Color Choices and Future Iterations

All right, Christina. It is good to see you. Good to have you here. And for the first time I can definitely say you are better dressed for this episode than I am. It's all about the hat that no one can see, but I'm wearing a Yankees hat. So And I'm wearing no hat. I should have a Yankees hat on to celebrate opening of the baseball season. That's kinda how I felt the the postseason is when I really get into baseball, but I do love a good kind of season opener period. Did you watch the Netflix broadcast of the the so the sometimes I think what they used to do is they'd have opening day and all across major leagues, like at one in the afternoon all the teams would play. And now they're doing a thing where there's like one opening night game and it would this year it was the Yankees at San Francisco and it was broadcast on Netflix. Did you happen to watch? I did actually because I wanted to see like how much their I guess live streaming stuff is improved for sports stuff. I thought it was great, actually. I thought it did a good job. I thought it was awful. Really? Explain why. In terms of being live, I think it was fine. Okay, okay. But the actual telecast was horrible. The score bug in the corner was so big as a rectangle but yet used fonts that were like twelve point type you'd have to be two feet from your TV to see it. They obviously did not play test it at a living room distance. Yeah, that's a good call. I think I I actually I think I watched it on my iPad, so I was probably part of the problem in that regard. The outfield camera, the one that shows like over the pitcher's shoulder the home plate, the one that you typically see while the picture you know, it's like the main camera for seeing the At bat was foggy the whole night. It was like c a cloudy image. And I wrote about it on Daring Fireball. And at one guy said I was in the ballpark and it was a beautiful night. Like it makes no sense. Okay. Well then that's wild. Okay, that's interesting because I just assumed that it was the conditions. I mean, and I didn't all that stuff, but you watch a lot more baseball than I do. I was actually I mean I I tuned in, I didn't watch the whole game. I tuned in like mostly just to be like, okay, well, how are they handling like live broadcasting? Because they're starting to do more of that. And that's interesting to me to see how they handle the load of all that stuff. But I am a little bit surprised that like they didn't just use the tip I mean it wasn't the w I I don't know. It just shows that they don't broadcast baseball regularly. And I think it's sorta I don't know. What was the other thing Oh the other thing that they screwed up was this year there's a new rule for anybody who doesn't follow baseball. They call it ABS, automatic ball strike. And on every pitch of the game, the umpire still calls the balls and strikes, but each team gets I actually forget the exact rules. I think you get like two a game, maybe something like that. But the batter can tap his helmet if he doesn't like the call, if he like takes the pitch and the umpire calls it a strike, but the batter thinks no way that was a ball . They can ask ask for a quick review and they go to a computer and it shows and this is the first year they've got it in major league baseball. And the first time it happened the in the game, you know, is it the the biggest moment in baseball history? No. But it is the first time that this rule has ever been used. And in the meantime, the sideline reporter is interviewing the Giants manager while this is happening and they don't talk about it. And it's like the cameraman for Netflix and whoever the director is, they cut away and you could see that the umpire and the batter for the Yankees are talking about it and this is going on. But meanwhile all you hear is this stupid interview with the manager where they never say anything interesting and so you don't know what the hell is going on and then they come back and they missed it. It's terrible. But anyway, the Yankees won, so I don't why I'm complaining. But it's the execution that will make or break an experience. And exactly. And so if you don't have the experience doing live switching, if you don't have the experience knowing how you want your lower thirds to look and you don't know who to go to and what types of content to have what you're showcasing, then it's not gonna have the same sort of feel that you might have gotten otherwise. Yeah. I did think in Netflix's credit, I thought they did a good job with the football last year. I did too. That that that was a thing. Yeah, good job with football. Amazon I think has actually done a great job with the football. But again, like I'm I'm a person who I'm like a fair weather fan for sports. I tune in during the big games. I don't not like a all season type of person. That's reasonable though. No, that's a good way to be a sports fan. You waste less time . Before we get into the meat of the show, how are you feeling? You had what, back surgery a month ago? Yeah, so like it was like seven weeks. So I had artificial disc replacement. So I had neurosurgery actually between C six and C seven on my cervical spine. So like where your neck connects to like your main spine. And I like woke up one day in like early November and I thought that I'd slept on my shoulder wrong and I was like, man, this really hurts. This is really bad and after about like I got into a spine like a sports medicine guy and he was like, yeah, this is what I think it is. I was like, okay, so am I gonna get like imaging? What are we doing? He was like, no, you're gonna do PT. And I was like, no, I'm gonna get an MRI. And when I finally got the MRI, it turned out it was worse, like was a a herniated disc , it was worse than what he had thought. And so I wound up then having to get scheduled to basically they go in through your neck. They cut your they go through like the front of your neck. They shove your blair. They go in the front of your neck, yeah. And so so they and they show your glarinx and like your esophagus aside, then they like burrow back down to where your spinal cord is and they dig out the bad disc, they take that out. If you have a fusion, then they'll fuse two of the bones together. In my case, I had artificial disc replacement, which should be better for my outcome. They put like a titanium replacement, then they shove everything back and sew you back up. Wow. And it went well? It went well. I mean recovery has been okay. I had some kind of uh reactions to some of I said weird like just withdrawal stuff from some of the medications that I've been on before the surgery. But yeah, I was in some pain afterwards recovery. I think I was more optimistic about what it would be like, which is stupid when I then describe like what the surgery is. You're like, yeah, of course this is going to be like a major thing. This is not minor surgery. The,y they keep you overnight and stuff like that. But yeah, I'm doing pretty well. And the the good news is the reason I had it is that in addition to the pain, like that could have been surmountable although it sucked, but the the disc was sitting on one of my like nerves, like spinal cord, and I had very little feeling in my left arm and then both of my hands were numb. And so before or after? Before that and that was why they like moved me into like the surgery position as early as they did because I didn't have feeling in my hands. Like it felt like you were to sleep all the time. Very scary. And my neurosurgeon's fear, he was like, we could give you shots, we could do other things that are not surgical. My fear is that if this goes on , it could take longer or become permanent. And I was like, yeah, we're not doing that. So Alright. Well congratulations. Sorry, but congratulations. Right? Yeah. Well yeah. It' hey, Im through it, right? It was one of those things, like people like well was there precipitating an event. Um no he said like in probably like you know uh fifty percent of the cases it's not like a thing where you fall off a ladder or whatever. You just people just wake up that way . And there you go. In some ways it's I'm laughing because it's like in some ways you really do want the precipitating event and it's like You do. You know, like you said, like falling off a ladder. It's like, you know what? I'm just gonna stay away from ladders. I'm gonna pay someone to do all my ladder work. And then this won't happen to me. And when it's nope, you just woke up wrong, it's like I can't avoid waking up. You know? And you have no control over what stupid positions you get into when you're sleeping. So uh but it is funny. I mean I don't know. It's easier to laugh because it was a good outcome. All right, let me take a break here, and I'm going to thank our first sponsor. Knock it out. It's our good friends at Sentry. And they want me to tell you about Se ar, their AI debugging agent. Sentry is S-E-N-T-R-Y, like a guard, not like a hundred years. Sentry. And SEER is S-E-E-R. Debugging sucks. You dig through diffs, logs, traces, and code and stuff you d code you didn't even write just to understand what went wrong. Sear is Sentry's AI debugging agent that uses the context. Sentry already collects the errors, the logs, the traces, distributed traces, and your source code to tell you what went wrong and how to fix it fast. It takes those things from the field from actual users, knows your source code, and identifies the fix very fast. 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Going to that link, we'll let them know. Sentry dot IO slash talk show. And they have a free dev plan and listeners of the show who either follow that link or use the code Talk Show, get eighty bucks in Sentry credits. Eighty bucks in Sentry credits just for going there, my thanks to Sentry. All right, what a month March has been for Apple. Crazy. I I can't remember like a uh I mean yeah, I'm trying to think like when we've had a a non kind of m I mean, maybe some of the M series launches, but I can't think of anything. Uh certainly not a new product. This has been one of the strongest product months they've had off cycle that I can recall. Yeah, definitely. I knew it's like I I it was it because it wasn't even at the beginning of the month. It's like it was on March 9th when I published my 17 E review. So it wasn't even you know, it's uh it' secsond week of March already. But it feels so long ago that I was writing about the seventeen E . And I guess, you know, let's go in chronological I mean the two big products I want to talk about and I think that you have opinions on are the 17E iPhone and the MacBook Neo . There are new iPads. Well which is kind of the problem, right? Yeah, there's new iPads. And then the the new the new regular Mac pros, right? The Maxes and whatnot, which are screaming and like seem like they're incredible machines. But the b the the ones that that I think are interesting um outside of the norm are the are the E and the and the Neo of course. Right. And I think that they are clearly and I I tried to write about it, but I feel like this is their theme for the show and I feel like you are the perfect person, guest to come and talk about it to sort of see it. They are like sibling products. I mean they could call I love the name Neo, especially now that it's sort of sitting on my tongue for a couple of weeks after they've announced it. I think it's a great name. And I kind of feel like they could rename these E phones the Neos. Yeah. Actually I think you're right. Like I I I wonder if they had been able to if like if they hadn't the 16 E , if they had, you know, called it like the 16 Neo or something, like that would because I think you're right. Like they fit to me, they fit the the same spot in the market, which is this is a really great value product, which Apple has never really done before, that is very ideal for first-time Apple users. Yeah. Or yeah, first-time, limited budget kids, you know, which is sort of a limited budget scenario, right? Like maybe Totally. I