah, I've just, I was super impressed with that screen, just every aspect of it and including how well they handled the crease. Yeah, and I really like the internal matte screen. I genuinely am not sure if I would want it on the outside. I probably would because using this thing in sunlight would be even better than it already is with a matte screen.

I think I would probably want matte everywhere, but I can tell you for sure I'm loving it on the internal screen. It just looks different in a pleasing way to my eye. It's fuzzier than a nanotexture on the iPad. It's a little bit fuzzier than that, but I think it works well on this particular device.

It is, I found it less blurry than I thought it was going to be, but again, good thing about being an Apple store side by side with a nanotexture iPad. You're like, oh, I see. The nanotexture iPad is a little bit more, I don't know, like refined and less hazy.

But, you know, that's because it's a much thicker piece of glass. Also, the inside screen feels fantastic with the Apple Pencil. Like that texture. Oh, interesting. Oh, man, does it feel good. I also, by the way, I did some testing. All over Amazon, there are cheaper Apple Pencil compatible styluses.

The biggest brand seems to be this brand called Metapen. And I've gotten a couple of them over the years for iPads. As far as I can figure out, they do not seem to be compatible. The only stylus I've gotten to work with the Duo is the Apple Pencil USB-C.

All those, you know, Metapens and stuff, you can get them to work on almost any other iPad. And they don't have any kind of, like, pairing. You just, like, bring it near it and it works. So it's probably using whatever mechanism the Logitech Crayon uses. And that mechanism does not appear to exist or be enabled for the Duo.

So, for whatever it's worth, if you were out there hoping to get a cheaper stylus for your $2,000 phone, it's not going to happen. At least not yet. So, if you want, you know, some kind of pencil, you've got to get the actual Apple Pencil USB-C. That being said, the Apple Pencil USB-C is pretty good.

And, my only slight complaint about it is that when you first pick it up, if you haven't been using it for a while, it doesn't work immediately. It has to, like, wake up and connect, I guess. So, if you pick it up real fast and start drawing on the Duo, the first few strokes might not actually register yet.

which is a little annoying, but I, you know, I understand why it has that, some kind of standby thing. But otherwise, using the Apple Pencil on both Duo screens, it's really, it works, it works great with that one massive exception of the Duo completely rocking on a table so much that you cannot write with it on a surface.

and no matter what case you get, I don't think it's going to make a big enough difference to that height. I'm sure people have cases that will even that out, but without a case, yeah, it's hopeless. Well, it would have to be pretty thick to even it out. I don't put little extra pegs to make up for the camera bump, I'm sure. But then it would be ridiculous in a pocket. Like, anyway. I know.

I think it's ridiculous in a pocket with any case on it. Yeah, if your plan is to, like, use the Duo to take notes, like, a lot, you better like holding your notebooks when you're taking notes on them. Or putting it on your leg or something, something squishier. Yeah, like, but even then, like, yeah, if it's on, like, you know, your leg or a bed or something, like, you can do that, but it's rough.

The other thing is, you really, if you're going to use the pencil with it, you really want to be opening it up and using it in portrait orientation. Using it in landscape, it's just kind of, like, with the hinge, it's kind of a little bit weird. I think the ergonomics of note-taking on it are much better handheld in portrait.

And if you want any other situation than handheld and portrait, you want an iPad mini. Coming back to the matte screen, again, love it, love it, love it. However, one of the things that I did not expect to be annoyed by, and I'm getting over, but was very, it put me off a lot at first, is the camera on the inside screen, on the bigger screen.

The camera that is under the display, I find that to be fairly glaring. I'm getting to get to the point that I can ignore it, but I find that oftentimes, particularly in dark mode, it's pretty obvious where it is. Additionally, even in light mode, if you can't see the circle that is the camera, the text that is under, or I guess over the camera, I should say, is fuzzier than all the text around it, and so I'll think, oh god, what happened, oh right, right, right, oh no, what happened to my screen?

Oh, right, my bad. So that's a little bit frustrating. Would I have preferred a hole punch camera? Maybe? Like, it is nice to have nothing, like, no clearly visible, and, well, when things are great, it's nice to have nothing that you can see as being a camera, but then, in more circumstances than I expected, the inner camera, the opened camera, is, the front facing camera, the one that's under the screen, I find that I see that far more

than I expected, and it's a little bit annoying. Yeah, they could have done hole punch in the upper right corner, like so many other Android foldables do, and then they could have done the Apple thing and just turn that circle into the dynamic island and sort of rejiggered their whole UI around that, but they didn't. Yep. let's see, the thing that might be driving me the most bananas about this phone, and I'm being a little bit hyperbolic here and a little bit dramatic, but I also kind of mean it, if you happen to have a standard iPhone

in your hands, you can follow along with me as long as you can do so safely, if you go to, let's say, send a text message, and you start to type a message, it doesn't matter what the message is, it doesn't matter who it's due, I'm looking at my comically tall 17 Pro, hilariously tall 17 Pro, it actually seems misproportioned into my eyes now because I've been trained by the Duo, anyways, if you look at the 17 Pro or equivalent keyboard, in the

bottom left hand corner, for me anyway, the way I have it configured, the bottom left hand corner is a little emoji icon, and above that is the 123 to change your keyboard. On the Duo, the bottom left hand corner is 123 with a little baby emoji one next to it, and then next to that is the space bar.

As someone who has been known to use an emoji from time to time, and by that I mean freaking always, I keep hitting the friggin 123 button when I mean to get an emoji, because I've gotten years of muscle memory for go to the bottom left of the screen, and the bottom left of the screen is now the 123 button.

I'm sure I can retrain myself, this is a silly thing to fuss about, but it is driving me freaking crazy that every time I go to send to an emoji, I'm actually changing the keyboard, and then I got to remind myself how the heck to send an emoji again. It's driving me batty. Live activities. I like what they're going for, and what they do is, in the upper right hand, well, sorry, live activities with the closed duo.

In the upper right is the hole punch camera, below that is time, and if you have a focus mode icon, well, I guess a focus mode icon, if applicable, then time, then you have that combined battery Wi-Fi cell widget, which I also really like, but if you have a live activity, it obviously is going to go into the hole punch, so to speak, and what it does is it shimmies everything on the right hand side of the screen down.

When you're on the home screen, that's fine, but when you're on the lock screen, or excuse me, when you're on apps, it's not great, and I think some of that is that the software isn't 100%, like the iOS software is 100% locked in on this, but live activities, especially if you're trying to do more than one, it's a bit rough out there, and I don't love that because I do love live activities.

I like it for sports scores, I like it for timers, I like it for a delivery or something like that. I use live activities relatively often, and it's rough out there. Don't love that. Another nitpicky thing, in Slack, they have updated Slack for the Duo, which is great.

However, the gesture to go, the left to right swipe gesture that brings you back, no longer brings you back to your list of workspaces. It used to be that if you kept swiping left far enough, you could get to your different workspaces, so the relay Slack, the incomparable Slack, all these different Slacks I'm a part of.

Well, now I absolutely have to hit the button in the upper left-hand corner to get to a different Slack, and it's driving me freaking batty. Selfies, they are better and worse. Fidelity, very good. Really like having the ability to use the outer main camera in order to take a selfie.

That being said, you look like a moron because you look like you're trying to take a selfie with an iPad mini. You look dumb. You really, really do. The way they handle this is when you open the camera app if the phone is open, if you flip the phone over on the outer display, the smaller of the displays, it says slide to show camera.

And then you can do that, and then you see the camera. I like that affordance. I think it works well. That being said, you look like a moron. I'm doing it now, and I'm the only person in this room, and I look like an idiot. Also, not a great work. Maybe I just haven't figured it out. Not a great way to ergonomically try to take a picture, because you've got this giant slab in your hands, and you're trying to figure out the right way to take a picture.

And if you're trying to do it one-handed, because you're trying to hold the thing out at a distance so you can get everyone in the shot dance, not great, Bob. Not great. Toolbar buttons. Because toolbars and everything is smaller on the outer display, the Safari share arrow, the Safari share arrow, is now buried within within the puzzle piece thing on the left-hand side of the address bar.

I don't think that was the case on the 17 Pro. I don't remember. I'm trying to find where it was. But it was not there on the 17 Pro. And let me tell you, it is very... Oh, yeah, because that's what it is. There's a second row of icons. There's back and forward, there's share row, bookmarks, and tabs.

That row is not there in the Duo's outer screen. Instead, you've got just the address bar with the left-hand side as the puzzle piece that has everything in it, the everything bucket. The right-hand side is reload. And in the toolbar, which again is the right gutter of the phone, you have new tab and the tabs button.

I get why they did that. I freaking hate it. The share arrow is buried and it's driving me batty. Getting close to done. I was on a FaceTime call with Stephen Hackett. We were talking about when he comes to visit and what we're going to do to my house in order to destroy it as per the goal on the podcast-a-thon or the campaign.

And there was a point in time that I needed to show him something, but I needed two hands because I was measuring something and I wanted him to see me measuring something. And you know what was pretty great? I could put the phone in laptop mode, sit it somewhere safe, John, and have it just looking at me.

Now, granted, I can't see Stephen, but he can see me just fine. And I didn't need like to jerry-rig some sort of apparatus in order to stand the thing upright. I just put it in laptop mode. It was great. You should have put it in open book mode. You know what I mean? Yeah, I guess I could have, but that would have been less stable.

Because then you would have a better view of the screens. You could see more of the screens. I probably could have. You're right. But the stability of that would have been questionable. Additionally, at one point, we were looking at the Unify app. In the context of FaceTime, I shared my screen, and it took two or three tries to get this to work.

But we were looking at the FaceTime app, and on the left-hand, or excuse me, on the Unify app, and the left-hand side, this is with the device open, left-hand side was Unify app, right-hand side was Stephen's face. It was great. Loved it. Also, Gruber covered this. I will probably forget to put the link in the show notes, but Gruber was saying that it's really crummy that closing the device doesn't lock it, because your natural inkling, if you're an old man anyway, having had flip phones when you were younger, your inclination is when you close the device, it should lock, and then

you can put it in your pocket. That's not what it does. When you close the device, it just switches to the outer screen again. This was kind of driving me batty, and Gruber complained about this a little bit. And then Stephen Robles came up with a shortcut, because apparently there is a shortcut trigger for when the device is opened or when it's closed, and Stephen came up with a very, very straightforward shortcut that says, when the device is closed, lock it.

Then he improved it to say, when the device is closed, lock it if it is on the home screen, but if it's not on the home screen, just carry on. Works great. It's really, really good. I'll try to remember to put a link in the show notes. Again, no promises. Link is on the document right now.

See it? Perfect. All right. Yes, I will endeavor to remember to transfer them to the show notes that people can see. The cameras. Yeah, they kind of suck. And right now, it doesn't bother me too much, because I haven't taken that many pictures. But let me tell you, we were at a football practice earlier tonight, a flag football practice earlier tonight, and it was getting dark, and I took a photo with my camera and took a photo with Aaron's 17 Pro, and hers was way better.

This is 17 Pro, mind you, not 18 Pro. Hers was way better. So I'm not happy about that. That is one of the things that I was expecting to be unhappy about, and I am indeed unhappy about. Final two items, super fast. Tent mode. This is where you open it like, you know, 30 degrees or whatever, and sit it on the desk.

I do this occasionally because it's kind of fun to have like a picture display going while I'm working. That's kind of neat. Laptop mode, I think I've used once, and that was in the aforementioned call with Steven on FaceTime. All in all, I really like this phone.

I think I'm going to stick with it for the year. I'm unsure what I'm going to do in the future, but let me tell you, it is pretty darn nice to be a passenger princess or whatever and not having to worry about bringing an iPad with you because it's already with you. It's pretty darn nice if you want to do two things at once.

Like at one point, Aaron had been asked to substitute a couple of times, and I was watching her fumbling about just in the sense that it's burdensome, not because she doesn't know what she's doing. She knows exactly what to do, but she's fumbling about flipping between calendar, text messages, calendar, text messages, trying to figure out from this teacher that asked for her help, what days and what are we doing those days?

Is it reasonable for her to sub, et cetera? You know what I could have done in the duo? Could have opened it up, put text messages on one side, calendar on the other, boom, done. Easy peasy. I really agree with what everyone says, that the multitasking on this is limited, but that is beautiful.

I love the way they handled multitasking on this. It's really, really intuitive, works really great. I really, really like this phone a lot. It is with compromises. In the same way, I think it was Marco said earlier, the original MacBook, the one port MacBook, was a machine that was defined by compromises.

And you can make that argument for this phone as well. But golly, did I love that MacBook. And golly, right now, anyway, I really love this duo a lot. I really, really like it a lot. I can't tell you if I'm going to stick with it. And I'm very excited for future Casey, a little less than a year from now, to share his thoughts.

But today's Casey, I really, really like this phone a lot. I'm really surprised how much I like it. I'm surprised how little I'm put off by some of the things I thought would be deal breakers. The only thing that I think is really remaining a deal breaker to me is the cameras. And 99% of the time, I'll have Erin with me anyway, so I can just grab her phone.

This is a really impressive phone. I'm not trying to imply that Marco is wrong by any stretch of the imagination. Not at all. Also, this thing is hilariously expensive, especially if you were coerced to buy it. What did you say? A one terabyte one or two terabytes? Two terabytes. Two terabytes.

