 Alright, and we're live. Hello everyone and welcome to a very special edition of the Vergecast. I am your senior editor Ross Miller joining me to my left as always. Being the second time ever. It is senior reviews editor David Pierce. It is the very special edition iPad Mini after party. I'm going to make that work. The iPad Mini after party? Can we make it like all one word and a hashtag? Can we camel goose? Done. Sold. Sorry guys, let's get focused. A lot to do today. We have a lot of people coming in to talk to us. Anyway, just minutes ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook walked off stage. We had big announcements. The iPad Mini as we expected. Revised iPad 3rd generation, I guess now iPad 4th generation. Bigger surprises, Retina MacBook Pro. Actually, what are the big Macs? So there was a new MacBook Pro which they're not calling Retina. It is a Retina display and it has the resolution that says everything you want. But they're not calling it the MacBook Retina or whatever. The same way they did with the first one. There's a new iMac which is super thin. It's a little more expensive than the last version but it upgrades across the board. It's really thin and there was like oohs and ahhs in the audience all across as he was talking about it. Oh, there we go right here. Yeah, I mean it looks pretty fantastic. There's still, I love how much they talk about the chin on the thing which always makes me laugh. Sorry. But so that's new and they kind of made a bigger deal out of Macs here than I thought they were going to. There's the new Fusion Drive thing which is kind of nifty. We'll get into that later. But it's part SSD, part hard drive and it was really a lot of build up to the iPad Mini which is clearly the main event. But there's a whole bunch of different things. A new Mac Mini. John, one of our video guys was talking about earlier. Let's be clear what happened to John. So John bought, John correct me if I'm wrong here, you bought an iMac, a Mac Mini and an iPad all in the last 12 months, right? The iMac is a little older. Okay, the iMac is a little older. But so in the course of like 15 minutes everything John owns is now completely out of date and awful and he hates it. Well first and foremost it's the nature of the beast. True. Second, I will never buy something he buys. That's fair. I just do not want to risk it. Just when John buys it, wait six months and get the new one when it comes out inevitably. But yeah, I think that's really the rundown of it. They talked about new iBooks stuff. And I was amazed how successful iBooks has been. I feel like it's been one of those things that Apple doesn't, they talk a lot about it but it doesn't seem to really catch on. But then they're throwing big numbers around about how many books are being downloaded. Here's my question. This is me admitting a little bit of ignorance. Are those big numbers? I mean Amazon does not talk about a lot of like how much it sells. Well I'm sure, again you're right, they don't talk that much about it. But from, according to, compared to Barnes and Noble or Amazon, I'm sure they're small numbers. Right. I'm still surprised like 400 million books downloaded, 40 different languages. He made a big deal out of you can swipe now to turn pages left and right. Which he was super excited about, I guess. Remember this is, you know, we thought was a big deal when they got copy and paste. Like every little feature that should be there, we thought should be there. It is a big deal to them. And you know, to us as well. We're happy it's there now obviously. No, absolutely. And he was like it's the feature you've always wanted. And then like beat, beat, if you're in Japan. And then kind of laughed at himself and I got a kick out of that. But so, and yeah, but obviously the real story here was the iPad Mini. Yes. 7.9 inches. We are seeing leaks for 7.85. I mean that's six one way, half dozen the other. As Schiller, Phil Schiller said, 7.9, 9.7, it's easy to remember the difference. Yep. I want to get into it a little more deeper later and we have a lot of people who will call in and kind of talk to us about it. You had the weirdest, no, not even the weirdest. You had such a tantrum when you saw the bezel. Oh my gosh. So, okay. So I, you know, play with a ton of different devices at various points. And the one thing that I hate most is devices with uneven bezels. So you have on the top there's a bezel and well actually the Nexus 7 has one too and you can actually see it. So it has, you have the top bezel here which is, you know, black and stuff. And then the side bezels are smaller. And like that's all well and good when you're reading. And then you turn it on the side and suddenly the sides become enormous and the top and bottom, it just looks bad. And I hate it and I wish they didn't do it. And the iPad has a pretty even bezel and it looks good. You're so angry you can't even finish your sentence. No, I just, it's irrational and ridiculous and I know that but I hate it and I don't care. And I want everybody to know. All right. Coming up we'll take a deeper dive. Josh and Neal I will hopefully be joining us later live from San Jose. First off we have some breaking news though. We got quoted. We did. Woo! Not just we the verge, like we. No, no, you and I. Yeah. High five. No, come on. There we go. Thank you. You don't have to respond. So what was the exact quote? So as he was leading Tim Cook comes out talking about the iPod Touch. Right. And quotes and he in his just wonderful kind of vaguely drawly voice that makes me think he's like bouncing me on my knee telling me stories. It's very soothing. Yeah. This year's iPod Touch is the best one ever. It's really a device without competition. Right. And he says this is what the verge has to