mean like I think with the E, what's interesting about it is that A, how much stronger it is over the sixteen E, which I didn't have a problem with. Felt like it was a hundred dollars too expensive last year. And I still feel like it's weird for them to sell the 15 and the sixteen while they're like last year I thought there was no reason they should have sold the fifteen alongside the sixteen E. This year there's no reason to sell the sixteen along the seventeen E. Like that is insane to me. You should never pay more money for these now like in every way, unless you're just obsessing over the comparison sheet, a lesser phone. But I felt like okay, it was maybe a hundred dollars more expensive and it lacked some things that really kind of like if if you're gonna give it up for the cheap iPhone, which is what like the SE has been and whatnot, then it just felt like for six hundred dollars, I was like, I d I don't know if I love this. But this year, because they brought in MagSafe, because the chip is so good, because the other kind of refinements that they've made a color. They added a color, which is hey, you know what? Like, I I'm not I'm not even gonna be mad at it. We get so little color love from Apple that like, hey, let's do it. I feel like it's a much better value. I s like I still feel like for most people, if you have the budget, especially if you're gonna be financing it over three years, a seventeen is a better phone. It's got the better front facing camera, you know, it's got the dual lenses, it's gonna be a little better performance, whatever. So if you're paying for it over three years and you're looking at like the two dollar difference that it might be per month, then 17 is great. But there are a ton of people who aren't, or to your point, they don't care. They just need the cheapest phone. They're getting a phone for a kid. This is my first phone. This is my work phone. This is something that I can only get if I'm on like a a a prepaid plan . Like this is a really, really good phone in its price , and it's a really big step up from what we had a year ago, and that's really great to see. Right. I personally, and I think this is to your point too, as an enthusiast who is deeply you know, n nerds out on details and secondarily, um uh always, you know, f for my whole adult life been a fairly avid pros umer photographer, I care about the cameras. I would love to talk most people thinking about the 17 E into spending two hundred dollars more into a seventeen, but it's their money, not mine. And uh that's the one thing I try to be you know, I r i i money falls through flows through my hands like water through my you know, like trying to hold water in my hands. I mean I just I can't hold on to money 'cause I spend it on stuff that I want. But I realize it's other people's money and the priorities you could just you whether I think about family members. I don't I'm trying to think, I don't know anybody in my immediate family with a E sixteen or seventeen E, but I know some people in my family who the next time they get an iPhone probably will get it. It's just that they haven't upgraded since these last year when the 16 E came out. Right. And I know what they think about a six hundred dollar cell phone, right? It's it is for a lot of people like going back in time to before the iPhone and saying, Hey, how about a six hundred dollar phone? And it would be like, are you out of your friggin' mind? Right. And so we who are uh super nerds about all this, and me who buys the Pro Phone every year for eleven or twelve hundred dollars or whatever it costs . I think six hundred bucks, man, that's a pretty low price for a brand new phone that has the A nineteen chip. And a lot of people out there, and I sympathize. I get it. And in some ways they have a lot more common sense than me. You know, that six hundred bucks is a lot of money to spend on a cell phone. It is. It look it it objectively is. And I think that that's like especially when prices are the the trend has been going upward, right? Like we had the subsidization era. Then like the high end if it was unsubsidized was like five or six hundred dollars. Like that was a decade ago. And then we broke that barrier and it's not coming back. And and there have been all these trade-offs if you've wanted to get an iPhone, like you've had to go back multiple generations or like the S E was a great phone if you got it literally the second it came out. Like if you bought the S E, the second it came out, it was the best value you could get. But they kept the problem was they kept it on the market for like three years at a time. And I was all over the place. Right. Some time I think four years the one time, I think. Four years the one time, right. So if so if you bought it like literally like the the day it came out, you're getting one of the best values in tech, but then it depreciates every single month that it that it's on the market. Whereas the you know, if if they continue to be doing what they're doing, which is like using like the binned, you know, um uh chips and like the the older, you know, bodies and like the different screens and you know, making the trade-offs that they're mak ing to to keep the price that way and they're gonna come up with one every year, I feel like this is a very good option for people who want an iPhone who might not be in a position to be able to spend $1,000 on one who might not care enough about some of the features. And or again, like you need a secondary phone. There are a lot of variations. And like before, what the option was was to buy a refurb. And like if you went on an iPhone, and this is better than a refurb on on any level unless you're getting it directly from Apple, because if you're getting it from your carrier or you're getting it from like back market or those places, like you know, you can't trust that stuff the same way. So this is a brand new phone, which is really great. Yeah. And I do think that it has kind of escaped attention. It's like the way we open the show with talking about the Netflix thing, and it's like the thing that's on my mind are the things that annoyed me. And annoyances get your attention more than things that you're like, oh yeah, that's good. You know, you're more likely to complain at a restaurant about a dish that was awful than you are like, hey, this was perfect, and you don't go to the manager after and say, you know, the steak fruits I ordered, they were absolutely perfect. You just don't you know, you're more you know you're gonna have the niggles. Well, especially people like like you and I who like we're enthusiasts and we like these things and we know what the other aspects I feel this way about the Neo too, right? Like I see like the the little things where I'm like, oh but if it just had this it'd be perfect. But I try to take a step back and be like, no, but for what this is , this is really good. The only problem I and I'd be curious from your perspective, especially since you actually spent time with a 17E, the only area where I feel like the only area where I feel like and again, I realize to some people's two hundred dollars it can be a really big deal, and so I don't want to discount that at all. But the only thing like I feel like holds back the 17E at all in some ways is that I feel like this is the best base model iPhone that Apple has had in probably a decade. Like I feel like that the 17 is a really, really strong phone because I have a 17 and I have the 17 Pro Max. I had to get a separate phone for work and I I bought a seventeen in December and I I paid, you know, eight hundred dollars or whatever for it outright. I think I traded in my twelve pro that I had laying around that was unused and and it was you know, so I got it for like six hundred dollars or something. And that is such a good phone with like the new, you know, front facing camera, um, with which is fantastic. The rear cameras are strong. The processor is good. You know, the the weight and stuff is good. Like that's a really, really good phone. And not every year the base model phone isn't always good. Sometimes they're hot, sometimes they lack other things. Like it had the promotion display now. Like it really feels like that gap is is narrowed. So that's the only reason I look at the 17E, and I'm like, okay, some model years, the E might actually, you know, be like the best kind of all-around, you know, winner. This year, I feel like just only because the 17 is so strong, I still feel like that's my MVP for like if somebody's asking me what phone to buy, I'm gonna tell them the 17. But if somebody's gonna tell me if you if you want a pro, you know you want a pro, it usually. But if somebody's gonna be like a little more like budget conscious or I'm gonna answer your question, but I would like to first go back to the thing that people complained about, and I think rightly so, and that has sort of escaped attention, is that in the Tim Cook era, which one way or the other is winding down, right? Yeah. Whether it's this year or next year or soon, it's you know, it's he's 65. It's sooner rather than later, he's going to step aside as CEO. And one of the defining factors of the Tim Cook era, and it was most prominently exemplified by the iPhone lineup, is the selling of year old and years old models at lower price points. And that really didn't happen in the Steve Jobs era. No. And it became a defining characteristic of the Tim Cook era for a while. But they've kind of gotten almost entirely gotten away from it. If you look at Apple's iPhone lineup now, the only old phone is the iPhone 16. Which is should not be sold. Should not be sold in my opinion. Right. And I think though that they are d click by there's only so much they're going to change year over year, you know, that they've got everything on this annual schedule. Everything, just about . And there's only so many changes they want to make year to year. I kind of wonder if this is the last year that they're going to do that. Like I c yeah and I think and I think to your point about the base no adjective seventeen being so good that that's why they don't want to move that down a hundred dollars next year. You know, because it has promotion display, because it has the new front facing camera. Oh, that's a great point. Because at that point that is a hundred dollar upgrade over a an eighteen e in most cases. Like uh it because you're not going to notice the processor differences. You know the cameras are going to be better. It's going to have the Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. So I kind you know and again, this isn't any you know, this sort of like how Apple strategizes that type of product I mean nobody in the rumor market even t uh tries talking about it. Everybody just wants to know what the new phones are. Nobody really sp Mark Gurman doesn't write reports or Ming Chi Kuo doesn't have updates like how many years are they gonna keep the iPhone 17 around? But I kind of feel like strategically that's the sort of thing that's interesting to me about Apple. And and they used to keep like two or maybe even three years of those phones around. And And i it annoyed people. I I get it strategically and I think Apple had sales data to to look I mean clear I mean because that's too much. Yeah. Right. And they're like, yeah, but people come in and they're like, yeah, you can get this one for a hundred bucks less. And normal people come in and you're like, you get iPhone twelve or the thirteen and they look at them and they're like, then the thirteen has better battery life, blah blah blah and you're telling them why the thirteen's better than the twelve and the meanwhile they're looking at the hundred dollars and they've already they're like walking towards the checkout and they're like, How do I check out in an Apple store? And you know, now they're they're just buying the twelve because all they see is the hundred dollars. Yeah. That they're sort of moving away from that with everything. And I think it's great. And maybe, you know, maybe