My word. The joke I made about Marco's phone earlier is it's like the diner lobster from the famous SNL sketch and from real life in diners where you'll see lobster on a diner's menu and they just assume no one's ever going to order it, but they always keep one around just in case. That's the phone that Marco got. Every Apple store gets one of those just in case someone comes in and he's like, someone came in and asked for it.

Do you believe that? We sold it to him. Amazing. Amazing. So yeah. So I am not trying to imply. I'm not trying to say. I'm not trying to subtweet, if you will. I'm not saying that Marco is wrong. And in fact, I could make the argument that I myself could make the argument that Marco is right.

But for me today, I'm just having a lot of fun with this thing. That's what Adam said. I'm having a lot of fun. And it is so wild what they've done to iOS, in a good way, mostly, what they've done to iOS to make all this work. I'm really, really digging it.

I just want to congratulate Casey for not breaking it in the first couple of days of owning it. Yes! So let's keep those fingers crossed. You have no case, right? No case. However, I did notice, I really don't want to belabor this. If we want to come back to this another episode, that's fine. But very briefly, I noticed that AppleCare, which has been my case recently.

Yes, I know it's not really a case. Just go with it. AppleCare is like $20 a month on this phone, and you are no longer allowed to pre-buy an entire year of AppleCare, which would save you some money. And I looked at it, and I did the thing that maybe I shouldn't, but I took the fall, and I did AppleCare Family.

So this is on it. Like, 15 devices are on AppleCare Family, and it is also very expensive. It's $50 a month. But, like, the entire family is covered. And given that we are starting to get to the point that children are going to have phones soon, it seemed like it was worth it. And again, given that this alone would have been $20, I figured, jeez, why not?

And I got a bunch of refunds. Like, I had just re-upped on the 17 Pros for an additional year for each of them, and I got a refund for almost all of that. I got some Apple gift cards for a couple other things that I had gotten AppleCare on, because it wasn't exclusively phones, but it was mostly phones.

But now, like, Vision Pro is on this, MacBook Pro. I'm pretty sure is on it. Studio Display, I believe, is on it. It might be too old now. I forget. But you get my point. A bunch of stuff is on this, and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it now, because now, some stuff that wouldn't have been on it, like, I did have it on Erin's phone for this year, but generally speaking, she doesn't have AppleCare, and she has broken a couple of phones in the past.

Not catastrophically like me, but enough that it's been annoying. So I'm really, so far, I'm happy with it, despite the obscene cost. And so, no case, no pop socket, generally speaking, but I haven't dropped it yet. We are sponsored this week by Granola.

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So, if you click on any line item that it comes up with, it shows a transcript summary, and then we'll call out the actual words that were said in order to get to that summary. And so, it's really, really useful. So, for example, there was a line item title, ATP Insider Show Q&A, transcript summary.

They landed on this after discussing the member special driven by one listener's question about ATP lore and deciding it was narrower than a general host Q&A. And then it has an actual quote from John, and then it continues with the summary. Then they explicitly workshopped the title and agreed to simpler framing fit because the episode would cover mostly show history, but not only that.

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Go to granola.ai slash ATP and try it on your next call. Thank you to Granola for sponsoring the show. Here's the deal, listeners. We are roughly an hour in and we got a lot of crap left to talk about.

So, the three of us are going to endeavor to try to be very quick about the stuff. Yeah, buckle up. We're going to try to speed run it. We're going to try to be quick about the stuff that leads up to the MacBook Pros and then we're going to let the MacBook Pro air out a bit. Or at least that's the theory.

Again, as always, laugh as you look at how long these chapters are and laugh at this sweet summer child that doesn't know what the future brings. All right. So, John, let's start and let's try to do this chronologically and we'll start with this past Monday, which is the iPad Mini. Yeah, Apple releasing things on a series of days instead of one big event.

Sure, why not? It gives you more time to make notes. The previous iPad Mini was A17 Pro. This one is an A20 Pro, which is a nice update. It's about the same size, a little bit less heavy. It's like 38 grams less to 34 grams less, depending on if you get cellular.

This kind of like we're going to see this in a lot of products that we talk about today. We say it's about the same size. We're talking sub millimeter differences in length, width, height, or maybe one or two millimeters. really weird that they didn't make them exactly the same size, but they're almost exactly the same size.

Storage is the same as the old model, 128, 256, 512. The A20 is an A20, but you get dinged some cores if you get, again, tied to random stuff. It's tied to storage. So if you get 120 and 256 gig storage, you get your downwind efficiency core and you get one fewer neural engine.

So only one of the two neural engines works. Like the A20 Pro has two neural engines, but you just get one if you don't get the 512 gig model. If you get the 512 gig, you get all the cores working, which is a bummer, but whatever. Just be aware. The big story is that it's an OLED screen and it's 8.5 inch instead of the old one was 8.3.

They call it Super Retina XDR because they love long names for screens. That will also come up later. 1200 nits peak HDR. The previous one didn't have HDR at all. And it's 600 nits SDR, which is up 100 nits from what it used to be. 25% or 24% thinner bezels.

And every time they make the bezels thinner on the iPad, I'm like, so is this just like impossible for me to pick up now? Like I know they have the touch rejection or whatever, but wow, they're they were already so small. Anyway, it's a 2316 by 1512 326 PPI. The PPI is the same as the old model, but it is 50 pixels wider and 24 pixels higher.

Okay. Sure. Apple. It does have nano texture available. So I know Marco and many others are super excited by that. It is an option on the 256 and 512 only, I think, which is weird. Yes. Market segmentation. No promotion. 60 hertz only.

And apparently it supports extended display mode when connected to external display. If you have iPad OS 27.2 and apparently this does not work on the old minis, even with iPad OS 27.2, which is a bummer. It's got the N1 chip, which gives you Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and thread radio.

C2 for cellular. So it's got all the latest Apple chips. 12 megapixel center stage landscape camera, which means it's on the long side now instead of the short side. It has an acoustic display instead of normal speakers. Yeah, this was fascinating. Yeah.

This is what Apple says. Specially designed woofers are paired through the display to produce punchier base and more volume. In addition, custom tweeters are now hidden between the glass and aluminum enclosure for clear highs. The acoustic display also features a sealed enclosure that helps iPad mini achieve its IP67 rating.

So the idea is they vibrate the screen. That is the screen is your speaker. And this is very well established technology in the TV world. I think my TV and has it, but it's been it's been in TVs for years and years where I don't know why they do it in TVs, but they do like to I guess to make that try to make the sound feel like it's coming from the screen and not from like especially a flat screen.

like where are you going to put speakers? If you have a front facing, it's weird. And they all the TV makers want to have like no bezel type things where it just looks like a screen. So where do you put the speakers? Now they're firing backwards, they're firing upwards. I've got it. Why don't we just make the screen shake? And then some TVs went so far as to try to find like the person's mouth on the screen and make the sound come out of it.

You know, anyway, shaking the screen is a well-established technology, but I will tell you that shaking the screen is not an ideal speaker. There's a reason real speakers are not made of a gigantic piece of glass. 65 inches wide, right? So I think it's a good idea for an iPad though, but I do wonder how it's going to sound.

In my experience with televisions, it doesn't sound good. I don't know if it sounds better or worse than crappy TV speakers, but it sure doesn't sound as good as any kind of real speaker that's facing you. But for an iPad mini, they probably had crappy speakers already. Maybe it actually is better. And especially if they put like more drivers into it and again, sealing it up.

So there's like fewer places for stuff to go in. I didn't look up what IP67 is. I think the 6 is the dust and the 7 is like splash resistance or something, but not dunking. I thought it was the other way around. I'm not confident that that's right. Anyway, the whole idea of like, where are the holes? We've got the USB-C port, which I think is already pretty well sealed, but the speakers are always a problem because you got to make them like the Apple watch where you have like there has to be a hole for the speaker to work and when water fills it, we have a feature that pukes the water back out.

You know, the screen using the screen as a speaker basically solves that. And I think the iPad mini screen is big enough perhaps to get decent base out of it, whereas the watch screen probably isn't. So anyway, still no face ID in case you were wondering. This is not a tiny iPad Pro, even though it has an OLED screen.

It remains an iPad mini segmented into that place. Again, no promotion, no face ID, even though I feel like it could fit. Midnight and Starlight Colors. All the prices are up a hundred bucks. Nanotexture is also a hundred bucks and cellular is 150 extra pre-orders October 28th in stores, November 6th.

And also finally, they have a new smart folio case. Actually, I didn't put a link to that in there, so I don't know what it looks like. But yeah, they love the tech woven stuff. There's a tech woven case for the iPad mini. Marco, are you excited about this? Are you going to get one? I have already ordered one because the pre-order was earlier today.

I think this is going to be really fun. So I've gone back and forth with lots of iPad logistics over the years. At first, I tried to use it as a tablet. And then when the keyboard cases came out, I learned that it's so much nicer entering text with a keyboard than any other way.

And that really killed my love for the iPad mini because while keyboard cases do exist for the iPad mini, they're so much more cramped than the full size iPad ones that they're pretty hard to use. Also, Apple makes the best keyboard cases for iPads, and they don't even make one for the mini because it would be way too small.

So you're stuck with third-party ones that don't work as well and just aren't as well made, honestly. And so the external keyboard situation is pretty dire for the mini, and so I kind of fell out of the mini for a while. But the problem with the big iPads is that ever since they went to the Magic Keyboard especially, an iPad Pro with a keyboard is just really heavy and bulky.

And at that point, you're so close to a MacBook that you might as well just get a MacBook. And so that's what I've been doing. And so I really haven't used the big iPads much at all in recent years. But then I started working on Fineliner, which is a pencil-based drawing app, and it works really well.

on the iPad Mini. And the iPad Mini happens to be a really good size for what I want out of a note-taking device. It's great. And so I started using my iPad Mini again, and I've just been so happy using it. And what they've done here with this new one is they have not pushed the iPad Mini into being more of a laptop replacement.

they've made it much better at being what it already was. So to be a laptop replacement, you need keyboard input. You just need a keyboard simple as that. On-screen keyboards are nothing compared to a keyboard case. But what this is pushing into is both, you know, small pencil use and also consumption.

That's what many iPads, maybe even most iPads, are used for, is watching video and reading stuff and browsing the web and stuff like that. And I think for that, if you're not like having to type a lot of text, this is a great device.

Now, the new iPad Mini is only one gram heavier than the iPhone Duo. And the screen is significantly larger. It's in the same ballpark, but it's larger. And I think if what you want is roughly that size class device to use, you know, always open, you know, you can't fold it, obviously.

Or as our friend joked in Slack, you can fold it once. I was going to say, if you have this thing in your house, the fear is you're going to pick it up one day and try to fold it. Yeah. But as that device, as mostly a content consumption or very light productivity device or like note taking or, you know, something with the pencil, for that, it's awesome.

And, you know, look at what they're doing with this. They made it substantially lighter, a little thinner, and water resistant. And with Nanotexture, they're competing with Kindles. That's what that is. That's why they're doing that. Kindles are great with glare because they're e-ink.

So that's what Nanotexture is for in this context. And Kindles are water resistant. That's what that's for in this context. And so what this does is it takes a device that already, it doesn't do everything the iPad Pro does, but it does, it kind of goes in places the iPad Pro doesn't go.

And they've taken it and moved it further that way. It is way smaller and way lighter than the other iPads now. It has water resistance, which none of the other iPads do. And it is going to be much easier to hold in your hand for a long time.

And by the way, Nanotexture is way more affordable on this than on the iPad Pro. because the iPad Pro, I believe this is still the case, doesn't it still require the one terabyte configuration to get this one does require the not lowest config for Nanotexture. Yeah, but you can get it with 256 for 800 bucks.

This is a, it's a very different price point for Nanotexture on an iPad. And I also will point out that if you're, if you're comparing pricing this, I just said they were all a hundred dollars more than they used to be. That means 120 to 700, 256 is 800 and 512 is a thousand. And then plus 100 for Nanotexture. But that still means you can get two iPad Minis with iPad Minis, OLED iPad Minis with Nanotexture, tape them together and it costs as much as a duo.

That's the thing. So like the, the value of the duo is it's always with you. It's always in your pocket, weighing it down and pulling your pants down, but it's always in your pocket. but if what you want is a phone, is like the best phone and the best tablet in that approximate size class, I think what you want is an iPhone Pro and the new iPad mini, which the combination of which costs as much as the iPhone duo.

So, but, but then of course it is two separate devices, which has its pluses and minuses. I think mostly minuses. Don't discount the two iPad minis taped together. It's the ultimate duo. Just don't fold them together too hard. You'll crack the glass. Yeah. But anyway, so I did, I did order one of these.

What they've done is they've pushed the mini more pro, but not all like I do wish, I think everyone wishes they would have gone a little further because the mini has not been particularly inexpensive for most of its life.

Like you would think a lot of times Apple, like the smallest product is the cheapest one. And so they sell a whole bunch of them to people who just want the cheapest one or kids or whatever else. The iPad mini for most of its life has not been that. So the people who were using it are choosing it for other reasons. Over the last couple generations, they've tried to like, you know, do little things, upgrading it in minor ways here and there.

People mostly have complained about the screen quality not being very good. There was that tearing issue on the one two generations ago. They've made it OLED now. Awesome. And that's probably responsible for some of the significant weight and thickness savings. Awesome. They didn't go 60 hertz or they didn't go 120 hertz.

Why? Market segmentation. But they're pushing it into pro territory and all these other ways. That's why it has no face ID. I'm sure they could find a room for face ID in there, but they don't want to. What they have done is make it almost an iPad pro, but small, like an iPad pro mini.