say. And I just immediately start getting tweets about like way to be a shill for Apple. And I was like well whatever. Tim Cook quoted me. I'm a big deal. I mean it's nice to reading you know at least for the superlatives. I like to think that Tim Cook is just trolling our forums all day under a various set of usernames. And I was all ready to mock you for it and then I got referenced too. You did. You got shillered. I got shillered. Yeah. Actually when you put it that way it feels a little bit. I had the shillered killer on me. You did. No. So we were talking about the 15 inch MacBook retina. Yep. And apparently I said the display looked nice at some point in the review. Hypothetically. It is a nice display. It is. It's a very nice display. There may have been a couple words with EST. Greatest, beautifulest, bestest, revolutionarist. I don't know. Something like that. It was resolutionarist. It's resolutionarist. I think it might have been. Yeah. It's the most resolutionarist MacBook ever. I think that was pretty sure that was the quote. I like it. We don't have any B roll to prove it so you'll just take my word for it. Right. It definitely happened. Yes. For sure. Yeah. I mean like but I will say I will you know 7.9 inch iPad mini that's interesting. I am way more interested in the 13 inch retina right now. Interesting. Why? Well because first and foremost it's 3.5 pounds. Yep. This 13 inch MacBook Air is just 3 pounds. The difference is so small and it's such a it's way more compelling hardware on the inside. It looks gorgeous. I don't need a disk drive anyway. It's not going to hurt my back. 0.5 pounds. I will take that for a much better screen than this. It's expensive though. Money is no option man. Dude. Not when you're Ross Miller. The famous quoted by Phil Schiller, Ross Miller. This is these are great words. Rhyme. That was pretty good. From the famous David Pierce quoted by Tim Cook, David Pierce. No so I kind of I don't know I'm lukewarm on the MacBook Pro. It's nice it's certainly a great upgrade but I don't quite have this I don't know I don't feel this desperate need to have the incredible displays on my laptops. I feel like when you and I both spent a lot of time with the 15 inch when it was here and it was like the things that looked good looked amazing and then there was this whole subset of things that just looked terrible and it's like I'm going to want this display a year from now when everybody's updated their apps and their graphics. Are you have you used the retina any time recently? Bits and pieces and it thinks it's getting better really fast for sure. But and you know we've been complaining about this even on our own site like the you look at the navigation on our site on a retina MacBook Pro and it just doesn't look that good. And well to be clear the text looks great. Sure the pictures don't. Sure. And I'll give you that the pictures do not look great. And so I'm like I'm I'd rather wait for the Internet to catch up and then I'll jump in with the hardware and then then it'll be amazing. But for now like I don't know it's great. Don't get me wrong but it's not quite the you know my seventeen hundred dollars isn't leaping out of my wallet right now. We're going to come back to that. We actually have pretty soon we're gonna have Craig Maud. He is credited with designing Flipboard. He'll have a lot to say about you know. I imagine so. Yeah I'm hoping so. Otherwise we're just going to talk about you know sports ball and other things. And bezels. Can we just keep talking about bezels? That's all I want to talk about. Can we not talk about it? It's just it's the worst. Your bezel is my little iPod touch loop. Which I cannot I can't get over it. So that's that's one of the things. It's the new the iPad Mini is barely thicker than that. So it's pretty wild. And you can you can just swing it. Yeah it's I'm going to take this away. That's gonna be a gift. Oh well. But yeah so it's what it is between this and this. It's 7.2 millimeters which this is I believe 7.5. It's made a little differently than the current iPads. Has an aluminum body and it looks great. I thought it was funny he like made a whole deal out of holding it up in one hand. It was like you know Mufasa style like showing the world. Wait wait wait wait wait. Mufasa style from Lion King? Like Lion King style yeah. No no didn't he hold it with two hands? Yeah I guess it was two hands. That would be. You just ruined the metaphor. I'm so sorry. All right now if we could get a clip from Lion King that'd be actually great. But if we can't just take my word for it. It was two hands. I know my Disney. I'm actually a little ashamed you don't. I know I'm sorry. I'll just. So technically the iPad one was the Mufasa moment. This is the twice as efficient. He comes out and does one of these. Yeah but look it's and he's making this whole big deal out of you know you can hold it in one hand and I swear I will stop talking about the bezels. But when you hold something in one hand the bezel actually becomes really important because like if you as you hold something in your left hand and you want to read or something you need somewhere to put your thumb and on this you're going to put it on the screen and that doesn't work. And it's why like you look at ebook readers the Kindle paperweight or whatever they all have wide bezels on the side so you can have somewhere to put your hand as you hold it. And this it makes it just without more bezel there it doesn't make as much sense in one hand. You know I don't think it looks. I mean I'm glad it doesn't have too much bezel. I mean let's look at the playbook. I still cannot say in the playbook design how much bezel there. It's funny though I kept looking at it and the first thing I thought and I really hate saying