it's the John Turnus influence. It does coincide with him being elevated to the chief of hardware. Maybe it would have happened no matter who was elevated to the chief of hardw are, but I think it it is a very interesting thing, and that's the thing that ties the Neo, the MacBook Neo and the 17E together, is that they are designed from the ground up to be lower price But brand new. Some things are brand new, like the A19 chip. The chips are new. Do you want to know my theory on this? My my on the chips. All right. So my theory on the chips is that in terms of the differentiation, okay, two things. One, I do think it's interesting to think about if they were to keep the 17 around, what would that do to how they position the 18E? I hadn't thought of that, but that's a really good point. But I think that one reason they might do as you're saying, like just drop like having that hundred dollar skew, which which you know in in most cases you shouldn't have. I think it's coming down to their chip production. There is so much competition right now from TSMC from everybody else. Like Apple used to be able to just buy up the supply chain and they had the the weight to be able to do it. Apple has competition now to do that. Other companies are coming in and front running that, the AI , uh Frontier Labs, you know, like NVIDIA, like the the other manufacturers are all needing that time. And so I think what you're seeing is that for higher volume products, so not the displays, not the Apple TVs, you know, whatever, but for the high volume products, I don't feel like they can continue to keep the manufacturing around to keep pumping out those old chips is my theory, which I think is ultimately a good thing for consumers, right? I feel like that's why they can use these binned newest chips in the phones. They can use last year's chips that they were shoving in like the 16 pros, whatever, into the NEO. They can save those off and know what they're gonna do in the future without having to keep up a separate line for a phone that if you're gonna be selling a seventeen, maybe you make enough of them in advance that you can still sustain another year of sales. But what happens if your estimates are off? Like are you gonna reopen the line or are you just gonna cancel that skew? Like I I I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. It might but that might be a factor. It really might. And I also and it it it's sort of a correlated point is I do wonder 'cause they are binned on the GPUs. Um you know, and that they've got four GPUs instead of five or something like that. Um I do wonder how predictable that is. And therefore, like how many of the 17 E's are chips where one of the GPU cores didn't fail testing and actually was either going to be discarded because it didn't meet the specs for the phone that had all GPUs active, and how many are actually like crippled deliberately for marketing, as I always call it marketing Yeah, I mean well NVIDIA used to do that, like with their GPUs. Um is that you would have like people that's how people figure out like overclocks is that in some cases it really would be kind of like a a bend uh with overclocks on CPUs too, but like people would figure out, okay, in some cases maybe you really do have a lesser chip, but in a lot of cases it was an intentional thing just for the market segmentation. Yep. And you know, and with PCs where you can o literally open the case and you know you can access stuff and the software is all there for you to modify. You can do crazy things like add your own cooling to the system and and enable disabled GPU cores and take your chances and you can't really do that with these A series chips. No. But I totally understand how and you think well that sucks though if some of these chips could have all GPU s enabled, but Apple is disabling one uh just for m marketing because th it's going into a seventeen E which is advertised thus. They couldn't just leave it enabled. I mean and they could, but if they did then people would go nuts buying them, going home, seeing how many GPUs were active and then returning it until they get one that has all s all the cores active.. Yeah So you kind of have to do it this way. If you're going to sell any of them. If you're going to Yeah, you have all of them have to be bent. Yeah, absolutely. And it becomes I like it would be interesting, I think, to know to your point, like how many of them are actually bent and how many of them are okay, we're just using either extras or excess. And and I'm sure that this is where like Tim Cook, I'm sure that his you know predictions and whatnot are pretty good. Like they look at, okay, we know about how many we're gonna have to sell and if we have to do another run that but really that's not a complaint about Apple it's a complaint about human nature right yeah human b human beings could not handle the fact that if you buy a seventeen E you're getting a lottery ticket as to how many GPU cores you're gonna get. We we just I I admit I'd like to think that I'm serene enough, you know, uh uh and above it all. But no, if I bought a seven T E and I knew some of them had six GPU cores and some had five, I'm gonna keep returning it until I get one with six. I was gonna say, I mean people already do that. They play the panel lottery when they buy monitors or or like uh you know non-MAC laptops, like people will literally buy six of them and then return them for each thing. It would be chaos. Like you ha you have to have it uniform. There was I I don't it doesn't really matter which phone it was. But remember there was one time where there were some s uh very earlier in the iPhone, there was like a chip that was made by Samsung and then one that was made by TSMC. Yeah. It was before TSM C's uh undisputed yeah, undisputed dominance of fabrication. And there were you know, there were slightly different benchmarks, you know, uh depending which one you got, even though you spent the same money and it said it was the same phone, it was like you you know, and it it was like country by country and it's Samsung still does that. Like they have their Qualcomm processors in the US and they have the ExxonS processors elsewhere. And they're different they're different performances. You know? Um but but Apple, yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, there might have been like yeah, it was just a country by country thing. They're like, okay, we'll get within this realm, but it was one of those things you're like, okay, but you knew if you got the US iPhone, you're getting like the good one. Yeah. So then returning to your point about the 17 being a really good base model, probably the best in a probably the best I I would say almost without question the best since they've split from base and a one with the name Pro in the in the name. I would say it's the best. And it's the two things in particular are the promotion display finally getting it. And I had been wondering for a while, even though the rumors said it was going to get it a year ago. So I kind of was like, okay, they're just going to they just waited. But I I legit wondered if in Apple's mind calling it Pro Motion meant it was only in products with Pro in the name. So only iPhone Pro will ever get ProMotion . And I kind of I didn't spend a lot of time blabbing that theory because I thought, ah, that doesn't hold up because eventually that's going to be table stakes, right? Right. Eventually, like the 20E, the iPhone 20E is gonna have it. It's gonna have it. Or the 21 E. I don't know what year, but it one of these years it's going to happen. It's it's table stakes. But I thought maybe though by the time they do that, they will give it a different name. Like maybe it won't drop to one hertz. You know, it'll it'll go to the higher rates, but won't drop to one. I don't know. But it's they just gave it promotion and that's great. It's a much better screen and it's a thing at these price points that had stood out uh for as much as ar consumers maybe don't walk in you know, not maybe almost certainly don't really walk into the store thinking maybe this is the year I'll switch from Android to iPhone or vice versa. I mean people do switch, but it's you know, not typical. But in our world where people review it at the eight hundred, nine hundred dollar price points, it was starting to stick out like a sore thumb it was that the iPhone was stuck at sixty Hertz. Well and I think the problem too was that it was actually hurting. Like you know if you're gonna go up to a pro that you're gonna be getting a better system, but say if you're not somebody who is ever going to be able to spend $1,000, $1200 on a phone, you're I think in some cases, the screen can make a bigger impact than people might think because they're re they're looking at the two phones side by side. They have similar unibody designs. They have similar lack of colors, they have similar camera systems. Should I upgrade to a new one? And and there wasn't necessarily a a push to spend eight hundred dollars on a new phone. Whereas now it's like, okay, I probably have a lightning phone that I'm replacing. This is gonna have way better cameras. This is gonna have the front facing camera is fantastic. And it also now has this screen that I'm going to even if I don't recognize the difference between 60 Hertz and 120 Hertz when I use my phone, I'm going to notice that this feels snappier. Yep. And it is sort of uh fundamental to the Apple brand, especially from the less technical and either an Apple customer or a potential new Apple customer is. It is almost primary to the Apple brand that Apple stuff looks better. Both the heart, everything about it. The stores look better, they have the nicest tables in the stores, they have nicer lighting in the stores . The actual aluminum hardware looks better. The screens look better. Everything is supposed to look that that's the Apple brand. They design stuff. That's why all the the the way Tahoe looks like ass is so off off brand. Yes. Right. That shit just looks better. Right. And you get j just go back to like the heyday of like the introduction of the iWork suite. And you you know, I know like Excel versus numbers is a really interesting comparison because I totally get how if you're a spreadsheet nerd you're like few numbers, I need this, that and the other thing that are technical things that Excel does that numbers couldn't handle. And the other side of it is yeah, but just look at the two apps. Just look at them. Alright? And it's like this is a numbers is somehow makes a spreadsheet look or used to at least look beautiful, right? That's the Apple brand. And so like the sixty hertz thing is like off brand for Apple at that price point, right? And I think it works at the new it the with the current lineup and the introduction of the 17E, I think it works where you could say, well, this is the base model, and you don't get and I think they were like maybe a at least a year, maybe even two years late, but probably about one. I think I think last year's base iPhones probably should have I think they should have too, because at that point it had been stable stakes for so long. And again, like to your point, people aren't coming in and being like, I'm gonna switch from Android to iOS. But it does kind of you know gnaw you a little bit if you're like, okay, because cause the thing with Apple is you know you pay a premium, but rarely do you feel like you're being nickel and dimed. There are a few products in the lineup and there are a few omissions that they've had over the year And and that felt like that was one of those really like egregious things. But it it's interesting, it's it's like at eight hundred dollars I expect it, at six hundred dollars I'm completely fine with not having it. Yeah, it feels right. Um and then the other one, and this is where I first uh the thought I gotta get Christina on the show this month is after I wrote my seventeen e review, you sent me a very nice text message where you didn't call me dumb, but but I was I missed the one thing