And I will add that if you get the big one of these 512 nanotexture cellular, that's like 1200 bucks. That's a $1,200 iPad mini. Yeah. But the iPad pro is like starting in that range. I know. I'm just saying like it does there is it does creep into the iPad pro range, but like they didn't make this a tiny iPad pro.

They intentionally are not doing that there. It's also not as cheap as a Kindle, I will say, but it is it's still staking out that like I'm not a pro. I just have some whatever pro stuff has trickled down to me. And also for the chip a 20 pro. That's a current gen chip, whereas the mini usually gets a chip that's been out for like a half a year or something.

That's the thing. So like between the OLED and the and like the the faster chip and the nanotexture option, like they really are bringing a lot of proness to it. They just didn't go further. Now, I don't blame for, you know, for it not being an M5 chip like that's fine because this is a much smaller device that that would probably not fit the power envelope.

And they might not update this for two years to sure. But to to push the iPad mini into being even better of an iPad mini, I think that's a very good choice. And I'm honestly I'm looking forward to this significantly. I think I'm going to end up using it a lot because of my new fineliner business.

And just because I'm getting into this, you know, as like a pen tablet, I think it's gonna be awesome. All right. M6 iMac. John, take us through it. All right. So there's two versions just like there was with the M4 iMac and I think the one before it and the two versions are two thunderbolt ports and four thunderbolt ports, which is a very straightforward way to describe the differences between these computers.

To be clear, it is the same form factor that it has been in the past, the colorful, very flat iMacs. It's available in all the same colors and every model is available in all the colors. I couldn't tell archive.org was failing me. If this is new, I seem to recall that at one point maybe the two thunderbolt ports model you can only get in two colors or something.

At least the very cheapest configuration of it. It was only like it was like the more boring set of colors. And but it was still it wasn't like only, you know, silver. it was it just it was like four colors versus seven or whatever. I think they're all available in all colors, but it was hard to tell. Maybe I was fooled by the configurator.

Anyway, the two thunderbolt port ones gets a binned M6 because this is the M6 iMac. And the binned one is down one performance core and down one efficiency core and down two GPU cores. And then the four thunderbolt ports gets an unbinned M6, which is nice.

RAM, you get 16 or 24 for 200 bucks more. And on the four thunderbolt ports one, you have the 32 gig option. And that also bumps up the SSD to 512. So it's basically a $400 RAM upgrade plus a $200 SSD upgrade. Apple loves doing this because it makes my eyes cross when I try to figure out the pricing and specs and these things, but they tie features together.

And so when you change one, it changes another. It's very confusing. For storage, the two thunderbolt ports one has 256, 512 and one terabyte. And the four thunderbolt ports one has two terabytes. And the upgrades are 200 to go to 512, 500 to go to one terabyte, and a thousand to go to two terabytes.

Nanotexture is extra 200 bucks. It is a 24 inch screen. It was a one extra 100 bucks to operate the iPad mini. And I think the iMac is more than two Mac mini screens, but whatever. Don't try to do the math. It's significantly more than two Mac mini screens.

For wireless, I think it has got the new N1 chip because it's got Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. It used to be 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Ethernet was one gigabits when you got it. But now for the two thunderbolt port model, at $30 extra, you can get the little like power cord ethernet adapter because there's no room in the thickness of the device for ethernet.

It's the same as it's always been. But the difference is for that 30 bucks, you get 2.5 gigabit ethernet. And the four thunderbolt port one comes with the ethernet thing at no additional cost. So look at that. An iMac with 2.5 gigabit per second ethernet. Very impressive. For input, the magic mouse is no cost and the magic trap pad is an additional 50 bucks.

Keyboard with touch ID is the same as it was. This really annoys me. If you get the two thunderbolt port one, you get for free magic keyboard with lock key, which is their way of saying you don't get a keyboard with touch ID. Not because the Mac doesn't support it. You just don't get one. If you buy the two thunderbolt port Mac and you want a keyboard with touch ID, that's 80 bucks extra.

And the only choice you have, I think, in the configurator is magic keyboard with touch ID and numeric keypad. So if you want a small keyboard with touch ID, your only choice is to get the fourth thunderbolt port model because then you get the magic keyboard with touch ID at no additional cost or the extended version of that for $30 extra.

And the reason this is all weird with the iMac, like, can I just get it with no keyboard and buy my thing separate? Apparently not. But also remember, every single thing in the iMac is color matched. And I think it was the case that Apple wouldn't sell you the color match parts, but I think you can get them now. But anyway, it's an annoying situation.

Come on. It's the M6 model. You can't put touch ID everywhere. I'm not even asking for face ID anymore. That's how beaten down I am. Just put, give touch ID an idea. So sad. The price for two thunderbolt port starts at $1,500 and for four starts at $1,700. Pre-order narrow now available in stores November 6th.

Looks like a basic straightforward part swap for the iMac to keep it up to date. And the M6 is pretty good. I give this computer mostly a thumbs up. Cool. All right. Wednesday today as we sit and record. Oh, no, I'm skipping one.

I'm skipping one. Shoot. Sorry. Tuesday still, we got the M6 MacBook Pro. This is a, the base model MacBook Pro and there's a new one. Yeah. I mean, this is very much like the iMac where they took an existing computer and pulled out its, you know, SOC and put in a new one.

It's got the M6 with all cores working on all the models, which is nice. But if you get the one with 16 gigs of RAM, you get slower RAM. Again, it's like, I think we talked about this on which computer, I forget. Some of the computer we talked about recently, Apple did the same thing.

If you get 16 gigs of RAM, you get 153 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth. If you get 24 or 32 gigs of RAM, you get 170 gigabytes per second of memory bandwidth. And why? They use slower RAM chips in the 16 gig model.

Awesome. All right. You got to save money somewhere and that's how they're doing it. Your RAM choices are 16, 24 and 32. If you're upgrading from 16, it's plus 200 for the 24 and plus 400 for the 32. Storage is one, two and four terabytes going to two cost you a $500 extra going to four cost you $1,500 extra.

The screen is the same as the old M4 MacBook Pro. It's a thousand nits SDR, 1300 nits HDR. Promotion nanotexture is 150 extra. 70 watt charger to no cost. 96 watt charger for 20 bucks extra. You get nickel and dime for everything here.

Unchanged size and weight essentially. Prices start at two grand pre-order now in stores November 6th. A nice update with the M6 and it is the only, as we'll soon see, the only MacBook Pro with an M6 in it. Yeah.

All right. So that's a thing. But now we get to the good stuff and we're going to stop our speed run. I think we did okay. Look at us. Look at us. I think I'm very proud of us. Yeah. All right. So now we're going to be here for another six hours talking about the MacBook Pro OLED. This happened earlier today.

If you'll permit me a two-minute digression, at 10 o'clock this morning, I'm sitting there refreshing Apple.com and refreshing the Apple YouTube site or whatever. I keep refreshing, keep refreshing, 10, 10.05, 10.10, 10.15. I'm not doing this like literally every second like an iPhone.

Look at the live blogs, man. Well, hold on. I'm not doing this like an iPhone order, but I'm doing this every like minute or two to see what's going on. At like 10.15, I'm like, why have they not put anything up? It was Pacific time. It's Pacific time. Way to go. Way to go, Casey.

Good work. Just what are we even doing here? I knew it was in LA. What am I even doing? Anyway, so at one when I was at lunch, that's when all this dropped. And yeah, there's a press, a newsroom article, we'll link in the show notes.

There's a like two minute product intro. There's also a one minute like commercial. John, take us through what do we got here? Yeah. So what is this book that everyone thinks they're referencing? I'm not familiar enough to the book to know, but the longer commercial says if you give a Mac an OLED, is that if you give a mouse some cheese or something?

Cookie? Are you familiar with that? Give a mouse a cookie? That one? Yeah. Give a mouse, what is that? Is that a kid's book? I don't know. I've just heard that phrase. You're asking the wrong person. All right. Anyway, people are saying that references that the ads are a little bit weird, but let's start with the name of this product. It is not MacBook Ultra.

It is not MacBook Studio. As the invitation said, Pro Intel, and, you know, they said we're here to talk to you about new MacBook Pros, and they sure did. The press release calls it this. MacBook Pro with all caps P-R-O-L-E-D XDR display.

So, MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR display. Elsewhere on Apple.com, they say MacBook Pro ProLED XDR display, or in the pop-up menu on the comparator, they say MacBook Pro 14 inch ProLED XDR display, parentheses, M5 Max. Woof.

All right, Sony. Oh, gracious. So, yes. Do you get it? It's a MacBook Pro, and it's got an OLED, Pro, OLED, ProLED. I don't think ProLED is a nice phrase. I also don't like to see it all caps. Also, keep in mind that ProLED, in all caps, comes after the word PRO.

So, it's MacBook Pro ProLED, but they didn't stop there. XDR, got to keep going, display. Awful. Awful product name. Yeah, it's not good. Awful capitalization. Very silly. ProLED sounds a little bit like ProLapse.

I don't like it. Wow. Wow. Gracious, John. Don't like it. All right, anyway, let's get to the good news. The lineup Apple logo is back. Oh, my God. I'm so happy. That is the best part. This is, this is, we are three old men. Totally get that. This is the old manniest old man thing to be excited about, but I'm so excited for this.

No, I really am. Because it, when Turner's posted that teaser with like the bat signal kind of style of like projecting it, I was, I was thinking, oh, my God, is the light up Apple going to be back? Because like, oh, I'm so happy. Because here's the thing. There is no purpose that it serves. It is just there for delight.

And that is something that Apple used to do a lot. And they really didn't do it much past about, about exactly 10 years ago. When they launched. That's when they removed the light up Apple logo in 2016. Yes. When, when they launched the touch bar generation of MacBook Pros that had the butterfly keyboard and removed all the ports and everything that they removed.

They like stripped away all of these little delights. I am happy to see this back for a lot of reasons. But number one, I think it shows kind of just as a, it probably doesn't matter in a big way if you look at it objectively.

But what it shows is Apple's current leadership likes computers again and likes Apple's computers again. And that, you know, what, kind of like the big like dark night of the soul that we all went through from 2016 to about 2020 was like it seemed like Apple hated the Mac themselves.

And we were like, but we, we love the Mac. Why don't you love the Mac? It's kind of scary if the people making the Mac don't seem to love the Mac that much. And, and it was that kind of like super like extreme minimalism, Johnny Ivan, Tim Cook stripping everything away, kind of like we hate computers.

Don't you hate computers? Let's make them as minimal as possible. And, but, but no, we don't hate computers. We love computers and you're the only company that makes the computers that we love. So we kind of need you to love them. And what, what's amazing about this update?

You know, we went into this kind of showing our damage from that, from that period saying like, oh, they, the rumors are going to make them lighter. Are they going to cut the batteries down? Like, are they going to, and I was worried too, like, are they going to take away any other ports? Like, are we still using the SD card slot enough that we can still keep it please?

I was worried. What are they going to take away? What is it going to cost us? because their updates during that time period, it was always like, all right, we took one step forward and three steps back. We made it better in this one way, but worse in the other ways that matter to you.

And what's amazing about this update is that as far as we can tell so far, they didn't take anything away. They just made it better. That is amazing. It seems so, you know, the battery capacities are exactly the same in watt hours.

It's on the spec pages. They didn't shrink the batteries at all. Well, we don't know if they shrunk them, but they have the same power. Well, yeah, they didn't shrink the battery capacity at all. Like, it isn't there. They aren't just playing tricks with like, oh, it's 24 hours now and it was 24 hours before. Nope. There's no benchmark tricks like that.

The literal watt hour capacity of the batteries is the same. All of the ports are still there. As far as anyone can tell, I think the keyboard seems the same. Like, it seems like they didn't make any parts of it worse. They just got gains.

Well, except the price, but they got gains from converting the panel to OLED and that seems like a lot of the weight gain or the weight loss was from losing some of the backlighting components and all that stuff. If that's true, and so far it seems to be, it's just better.

That's exactly what a product update needs to be. It's just better. And for, I would say, probably their most important product for most diehard Apple fans, that's really important. Most important product for their pro users, like kind of like, trying to characterize it as weird, because it's not their best-selling Mac, it's not their most important product, that's the iPhone, but it's like their most important high-end product, I guess.

Most important high-end Mac. Lots of adjectives get put in here, but the MacBook Pro is kind of the standard bearer for the entire Mac platform at this point, because most people buy laptops, this is the top laptop, and even though it didn't get a new name, it just got the stupid suffix, this is the top of the MacBook Pro line, as that ends by the price, which we'll get to.

Yeah, but this, I'm just, I'm so, I'm so happy to see this. Like, again, like, it does show our damage, like, how much we were, honestly, gaslit for a few years there, to whatever degree that a computer can do that to a fan group, but it was, it was a rough time being a fan of these computers for like four years, things like this, and they've just been getting better and better and better since then, and again, like, the rumors came around, they were going to redesign the MacBook Pro, and we all were like, uh-oh, you know, getting a little nervous.

No, this shows, Ternus has his head on right, like, and I think this, this bodes very well for the Ternus era in hardware. We don't know how he's going to handle a lot of other stuff yet. You know, he's, he's very new to the job. We'll see how, you know, things like policy decisions, like, look, it remains to be seen, but I think this is showing, like, the hardware is in a really good place and is, and just keeps getting better in all the right ways.