this but the first thing I thought was it's the Galaxy Note 2 a little bigger. Interesting it looks like the front is very similar. Well so that was I mean I got on the on Twitter a lot as soon as it came out a bunch of people were like oh it's actually an iPod touch that's bigger and like everybody made that joke when the first iPad came out. I think it's the aspect ratio thing maybe. But like this really kind of is just a bigger iPod touch. Well good news we should have on the line now Craig Maud. Craig Maud is the designer of Flipboard. He is currently actually Craig are you with us? Let me just ask you. I'm here. Can you guys hear me? I can hear you. You sound great. Sound better than David actually. So real quick Craig just tell us who you are. Well I'm a writer and a designer. Last year I was a product designer at Flipboard and now I'm just independent doing consulting advising and writing. Awesome Craig thanks for joining us. You know we're big fans of your work big fans you know some things you've written about in terms of design. We wanted to get you on want to talk to you about iPad Mini. Now obviously you're still using the same 1024 resolution as the original iPad but you're using it on a smaller screen. Do you see any concerns with like any limitations that's going to put on developers with how they design the interfaces? Yeah well I mean the one concern I guess that comes to mind immediately would be font sizes. If you're using a small font size on the regular iPad display it may get a little bit too small if you shrink it down to 7.9 inches but other than that I don't know it's going to be interesting going in and playing with all the apps and seeing how they feel kind of just like slightly reduced in size. Now is it 67% is that what they're saying? I think that's about right. So you do you think of any apps off the top of your head that would actually have to design around the small limitation like 10 inch apps that had like smaller icons is this going to be a concern you think? Well I think it'll only be a concern for apps that did a poor job designing for the 10 inch model. Apps that are probably too busy that have too much going on on the screen. So immediately that would come to mind would be sort of stock apps. I can imagine a lot of stock quote apps, financial apps that are just you know a little bit over designed too many scrolly things, too many small tap areas that will probably need a little bit of tweaking but I think honestly if you design for the 7 inch screen first and then it scales up to the 10 inch it will actually probably provide a better 10 inch experience. Bigger hit areas, easier to read fonts, things like that. One concern I see people coming up with quite frequently is the lack of retina display. What do you guys think about that? Are you is that a concern for you? Is that something you see popping up in your comments? You know honestly I would have been surprised if they did have retina. That's a lot of pixels for such a small area. I'm sure it's going to come with time. I just didn't think it would be hitting now. So maybe I guess my answer would be I was ready for it not to be there. I mean I think for me it's the same resolution as the original iPad but on a smaller screen so it's denser and will look better. Sorry go ahead. I think the actual PPI is actually 162 PPI if my math is correct which is pretty close to what the original I think the iPhone 3GS was. I see a lot of people bring up concerns about are fonts going to look good enough on 7.9 inch with non-retina display? Is it going to be comfortable to read in iBooks, things like that? I read a lot of books actually on the original iPod Touch that was based off the same display as the 3G, 3GS which was about 160 PPI. It was really comfortable. It was a great reading experience actually. I thought it was a better reading experience than when I finally got the first iPad. So I think, I don't know, retina display is also a product of distance from your face. We hold these iPads further away from our face. If this thing has a pixel density similar to 3GS and you're holding it further away I don't think reading and the resolution of fonts and the rendering quality of fonts is going to be that big of a concern. Yeah I tend to agree. I feel like the only challenge they might run into is if you get somebody who currently owns a retina iPad and then gets one of these to supplement it because they want one. There might be a noticeable difference downward in that case but I feel like if I just handed you one and you started to use it, just like I still have my now three year old iPod Touch and it's still fine for reading on but then I pick up the iPhone 5 and it's considerably better and I feel like this is the same thing where it's perfectly good enough but there's definitely this better thing out there. Agreed. Right. Well I also think that the quality of a reading experience isn't just based on obviously the pixel density of the display. It's also a product of the weight and the ability to comfortably hold it in one hand which is also a product of the weight and I've always found the iPad, even iPad 3, it's too heavy to hold in one hand to read comfortably which that's always been the biggest sort of deterring factor for me when I go and I think okay I want to read a book in Kindle, I go and I pick up my eBook, my e in Kindle because it just doesn't weigh anything. It's so comfortable to hold in one hand for a long period of time. I think that's a huge factor and I'm really excited to see if the iPad mini feels close or as good as the e in Kindles or the lighter Kindles for a reading experience. That to me actually is the bigger determining factor whether or not I'll read on it. Yeah. So actually I'm curious to hear what you