I did not put in my review was to talk about the front facing camera. Yeah. Which is a huge difference f with the seventeen E to the regular seventeen. Where the regular seventeen and this is another one of the reasons I call it the best base iPhone is Apple introduced this all new front facing camera this year where it's a squ it's really interesting and I think it makes so much sense that it's a square sensor. So no matter which way you orient your phone, you can take a quote unquote full frame image or at least full width image with the front facing camera. And in addition to the sensor sensor size, which lets you rotate the phone either way without cropping, it's just a higher quality front facing camera. It's facing it. But I do sometimes, you know, and other people I know take lots and lots of them, and it's just a much better camera. And it just is I I my person al lack of selfie photography makes it a blind spot for me, but I just know that technically it is a much better camera. And it's really interesting that they put it in this non pro phone the same year that it came out in the profile. Yes. And and I do wonder to your point, maybe if they were that was kind of part of their differentiation strategy, right? Maybe if you're thinking longer term, okay, we're gonna stop selling the prior year model at launch, maybe we'll let carriers continue to do that, but we're going to only sell our kind of three main tiers in the store and not four, which which I think is it would be neater in any way just for the lineup. But I wonder like if they're looking at that, they're going, okay, we've got this new sensor, we We know know. and I think it's not just v photos, I think video is actually where a lot of people use this stuff. And you know, for for taking TikToks or Instagram reels and other stuff, like a lot of people use this a lot. And this is where you really see the stark difference and they're like, okay, what's the thing that's gonna help move the needle? Because once you have MagSafe, once you have the chips that are fast enough, you know, once you have a good enough rear camera, uh a promotion display is great, but the thing that you could see somebody being like, okay, I will step up and pay the extra $200 . Or even in this case, like I said with the 17, like why I think it was such a good base model phone, is you're like, okay, this is leaps and bounds ahead of my iPhone thirteen or iPhone fourteen, right? Even if I had a pro, the base iPhone this year is gonna be better uh in most regards. So yeah, I I think that that's a a great like to me. I looked at the seventeen E and I was like, okay, that's their differentiator. They've gotten rid of the stuff where I felt like they were cheaping out. Like last year, it really bothered me that they didn't have Mac Safe. I was like, this is this is a this is a move. I think you and I talked about this on a previous uh talk show where it was like when you don't include the seat cover inside your car, right? Um the floor mats. The floor mats. Thank you, thank you. Yeah. And and so you know, like when you don't include the floor mats with a car, like that's what this felt like. This felt like not including floor mats with the car. Yeah. But if you get past that, then I'm like, okay, I can understand why having to upgrade the sound system or upgrade like the GPS system or whatever to be better than what it was. That's a trade-off. And that's even a thing where I'm like, okay, well this is the one I really want, but it doesn't feel like nickel and diming. Yeah. Absolutely. And effectively you do get the nicer screen. And that's nice to have. It does make it look nicer. But I would say the main reason to think about spending the extra two hundred bucks is to get two hundred bucks worth of camera that front and back. Front and back, I agree. Front and back. You get the second lens, the ultra wide, and uh you don't even get the second lens with the seventeen E. And the one X main camera is better and it is very noticeably better in low light for sure Anybody could see it if you turn off the flash and take low light photos. It's really not subtle. You don't have to zoom in. But all that said, the seventeen E1X camera is really good for the price point. And other than and you know, people are like, I don't take a lot of pictures in low like really dark rooms. You know, I I turn the lights on. You know, or I take them outside. And in good light it is surprisingly good and often to to me, as somebody who cares, surprisingly hard to tell the difference in like outdoor lighting. But you know, just going to cycle. And I think it's a test a testament how good like Apple's phones have been. And again, like I think that the person who's buying this, like you might have people who are buying them for their kids, but a lot of people are going to be people who had an iPhone 12 or a 13 or something like that. And at that point you're like, okay, this is gonna be, even with these comparisons, this rear camera, this single lens is gonna be better even in the low light than what I had five or six years ago. Right. And there are people who don't take a lot of pictures with their phone. And then they look at the back of these iPhones and the camera units are getting bigger and bigger. You know, the plateaus are are huge on the pro now. And then you look at the seventeen E and if you don't really care about the camera and you're like, yeah, once in a while I I take a picture and it's like you look at the back and yeah, that's what I want. It's just a lens that's a little it's like the sticks out about as much as a dime, but it's smaller than a dime and that's it. It's just a lens that sticks out. And if you're like ninety five percent of the people and maybe even higher for the 17E market who put a case on their phone then the case doesn't have a lip around the lens because it doesn't need to because the lens sticks out so little that the thickness of the case actually is higher than the the surface of the sapphire of the lens. So you don't even need that. And so with the case, it just sits flat and it does. It is a great look. And it is , in my opinion, the best well second best feeling iPhone. The air is obviously the best hand feel. But l the I just had the compare page open. The weight of the air is a hundred sixty-five grams. The weight of the seventeen E is 169 grams. It's oh my gosh. It's just like one tenth of one tenth of an ounce. So so it's almost it's almost the same weight. It's obviously the the air is gonna feel better because it's the higher quality materials and like the air does feel like a great beautiful but that's awesome. Yeah, there's no camera bump up there for your fingers. It's really great. And the MagSafe thing, I totally agree. It's a good segue into talking about the Neo. So I'll say this. It was honestly in hindsight a mistake in the 16E to not have MagSafe. It just felt really cheap not to It. It felt spiky. It felt punishing. The fact that people were having to buy cases or put on like little magnetic things, exactly, right? Just to do it and you're like, okay, but like and and you know, and the fact that you can get it every other phone would have that. That was the problem. Right. And if the charging rate was still as low as it was in terms of oh you want to buy seven point five watts of charging speed or whatever the limit was, but just put the magnets in there so it sticks to the thing in your car or sticks to the thing that you could the tripod mount you could put on your desk for using your phone for video calls or any of the zillion other weird things out there, the ten thousand things you can buy on Amazon that have MagSafe compatible uh mounts it's like part of having an iPhone you know is that you have MagSafe and it's like and I know USB C is universal across all devices but it's like if you go back to like the lightning era, it's like all the iPhones had the same charger. So it's like if anybody had lightning, it's like, well then you know, if you check into a hotel and there was a lightning bedside charger in the hotel, it didn't matter which phone you had, you just stuck your phone on it. And that's like what Magsa fe is and it just felt so uh like this is this one had like a bad smell to it aspect of the sixteen E. They fixed it. It's great. Yeah it's great. Yeah. Up the base storage and that was huge too. Because I think that I think that one's still being sold at 128 gigs of storage. And you're like, okay, why is this still here? I'm thinking that Apple Intelligence might be driving this a little, like where they want to comfortably have a fair amount of storage that they can take up Yeah , EOS I wonder if you're uh maybe it's that. I think uh maybe they finally like the bullying worked and like us complaining about you know the base storage has finally kind of gotten to them and they've kind of realized uh it might also just be a matter of again, like with when it comes to supply chain stuff, might be like the chips, it's like it's cheaper for us to just buy, you know, the the two fifty-six NANS. Yeah. And I don't focus on Apple's financials , that's not really my beat, but their margins continue to inch higher, not lower. And part of that is that the mix that is services, which is the highest profit margin segment of Apple, but their their overall company profit margin is inching higher than services alone. Like their margins on hardware are inching higher too. And so I think that's part of it where it's like, man, we are really firing on all cylinders and we're we're in the low forties on margin quarter after quarter, whereas for years it was a f uh an enormous feather in Tim Cook's hat that they were in the thirty high thirties, you know, for years. And it's like now they've gone even higher. And in a in a businesses like PCs and phones where the competition is in this cutthroat, low margin ter ritory for the most part that their margins are so good that they really can afford to not skimp on base storage. And it's like, okay, fine. Right. But it's great. All right, let me take a break and I'm going to thank our other sponsor of the episode, and it is our good friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in one platform for building your space on the web. It is if you don't have a website, you almost certainly should. And if you do have a website and it's outdated, perhaps you should look at Squarespace for for building a new one. And as I almost always say when I do these reads here on the talk show, I know the talk show audience and I know that you're the type of people who your friends and family, when they need a website, they come to you for help. Send them to Squarespace . And it's not just like being a crummy family member or friend to get them out of your hair, but you could actually get them involved and encourage them to actually do it themselves. They might think that they can't because they don't know how to make a website, but Squarespace is so approachable in a way that they the how WYSIWYG it is. It's it's really as easy as like using a W Menus and stuff like that. Squarespace makes it that simple to have an entire website, including adding seemingly complex features like a store where you could sell actual physical products or something where you sell your time as a consultant or a trainer or something like that. They've got all of these features built in and they are just components that you drag and drop in to your website and use them as you need. And they do things like take the actual payments and it's so easy. Squarespace domains, so just the simple starting point of picking a domain name, they've got a great service for picking a domain name with fair pricing, all inclusive, no hidden fees or add ons like a lot of dedicated domain registrars have where you have to pay extra for advanced privacy and security and stuff like that. You get all that built in when you register your domain with Squarespace domains. And when it comes to analytics, like trying to see where people are coming from and where they're