I'm so happy to see that, and to bring back the logo, the glowing logo on the lid, it's like, oh, finally, fun, and, like, a little bit of whimsy and a little bit of respect to what we used to love about this, like, you know, enjoying Apple's past, like, celebrating things that people love about their computers.

That's all here, and I'm so here for it. Keep in mind that the laptops got fixed when Tim Cook was still CEO, whenever that was, 2021 or whatever, when they finally fixed the laptops and gave it the good keyboard and put the ports back on, and this, this, these models, these pro-led things were started several years ago, so this is all under Tim Cook, these projects are happening.

So the turnaround had already happened. Now, granted, Ternus was in charge of hardware that whole time, so it's fair to treat it to him as well, but the battle had already been won, so in some ways it was a little bit, again, maybe, like, irrationally worried for us to think, oh, maybe they're going to screw them up. It's like, well, what has changed inside Apple that would cause them to screw up something, given that these computers were started three years ago?

And the answer is nothing, and so here we have them, they're normal. Although I will say, for the light of Apple logo, someone somewhere inside Apple slightly gave in to the urge to make the logo bigger, as they say, because I do feel like the Apple on the back of the thing is a little bit bigger than it should be.

It's fine, it's fine, it's just a little bit too big. Maybe they'll fix it in the next one. And unlike, I don't know how actually this works, because I don't think I was watching teardowns when it happened, but people are saying that back in the day when they had the glowing Apple logo, the backlight, the either LED or cold cathode, whatever, backlight of the then-LCD displays is what you were seeing through the Apple logo.

I don't actually know if that's true, but I'm pretty sure it's not true with OLED, which means that the light-up Apple logo has its own lights, which means they could do an RGB stripe color one someday. I don't think they will, they probably never will, but third parties will maybe crack that sucker open and figure out a way to do it.

But anyway, everyone who has gone to the event has said and shown that it dims with the monitor, so if you dim the display down with the brightness keys, the thing on the back dims as well. I would imagine it has to be independently controllable somehow, because those two things aren't actually connected, it's all just software keeping them in sync.

And I do wonder if in a dark classroom or something it would be convenient to be able to like, you know, cut the light on your external thing, but maybe it doesn't make a difference, but I'm sure some will figure it out. Down to some bad news, these MacBook Ultra rumors had our heads spinning with all the things that it could be and all our hopes and fears, and one of our hopes was cellular.

Nope. Nope. You would think, given how astonishingly expensive these are, which we'll get to, you would think that maybe they could find a way to throw some cellular in there. Nope. All right. Well, you know, look, this didn't take something away.

We never had it. We still don't. There you go. And still no face ID, obviously. All right. Let's get to the screen. Let's talk about the screen. Tandem OLED, which is what Apple's been doing for their OLEDs and all their things. It's 14 inch and the 14 inch, well, the 14 inch screen is 22 pixels wider than the non-OLED version.

According to Apple's animation on their own website, when they like zoom in on like the pixels of the display, they show the sub pixel arrangement. And I heard some people saying, I've never seen a sub pixel arrangement like that. They're on every single OLED monitor and television. This is the classic OLED arrangement of RGB, but it's like a red, a green rectangle on top of a red square and to the right of that a taller blue rectangle.

It is not what the current fashion in OLED displays is, which is RGB stripe, where they do a red, green, and a blue stripe, just like they are in LEDs. RGB stripe OLEDs do exist. Many manufacturers sell them in very many different shapes and sizes on big monitors, small monitors, phones, blah, blah, blah.

This doesn't have one. It's not as big a deal on the Mac because macOS many, many years ago stopped doing subpixel anti-aliasing, which is where they use the R, the G, and the B subpixels as a way to make jaggy lines by using individual subpixels. The Mac hasn't done that in years and doesn't.

But if you're using an OS that does do that, like Windows, if you don't have an RGB stripe subpixels, pixel layout and you try to look at text, they get weird color fringing on them. I don't think it will be noticeable on this. Have you noticed it on your phone? Because guess what? Your phone doesn't have an RGB stripe screen either and hasn't in the entire OLED era.

So just FYI, this is not an RGB stripe OLED. I still think RGB stripe OLEDs are nicer if only because of the, I think this is what they call the pixel aperture ratio, like how much of each pixel is light up and how much is not. If you look at the subpixel thing on Apple's page, you'll see, boy, a lot of that pixel is just black space.

With RGB stripe, if you can shrink it, then you get a red, a green, and a blue stripe pretty close to each other. So most of the pixel is light up and that helps with brightness and power use and all sorts of other stuff. So anyway, it's an amazing screen, but be aware it is not RGB stripe. Apple says that the touch center is built directly into the display panel, not layered on top of it, reducing latency so users feel like they're touching the content itself, blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, I think that's pretty much standard. One of their ads, the short version, or maybe it's a long one, one of their videos says burn-in protection, and then it's never mentioned again. And I can't find anything on Apple's website. What do you mean burn-in protection?

There's lots of different kinds of burn-in protection. There's pixel cycling where they provision extra pixels on the display, not pixel cycling, like pixel shifting where they provision extra pixels and then move the display around a few pixels at a time so that it's not in the same exact place.

There's, you know, static logo detection where they did, there's all stuff from the TV industry. None of these things can really help in the end because if you have some element that's on your screen and it's very bright and it doesn't move, shifting it around is just going to smear the burn-in edges, which is better than a sharp burn-in edge, but it's still burn-in.

And reminder, burn-in on OLED is because the pixels have organic material in them that wears out the more you use it. And the more you use it, meaning how bright are you driving these pixels in whatever, these subpixels in whatever color. So that's just the nature of OLED. Over time, they wear out.

They have compensation cycles that they run where they try to figure out how much the pixels have worn out and try to underdrive the other pixels around them so it continues to maintain an even display. Again, this is nothing new. Our phones have had OLED forever. Our iPads have had OLED for a pretty long time.

Now a Mac has OLED. Granted, a Mac has a different environment than your phone. Your phone is, you know, even with the always-on display that's kind of dim and you're turning it on and off and putting it away. Same thing with iPads. A Mac could be on all the time. Maybe it's bringing back the purpose of screensavers.

Back in the day with CRTs, you know, there was like a reason for it. And now with OLEDs, maybe there's a reason for screensaver. We saw just pretty images just to get changing pixels on your screen. But maybe for next week, I would love to learn more about what Apple is doing for burn-in protection because they did mention it.

Oh, here's another no. It does have a touchscreen. We'll get to that in a second. We didn't mention it before. Sorry. We just assume you all know the rumors. Anyway, no Apple Pencil support. I mean, of course. So you can touch the screen, but you can't poke it. That's, look, having experimented a lot with the Apple Pencil, with the iPhone Duo, with like it not being good on a Surface, you're not going to like flip your laptop up on its screen so that it's against the desk.

They'd have to have the screen like bend around backwards, you know, like other things do. Yeah, like original tablet PCs. The convertible type tablet PCs did that. Yeah, that's you don't want that. Yeah. So anyway, just FYI. No, touchscreen doesn't mean pencil, no pencil support. It's ProMotion 120 hertz, 1,000 nits sustained, 2,000 nits max, which is really nice.

And they'll do 1,000 nits sustained. So they'll do 1,000 nits in SDR for like outdoors and 2,000 peak. Nanotexture is 150 bucks extra. The non-nanotexture has what Apple says is a state-of-the-art anti-reflective coating.

I don't know if that means just the same anti-reflective coating they've always had on the screen, but they made a little bit of hay about how their anti-reflective coating is better and supposedly better for touching the screen as well. It's also got all the Apple's color calibration stuff with their Apple color matching function 2026 that we talked about in the past episode.

It supports Genlock so you can synchronize with a well here's I'll read Apple's thing because honestly I don't know what Genlock is. With support for Genlock MacBook Pro with Pro XDR display synchronizes the display's refresh rate with the camera's capture to minimize ghosting, tearing, and other visual artifacts.

There you go. It's syncing with the camera. So what you're seeing on the screen is in sync with what the camera is seeing in its sensor. And finally for the screen it has a dynamic island instead of a notch which we talked about at length about how this would manifest itself. I still think it's a little weird but software wise Apple is doing what you would expect.

So now that it's a dynamic island and not a notch everything expands from that area. I don't know if it does this on the notch ones you guys can tell me but do they do the same thing with like when you do Siri does it pop out of the notch or does it just go in the middle of your screen? It just pops up in the middle of the screen. Yeah well with this one everything comes out of the new dynamic island.

So if you have like a live activity thing if you're someone sending you airdrop and it says accept decline on my Mac I see the accept decline thing in the upper right corner as a notification but on this thing it grows out of the dynamic island top center of your screen. The dynamic island is very small. It is like it's not a circle but it's like a very very small it's almost like two circles connected by straight lines when the two circles are touching each other.

It is very small but because there's a dynamic island and not a notch it does not go to the top of the screen. So there's a bunch of light up pixels above the dynamic island. That's what makes it an island. I think that's a little silly because what am I what benefit am I getting from that?

If it was up to me I would say could you move that dynamic island up so it touches the top of the screen and becomes a notch so I get more pixels below it because that's what's more important to me is the pixels below it. And in one of Apple screenshots they show the dynamic island. First of all in all their screenshots they show it with the I forget if this is the default but they show it with the not visible menu bar like where the menu bar has no background whatsoever.

Right. That's how they want you to think of the display like oh the menu bar it's barely even there it's just words floating on nothing. And then the dynamic island is between the words they show like this is some 3d program that has so many menus that they span through the dynamic island.

So it's like volume mo graph character. The next menu title is animate but it doesn't fit between the character menu title and the dynamic island. So there's a bunch of blank space. Then there's the dynamic island. Then it says animate simulate tracker.

These are all menu you know menu bar menu title names. And then I look at the dynamic island and I'm like is that dynamic island lower than the bottom of where the menu bar background would be because if you move that dynamic island up so it touched the top of the screen you could make the menu bar narrower and get back some pixels.

I don't know. I mean it just I'm bothered by I'm bothered by this thing taking up space on my screen vertical space to be clear not horizontal space vertical space I'm bothered because again like the whole point of this is like well if it wasn't there we'd have to have the camera in the bezel and you would lose those things anyway. It's like it's all a bonus.

I get it. But moving it down from the top of the screen is not a win for me. So I'm not I mean I don't even use laptops but I'm not a particular fan of this. I do love how tiny it is. It's very very tiny width wise. It's much tinier than the notch. We're getting there but I don't like those light of pixels above it.

Sorry. Yeah. Well I mean I'm sure it won't bother most people touch support. Now we're getting to it so it is it's a touchscreen. Okay. So a bunch of people have input on this and they really for in the little presentation that they gave which apparently was not very long. It was not live screened but a lot of people in the audience have shown segments on it so I feel like I've watched the entire thing.

Turnus came out and said we got new Macbook pros. They have touch. They have Apple logo. Here they go and go into the room and take a look at them. It was longer than that but it was not much longer. So here's Stephen Levy at Wired quoting John Turnus talking about touch stuff. Because of course everyone's going you said you're never going to touch the Mac.

You said touch isn't good on the Mac. Blah blah blah. Anyway so here's Turnus explaining it. The Mac is first and foremost an indirect input device built around the trackpad and keyboard but I think there's times when it's comfortable and handy to have touch. We need to get to a point where adding touch didn't make the product lesser in any way.

It didn't make it heavier. It didn't make it thicker. That came together with the OLED screen the best display we ever put in a Mac. All these things and oh yeah it has touch as well. So Turnus' explanation and this is very clear both in what Turnus says and what all the other C-level executives are saying. Also in the developer videos that we're going to talk about in a little bit.

Every piece of Apple messaging is the same. The Mac is for keyboard and mouse trackpad whatever. That's the Mac interface. But it also has touch now. And that is reflected in the software they provide as well. Because that's the question all the people are asking.

You said we would never do touch. Touch sucks on the Mac. It's uncomfortable. You shouldn't do whatever and what they're trying to say is we wanted to do it in a way that didn't compromise the thing at all. And it's not going to become a touch device. It's just not. It's a Mac. You use a keyboard. You use a trackpad. It's got a pointer.

It's indirect input. Which again, greats because the Mac was the original direct input. But anyway, in the modern day, in the age of touch screens, the Mac has indirect input and it still does and they're not changing that and they keep emphasizing it. More from Jaws. Greg Jaws justifying the, you said Apple would never do this.

He says, most pros own an iPad and almost every pro owns a phone, an iPhone. So this is something they're natural with. There's a generation of young creators and young people using our MacBook pros that expect to touch. Well, I think they expect to touch because every other laptop in the world has touch.

Also true. Right. Like, and they're right, you know, because these people grew up on iPhones, they expect to touch it and everything expects to have a touch screen. But that's the reality. We talked about this many, many times on this show before these were even like any kind of a concrete rumor that it just makes sense for Apple to add touch because we all see people just stab at the screen with their finger and are kind of surprised when it and disappointed when it doesn't work.

And does that mean the Mac is going to become a touch interface? No, but it just means every once in a while it's a convenient thing to do. And for a limited amount of things, it's actually better than using a mouse or a trackpad in some ways. And they even got Johnny Cerugian because remember, he's not just the chip guy anymore.

He's the new John Ternus. He's the hardware guy. So Cerugi says Mac touch also involves custom silicon, of course, and a re-architected thermal system to prevent the display from feeling hot when people pinch stretch and swipe on it. I haven't used enough touchscreen laptops to know if the screen getting warm is a problem, but I suppose it could be.