think about this. What else goes into a really good reading experience on a device like this for you? You've written and talked a lot about designing good reading experiences and I'm looking at this one thing where you have the four different Kindle images here. And I love my Kindle too but I'm curious what you think about beyond just Christmas of fonts and the weight of the thing, what makes a really good reading experience? Because that seems to be what they're pitching on this device. Right, right. Well you know it's funny that their one big feature was the scroll, the introduction of sort of scrolling through books as opposed to paginating books. I think that's fascinating. I've never really been a huge fan of reading the Kindle chapters paginated. I mean you kind of get used to it but if you notice when you read a lot of sort of scrollable text spaces you kind of keep your eyes on that top third, top half of the screen. That's sort of like the comfortable place to keep your eyes and you kind of keep pushing the text up to that area. And so you know with these paginated displays with sort of like in iBooks or within Kindles you know your eyes are constantly going all the way down and then like sort of rejiggering themselves back up to the top of the page. In terms of keeping your location, keeping your place, pagination can kind of I think work to your benefit in that case. But I think you can be smart about saving scrolling locations. And I also think that a lot of what we're reading on these devices outside of books, scrolling is actually, it's a really great way to read. Not everything has to be paginated. One thing that comes to mind for example of a great recent app that kind of embraces scrolling and also does a good job at packaging content is actually Marco's from Instapaper, his The Magazine. I think it does a couple of things great that contribute to a wonderful reading experience. One is that the way we read on digital devices is different than the way we read obviously physical books and physical magazines. And so by packaging what an issue is, by rejiggering the sense of like an issue isn't 30 articles, an issue isn't 15 articles, it isn't a 500 megabyte download, an issue is just four articles, really lightweight articles and it comes only once every two weeks. I think the sense of being able to complete sort of an issue or complete a book, complete a piece of reading, complete a piece of text is a hugely important part to the digital reading experience that we've kind of lost and that a lot of these interfaces don't sort of allow us to do. I feel like we've finished something, we've completed something. But also the size of that content, breaking content up, even larger book, breaking content up into maybe more digitally native, indigenous sizes I want to say. There's a certain I think length of text that feels most comfortable for digital and it's not the same length of text that we tend to break things up into print. So I think apps that do that, that start to like create these sort of boundaries around the size of the chunks of the digital content that we're reading, I think that actually is a super critical part of making reading more enjoyable, more comfortable and sort of more satisfying to readers than it has been in most of the apps that we've seen up until now. So Craig, we got to go unfortunately soon, but I do want to ask you one other question. So we talk about iPad mini a lot. The other one thing I want to ask you about is kind of the new kind of retina MacBook Pro. It's a 13 inch. More importantly though, it's another retina display that web producers have to actually worry about. We noticed with the 15 inch retina display that a lot of websites just don't have the right image assets. Your focus obviously is on text and words, but obviously there's an imagery issue too and page loading. What are your thoughts on having to basically redesign the web for a higher resolution display? Well, I'm excited about it for the text properties alone. The fact that a lot of the data plans that we use, so if you have a 4G MIFI, MiFi, from Verizon for example, the data caps are so high in terms of cost per megabyte. Four megabytes or gigabytes, four gigabytes or five gigabytes is something like 50 or 60 dollars a month. It's an incredibly high price. So I think there's going to have to be this sort of alignment between cost of data before we're able to ratchet up all of the image assets on the web to super high res retina image assets. It's not that big of a concern for me to have high res retina quality images just yet. I think that the reading experience with the fonts for now is to me the thing that I'm focusing on that I'm most excited about. Awesome. Craig, thank you so much for joining us. I'm sorry we don't have more time. I really appreciate it. Of course, Flipboard is amazing. Craig, anything you want to promote? I mean, really quick, we actually dragged you out to talk about this. Anything else you want to say before you go? Thank you for having me and I'll be on again soon. Awesome. Craig, thank you so much. Thanks, Craig. Before we move on, David, you have an apology you want to take to the correction. I do. I need to issue just a humble, humble apology to all of our watchers and readers and fans. I just blew the Lion King thing horribly. Not only was it not Mufasa, it was Rafiki who's holding up Simba. Mufasa had nothing to do with this. Holds him up and he's just, and so we just, I just blew it and I'm sorry. And I'm going to go home and watch the Lion King 445 times to get it right. I think it may be available now on Blu-ray. We can get some gorgeous, maybe it's a 3D even, I don't know. If Netflix doesn't have it. AK 3D Lion King, please make it happen now. Better than an apology, we have