which pages, which sections of your site they're actually using, Squarespace's analytics is one of the best presentations of website analytics that I've ever seen in terms of data visualization and making it coherent where you don't have to be a trained analytics expert to figure out the dashboard. It's like just sit down and it's like, Oh, I see. Here's where people are going. That whole section of the site nobody's going to. Oh, here's where they're all coming from. They're all coming from our Instagram posts or something like that. All of that stuff is present in Squarespace analytics. So where do you go to find out more? You go to squarespace.com slash talkshow and you go to squarespace.com slash talkshow you get a thirty day free trial no watermarks on the website. Just get started. Build a website. All the features are available. Thirty days later, when the free trial's over, just remember that code TALK Show and you can save 10% off your first purchase of a website, a domain, anything you purchase, squarespace.com/slash talk show. My thanks to Squarespace for their continuing support of the show. All right. So that brings us to the Neo. I love the NI.O I gave it I think for me a rave review, but the problem I see talking about it in the same month back to back with the seventeen E is that the seventeen E is so much better than the sixteen E, and I can't help but feel that the Neo two next year is gonna be a lot better than this year's Neo. Yes. I I feel the same way. I feel the same way. I like I love the Neo, like my I was critical about the Neo when it came out on like the things that you and I would be critical on. And I wanna be clear, my critiques are I think it's a great product. I love that Apple is entering into this market segment, which they've, you know, like for various reasons not wanted to get into. Maybe they didn't margins or whatever. I feel like it's really good. I love the colors. I like the positioning. I like the TikTok ads. But if we look at like the the the 17e and we're like this is so much better than the 16e . I don't know if I could definitively say across the board that the Neo right now is better than the MacBook Air M1 . And like like I I realize that it's a better performer, but it's close. And that was selling for the same price at W almart. Whereas next year, if they are following these trends where they're going to be using the cut-down chip that's been, if it has 12 gigs of RAM, but if it has other stuff, like then you kind of like set yourself up to this position where you're like, I'm not gonna tell anybody not to buy it, but it is one of those things where I'm like, man, you can almost see where the tea leaves are going and it's like, okay, the next one is going to be like the one. Yeah. And again, they are like sibling products where the iPhone 16E a year ago had this one glaring everybody's gonna notice it omission, which was MagSafe, right? And to me, with the MacBook Neo this year , that one thing that everybody notices is that dud of a second USB C port that's only at USB C two speeds. Right. Yeah. You've got one full speed USB three port. And then the second port is only USB two speeds. And it's story, which I give them credence to right at the New York event, they had it ready to go, which is that this is the first product they've ever sold with an A series chip that has more than one USB port. And it was an engineering challenge to add the second one even with the USB two speeds. What they mean by that, what they leave out is the engineering challenge of doing it at these price points. Right? Like obviously if they wanted to sell it at a higher price, they could have done it. And the proof of that is the developer kits for Apple Silicon in twenty twenty, which were what was the hardware shape? Was it a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio? It was a Mac Mini shape, I think. It was a Mac Mini, yeah. Right. With uh the A twelve Z chip, which was previously the Z chips were for iPad Pros for a while before the That's right. Before M series chips existed. And by definition, the developer kit in twenty twenty when they first announced the move to app the transition to Apple Silicon wasn't gonna have an M series chip yet because that's what we were waiting for. Right. And those developer kits in the Mac mini case had multiple USB C three ports and I don't I they might have even had Thunderbolt I think it was Thunderbolt but I was trying to rem ember it might have been Thunderbolt 3 actually but it was it was definitely USB three it was it was definitely and it was it was the yeah it was multiple ports multiple yes and an HDMI port out and obviously what they did is that the whole system you know they call these things SOCs and like the A twelve Z was a system on a chip and as it stood it was the whole system in the iPad Pro that it was in. What they did for the developer kit was obviously add parts of the system that weren't on the chip. Yes. Right. It's that there was more computer in the developer kit than just the A twelve Z system on a chip. There was parts of the system were outside. Which added cost and they never sold those things they never sold it. It was there was one offs, right? They even like paid people to like, okay, you're gonna put that under the positive please send this back because I know people wanted to keep them and yeah, exactly. It it was not a mass market thing. And so I understand why the engineering decisions they could make for that are why they are decisions they could not make for this product. However, it still sucks to have a USB two port on a laptop, even a $500 laptop, if you're getting the student discount in 2026. People say, Oh, it doesn't matter. And I'm like, but that's the only part of this whole thing that does, like, even the RAM aside, that's the only part of it that I'm like, okay, a $300 Chromebook has better I/O than the MacBook Neo. And that's just true. The I.O. is better. Like, I'm not saying that it's a better product at all, but I'm saying the I/O that you get from those things. They have HDMI ports, they have multiple USB C three dot port two s. It's it's better. Some of them have S you know, like buttons. It's not subjective. It really is. It's a little frustrating but not surprising that they don't label the two ports. They don't even use that's I hate that. They don't use like and again I like there's sort of an industry standard that you can use blue plastic inside the port to suggest PD uh what's that power delivery. I guess I'll here I'll make a note and put a link in the show notes. But I often recommend these nom ad slim chargers. They have three. They've got like a forty watt, a sixty-five watt, and like a hundred watt or something. It's the middle one that you want, in my opinion. The 65 watt nomad slim charger. It's a flat charger with a prongs poke out and it has two USB ports for the out from the charger, but one of them is blue and one of them is black, it the plastic inside. And the blue one is the one that if you plug two devices in, that's the one you should chart put put the Apple doesn't do that and what they could have done and they're not gonna go along with the industry and make them all blue like but what they could have done they could have color matched color match the actual device. I don't know what they would have done for the silver one. I don't know, maybe make it black or something. But color match it, right? Put a citrus colored piece of plastic in the good USB support. It really is frustrating that there's no marking at all. And yes, it is nice that they updated the OS so that it'll d say hey that and I tested it with a couple of things. I tested it with a camera, I tested it w which the camera doesn't even work in the slow port. And I tested it with like uh uh external hard drive or even a USB stick. Like I because I've got a USB si uh sand disk one that is super high speed. And it's if you plug it in the dumb port, it'll say, hey, if you eject that and plug it in the other port, you'll get faster uh I'm glad that they do that. And they they they would have to, right? Because otherwise you're not going to notice, right? Because it's things, and look, there are some accessories, a camera's not going to work, but a microphone would. Um you know, uh it's fine for charging. But and and I guess uh part of me I've kinda gone back and forth on this uh about whether they should have just included one port if they were only going to do this or not. Like I don't No. This is better than this is better. icon because that's not thunderable, but could you have had a dot? Could you have done something? Yeah. Because it just it just because it's just like having to remember is it the front port or the back one that's slow? And yeah, your OS is going to tell you, but if you don't see that pop-up or whatever, I can just see scenarios like I can just, you know, sense frustration from regular people. And this is the stuff that Apple typically avoids, which is why I nitpick on it, because Apple is usually so much better than this, where you're, you know, a teacher in a classroom or student in a classroom trying to give a presentation and you you have know your um thing plugged into a dongle and and it's connected to the TV and and it's the wrong port, you know, and you're having to kind of switch them back and forth and you you you don't know by by feel or by anything else. I don't know. Um Yeah, it and it's I get it. Like I I'll bet just hearing you make the case there, I'll bet it was a discut a a serious discussion in Apple whether they should just go with one and maybe they would have if they hadn't tried it before a decade ago with a with the just plain MacBook. Which the difference there was that it was a fifteen, sixteen hundred dollars starting price. Yes. And it felt like hey, how how are you selling a premium priced laptop like fifteen hundred dollars? And again, fifteen hundred dollars a decade ago, not now . No, it was an expensive thing. all laptops will look like and that wound up not really being correct but the USB C thing was but like that but it was in many ways the it was the replacement for the air like they they got rid of the air and that was which was a less expensive product. They they never got rid of the air, but they kept it at a non-retina . And at one point even reduced it to eight ninety-nine, which was you know well but by getting rid of it, what I mean is they were literally when before the retina air came out and that was a terrible machine. Oh my God. But before that, like it was in tw enty sold in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, it was like a twenty twelve or a twenty thirteen Intel chip. So it was years old. So it was so so by what I mean by getting rid of it is like yeah, they sold it, but it was not like they were not going to be improving it. Like it was they they they literally had the same hardware they've been selling for, you know, like half a decade. Yeah. And I'm in general in the Apple pundit sphere a bigger Johnny Ive defender than a lot of people. And there are a lot of things that people say, Ah, Johnny Ive the goddamn butterfly keyboards. And it's like that wasn't Johnny Ive. That was engineering and and like Tim Cook and a oper ations and like we think we could save money and wrongly giving the butterfly engineering team too many cracks at it where they kept coming back and they're like, We've got it this time And a single crumb underneath the case. It was worse. Well, what was actually worse on that, my experience with the twelve inch MacBook, because I had one of those for a while just as like a secondary device because it was rose gold and I loved like the look, even though it was a objectively not good machine. Um, that keyboard, even though the key travel I didn't like typing on it, I never had any issues with it. It was the touch bar models, and I'm not sure what changed. That was the one that I had to have one of them replaced by Apple three times. I think it was just bad luck, Christina. I really do. Yeah, maybe. You