Well, no, it's a problem with the way that MacBook Pros have vented their heat has basically been they suck air in through those slots like under the palm rests and they blow it out through the hinge. So I don't think it's necessarily a problem with other laptops as much as it would be a problem with Apple's previous thermal design if they didn't change it.

I think they still do the same. They say it involves custom silicon, but they don't elaborate. I'm not sure what the custom silicon is. And then re-architected thermal system would be what you're saying, Marco. Maybe they're sending the hot air out somewhere else. I don't know, but we'll see when they tear these things down. I wonder if maybe because the screen is so bright, I wonder if maybe they somehow have slots in it so that the main fans of the laptop can shoot some air through the screen too?

No. Let's do it. So what they do in the TV world, TV manufacturers will buy OLED panels from the one or two makers that make whatever OLED panel they need. But then what the TV makers will do to differentiate their TV set from other people who use the exact same panel is they will all have some kind of innovative, whatever, some kind of proprietary material they slap on the back of the OLED to dissipate heat.

We have a special honeycomb graphite layer. we have a special heat spreading copper or whatever. Like everyone's got something that they stick on the back of the OLED to pull heat away from the OLED. And I'm assuming that's what they mean, that they also bought an OLED screen from LG or Samsung or wherever the hell makes this.

And then they stuck their own proprietary heat sucking thing to the back of it. That's got to be it. But we'll see with the teardowns. This is Stephen Levy continuing here. Surujic intends that the current touchscreen laptops suffer from wobble when fingers make contact with the display.

To minimize this effect, Apple has redesigned the hinge on the MacBook Pro to stabilize it. So I'm very interested to see a teardown of like comparison of the hinge on the OLED MacBook Pro to the non-OLED one. But that's a claim right from Surujic that the other laptop wobble and ours, I guess, wobbles less.

Because as you said, Marco, it's not like you're going to, you know, if you push your finger on the top of a laptop display, it's gone over. It's just going to happen. That's also how you adjust it. Like, it can't be too hard to push because that's how you operate it. Yeah, and opening and everything.

We'll see. Like, they've always had the variable effort where it's like it's easy in the beginning but not too easy. It is a delicate balance. Apple has done pretty well with hinges setting aside the Duo screen thing, which we will talk about in the next episode, people. Don't worry. But that's the claim.

We'll definitely have to check that out. Now, here is an article from Wired with Terrence O'Brien and Antonio G. D. Benedetto. Oh, no, not Wired. The Verge. Sorry. They say, Apple is adjusting macOS to handle touch by magnifying some controls when you poke at them, like the red, yellow, and green traffic light buttons in the top left corner of Windows to close, minimize, and maximize an app.

Similarly, tapping to open a drop-down menu magnifies it, giving you a bigger target. And while MacBook Pro hinges are pretty solid, yes, you can make it wobble pretty easily with some firm taps on the top of the screen. So there's two things. One is commenting on the wobble. Yes, you can still make it wobble. They don't comment on whether it's better or worse than it was before.

And then the adjustments to macOS. They posted this before Apple started posting its own videos, one of which we'll link, which is designed for touch on Mac. And they go through and explain in this video pretty succinctly, here's what we're doing. And their answer is, everything looks the same.

Nothing looks different. Everything measures the same. Your apps aren't going to break. The Mac is a keyboard and indirect input device. But we added touch support. And that's the message. And it is very clear and it is refreshing as a Mac developer that they haven't like made a giant Fisher-Price version of macOS or they haven't broken the layout in every single one of our apps.

But they have done a tremendous amount of work behind the scenes to make macOS touch-capable without changing any of that stuff. And I don't envy them because so much stuff, especially in like AppKit, which is a framework dating back to, I think, the late 80s, early 90s when it was, you know, the next step, open step days.

That's where all this came from. When they were making that UI toolkit, they didn't have a notion of multi-touch on desktop computers. It's like you have one pointer and you can click it somewhere and you can click it on a single control at a time and then you move it and you have dragging and it's like, what do you mean multiple points on the display that are being quote unquote clicked at the same time?

What do you mean multiple things are dragging and we have to track all of them? Like that breaks everything. It breaks everything having to do with anything. So to begin with how they're handling this. First, they had to map all the gestures of like, what does it mean to tap? What does it mean to double tap? And they had to map that to stuff. So like, you know, a click with, uh, they say trackpad, but I'm going to say mouse clicking with the mouse is tapping on the screen.

Double clicking is the same as double tapping. Drag or flick with two fingers is the same as drag or flick with one finger. There's a trackpad, you know, when you do two fingers on a trackpad, it's scrolling. That's one finger on the screen because you don't have to take two fingers on the screen to like scroll Safari Windows, just like on an iPad.

Pinch is the same in both places. Context menu is tap with two fingers on a trackpad, but on the screen you tap and hold, uh, and then drag is click and drag on a trackpad. And on the touch screen, it is tap, hold, and drag.

And they demo this. When you tap and hold, the context menu appears, but just ignore that and start to drag. So they've kind of overloaded that one gesture, which is tap and hold, but they're basically out of gestures. They didn't want to make you do two fingers or whatever. And there's other stuff built into macOS, like three fingers swiping on the screen to go back and forth on apps, three fingers swiping up on the screen to do like expose and all that stuff.

It's what you expect. The next clever thing they've done is what they call expanding controls. And I'm encompassing two things in that. They just talked about one, but one way of expanding controls is they just made the touch areas of controls bigger without making the controls bigger. Kind of like the letter E on the keyboard is it's the same size visually, but when they think the letter of the word is going to be E, the actual touch target for the letter E is much bigger.

They do that with all the controls and all their framework. So like they show like a save button that looks the same size as it always been. But guess what? The touch area extends beyond the bounds of the save button. Same thing with, you know, checkboxes and pop-up menus or whatever. The thing on the screen is the same size, but the part that you can touch with your fat finger is much bigger.

And they claim the bigger area is coincidentally exactly the old 44 points on the original iPhone size that they always said, like a minimum touch target of 40. Nevermind, they violate this all the time, but they're saying that it's whatever it is on Mac screen, it's 36 points and that is equivalent to 44 points on the with the old iOS guidelines.

So bully for them for making a matchup exactly. as for the controls that actually visually expand, we talked about this rumor a while ago and it is much more tame than I thought it was going to be. So some examples from the video, if you pull down a menu from the menu bar with a mouse or a track bed, it looks normal.

But if you tap that menu with your finger, every item in the menu is spaced out more. It's not double the spacing, it's maybe like 20% more space in between them, but it just makes it easier to tap the item you want or to drag down to the item you want with your finger.

And they show it side by side. Basically, your menus get taller. I suppose this could break some people's layout because I never expected that menu to go off the end of the screen, but the menuing system will handle that and just having a scroll. But that's one way of expanding controls. Another one, this is the one near and dear to my heart, currently working on an app that has about 50 of these controls in it, the stepper control, where you have a text field and then like an up and a down arrow and you can make the number in the text field go up and down.

That may be the smallest standard control in macOS because the stepper is the same height as the text field, but the stepper has an up like little chevron and a down thing. So it's half the height of a text field. That's how big the buttons are.

It's fine to hit them with a trackpad or mouse because you got a little pointer and it's very accurate and you have pixel precision with it, but try hitting the up or down stepper with your finger. That's really hard. So the way they do it is if you touch that little stepper, the little stepper control expands to be like four times the height and twice the width it was before with big, fat, friendly, touch friendly buttons.

So you touch it once and it's like, whoop, and it zooms out into this big capsule of touch size controls. So then you can go tap, tap, tap, up, up, down. You can drag between them. That's very clever. Sliders, they do the same thing. Sliders are fine to control with your finger, but what if the slider is really short and when you put your finger on it, you can't even see where it is in the slider anymore because maybe the slider is only twice the width of your finger.

Now when you tap a slider, it zooms out to be this big, giant slider floating above your UI and then you can use it more easily. And then the final example that gave was a control that I haven't seen in ages, but it's the little like circular volume dial control that is about the same, again, about the same height as a text field and you can like rotate it.

You tap that sucker and it becomes, I don't know, 10 times the height with a little, uh, touch thumb that you can scroll around with. So again, this only happens when you touch it with your finger. When you use it with the mouse, it's the same as it always does. When you touch it with your finger, some bigger thing appears.

That first touch doesn't count towards using the control. It just makes the bigger control appear and then you use it with your finger. And that's basically it. That's what they've done to macOS to make it more touch friendly. Setting aside all the other stuff of like, of course, you can pinch and zoom in maps and you can swipe to scroll and, you know, all the things that you would expect to work everywhere.

If you're using an iPad app or iPhone app in the iPhone simulator, now you can just touch it on your screen. I know that's, I know you keep your things up in clamshell mode, but that might actually be useful to actually touch your, you know, simulator thing instead of using the weird, like, uh, virtual circular fingers or holding an option or whatever the heck you do these days.

Whatever the kids these days do. They're option keys. I don't know. Do you guys do stuff in the, you have to use your apps in the simulator. You're not always using it on device, right? Correct. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know, but if you have, you have your, uh, desktop laptop and clamshell mode, you're not going to be able to take advantage of this.

So you should open the display up and now you can touch it. You can touch it in the simulator. Oh yeah. One of the other things they showed in lots of the software demos, this is not a sort of OS level framework thing, although it kind of is they showed like, I don't know what app this is. Let's pretend it's logic, but some app that has like a, a on screen representation of the level sliders that you would see in like physical level sliders and like a music studio.

And you can just move four of them at once, put four fingers on the screen, grab them, go them up or, you know, like it's something you can't do with the mouse because the mouse, you click one of the virtual sliders, but in, you always see them in like the, you know, seventies music studio, you got your hands on the sliders and they're moving multiple sliders at the same time. Go ahead. Of course, they show an onscreen piano keyboard.

Now you can play piano with multiple fingers on your screen. Couldn't do that before the mouse cursor. So yeah, all the normal stuff that you would think would work does work. And how practical is that? How many people are going to be adjusting the, the faders with multiple fingers on the screen of their laptop? I don't know, but it's a thing you can do now because it is a multi touch screen.

Honestly, I think this is a great way to have done it. And we've been saying for years, like they probably do need to add touch screens to their laptops because everything else is a touch screen in everyone's lives. Young people expect every screen to be a touch screen. Many people touch their laptops now because they are accustomed to touching everything else in their lives of all ages.

And we've talked about I pinch and zoom paper magazines sometimes. Yeah, exactly. Like we've all done that your brain at this point. We've all done it at least once. And so I think enough people expect screens to be touchable and to respond to things like pinching and scrolling that if you're if you have a major computing device that doesn't have touch screen input now it feels broken to a lot of people.

So they had to do it and they didn't. I'm glad they didn't basically turn Mac OS into iPad OS to do it. They did like little adjustments here and there. But for the most part Mac OS will still look and work the same way as it did before when everyone's not touching it.

That is exactly the right amount of accommodation that I think it deserves. And so again I think they did a really nice job so far. I mean we haven't used it yet so we'll see what it's like in use. I don't personally plan to touch my screen almost ever.

One thing I will be curious to see is like with the new screen you know they've raised on the whole laptop. There's a whole new screen stack in there. Will it be better and maybe this is part of the consideration for like making it touchable and maintaining that long term.

Will it be better at resisting the keyboard imprint problem on the screen. And if you do get the keyboard imprint will it be more easily cleanable. Why do you think it would be better. Because if they are making a screen that's designed to be touched maybe they've made it a little more cleanable.

That's what I'm hoping for. Yeah I don't know about that. I mean again you know it's kind of you know I know it's a bit of a stretch a bit of a wish list item there but since it will now be even dirtier for many people because they will be touching it regularly that would be nice to have.

Maybe all the fingerprints will hide the key cat you know because you see it now because the key grease makes little like squares right. So maybe there'll be so many fingerprints that'll just be like it'll blend in. Anyway I don't plan on touching my screen but I'm glad that it's there. Getting back to the hardware finally. It comes in space black and silver.

No new colors. The SoC. I saw Gruber. Gruber is obviously not keeping up too much with the rumors or doesn't believe them anyway. It's like people are saying that there's not going to be an M6 Max or Pro. That seems weird. It's like yeah that's the rumor.

And guess what it's true. You get an M5 Pro and M5 Max with binned and non-bin varieties that I believe are essentially the same binning and non-binning for the as the non-OLED version because these are chips that have already been in MacBook Pros with all the same price adjustments and everything that go with them which is annoying.

Size and weight. Here's where we get some interesting stuff because as Mark already alluded like the rumors about this we're worried like oh no they said the last late big rumor you talked about where German said it's going to be considerably lighter. Oh no are they going to take out battery? Are they going to make it too thin? Are they going to remove ports?

So here's the size difference. 14 inch is almost exactly the same size but not quite. The biggest difference is that it is 0.2 inches thinner but it is 0.07 inches less wide and 0.16 inches less deep.

So it is smaller everywhere but mostly where you're going to notice that it is thinner. But here's the real stat that wins. One half a pound lighter. Both the M5 Pro and the M5 Max version are one half a pound lighter. in a thing that used to be three and a half pounds now it's three.

That is good weight savings. Yeah. You will notice that like when you pick it up you will notice that because that half a pound. That brings it almost to the weight of the MacBook Air. Yeah. Which is 2.7 like it's and this is a 3.0. It's that's very like going from 3.5 to 3.0 you will feel that and it will feel a lot like the MacBook Air.