hands-on video. I'm hearing we have hands-on video. Billy, can we show that? One second. It's funny because we get these nice little earpieces and they can tell us what's ready. They're like, hands-on's ready. Please cut to a hands-on. All right, we're going to do this. And they're like, all right, give us five minutes. Yep. I thought the Rafiki thing was going to go longer. My Rafiki apology was a quick one. Correction, correction, Rafiki apology was supposed to go longer. So what I thought was interesting, we have, there's Josh. We have a post on the site with a bunch of hands-on pictures. And I thought the first thing that really stuck out to me was Josh says, by comparison, the Nexus 7 and Fire HD feel like toys. Really? Which is a pretty aggressive thing to say and really kind of mirrors what Apple was talking about through this whole event. So Schiller gets up there and just like Nexus 7 burn after Nexus 7 burn. He had the two screens up next to each other and just couldn't stop talking about why the iPad was better. And it's thinner and it's faster and all this stuff. And I mean, to get it in your hand and say the Nexus 7 and Fire HD feel like toys, like, this is a perfectly good device. And we liked the build quality when we reviewed it. It's still good. And then if it can be like a league beyond the Nexus 7, that's something pretty remarkable. We're talking qualitative. We're trying to figure out what he's really meaning. I will say the Nexus 7 is a very sturdy piece of material. If he's saying this feels like a toy, then I don't know. Is it like design? Is it structural? I imagine there's a lot that's packed in that very thin frame. Absolutely. I've seen this iPod Touch feels like a toy. Right. But then like with the iPhone 5, it's kind of this incredible piece of machinery. And if they've done that again, I'd be pretty excited. I would be. Let's talk a little bit about the last event. So we got a few numbers. We'll kind of get into the details later. Yeah. They announced the two new iPods, the iPod Touch, the iPod Nano. These have sold $3 million or $3 million, $3 million units. A lot more than $3 million. A lot more. A lot more. Whereas the iPhone 5 sold $5 million in the first week in the loan. In the first weekend. So I mean, that's $5 million in a weekend is a wild number. And it's amazing that it keeps going up. Okay, we have a hands-on video, but no sound. So Ross is going to narrate this hands-on video. I'm going to narrate this video. Let's do it. Here we go. iPad minute hands-on. Look how thin it is. Okay, that's the worst idea I've ever had. I'm getting so fired right now. No, it looks super thin though, I'll have to say. It just looks like a smaller iPad though. It really does. I mean, what else were we expecting? No, I mean, it's really insanely thin. This is riveting if you're listening to this. I'm sorry. Nice watch Josh is wearing there. It's a really good watch. Can we go back to the watch? No, we can't go back. Oh, yes we can. We went back to the watch. And right at the... I have to say, I was wondering about the 4-3 aspect ratio. And like, I'm a little nervous with this device as something for watching movies and stuff because you already get the letterboxing if you're watching a movie on the iPad. And now if you get rid of, you know, 33% of the screen space, you're going to... The video suddenly becomes kind of small. And on this, which is 16-9, the Nexus 7, it actually fills the whole screen. So I do wonder how video is going to look on a 4-3 screen that's considerably smaller. But the upside is it works better in every orientation for everything else. Don't you think that's the direction that Apple is going with though? I mean, clearly the iPhone itself just went to the 16-9. Very standard aspect ratio. iPad mini, of course, I'm sure they didn't want to make another fragmentation, like another screen you have to develop for. So no surprise to me they kept the 4-3. I do not imagine it's going to be the same years down the line. You don't think? You don't see... You see them going to 16-9 for tablets too? I wonder. I feel like at some point they're going to standardize that. Maybe, you know, maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I think my... I would be shocked if they release the 9.7 inch iPad at 16-9. Because we've seen so many 10 inch 16-9 tablets that are fine in landscape and like ridiculously humongous in portrait where you hold it vertically. And so, but this with 7 inches, it makes a lot more sense to have it be a little taller. For the same reason that a 16-9 phone makes sense to have it a little taller and you can still use it functionally in portrait without it being like comically tipping over as you try to hold it. You know, I'm going to tell you a story. This is a story from when I first started and this is why you should never, ever take anything I say about aspect ratio for like, for anything. Don't take it for gospel. Don't take your opinion on this. But I'm going to tell you the story anyway. I was obsessed with the 21 by 9 aspect ratio of like this LG phone way back when. I remember that phone. The VL4D chocolate or something like that. Something like that, yeah. It looks like a candy bar. I liked the aspect ratio. I would put a candy bar in my pocket. Back in my fat young days, I had candy bars in my pocket. It felt natural. So I want you to think about that. I want you to think about little fat Ross. Somebody tweet that at me so I can retweet what Ross just said. Uh, mop top. You can't tweet yourself. I'm just going to talk at you anyway. Okay. So just imagine, just picture it. Actually, it wasn't that young. Well, let's picture 13 inch Ross, bleached blonde hair, super fat, round, carrying candy bars in his pocket because he always needed a