know. But even anecdotally, the we didn't ever see and it might have also been a volume thing. Like they sold far, far more pros than they did . The twelve inch Mac. The twelve inch. But I remember because the reason we were surprised is that no one like I it didn't even occur to me when I first reviewed the touch bar MacBook. It didn't occur to me that that could be an issue. I was like, I don't love the key travel, you know, have to get used to it, but it's you know, it's fine. And then it was like, you know, a year later when Casey wrote her post, I think for the outline at the time that kind of blew up the fact that everybody was having these issues that it was like I don't remember anybody ever having that with the 12 inch. The 12 inch seemed okay. And so I don't know if they made modifications to like the design when they went to the pro and and that made it even more sensitive, or if it was just the volume, or what? I don't know. Maybe I don't even know, but I don't want to spend too much time. But maybe it was like because it was so pristine and expensive that maybe there was a higher tolerance of the aluminum around the keys. So there it was the same mechanism, but there was less of a gap for crumbs to get whatever. But here's what here's where I was going with the whole thing with going back to that model is where I will say it was clearly a Johnny Ive led decision was the idea that the future of MacBooks was more like iOS devices where you don't use them plugged in. Yes. That's and that's why it had one port. It was a statement of intent of how their vision of how Mac Books sh quote unquote should be used. Right. Which was like and that's why even to this day, given even given the fact that you can configure like a two thousand dollar iPad Pro , even a two thousand dollar iPad Pro comes with one USB C port, right? Right. Because that's the vision of how you use an iPad Pro. Um and that you don't use it plugged in. And that was the vision for the MacBook and I think that's as wrong a vision for a MacBook hardware as as Tahoe is as a vision for Mac software. No, I really do. No, no, I think I think you're right. I think you're right. Um I in the way that Alan Dye and his cohorts have no idea of the nuances of what Mac OS really should be like software wise, I think that that was an area where John ny Ive and his closest people who designed that really were wrong about a huge swath. There are people who only use their MacBooks, not plugged in, road warriors, you know, whatever you want to call them. But there are so many people who need to use them plugged in because of what they're doing and still need ports to plug in drives or peripherals or cameras or microphones. Right? How the fuck are you gonna do a podcast with one port? Well well right. You make you make a great point. And so I'm glad they have two ports. I that is better than the alternative. It just sucks that one of them is essentially only able to be used for charging. Um but okay, fine, fair enough. But you know what?be May I I I do feel confident that like next year they will figure out that they will have designed things in the SMC in advance so that they can have the multiple things. And then eventually at some point it will happen. Two ports same speed. Two ports same speed would be great. And I think what'll eventually happen, uh if they what I hope is that they will do these on an annualized update. And and part of me hopes they'll do that just based on like the chips they're using. They're gonna have to continue to make new chips, so they might as well update things , is that we have Thunderbolt, you know, in the iPad Pros. That is eventually going to come to the iPhone Pros. And when it does, that would be a really nice thing to be able to drop in to a Neo, right Yeah. Yeah. And it is an interesting difference between the two that the iPhone obviously the iPhone 17E did not get the nineteen A nineteen Pro chip because it is, you know, it's a six month, five, six month old chip and it's got the current generation , but it's not the pro. And the Neo is a brand new MacBook and it is using a quote unquote phone chip, but it's using the pro variant of the year and a half old chip. Each one of those devices got the best chip we could hope for for Apple to provide. It is totally fine for a brand new MacBook Neo to have a year and a half old phone chip because it's the Pro variant. But I do think it it's uh I mean I would bet money I wouldn't bet the house but I would bet money that the that next year's Neo I I would A bet a fair amount of money that there will be annual updates to the Neo and I would bet a little bit less, but I would bet that it'll have two ports and they'll both be USB C three. In the same way that I kind of thought this year's seventeen E would have MagSafe. It's like, come on, you're gonna listen to this. Yeah, totally. There are so many things that the Neo gets right that I think that this is like we're we're we're quibbling, but it it's just especially like what I keep coming back to is like for all my niggles and I have them, is that the operating system that it ships with aside, like this is you cannot get well and even comparatively, like this is a five hundred dollar with a student discount computer. And that is unbelievable. Yeah, it really is. And I don't know I mean and I don't know why I guess I shouldn't be, because my son is still in college, but I haven't used education pricing I guess since he went to college. I mean his you know the stuff he has was all purchased with the education discount you know that it's it's really easy to use an educ you know yes in in the United States there's no verification. Right. Everyone can be a lifelong learner, everyone can be buying something for a home school thing. Like there's literally just a link that you need to go to. Right. And as a percentage, you know, like the hundred dollar discount for education is kind of standard, but when you look at it as a percentage of the price, it's enormous That's a sixteen point six six six seventeen percent discount. That's huge. Just for saying yes, I'm a teacher or I'm a teacher or a student or I'm buying this for a student, whatever the case may be, right? Which there's been a lot of talk about whether this will be a thing that will finally get Apple back in education like institutions. I really do. I in a way. Not like hey, we're taking over the market, but like I think it will put them in the conversation. I think that unfortunately when they made the decision again about a decade ago to push the iPad as their education experience, Google doubled down on the Chromebooks in not so much for the the cheaper hardware, but in the management of devices. And that's the area where I just I don't know if you overcome that, right? Um maybe for your high schools, again, like private schools Home, you now have, you know, if you have a $500 budget, you now have a really great option. Whereas before you didn't have anything, you could find things on on sale. You could get the M1 MacBook Air if you got it at Walmart. Um uh like there were some other deals that if you were s a smart shopper you could get, but you were realistically looking at about seven hundred, seven hundred fifty dollars um to to get a MacBook Air. And again, going back to like the the seventeen E discussion, two hundred or two hundred fifty dollars can be substantial um for for for people, especially if you're buying a laptop for, you know, a a kid at home. Um now would I encourage somebody to take this to college? I'm gonna be honest and say no. But much and you know I need to or I need to just recommend you know to somebody else who like an iPad's not going to cut it for them, but they need a computer and I don't want them to be you know dealing with like the the you know, Windows ecosystem or a Chromebook, like this is so good. Yeah. And it's it's also further interesting to me, and I'll call the claim chowder on myself. When Jason Snell was on the show a month ago, both of us thought, you know, this was before the NEO was announced that our guess for the starting price was like eight hundred dollars, you know. Six hundred dollars with a hundred dollar for education is way lower than I would have guessed. I'm happy to be wrong. Super happy to be w rong. Yeah, yeah. I I was hoping that this is where they would be. Um I I've been I think I the the RAM is the only area where I have and again like if if they do continue just the pro chips it'll be so much better next year. With twelve. It'll be with twelve, yes. Because that's the weird thing. We already know the specs of the checks. We already know the checks, exactly. And like I feel like for for now, you know, um Apple i it'll be fine eight gigabytes is fine. I feel like my only thing when I kinda think about this long term is that if you're buying this computer and you're expecting to use it for five years this first NEO, yeah, that's where I'm like, uh I don't know man, I don't know. But again, it's five hundred dollars. Yep, exactly. And again, in the same way that a hundred dollar discount is as a percentage way bigger for a six hundred dollar device. Um go to you could still say, well, twelve megabytes of RAM kinda sucks still. It's one point five X. Exactly. Right? It's it's it's it's a game changer in in those regards, right? Because and people are like, oh well you're only going on the web. I'm like, yeah, but have you seen how huge web pages are, right? And and it's just it it's one of those things. Uh browser you know using. Yeah. It's the main reason uh my main machine is still the M One Max MacBook Pro from twenty twenty one where I max ed it out with then the maximum amount of RAM sixty four. And when I check activity monitor, I've got so many goddamn tabs open. I I almost never see swap, but I get close. Exact same MacBook Pro and then I upgraded to the M3 Max and I got 128 gigs so I could do local LLM stuff. And I usually don't run into that. But yeah, you know, it's one of those things like for me personally, I'm like, yeah, I don't feel like I could ever buy a laptop with less than thirty two gigs of RAM for any use case. But twelve I would be I'd be no problem recommending people. Especially for people who've never had a laptop. It's one of those things where it's hard to go back and you know, I'm still using my Neo review unit and it's like the more I you know, if I open start opening a lot of tabs, it's not that it slows down, I don't see the spinning pizza of death cursor, but I you know, I s can sor sorta feel it. You know, I can't. Right. And and and and again you know, because you're used to it. But like for people, if you're coming from a Chromebook, if you're coming from an older Windows laptop, heck if you're coming from a MacBook Air from the Intel era, right? Like this is gonna be a really, really big upgrade. And I think that's the thing, right? Is these are either like Tim Cook says, best week for first time Mac buyers. I would also bet that you have a lot of people who are buying this who have older Intel Macs and I hate that the Intel era of the Mac stuff ended the way that it did because I think that it unfairly overshadows how important that transition was for Apple because I think that that was like a a genuinely like a necessary and amazing thing. But Intel was doing so poorly and then Apple didn't help by their thermal designs, like the the last couple of years of Mac hardware on the Intel era, they were not good. Yeah, I never thought about that. But that's an interesting point, Christina. With the other transitions, Apple didn't leave with a bad taste in the mouth. Like with the 68,000 to power PC , the quadras were great machines, the 68040 chips. They were really good machines. And there were certain things that were still better on a quadra because of the software, because of software that hadn't been updated. And the power PC to Intel thing was such a surprise, right? And I remember I shot my mouth off when the rumor came out, like, and it kind of did drop as a