Yeah. And like I said it's a little bit thinner too and a little bit small all around. The 16 inch same deal although not as big a difference is 0.03 inches thinner 0.01 inches less wide 0.15 inches less deep 0.7 pounds lighter. Holy cow. Went from 4.7 pounds to 4 pounds.

That's again amazing. Three almost three quarters of a pound. Yeah. A top tier laptop and these these go to these go to the respective 0.1 pounds when you put the M5 Max chip in them. I don't know what the 0.1 pounds I guess maybe heat heat sink I bet anticipation. Yeah. Because the way they built the Max studio for a while is like the ultra had a copper heat sink.

Yeah. Yeah. The standard chip had like you know probably an aluminum heat sink or something and then the big one had a copper one. They're probably doing something like that. I think it's still that way. Yeah. That's my guess. I mean I you know the actual you don't think the M5 Max weighs more. Yeah. I mean it does weigh more. 0.001 grams more. You're right. The chip definitely does weigh more but it's not enough to matter.

But yes it's probably like a larger heat sink or something and that's great. It's amazing that they didn't emphasize this more because like they lost weight. They didn't lose a lot of size. They lost a little bit of thickness but somehow somewhere they lost weight and as Marco said before and as we'll get to it they didn't remove battery capacity.

It's exactly the same but I think it's probably exactly the same batteries like maybe it's that we'll find out is like is it literally the same battery that's in the existing M5 Pro and M5 Max. No the the 14 inch gained like 0.1 watt hours or something so it's like a slightly different spec but I that's the thing I I'm looking forward to the teardowns of this because you know a lot of times I fix it well like you know weigh the different components or whatever.

I really want to know like where the weight savings come from. It can't all be backlights for the screen like there has to be something else. They took out the lead weights that were in there before to make it feel expensive. Yeah right. All right so looking at this picture wise having just I made a point to go look at these in the Apple store because I don't have one of these and I just want to look at them again so when the new ones came out I would have a comparison and styling wise even though the people who are there in person say oh it's a lot like the old model but it may be a little bit more tapered or whatever but this looks so

much like the existing MacBook Pro case. Obviously it's not the same case because every dimension is different if only fractionally especially the thickness but like I said it has all the same ports. It seems to have exactly the same strategy for cooling like with those long slits along the size that the MacBook Air doesn't have but the pros do have you know for cooling.

Well the slit on my 14 inch is each side is one long slit. This one they're divided in two. Yeah I wonder if they did that because like the nut that because if you make a really long open slit you can pinch it together in the middle right. Yeah it could be for structural rigidity or maybe it's two different channels of it maybe maybe one's an exhaust.

I don't know like who knows. I do find that slit to be slightly uncomfortable when handling these. It's a little bit sharp edge maybe they've helped that a little bit but anyway if you were to look at this from a side. It could even be acoustic related because you know they have a bunch of new speakers and stuff in there. I wonder if that's part of the speaker design too.

But it really does look like the current model so it is not a radically new reimagining of what it looks like. It's basically flat sided round you know like all the same kind of practical no nonsense make a rectilinear container with pleasing edges where you can fit all the components.

like we said all the same ports you got I think it's the same ports in the same order. Yeah same ports in the same places and thank God they didn't mess up the ports. Didn't lose anything. We didn't get we didn't get a better SD card slot but like whatever this is you know this is a weird thing because again this is a computer that they're releasing with the M5 Pro and M5 Max many months after the MacBook Pro already got the M5 Pro and M5 Max.

So it's not the new M6 anything. It's not you know like the M6 one is a newer thing with two neural engines and blah blah blah. but this is the Pro and the Max. Anyway it's it's a little bit of a weird model. Presumably things will be right again with the M7 when you know these things go to the back of the back.

So anyway yeah as we said batteries are the same capacity within 0.1 watts hours or whatever. No change for the ports. MagSafe 3 is the same MagSafe that yours has right? I don't know. I think so. Yeah I don't know. I think it's the same. obviously Thunderbolt 5 all that other stuff from the other things RAM their RAM continues to be torturous.

If you get the M5 Pro with the the binned one you can get 24 or 48 at an additional $600 but if you get the unbinned one you can get 24 48 with an extra $600 or 64 with an extra thousand. M5 Max if you want the 30 core GPU you can only get 36 gigs of RAM.

If you want the 40 core GPU which is the totally unbinned one you can get 48 64 at 400 additional bucks or 128 at additional 2,000 bucks. Same thing with storage they have to mess up the configurator. M5 Pro gets one two or four terabytes with two and four being 500 and 1500 extra.

M5 Max you can get starts at two which is nice. Two four eight and 16 to go to two to four is a thousand to go to two to eight is three thousand and go to two to 16 is seven thousand additional dollars. or the SSD space but wait the options will get worse on later computers but yep $7,000 upgrade to your SSD to go from two terabytes to 16 terabytes.

But this is the first time 16 has been offered in an Apple laptop so that's good. Yeah. If you want to spend $7,000. If you want to spend multiples of the price of your computer to expand your storage you can do it. The wireless stuff is all the same as the non OLED versions right Wi-Fi 7 Bluetooth 6 all the other stuff you expect.

They made a little bit of hay about the sound. Apple says high fidelity six speaker sound system with force canceling woofers and they say an all new woofer design that provides 50% deeper bass and all new tweeters that shape sound dispersion for remarkable clarity. And for the first time dedicated audio tuning for closed lid use delivers exceptional sound quality when the MacBook Pro is connected to an external display so users can enjoy a premium audio experience however they work.

What does that mean? I am really curious like because like I would never even thought they would try. So my my best guess here is that when the lid is closed maybe they don't use the speakers that point directly against the screen in that configuration like the other ones like that are aligned with the keyboard like maybe they just turn those off and just shoot it out the sides.

my first question is does this mean that they're saying that they drive the speakers on the MacBook Pro differently when it's closed? Yes. Or does it mean that when your MacBook Pro is closed and attached to your next door monitor they change the audio leaving your MacBook Pro and going to the monitor?

No. No. That's not how I took it. It's all about what's on the device. So you think they're saying we change how we drive the speakers in your MacBook Pro when it's closed? Correct. That's how I took it. That's how I would take it. I mean I guess the only other I guess yeah they wouldn't like use the laptop as the woofer or something that would make sense.

Because I imagine they do processing on the laptop to be like hey when we're driving our weird little speakers inside the laptop do this. Absolutely. Yeah. They definitely do it. But when we're driving when we're sending the audio signal out to the monitor do something different. Almost certainly. I don't I don't think it's necessarily well I guess it's implicitly about the monitor.

I think it's whether or not the damn thing is closed but I guess it won't be closed unless you have a monitor nearby so I guess. Yeah it's weird because they say when it is connected to an external display but you could have the lid open when it's connected. I don't know. They don't explain we'll find out. But anyway they're doing some audio stuff. Camera the only difference they had in their compare thing was advanced video stabilization which I don't know what they mean and why is that not on the other models because they literally have the same SoC.

So I don't know what that is. the charger they bifurcate bad if you get the M5 Pro you get 70 watt for free and 96 watt for 20 bucks extra the M5 Max has 96 watt for free. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that your $2,800 laptop should come with the right charger no matter what options you have.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's just 20 bucks extra. You got to nickel and dime you. External displays there it's the same as they were on the other ones but just to remind that if you have an M5 Pro you can drive up to three external displays over a single cable. If you have M5 Max you can do four external displays and the M5 Max has DisplayPort 2.1.

The M5 Pro does not. In general the M5 Max has more display hardware and more GPU so it can do more displays if that's what you care about. Prices. 400 extra bucks in addition to the price of the non OLED. So the M5 Pro version starts at 2,900.

For that you get 24 gigs of RAM 1TB SSD and the stupid 70 watt power adapter. The M5 Max version starts at 4,500 bucks. For that you get 36 gigs of RAM 2TB SSD and the good power adapter. And if you max this sucker out with an M5 Max 128 gigs of RAM 16TB SSD and nano texture it will be $14,249.

Half of which is that SSD. Just bananas. So I genuinely don't know what I'm going to do about this but I had told myself a year or two ago before RAM pricing became lol. I told myself that I was going to upgrade once the touch screen happened not because I necessarily want a touch screen.

I think the point about using it with the simulator is very valid but generally speaking the most I would ever probably do with the touch screen I think is scroll from time to time. But anyway I priced one out to basically replace my existing M3 Max MacBook Pro which I don't have any particular problems with but it's you know three-ish years old now and I feel like it's roughly time.

So I priced out 14 inch space black nano texture M5 Max with no binning because I want 64 gigs of RAM which is what I currently have. I want 8 terabytes of storage which is what I currently have and I'm getting astonishingly close to filling because I really like having all my photos and some other stuff all the time.

If I don't trade anything in the total price to buy is $8,649 which is astonishingly expensive just ridiculously expensive.

So then I asked myself well if if I do this should I lease it which I generally. Please please let me stop you. Okay yeah. You connect your laptop to three giant monitors. You never even look at the screen. The only difference between this one and then the existing M5 Max and M5 Pro MacBook Pros is the screen.

The screen means nothing to you. If you want to get a new laptop get the non OLED one save 400 bucks. When 400 on top of 8600 like at that point. Yeah well that's because of your 8 terabyte SSD. It's really going to kill you. It is. And I mean and yes I know people are going to write me like you really need the 8 terabyte SSD.

No I don't suppose I need it but I apparently you do if you're filling it. Well that's the other thing but I could make I could make moves so I don't need it. But I should tell you some of my sob story about that in a future episode. Yes please. I would love to try to save money on mine to do 4 terabyte and it's it's a juggling act but anyway continue.

Right that's what I'm saying. And so I don't particularly want to downgrade but I don't know if I want to spend 8650 on a new machine and then I'm looking at leasing because I figure you know unlike a car which we actually did lease Aaron's car and I hate that we did.

It's just leasing is not my cup of tea. I'm not saying it's again like the duo conversation. I'm not saying it's wrong for everyone. I just don't like it but I thought to myself well I mean I upgrade a computer every two to three to four years so it may make sense in this context especially with this pricing being absolutely bananas but a lease is $183 a month which is also astonishing.

So I computed it. What is it 183 so it's actually 182 and change but $183 times 36 months is $6,588 or thereabouts. Could be there are also some tax differences that for business expenses there that might be relevant but but agreed you know that is that is obviously a lot of but look you're talking about a you know $10,000 purchase.

But like this is this is such a the wrong the wrong time to buy because this this is a weird generation where the latest and greatest MacBook Pros have the same exact SOCs as the ones that have already been out. The big selling point of this one is it's lighter which you don't mostly care about and it's got a display and it's got a touch a touch display and an OLED display and again you're looking at your three big 5Ks you're not looking at touch display it's like do not spend $200 a month or $8,000 up front and

granted like you're like well I have an M3 so it is a big deal for me but like wait like of all the years to buy a new MacBook Pro unless you were dying for touch or unless you're like I use this screen all the time and OLED is going to make a big difference in my life this is not the time to spend that much money now if you were getting a base model you're like all right well $2,900 bucks and I'm going to get a 14 inch it's fine like that's more reasonable and that lease would be more reasonable because you crave the 8 terabyte SSD and because you need 64 gigs of RAM and because we're in Ramageddon it just

blows everything all out of proportion and like if you're going to spend that wad of cash get the latest and greatest SOC get something with an M7 get something with an M8 or something I definitely think you should wait. No no no I I mostly agree with you I take a couple of minor issue with a couple things you said like for example I do care about the quality of the screen even though you're right most of the time I'm not looking at it.

But one day a week you're not. I mean again you're not wrong but that being said the the thing that I'm worried about is do I really think Ramageddon is going to get better in the next year or two because I really. Give it three years. But that's the thing in three years I'm 100% going to be replacing this computer.

So don't you want to live like me a little bit and just be desperate for a new computer. No sure don't. John as much as I love you. No absolutely not. But that's what happened to me. I was desperate at exactly the wrong time and Casey you're not desperate at exactly the wrong time which is now. Yeah I mean I guess you're right.