spare. Sure. And then cut to early 20s Ross, put it that way, looking at this chocolate phone and just like falling in love with that aspect ratio. And I like it. I do, but I know that's ridiculous. And then you tried to eat it and you were like, I should probably get a phone. So when I say I want a 16 by 9 tablet, I really want a 21 by 9 everything. I want the bio that was really wide screen. I want my phones, I want my tablets, I want everything like that. Then we can just roll it up in the future. It's the future. I hope that's the future. No, I don't hope that's the future. No, but I am curious to see what happens with six. It would be really interesting now, especially if they come out and say like, Oh, we're changing the resolution and the aspect ratio because they did it with the iPhone and I kind of thought everybody would freak out. But then it turns out all you do is just, you know, extend your display and it's not a huge deal. Well, I think it was reverse. I think people were maybe were freaking out from the design aspect. Oh God, I've got to put this more space on there. Consumers did not care either though. No, absolutely not. They're like, whatever, have another row. No. I mean, I really, I think the only people who would have any issue with it whatsoever. I mean, most people are just going to buy whatever they're given and learn to deal with it. Right. Right. So, but developers on the other hand are like, Oh, I have to completely recode my app. And like they didn't, they ended up just extending it. And like we've seen a couple of really cool apps that use the extra screen real estate. There's a, I think it's called DJ. It's a DJing app that actually like added a bar on the side. Okay. And now we're just going to show more versus the Nexus 7 here because this is just shillings just burning the Nexus 7 over and over. And Billy is just telling me what's on screen here. This is great. And the thing I loved was, and I actually want to talk about this because I think this is like the most interesting part about this. Right. Was, was the app comparisons he kept doing. Here he's talking about, you know, there's a lot more screen space and I never really thought about how much more argument again too. Right. Until he shows how like diagonally it's, you know, only what nine 10ths of an inch bigger, which doesn't sound like much, but then you look and it's like, you get actually a lot more space. But I think the thing that's going to happen now is we're going to realize how many, how much better the iOS tablet ecosystem is than the Android tablet ecosystem. Like he was showing Yelp and TripAdvisor and all these apps that are, that have ones designed for the tablet on iOS and on Android, they're just blown up phone apps. So they both exist. Like this is eBay and there's an eBay app for both platforms. Right. But it just, it's a blown up phone app that was designed for like a four inch phone and now it's just bigger and it works and it's fine. But then on the iPad, it's something designed to take real legitimate advantage of the screen. Can we stop on the TripAdvisor thing? I think one of the issues also that's unfair is that, not even unfair, I think it's just an issue that Google has to figure out is differentiating a tablet app from a phone app, including the TripAdvisor one was meant to be on a phone screen. Right. But that's, I mean, but, but Android and Andy Rubin has come out a bunch of different times and said, we don't believe that they're a different phone. And they're kind of scaling back on that now. Right. They've, they've, their party line has always been, we think that you just build an Android app and that's what it is and it works everywhere. And it does indeed work everywhere and that's great. But it just looks bad. It really does. And increasingly, I think people are going to pick, like you're going to go to Target and you're going to see like, oh, I want to listen to music. And you're going to see Spotify on Android and Spotify on iOS. And it's, it's night and day. It really is. And I think that's, it's going to be way more obvious now that you have two relatively similarly sized devices with relatively similar, you know, resolution and screen space and all that stuff. And you're going to see how different the apps make the experience for the device. And that's why I think this is going to be huge immediately. It's the same resolution as the original iPad. So there's tons of apps perfectly designed for it. It's it has this huge, you know, hundreds of thousands of apps designed specifically for the iPad. And Android is just blowing up the Twitter apps so that all the text is tiny and the menus are humongous. I want to argue with this about this. I do want to argue about this more and we will. Can we talk about bezels? Is that what you want to talk about some more? I don't want to talk about bezels. Can we talk about the loop? No. Okay. I'm just going to swing this around for the rest of the 90 minutes. We'll agree on the more it's already in there. Just swing this around guys. No more loop and no more bezels. Great entertainment. First though, we have Andrew Allen on the line. Andrew Allen is a designer from 53. They made the paper app, which we love. Ellis Hamburger actually, our reporter is in mad love with this app. Ellis Hamburger has not gotten any work done since paper came out on the app store. He just draws pictures. He's made every single one of us buy it. And I got to say, I love. Oh, it's amazing. I look, it looks good. I'm going to get a free diagram for drawing because I look like I'm doing something worth it. Worth, you know, minor elementary art. You're like, oh, look at this thing. So just imagine 13 year old fat Ross sketching with a pencil. Now I can do it again. A lot of fat Ross. You