surprise. Apple it it like the Wall Street Journal, I believe, had the scoop like the Friday before the Monday WWDC keynote that Apple was going to do it. And I, you know, I didn't say, ah, I think that's bullshit. I was like, ah, this seems hard to believe because XYZ, right? Like this is if it's true, it's a big surprise. And it was a big surprise. And part of it was just that the power books and the power max were in pretty good shape. And yes, there was the whole G five power book that never came. Because they couldn't hit it in the thermal window. But but the G4 was still great mach ine. Right. And and and and if anything, they were selling because the iPod Halo was real. Like I I I had just started college at that point and people were finally like showing up to school with Macs. Right. Whereas the last few years of Intel Ma x everybody was like, Hey, this sucks, you know, like these things are hot, these things are uh aren't getting updated on a regular basis. You know, there was I d uh we could talk about the Mac Pro being discontinued yesterday, quickly. Yeah yesterday yeah you know the Mac Pro even the i at at uh every end of the spectrum it was bad, right? It was bad. It was you know there were no mobile chips. The one port MacBook was incredibly slow with the Atom processor. They got the thermals. They they optimized for thermal. Yeah. And they put and they put that in the retina MacBook Air, um, which I bought for my mom and I'd hoped they'd kind of you know fix things because she'd had like a 2010, 2011 MacBook Pro. And I got her the Retina MacBook Air, and that was an awful machine. I got her an M3 MacBook Air for Christmas last year. Um and and I I but but I I almost like felt like apologizing like I'm very sorry that I you know bought you this fifteen hundred dollar laptop you know that looked beautiful but was not a good performer. Yeah, and I think that it's a mix of the different places Apple was at and wanting to it's like that old adage that you should um measure twice, cut once. That th when they clearly could have moved the Mac to Apple Silicon years, not just a year, but years earlier. Like the performance was there. And I when I wrote about the Neo, I even wrote went back to like old reviews where I noticed when the single core benchmarks for phones had passed the MacBook pros or getting close. And it's like and you know you can add more cores in a big ger machine. It's the single core thing really shows you what the potential is and it's like, hey, this is already there and you get way better performance per watt. And I think you know, I'm not saying they they should have done it earlier. I th 'cause I think the way that Apple Silicon launched at the end of twenty twenty with these just uh mind blowing reviews, like this these machines seem impossible was the way to do it to just come in with overwhelming advantages . But that meant that those final years of the Intel era on the Mac, Apple was sort of like we're done with these fuckers. You know, we are not gonna we're we're done with this. We're not even gonna update this shit and it's like uh you know, we're done with your terrible price performance ratios or performance per watt ratios and but then in the you know , we the users were out there, it's like, well, what are we gonna buy? Well, right, that was the thing. Like like I I I bought and and I did it knowing because they'd already announced the transition, but like I I bought the the twenty twenty iMac, the twenty seven-ish iMac and, I did it because I knew it would be the last until you know Mac I would ever buy. I went in wide eyed, I put 128 gigs of RAM in it. I it had like the uh you know the the the ten core you know processed. No, this was the this was the regular but it was more powerful than the pro. It was actually more powerful than the pro uh by the time it came out. It had like a 16 gig GPU, it had you know 120 gigs of RAM, it had you know like the the the 10 core processor, very good performing machine, but even that one, because it didn't have the i Mac Pro's like uh extra fan, you know, it gets noisy. And and I I frankly bought it 'cause I knew the transition would take some time and I was like, I'm gonna need something to run Docker containers. I'm gonna need to be able to run Intel stuff. But I was in that like weird position in 2020 where they'd announced that the new ones are coming. I don't know when that's gonna be. I need a new computer . And like you what are what are you gonna do? I wound up getting the M1 Macs the the following year, but I did buy that final generation Intel. The people I feel for, like them killing the Mac Pro, it's effectively been dead since 2013, if we're all being honest with ourselves. But the only people I feel like really got screwed, like if you bought the M two Mac Pro, that's on you. Like you made that decision for whatever reason, probably because it was a tax write-off and it didn't matter. But really needed the I But the I.O. wasn't even that good. It was like one of those things like i I I I uh there are so few scenarios where you would need to have that many SSDs on board where a separate appliance would not fit. I I just feel like people just bought it because it was a tax, you know, they could business expense or whatever. But the people I do feel for were the twenty nineteen Intel Mac Pro buyers because even though we knew they were working on things, we didn't know when, we didn't abandon stuff. We didn't realize that like Apple was gonna basically not continue to release GPU or other add on stuff. And it was like, okay, if if you spent ten thousand dollars on that machine in twenty nineteen, which a lot of people did, my God. And and those were good computers, but like i it's it's gonna be EOL, you're not gonna be able to get software updates on it after the fall and like that sucks. Well, m maybe they would have been better off if they got cut it off at last year with Sequoia. Maybe. I haven't updated my Intel Mac to to Tahoe and I won't and and it suc that's actually kind of it feels like the whole Intel thing again to kinda go back, it feels like it just ended on a sour note 'cause I'm like I can't even update the latest security stuff because I'm not willing to put this garbage on my Mac. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we'll stick with the Mac Pro. But I I went back and looked at the timeline and it's like I even had to update my post from last night. Marco Armad texted me overnight and said like hey 'cause I said like the the first Intel Mac Pro be you know, there was PowerMax before. Then when it went to Intel they renamed it Mac Pro came out with new uh in two thousand six, I guess. Uh six, yeah. The canonical the best known case. Yeah. Toward case. The cheese grater. And then they had two thousand you know, speed bumps every year for a while, then to twenty ten, and then there was an update in twenty twelve, but it really was a weird update where they kind of just sort of uh they didn't really update the specs. They got rid of the base model and made like a mid model the new base model. So it was sort of more of a price reduction than a speed bump. And then there but there was like a new high-end config, but without new chips. So it really in some sense you could go back to 2010 was the last real speed bump for it. And then the trash can was a one-off in 2013. Then they went all the way to 2019, and the Intel new tower with the fancy drilled holes was a one-off. And then the M 2 in 2023 was a one-off. So they had three one-offs. The trash can, the 2019 Intel that never got a speed bump, and then the M two Ultra in twenty twenty th thatree never got a speed bump. That's in fifteen arguably fourteen, fifteen, maybe even s uh sixteen years if you go back to twenty ten, that there were only three updates never with a speed bump. And then the good news is the Mac Studio kind of is the new Mac Pro. Oh it is. No, that that's great news. I mean I know some people are upset about the death of the Mac Pro, and I'm like uh you needed to come to terms with this years ago because as soon as they announced Apple Silicon and and the way that they do IO and their integrated systems, which works for them, the appeal of the Mac Pro goes away immediately. And a lot of people bought them because it was very PC like, but you could run Mac OS on it. Like that was a big part of the appeal. When that goes away, when the performance and the other stuff is nearly identical, and you're just paying an inflated price, you're like, okay, this is even data centers, I promise you that the the one that Apple has, like, I can't imagine They're gonna shuck those things out of the cases and like you know put them in custom racks, I'm sure they're using Mac Studios. So it's a shame uh except that would they've replaced I can't help but think though that they were unsure. That's why they did the M2 generation, and that's why they only canceled it now in March 2026. And the big tell for Apple is that even if they go a long time between updates, and they sold the trash can all the way up until twenty nineteen. I mean they were selling a six year old un without a reduction in price. Without a reduction in price which was ridiculous. They did have the iMac Pro, which was like their conciliatory we don't have anything else. Like they had that round table with you and Lance and a couple other people and like their response to that was okay we'll just make a few modifications to the IMAC chassis and put in a Xeon in that and we'll sell that as like our our stopgap. But but again that was a one -off. Right. And you know but the only exception to it that I can think of is the home pod , where they actually disappeared the home pod one and then they came out with the home Pod Mini, which was weird 'cause there was a mini version where there wasn't a full size pro version. And they did come out and they still sell the HomePod too. And it and I think that was the only time there they ever stopped selling an old dev ice but weren't done making it, they just ran out of the old one, didn't want to produce more. There was like a weird thing with the original home pods where people who looked at the serial numbers and like the copyright dates on the boxes. By all accounts I've ever seen, there was only ever one production run of them. You know, and it was so expensive. Yeah. Right. If you have a home pod one, it was all from the first production run . And something must have happened where they the it took them longer to get the home pod twos out than they expected, but they didn't want to restart production of the home pod one, so they went like a year or close to a year without having a home pod in the lineup. But other and I think that was just a weird circumstance for a very a very niche product still to this day. But for the most part, if they intend to replace a product, they'll just keep the old one for as long as it takes, which is what they did and best exemplified by the trash can Mac Pro, which was still there in the lineup in twenty eighteen and early twenty nineteen. Six years old at the same five or six thousand dollar price with a chip from twenty thirteen and an underpowered GPU from twenty thirteen. Kind of ridiculous, but it was their way of signaling, we are going to have a new one. And so there was hope to hold on to it that there would be a new Mac Pro up until yesterday. Up until yesterday. No, there there was hope for that. The only other thing you're talking about, like the home pod, the Apple TV, I think maybe the original one, like I don't know if there was a a break in sales, but again, that w and that felt kind of like the home pod. Obviously the design was was different, but that felt like they did take like almost a deliberate pause and it was like, okay, this this first one and even the take two software didn't work, now we're gonna actually make this, you know, much more appliance-like, whereas before it was much more, you know, Mac like. Yeah. But overall, a bit of a sad, you know, pour one out for the Mac Pro name , but