I just am I am I screwing future Casey because is what did we say the eight terabyte SSD is where was that it's three thousand dollars. Is it going to be four in twenty twenty seven or five or seven. Although by the way I'm pricing I didn't get to the second part of the pricing which is the 16 inch you're like oh that one starts at thirty four hundred you know specs of the same twenty four gigs one terabyte and the max starts at forty eight hundred but then you go to the maxed out version of the 16 inch and the maxed out version of the 16 inch is fourteen thousand five hundred forty nine because you probably didn't

memorize the number I said before you're like wait isn't that the same price as the fourteen inch once you get up to the maxed out price the price of like the sixteen inch screen versus a fourteen inch like that just becomes noise if you don't remember the maxed out fourteen the maxed out fourteen inch was fourteen thousand two forty nine and the 16 inches fourteen thousand five forty nine practically the same price it's like when you buy a car you're like oh what's two hundred bucks for floor mats because you're buying a thirty thousand dollar car right it's all the sixteen terabyte

SSD in the RAM that's what you're paying for and some other stuff that comes with it yeah the the MacBook Pro like ever like the last generation MacBook Pro was always priced that way we're like the it was like all the same pricing basically but the sixteen inch was a few hundred bucks more at every single tier but also like and once you get into fifteen grand a few hundred bucks becomes line noise yeah but also like I mean look I I'm not gonna say these are you know amazing prices they're not I think if Apple adds a high-end option like a sixteen terabyte disc that literally literally didn't exist

before and everyone's like it's now fifteen thousand dollars like yeah but no one's gonna buy that it's now says mr. diner lobster I know but you're gonna go and you're like oh look I needed a six inch MacBook Pro and the only one they had came with a sixteen terabyte SSD so I bought it for fifteen grand I'm gonna return in fourteen days I mean yeah but like I need a laptop now I I do but I'll get to that but imagine going home to your wife and say I needed a laptop so I bought one for fifteen

grand but don't worry I'm gonna return it this is the only one they have no but that's I feel like people are like they they raised the price to fifteen thousand dollars like that's not that's kind of disingenuous like okay they added an option that almost no one's gonna buy and that's higher but when you look at like you know what the where the pricing is now yeah compared to where it was ten years ago it's a lot of money but like the m3 max that I have now like that was like seven thousand dollars when I bought it three three ish

whatever it was years ago that that was and to replace it with the same specs now it's about I think it's about eight or ten thousand dollars so it's more but yeah but that's the environment we're living in like they didn't make the thing out of solid gold just to you know jack the price up like yeah no I'm not saying it's egregiously expensive I'm just saying like this is this is like Apple is enjoying a grace period in which all the price increases we say well yeah that makes sense because we know their costs are increasing and we know they're just passing it on to us right and look and they're gonna

make their margin but they were already before like what I'm saying is like the increased prices now it's just a a ramageddon inflated version of what they've been doing since the beginning of time and so yes these are expensive computers they've always been expensive computers and what you if you compare this you know try to price out like a pc workstation laptop for that has anywhere near these specs like you're not gonna get stuff that's that much cheaper if it matches the spec for a spec and if you don't

need these specs great Apple offers laptops from six hundred dollars up and also these very same laptops without an OLED screen for less money right exactly so like these are the top of the line and if you if you need or want it that's what the top of the line costs and speaking of top of the line just gonna throw this one in there when the Mac studio came out they said and you know you can get it with up to 512 gigs of RAM but actually 512 gigs of RAM isn't available now it'll be coming in October well

it's here and if you go to the Mac studio configurator and you upgrade the RAM from 96 gigs which is the minimum on the spec where you can go up to 512 you go from 96 gigs to 512 gigs that option I think this is the champ for the highest price option that you can click in a configurator to say hmm I'm going to go from 96 gigs of RAM to 512 gigs of RAM that will be an additional 15,500 dollars for that change in RAM it's a car it's a car for good just one option

just changing the RAM that's not the price of the computer and that is RAM again for you in a nutshell so there we are and by the way the maxed out Mac studio is now $29,800 yeah that's a hell of a lot of RAM but just FYI that that is how much it costs if hey if you need to do local AI and you want to gang together four of these things it still might be cheaper than one of those $50,000 Nvidia things but I'm not sure no I think this looks really good on the whole I don't think I

disagree with you John that because there's nothing actively like broken about my current computer I don't know that it's the right time to upgrade the only thing that worries me is I genuinely worry that RAM pricing is going to get worse and SSD pricing is going to get worse not better and if that's the case I should buy now but yeah I mean it really it really depends on like here's the thing having just gone to a essentially a downgrade in specs I have less RAM and a smaller SSD because prices right having just done that the

convenience of an M3 with the RAM and the SSD you want versus an M5 without the RAM and SSD you want I would stick with the M3 in a heartbeat just because like the day-to-day convenience of having all the RAM and all the space you need versus having it all of a sudden to be thinking you have to worry about and to be clear I haven't had to worry about RAM but I have had to worry about disk space that inconvenience doesn't make it feel like a fancy new computer and to be clear I cheaped out on my M5 Max Max studio as much as I

possibly could for to try to make it so like yeah okay it's not as maxed out as my whole computer but this is a time you over computer and I didn't spend that much for it you know what I mean like that's that was my goal so if you're looking at this and you're like oh it's so expensive maybe I should get the lower spec one like that I feel like that would be a downgrade for you for sure because you've got you've got a system now that does everything you need has the capacities that you want that is fine for your purposes and downgrading

from that especially in disk space because it's like there's no there's no getting around right it would just it would just feel worse for you and on the other hand you try to match those specs as you said it's now you're paying eight grand to go for an M3 Max to an M5 Max like that's basically what you're paying for and yes it has a nice screen and blah blah blah and stuff like you're basically paying for like to be fractionally faster at a bunch of stuff that probably doesn't matter in the grand scheme I think so I definitely think you should skip these things just skip them entirely and even if it turns out SSD prices go up because they

probably will you probably shouldn't buy next year either you should probably buy an M8 like I think because look look at it this way what is it about your current system that is currently bothering you are things too slow and you're twiddling your thumbs and getting distracted because compiles are taking too long how much faster would they be with an M5 how much faster would they be with an M7 or M8 like is that going to make a difference in your life and the OLED screen would you even notice like I would I would I take your point though I would notice but I take your point and

yeah Marco should get one though I'm sure Marco already ordered one Marco did there it is what did you buy all right oh god they're nice laptops Casey it's very nice so what I've been doing a lot recently the number of times that I am away from home has gone up in the last couple years I'm bouncing back and forth a lot more between the beach I'm doing a lot more stuff

going back and forth with the city oh we got two of them yeah and the other thing that's changed massively in the last six months is I'm doing a huge amount more agentic software development and what the so what I've had is desktop laptop and laptop laptop desktop laptop is the M3 max all decked out I've used it as a desktop it stays at my house most of the time if I you know go to the beach for the summer I'll bring it but you know for the most part like I'm traveling with

the smaller one when I'm just going somewhere for a day or or a weekend or something I'm bringing a smaller one and I've liked having two different computers in a lot of ways because like you know like I you know run the beta on the small one but not the big one and stuff like that like I would I would treat them differently but one thing that's getting increasingly high of a pain in the butt is trying to coordinate cloud code between the two and trying to coordinate any kind of AI project and operation between the two

because it these things just don't share well and also because like when I when I first got the travel one the M4 the base model M4 14 inch I wasn't writing that much code like on the train on the ferry but when I would I'm like well there's only so fast I can type and I'm not going to be held back that much by the build speed of this well that is very different now because now when you're doing a lot of agentic

work you are being held back by the build speed a lot you're being held back by simulator speed a lot and the simulators have gotten so slow I have been waiting on my laptop so much these last few months as I've done more agentic coding which it was the opposite of what I would expect but that's how it is because in the background Claude's like cranking away like testing out different things building test suites running test suites trying different techniques trying different things it's working my computers butt off on my

behalf you know and it could be doing like three different things at once and different projects and those are all just slamming the processor cores with like background Swift compile processes background simulator launches like all sorts of stuff like that so my plan has been I really should probably upgrade that laptop with this generation and get you know get it like a pro or max chip and a bit more RAM so I can do all that stuff a lot better and then next year with the m7 generation upgrade my

desktop laptop all the way with the 8 terabytes and the 128 gigs of RAM and stuff like that but I think that is actually the wrong move I think the move for me is to go back to one computer because of all this agentic stuff happening I think I need to go back to one laptop that is super powerful this is the way and and you know and look this stuff is changing a lot so

it's possible in six months I might say that's no longer the right move I don't know probably not but who knows but it is getting increasingly obvious to me that the the best way for my current computing needs to continue is to have one really awesome 14 inch MacBook Pro I did like for the last you know couple of days I've been carrying around the 16 inch trying to use it as just my laptop laptop and I really don't like the 16 inch for that purpose it doesn't fit

as well in small seats on trains and ferries and planes and stuff like that it is and I really missed my nanotexture display that I have on the 14 inch even though it has a keyboard imprint in it and so I figured okay what I really what is best for me really is to upgrade the main laptop and retire the travel laptop and just have it be one awesome 14 inch and I could wait for the m7 generation to

do that that's probably if I was John that's more that's closer to what I would do I mean John would never buy a laptop but that's more that's closer to what I would do but I'm not John I'm me and so of course I ordered one so I I basically maxed it out in every way except the disc it was a lot of money and this is the main way I make all my money so I think it's worth it's a business expense in every possible way and it will literally allow me to work better and

faster almost every day and I think having it just have just be one computer again will it's not going to be better in every way but I think it's going to allow a lot of efficiencies in a lot of my workflows and a lot of you know other stuff so I'm going to keep the 14 inch that I have now as like a you know like a backup just in case if I needs if I need another Mac maybe you know install betas on it still but for the most part it's probably

going to become a transcription worker machine in my house and and I'm going to upgrade so I ordered the again the 14 inch mostly maxed out except for the SSD and we'll see when it gets here are you going to trade in the 16 inch sell it or someone in your house going to use it where is that gone I haven't looked yet to see like you know what you know what is the right move for that I I'll see what Apple will give me for it but I don't know I mean it's you know usually when things are like

very well optioned usually trade-ins are not very well priced for you usually like a direct sales better I don't think I have any immediate family needs for it so I think selling it is probably the right move take it I don't know if he cares yet about having his own Mac laptop he's still you know PC gaming I think he's a little young to care about that but we'll see anyway so that's that's the plan high-end 14 inch replacing both of my current computers and the M3 max is probably going to be sold

I get what you're saying about like tray tables and stuff and it taking up our room but it's it's like three quarters of a pound lighter than the old 16 inch so would that make a difference or is it really just a little bit length and width it's really about this like the screen lid size like you can't open it all the way when you have like a like a small seat and especially a bigger screen you're getting you're getting Xcode on the 14 inch screen you're okay with that well here's the other thing I'm using Xcode directly a lot less because a lot of the times I'm having Claude fix the bug and I'm

just reviewing it like in tower to see what did you do and I see oh all right yeah you did it the way I would have done it or better great check done like so I'm actually not spending as much time maxing out the screen space like what I've been doing recently I like I went to the beach this past weekend as like a little work retreat to get all the stuff out and I like I didn't spend almost any time in my office I was like upstairs looking out the window with the 14 inch on the

kitchen countertop and I just loved working that way and that's I realized that I've been using the 14 inch more than my big computer just because it allows me to work in other places and I've never been you you've heard me on the show for a decade I've never been the kind of person who didn't want to do everything possible in my office at my desk with the biggest monitor with the full keyboard with the mouse everything like that but honestly AI work has changed that pretty pretty significantly and I'm I'm more loving the ability to just be wherever I want

to be I can work better in coffee shops I can work better at different parts of my house I can work better while I'm traveling so my needs have significantly changed and my usage has significantly changed so that's great and you know when I when I when I and look I've I've traveled with a 14 inch for a long time now so when I do actually dive in and use Xcode it's not impossible I can also you know I've edited our podcast on a 14 inch again like you know logic is pretty cramped compared to a 32 inch

monitor but it's fine I make it work it's fine so for me the the ergonomics of using the 14 inch like in cramped spaces where I often am are are better overall than the 16 for my for my actual needs what color do you get silver of course silver 14 inch with the glowing Apple logo it's gonna be awesome you know the thing I noticed again being in the Apple store and looking all the stuff it I don't think it had occurred to me or maybe I had forgotten that they they put black under the keyboard like and even if

you get the silver one they have essentially black whatever and it is Asian or yeah they've been doing that for a while yeah that's I kind of like the better one is silver I do too but like but they started doing that when they when they revamped it for the M generation I I accept that because I recognize that when it's all silver underneath it like it was with the old the old old MacBook Pros that does still is with the air it does look old in a way no I'd like it better but it makes it almost makes me like because at least with the black one it matches because it's black everywhere but like the

silver one it's like this big black hole and anyway it doesn't matter I don't I don't care I'm not a laptop person it just I was just struck by it because especially again at the Apple store where it's sitting right next to the laptops that don't do that yeah the current the Neo doesn't do it the air doesn't do it I think those are the only ones I think all the pros do it all right did we make it I think so I think we did I mean we skip well maybe for next week or maybe some other time we didn't talk about the creator studio update and we may talk about in a future episode or may not because there is some stuff there all right

thank you to our sponsor this week granola and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join us at atp.fm slash join one of the many perks of membership is atp overtime our weekly bonus topic this week on overtime we'll be talking about is Apple reentering the server market we're gonna be talking about that you can join to listen atp.fm slash join thank you everybody and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even

mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental it was accidental and you can find the show notes at atp.fm and if you're into Mastodon you can follow

them at C A S E Y L I S S so that's Casey Liss M A R C O A R M N T Marco R M N S I R A C U S A Syracuse it's accidental accidental they didn't mean to accidental accidental tech podcast so long

and Marco I really wanted to try your app but apparently you're not making it available in the UK and I'm very angry about it also I live in Norway and I really wanted to try your app but it's not available in Norway and I don't understand why we should have gotten ahead of this I feel bad it was a group effort but we should you ever gonna make the app available in Germany Marco so yeah all right so what happened was last week's show I said in the after show I said like oh it hasn't so we talked about my new app Fineliner we're

gonna talk about it again in a minute but what I said was like it's still a review it's not out yet it'll come out sometime soon but we'll put the link in the show notes when it comes out when you click a link to the app store to an app that's not released yet the error message that shows from Apple is something like this this app is not available in your region or something like that yep which is true yes it's true what it actually meant is this app is not yet available in any region but that's not you know