know what? I have issues. I'm getting through them and we're going to work through them. Let's get Andrew on the air. Andrew, are you with us? I am. Nice to be here. Great. You can be my therapist. No, I'm kidding. Andrew, I want to talk to you about a few things. We just had Craig mod on. Craig mod kind of talked to us about the, the output of design, basically how to make, you know, apps that work for the smaller screen that are crisp or clear. He loves retina, of course. Paper obviously is more input focused. I'd love to talk to you what your thoughts of the new iPad mini. You guys were highlighted first and foremost. The second thing of course, though, is that it's, there's less to actually hit and you've got to like be a little more precise. What do you think about the 7.9 inch mini? Are there challenges that you're going to have to face now? New challenges rather. Yeah. I mean, because, you know, drawing is very size specific, you can't really scale it up and down that well. You know, the interaction just kind of fundamental changes. But that said, you know, a lot of what we're really excited about is just that increased mobility. You know, so having that smaller screen just means you can take it, you know, a few more places, pull it out, you know, in a few more places and feel a little less awkward for pulling out your giant iPad. And so we're all about, you know, trying to capture ideas sort of as they happen in the moment. And so, you know, something as simple as even just a smaller screen size can make you a little bit more, you know, just make it a little easier to just whip out and sketch down an idea. But it definitely has some challenges around ink and input, especially of styluses. They've already have had, you know, an issue with, you know, styluses are just not that precise. And so, you know, it definitely produces a little bit of a challenge for us dealing with drawing. But, you know, we see it as kind of a positive trade-off. So how much did the higher resolution on the newest iPad, the one before this, but the third and fourth generation, how much did that kind of open up a possibility to do more and do better for you guys? I mean, it sounds like that was like the big thing that really opened up this world of possibility to be more precise and more exact. Like, is that a problem here now that it's less? I mean, now that it's back down to 1024. Yeah. It is a little interesting to kind of see how that, you know, how people's work now kind of scales back down. And we do have some sort of technical challenges moving from one device to another, that type of thing. But, you know, definitely we launched with the iPad 3 back in March, and that increased resolution definitely brought like a whole new level of detail into sketching and drawing that just wasn't there before. Andrew, I have a small question. Actually, it's more of a technical thing. You may be able to answer it. When you are coding an iPad app, retina and non-retina, can they be like wholly different experiences? Can you say like, this is a non-retina version of the app, let's make the icons bigger, or does it have to be like just similar assets? Yeah, definitely the way to go is you produce different assets for each, but you name them in a certain way with mat2x at the end, so that the retina-ready version knows which one to pull. So the design pretty much has to be the same for both? Yeah, yeah. It has to be very similar. That's going to be interesting, though, because you'll see people like, we know it's coded for the smaller screen with a smaller iconography, but it still has to be the same general size. So under this new rule, you obviously have to make apps for the 7.1 inch mini, and you've got to make apps for the much higher resolution retina iPads. Do you see this as like a new limitation that's going to affect the third and fourth gen iPad users as well? I don't think so. I mean, you know, we'll try and make it as sort of universal and as great as we can across all the platforms. I mean, it is interesting, though, that from what I can tell, I haven't seen it in person yet, but it looks like they've essentially scaled everything down. And so Apple used to have a guideline that was, you know, a touch target had to be a certain size. Right. And so scaling that down now kind of scales down that touch target. As far as I understand, they haven't increased the touch sensing capacity at all. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, how they've kind of adapted to that. I think it would be interesting to see everything from like, things like that. If everything just scales down, then, you know, targets just get smaller. Right. Well, the one thing that unfortunately we cannot scale, this is actually, you know, it's a niche issue, I think, but it's something that's going to affect 53 a lot more is stylus. You know, we've been going through a lot of stylus roundups. Ellis is crazy about them, and I thank him, which means I had to, you know, I got the right stylus, got the bamboo. Andrew, what do you use for a stylus? Or do you actually finger paint? I use whatever we have around the office here. We have every stylus under the sun. I believe that. So I've used bamboo, used cosmonaut. Right. Do you have a favorite? You know, the bamboo is, I think it's a good all-around stylus, but, you know, still, there's still something to be desired in the stylus space, and so hopefully things can continue to get better there. So do you think that type of interaction is going to be as, you know, prevalent and useful on a seven-inch device? I feel like with these smaller devices we've seen, it's kind of a different use case. It's more for reading and kind of holding in one hand and doing stuff. Do you see this as still something people use a lot of