the Mac hardware lineup remains in the best shape it's ever been in company history. I was gonna say I'd be more upset if like the Mac Studio was not so good. If the Mac Mini wasn't so good, right? Like I think that pros would be too like what happened before with the trash can and even after that was that you had people where that was the highest in Mac you could get and you might have needed it for some purposes, but it wasn't good enough. Yeah. And now it's like you don't have that same problem. Yeah. Presumably there are new Mac Studios coming with M5 chips. And I think they've surely made this decision that the Mac Pro was going to be end of life a while ago, you know, and it was just a matter of when to announce it. And I think strategic ally it's kind of interesting that they decided to make the announcement not coincident with the release of the M five generation Mac Studios, but rather in the wake two weeks later of the introduction of the MacBook Neo, which is the furthest product in the lineup possible, right? It's a laptop, not a desktop. It is literally is using an iPhone series chip. It only comes with eight gigs of RAM, you know, it's etc. etc etera et cetera. It introduces it breaks shatters the pricing barrier of a Mac, whereas the Mac Pros shattered pricing barriers the other way. Right. But it is it's symbolic of hey, this platform is in better shape than it's ever been. The whole overall it's it's about the overall platform ecosystem not the status of pro desktop hardware. Like Marcus Brownley, like he had commented a couple of times like on his M five like Max reviews that like those were outperforming his M two Mac Pro. And so I feel like that's honestly I feel like the way that they just kind of quietly removed it from their lineup is a real kind of almost like flex to be like, yeah, because within three years the chips that that we are selling now in our consumer laptops are outperforming our ten thousand dollar Mac Pro machines, which is wild, right? I expect probably around WWE C we'll see a a Mac Studio revision which will be even more powerful. And like that will be the one that if you really need to do all the work and you want something that's gonna be you know plugged in all the time, that's gonna be for you. Aaron Powell Yeah, and I think strategically this does make sits intuitive sense to me that you make this sour note announcement in the wake of this univers ally hailed. Yes, there are gripes about the ports and the pri and the RAM of but it the whole idea of the MacBook Neo is that this is going to be a smash hit. Deservedly so announce this Mac Pro thing now. Let all the griping and consternation and hand wringing and pouring one out happen now and then when the Mac Studio does get its bump to the M five, that's all out of everybody's system It's out of everybody's system. It's just celebration. It can just be concentrated on what's good about the new Mac Studios and not but where's the Mac Pro. Yeah, no, totally. I I have a feeling that after the 2019 kind of rug pull as I think about it, and I and I don't think it was intended to be that way. It's just how the hardware cycles happen to turn out. I feel like if you bought a 2022 Mac Pro , you knew what you were doing and you knew what those risks were. And so I don't feel like bad for anybody in that regard. And and even then I think uh everybody's kind of r assessment was even Apple's kind of thing if you did the comparison it was like there's almost no reason unless you are in an infinitesimal part of the a populace where you should ever buy this one versus this one. And so hopefully people have had time to kind of grieve and get it out of their system. You can't complain that like the to your point, like the hardware's never been better. Like the Macs that you can go into the store and buy today are better than what we could get at any time in Apple's history. So I I I'm also sad that the the X serve was was killed a million years ago. But but but you have to make w it's like part of us like we complain that Apple has too many choices and then we complain when they take one of the choices away. It's like we can't have it both ways. I was thinking about that listening to Marco last week on ATP talk about putting forty-eight Mac minis into a data center. It's like I understand why. And it's like, boy, it would be something if they still sold X serves though that were meant to go into data centers. But yeah, yeah, well well at GitHub what we do is like again, like we buy Mac minis and then we like shuck them and then like have custom racks that we put in. Yeah, no, genuinely they take them out of like the you know casing and whatnot and then they have like custom power supp Aaron Powell It's like the enclosure is just another level of packaging. Oh, it is. Well that's the thing, right? 'Cause you can store way more of them, you know, if if you get rid of the enclosure. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Uh all right. Last question. Revisiting the seventeen E versus Neo. The other difference is the Neo comes in three fun colors and one boring color, and the 17E only has one fun color, the the blush. Uh I kind of feel like that's where the NEO should catch up next year to the seventeen to the e phones is by getting rid of the biggest shortcoming, which would be the port differential. I feel like the seventeen the eighteen e phone should catch up to the NEO and come in like at least two fun colors every year. Black, white, color, fun color A, fun color B. Yeah, I would agree with that. And and and I have to think like um I you know obviously we apple never break this out, but just from anecdotally what I'm seeing, like I have the orange iPhone Pro and uh and I love it. Like Orange Gang represent. And I I loved that they were that bold with it, right? Like it's not even like my favorite color, but I was like, there's no way I'm not buying the orange iPhone. I see them everywhere. Same. And so part of it is it's the signifier, it's the new one. But you could also tell it's new based on like the new camera array. But I think that like I really hope that this the success of this stuff to maybe encourage us and be like, yes, let's take more experiments with colors again. Because like that was what was great about the iBook, the first iBook. That was what was great about the iPod mini and and the nanos, like was the colors. It's people like to have people play personalization of stuff. It's like, yeah, people put skins on their laptops or whatever, but man, I mean i I can I'm just imagining myself being like in middle school and like how cool would I feel like going to school with the pink MacBook or or even the citrus one or whatever, right? They're all great. I mean so I honestly and I am a very boring person color wise, wardrobe wise. I mean what am I even wearing today? I'm actually colorful. I have a tan shirt on. Um honestly I, I've just I knowing we were gonna record today, I went into the Apple store yesterday at the end of the afternoon with good light coming in and looked at all four Neos again. I've still I've got my review unit of citrus, but I hadn't I really like it. Um and I really like now that I've really thought about it, because it was such a surprise at that event in New York that the keys were color matched to the hardware. Yeah. I really like the way they did it with the indigo one too. It's really, really neat. I can totally see how the pink one Citrus sold out the the right away. Like as soon as they came into stock. I do too. Right? But with the indigo and the citrus are the ones where like you won't mistake those for other colors. It's not like the blue MacBook Air where that might as well have been silver, right? Like this you're gonna know that this is not a normal col Yeah. And you know that Apple thinks about such things. The way that they have them set up on the same table, there's four MacBook Neos on a table. Side by side on the left is the citrus and on the right is the indigo, which I think are the two best colors. But then back to back on the left side with the citrus uh facing each other is citrus and pink , which is maybe the two more fem ale colored ones. And then on the other side, back to back is silver and indigo, which is the more boring colour. But then I also think that part of the reason they have that in the arrangement is that when you're facing the pink and the silver. The silver, they look too similar. Well, no, they it actually makes the pink look pink. Right. Oh, okay. Got it. Oh, that's what I mean yeah, yeah. Because they're left or right. Because I think that if the pink was side by side with the pink, that's that okay, that's that that's how I was thinking. If they were side by side, I think it'd be hard to tell. But yeah, but if they're back to back, yeah, it it pops more, yeah. But I do that's the thing. But who am I to say that it is the second best selling model? And I do think for everybody who just wishes, why don't they make it like super super saturated like the IMAX? I wish that someone at Apple would just come out and fucking say it in an interview that yes, we've tried it and it actually looks bad to have super saturated colors on a laptop. And if you look at the IMAX which have those much more saturated colors, they're only on the back. It's only on the back. Exactly. Exactly. On the chins, they drop to very pale colors. And I think it's because when you're looking at the screen, you don't want like bright orange or saturated orange in front of you know skewing your eyes' perception of color on screen. But nobody at Apple will just come out and say it looks bad. Right, right. Well I feel like they could have just tweaked it a little bit more and I can't help but think more. Right. Right. No, citrus I think is perfect. And and and again that indigo I actually think looks really good. Um I was on Mac Break Weekly this week and Stephen Hackett was showing his off and like that that indigo again like it doesn't look like the midnight, like it it looks very distinct. It it it looks great, right? And I think the color matching I th had the same reaction in the store. I was like, oh, the color matching on the keys here , you can really tell they have the the light blue hue. Like this is really nice. Yeah. Um so I don't know, maybe for next year I I hope that the success of these things will encourage them to be like, look, people are not gonna freak out if you if you just increase the saturation just a tad or you know do what they've done with the iPhones, you know, and and you know, give us a different colorway every year. You know? Ha ha have your core ones, but like swap citrus out for something else. You know, each and I wonder who the silver is for. I wonder like is that what like education's doing 'cause they don't want the kids to fight over colors, you know. Oh, that's a great call. Yeah. I actually that's a really good call 'cause I I've been thinking that too. I was like, Well yeah, you just buy a bunch of the whatever. No, the kids would be I because everybody would be I know that I would be as a kid, I would have been so pissed if someone had if somebody had like the fun color and I'm stuck with the boring one, oh h heck no. You know And I I'm not too proud to admit that when I was like eleven or twelve I would not have wanted the pink one. I wouldn't Oh absolutely not. No, I I would have but but no but you can't get the pink one like that's gonna be very gendered. Everybody's gonna be fighting and the thing is the other ones like we don't know how these things are going to hold where at this point, right? Like are they gonna are they are they gonna scratch, they're gonna whatnot. So yeah, if you're a school, you're just buy the silver. Buy the silver and suck it up, you're in school kid.. Anyway Christina, thank you for being on the show. This was a great episode. I hope your recovery continues. Thank you so much. Unabated. Sounds like it's going well. And I it's going well for sure. Yeah. All right. And of course, thanks to our sponsors, Sentry