Apple's message kind of is misleading and unhelpful so the actual situation was the app was not approved until today so anyway and it's not again the people who sent this message it's not your fault it's Apple's fault for their stupid error message yeah it should say hey this app isn't even on the app store not it's not available in your country so incredibly misleading it is not the fault of the listeners it's entirely the fault of Apple very frustrating yes anyway that is now behind us and I'm happy to say

fine liner is out it's on the app store now it's free go get it I have had so much fun developing this app I we gave a brief overview of it last episode I will just reiterate it is a really fun notebook app for iPad iPhone duo and even a little bit regular iPhones in the meantime I actually did add like a text tool to make it more useful on regular iPhones than it was last

week I have had so much fun making fine liner and the initial reaction so far from people are so strong this means a lot to me for a lot of reasons you know overcast has been my only you know major app for such a long time when I launched unforgettable this summer that was a very like personal app for me because it was about like you know my struggles with ADHD and trying to help other people like me and that meant a lot to me as

well but unforgettable is a very small app and I wouldn't describe it as fun it's very utilitarian but but it's also it's a very very specific app it's like if you if your brain works a lot like mine and if you want your task list to be basically exactly what I want out of my task list this app could be for you but if you like it's a it was a very narrow focus of like very high value to a very

small group that's unforgettable and also unforgettable is also basically done it's a very simple app again by design I don't want to blow it up with a bunch of additional features that would make it less effective and so there's not that much more to do besides regular maintenance over time fixing a few bugs here and there as they crop up you know adapting to new screen sizes I you know I adapted it to the duo you know like that kind of stuff but I don't think I need to really add a lot of features to unforgettable

I think it's it's effectively maybe not feature complete technically but it's close to feature complete and fineliner I almost didn't release this app because I thought yeah who's gonna who's gonna want it I you know I wasn't sure what it was gonna be but then I started working on it inspired by the iPhone duo number one I realized I actually like it a lot on the iPad mini as I discussed earlier and the iPad mini is such the perfect device for

fineliner but also I realized like this the more I've developed it I keep having more and more ideas for fun or interesting or useful features and when I do them I smile and when I see the results when I try the results I have had so much fun making this app and I've had the most ridiculous ideas and then I try to do them and most of them work and I'm like oh my god and I

like the the delight that people are reporting to me that they have trying this app for the first time I had that delight when I tried it myself for the first time it's you know sometimes like you don't get that when you made it because like you know you've seen how the sausage is made or it's you know you're you're too close to it to really appreciate it or whatever else that's not how I feel about this app it's so fun and so delightful that I am having that same experience as I use it

myself and I know I don't want to spoil much about the app if you haven't tried it yet no no I think at this point since John insisted on spoiling it I have not a spoiled this technically I'm not a spoiled a single person everyone has said hey I stopped when you told me to stop and it didn't get spoiled not everyone there are plenty of people who are like I couldn't wait I just rammed through it well I mean they they were fairly warned if they spoiled themselves they spoiled themselves but it's not as I gave them ample warning everyone else who didn't

want to be spoiled stop the program just like I said and then they waited patiently for it to be released in Brazil in any case my point the reason I bring this up other than to fuss with John is to say at this point I think we can assume everyone is spoiled whether or not they've tried I was gonna say the no no sense in spoiling because we already talked about the spoiler part now we can be spoiler free so now our roles are reversed I'm saying oh all right well I mean I'm also happy to be spoiler free but yeah just like go check it out it's free like you know it's literally a free app just go download it it's not free and then like it makes you pay immediately

like it's free free free free free free there is a thing to pay for in it but you can use the app for almost all of its functionality for entirely for free yeah I'll tell you like so it's no ads it's a it's like a notebook app so you know you're drawing and stuff and what you pay for is additional pen colors additional page templates and additional pen widths there's that you get additional pages right unlimited pages unlimited notebooks unlimited text recognition all that stuff that's all unlimited no ads

no ads and nothing is subscription based it is all for the most of the features are totally free and then you know the handful that charge for their one-time purchases their family shared they're between 10 and 12 bucks so like it's just really what I'm trying to do here is in addition to just having a lot of delight in this app and look the other two of my apps are subscription priced that it that is what makes sense for

them but no one is delighted when this year a subscription what I'm going for here is delight and and also functionality but I'll get to that but like I'm going for number one delight when people see this like I you know I've been I've had it out like in testing around a lot of different people and you know different groups of friends you know occasionally like strangers or or other developers who like you know see it over my shoulder or something

when people see it they are delighted by it and that means the world to me I am so it makes me so happy so that was what I was going for this entire app was delight so I wanted this I wanted to extend to the whole thing from from the visual appearance to the business model and also to some of the tech details fine liner is a very playful looking app but it's also serious tech under there it is a very nerdy

implementation of a very delightful app everything you're all of what you're drawing with is all vectors everything you can export to SVG and PDF even like you know if you if you you can export it has like its own native document format to like transfer the documents between different devices or if you need to for some reason there's a sequel light files you can look at them it doesn't matter like do whatever you want with them I don't care everything about this app is nerd compatible there are no

analytics there's no accounts there's no logins the sync is just iCloud sync so it just syncs automatically with iCloud that's all it needs to be there's no tracking like there's no creepiness and it performs well it has the tech that you need like you know it handles stuff you know sync conflicts and merging and all that stuff that's all handled for you don't have to deal with that i've had people fill the entire page with strokes so it's kind of like performance

test like this stress test the engine and then i like you know take an eraser and take stripes through it or take a segment out and chunk it out and pull it out i made a whole text engine between last episode in this episode that is in 1.0 that's why that's what made it more useful on the iphone the text it is vector shapes but it remains editable unless you really mess with it but you can like drag text out of a text block you can select it and move it out the rest of the text will reflow around

it and you can drag in near the text a drawing say a graph or whatever the text will reflow around that drawing you can strike out through the text and it will erase that word and collapse the rest around it there's so many features in here that are like technical fun there's a lot of the app that you can i will say you can customize and you can export some of those customizations in ways that you might find useful you will see later if you are into note-taking and you want to

use it for note-taking it indexes everything you you write of course it recognizes text it also recognizes what you draw if you draw a picture of a hamburger and you search the word hamburger your picture will show up in the search results there's all this tech underneath it because what i also want to do not only am i delighting people i think and i hope well and i know i'm not i'm not going to stand back myself i know they're telling me not only am i delighting people with the visual interface but i also want to delight nerds when they go to do

something nerdy and they find something like that like when you go to edit text and it just edits and or reflows when you you know if you're typing text onto the you know with the default textbook if you don't if you don't resize it it aligns with the lines on the page of course why wouldn't if you have a line template on the page why wouldn't your text align if you select wide lines it aligns with the wide lines if you like it's whatever lines you select it aligns with those if you're typing into a text box and you hit the

end of a page it just turns the page and starts on the next page transparently just does it what i'm trying to do here is make something that scales with your technical needs while still being this fun delightful app that is just super fun to use and makes people smile it is playful it is a little bit retro and it's super fun on the iphone duo although it's even better i think on the ipad check it out it has a lot of there's a lot of depth

to it that you you will eventually maybe find but check it out it i think it's a lot of fun if you want technology to be fun again i think you will enjoy this and i think that ultimately i'm so inspired in part by the iphone duo in large part because it but by that as i was saying earlier even though the duo you know i'm not sure if it's going to ever really be right for me but it is really fun and again with the macbook pro they re-added the the apple logo the glowing apple logo that's

just fun that they that doesn't serve any technical purpose it's just fun we've been in an era of tech in for a while that fun has been pretty hard to come by in a lot of what especially what big tech was doing and i feel like right now we we're kind of breaking out of that fun does typically go in cycles and we've been in like in a low fun cycle for a while and i think now we're breaking out and we're having fun again the duo inspired that for me and i'm

having so much fun with fineliner i think it's the right time for it and fun you know there's a lot of apps that i think if you use it on the duo you know stuff like the you know like the cassette player app and the toaster and the mini computers like these are apps that you'll download and you'll have fun with them for two seconds and then you'll be like all right well that's i'm done fineliner is not that fineliner you will have that fun but it's also really

useful as a note-taking and doodling app and so if what you want is to have fun with notebooks or just to have a really good reason to have an apple pencil give it a shot it's so much fun and it's also a pretty good note-taking app and for all the fun you're having here it is i suppose fitting that your business model is essentially the current video game business model which is you sell cosmetics yeah honestly like it's so before you get this honestly like part

of what i'm going for here is more of a game feel like it's like what if you know it's so it's it's very much inspired by the way i you know kind of stumbled through school was i tried to have fun with everything like i was doodling all over my notebooks and and by the way i can't draw and with fineliner that doesn't matter you'll see the aesthetic of the app is such that if you can't draw it's almost better but also it

doesn't require you to be good at drawing it embraces our crappiness in drawing i cannot draw for crap and it's fine even the icon i hired our friends at parakeet to make an icon and they made a great icon but i ended up not using it because it was a very polished icon and i made this crappy stand-in one i had a page open and fineliner that was like brainstorming different icon concepts and this was the second

one i drew and i drew a bunch of other stuff and i had the icon from parakeet and i was showing other people and they were like oh i like that one better and they kept pointing to this one and literally i must have shown the app to 10 different people every one of them said they liked this icon the best like what am i doing fretting over this why don't i just ship my draft like literally i did not draw this to be the icon i drew it as a concept of what someone else with more talent might

make as an icon and then i shipped it that's kind of the ethos of fineliner it is very much like hey let's let's just kind of do a fun imperfect job it's it's it embraces imperfection in a way that is very fun but i am like i feel almost like it is a bit of a game in but you know certainly in the business model and you're right it is basically selling cosmetics um although there will be some functionality upgrades coming down the down the road as well like i'll i'll spoil i'm adding a widgets feature

and that's going to also be a purchase because that's you know that's a pretty narrow feature but um it'll be fun but um i'm kind of treating it really a game like it one thing you'll you'll notice in fineliner is i use as little stock system ui as possible the entire ui is custom almost everywhere across the app you're seeing custom ui even like i made my own dialogues and sheets and popovers they're all custom because it's it fits

the aesthetic and when you see fineliner running on a device especially if you see it on an iphone duo it looks striking it looks so cool like i i love the way it looks on the iphone duo so much it's it really is like striking and i love that like it it makes me feel first of all it makes me feel very proud of my work because i have always said i'm not really a designer this makes me feel like i'm a designer i'm not a very traditional

designer but this app is my design and i think it has a great design i think this has an actual chance of getting me an ada for the first time ever and i'm and i'll tell you right now i'm going for it i am aiming for that ada this year i i really i don't know if i can get one but i'm i'm gonna push for that i'm gonna do whatever i can to get this app to be that caliber to maybe win an ada because i think it actually has a chance and i feel really proud of this design and i just that's never that's never happened before i've

never been this proud of of a design um so i'm very happy about that but we will uh we'll see how it goes i as of this um speaking i have zero sales data because it's only it's been out for less than a day and i don't have any analytics on it so i have i have no real-time insight into how many times it's been downloaded how many what what people are using it on like how many times that things have been purchased i have no idea but my goal here is reach i honestly if i don't make that much

money from this but a ton of people use it i consider that a win that's what i'm going for i want as many people as possible to see fineliner and have fun with it and enjoy it and if i happen to also make money from it great uh i don't look the reality is i don't think that many people are going to be encouraged to buy my internet purchases but i just want as many people as possible to see this app and to use it and for other people to see it running on their phones and ipads and for people around them to say hey what's that

that's what i want here uh so here's hoping oh it's a shame because i had a quick advice for you how to make money on cosmetics uh but i guess you don't want to make money so i'll just keep those suggestions oh i would like to also make money but that's just not the primary goal you're selling cosmetics you have to have like holiday notebook covers of course i'm gonna yeah that's the idea here making sure that you're picking up the easy stuff there just like yeah there are so many things in your app that lend themselves to seasonal cosmetics to you know just like anyway yeah yeah

absolutely so that that is definitely like on the like part of the concept when i designed when i decided to do this business model was yeah of course i'm gonna have like seasonal packs and stuff like that like that's that's definitely you know and there's look it's a notebook app i can also have different packs for things like different you know different types of templates that you can have you know not just like you know lines and grids and dots but you know if certain types of planners and stuff like that like until most people come after you if someone's gonna find you and sue you so be careful oh thank you yeah so i'll i'll keep

an eye on that but um but yeah like i think there's a lot of potential here for future fun stuff to be added future purchases of you know different you know ink packs and and color schemes and templates and stuff like that um but ultimately again like ultimately i i don't i i think what i would expect to happen here in the best case like the way i see this mostly succeeding is just a huge amount of free users and then you know some tiny percentage of them buy the special pens or whatever and as long

as that gives it enough money to survive which you know it's it doesn't take that much because i'm not running servers for it um it it should be i think it should be sustainable so we'll see again i i as of as of right now i have no sales data and even tomorrow i mean it's it tomorrow it will have been out for half a day so i that's not much data either so we'll see how it goes you know i'll report back over time if it's going you know amazingly terribly or you know within

expectations but in my mind it's already a success for my goals which is i wanted to make something really fun that made me smile and is making other people smile and it's achieving that in spades well i'm really really pleased for you it seems like the launch has gone really well from all the chatter i've seen uh there have been a bunch of people who've said i waited like casey said it was worth it you know just saying john is not always right folks i gave a spoiler warning as you could hear it if you wanted to i wasn't saying people

should be spoiled i saying i wanted the people i didn't want to leave it a secret so the people who wanted to know what it was about could just listen to the show just give me the option i'm very happy spoilers or additive casey oh i see how it is uh no i'm very glad that it's gone well um and i'm very excited for you and once i can take a breath because this week has been just a little bit relentless uh i am really excited to sit down with my ipad pro and really properly give it a shot Beep, beep, beep.