for kind of these big canvassy drawings that people have done with paper? Yeah, I mean, we're really interested to see what people will actually start creating with the new, and how those creations might be different. Yeah, it may be a little trickier to do more sort of complicated drawings and illustrations, but honestly that's never really been our focus. We've been more about just trying to capture ideas. And so, you know, we see it as a great place. It's almost like a memo pad that you hold in your hand. Because you can hold it with one hand, you can easily hold it with the stylus in your hand. Right. Now, I want to actually talk about the app that we showed, or that Apple showed at the event. Ellis is actually, he's pinging me on the computer. He will freak out if I don't ask you this. That was a new paper app, if I'm not, it looks like, with a color picker. Can you talk about that at all? We are in the works on a pending update to paper that will be coming very soon. Can you talk about that at all, from what we saw at least? Is it a free update, or is it going to be another little package we can kind of get with the other sets? You buy the pen and the paintbrush separate now, for example. Yeah, we'll be explaining more of those details when it launches. Fair enough. But it is just around color. When you think about color, color hasn't changed. The basic color controls really haven't changed for 40 years. And so we've really taken a lot of time to go really deep on color, and we came up with what we think is a very innovative and new control for color. What we can see from the iconography, that looks exactly like what I wanted, personally. I'm really excited to see it. I wish you could tell us more, but I'm always going to wish that. Ellis, too, I can hear him screaming and crying in the back. Yeah, Ellis freaked out when he saw it. He could not wait. Actually, yeah, it's going to be awesome. We're really looking forward to it ourselves. Andrew, I've got a question. Are any of these products things you've already pre-ordered or you're going to pre-order, are you going to pick up a new iPad on day one? Definitely. It's our job, man. No, no, no, no, but... You know what, that was probably the dumbest question. I'm right. That's fair. But for personal use, what about the new MacBooks with the retina display? We do have... I mean, we have the 15-inch ones, so we're not super... We don't need to get the 13-inch, necessarily. Yeah, we get the tools as we need them, but definitely the new iPads because that's the platform we developed, but we have to get that on day one. So we're out there in line. For you personally, which iPad do you imagine you'll use more? I imagine you're a pretty heavy paper user, or at least if you're not, you have to say right now that you are or else you'll get in trouble. He also just said he's going to wait in line. I have a hard time believing that when he just featured his app. That's true. Which do you see yourself using more, the bigger one or the more portable use-in-one-hand-and-sketch one? You know, I'm not entirely sure yet. I'm one of these guys that has to try something out. I try everything out, and then if it sticks, I stick with it. But I am really curious to try it. I think it's going to be a big product for Apple, and I think it's going to be big for a lot of developers, too. I think it's really going to open up the app market even more. What about Android and Windows 8? Obviously, you guys have been focused on iOS devices. Do you see anything with Android tablets? Obviously, Apple feels very strongly in one sense that they're terrible, terrible devices. What does 53 think about those? About the devices? There are some good devices out there. The biggest challenge for developers like us, especially for an application like ours, that's very size-dependent, is all the different dimensions and orientations and screen ratios. It becomes very tricky to scale from a 3x4 ratio to some different ratio. So at least Apple with its mini has maintained the resolution of iPad 2 with the same screen ratio. So we're really trying to focus on building out our ecosystem on the iOS platform at this point. But it's only a matter of time before Android and Windows become more possibilities for us. So I want to just go back real quick to what you said a second ago about you think it's going to expand the App Store in new directions with this new device. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What do you see happening differently in the App Store or expanding now that this new device and form factor is out? You know, I'm not, you know, probably ignorant and make some assumptions on that. But, you know, when you look at every new form factor, even if it's just kind of a slight size change, it tends to spur an entirely new class of applications that suit it. You know, like everyone kind of thought when the iPad first came out that it was essentially just a scale of iPod touch. And then people came out and did drastically different things with that. And so I'm really curious to see what types of content people are actually using for it. Great. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to let you go. I know you've had a busy day. Congratulations on the mention. Looking forward to the paper app and, you know, looking forward to hearing way more about it. Again, thanks for hanging out. Yeah, go get in line for the new iPad. Yeah, obviously you're getting in line for that. Please, please do that. Oh, that was a quick cut off. He just dropped the mic and get out. Right. You got to do it. Well, before we go on, I do want to thank Andrew again. Andrew's on Twitter at ASALLEN, obviously ASAllen. That's easy enough. Craig Mott from earlier, design flipboard. That is Craig Mott, C-R-A-I-G-M-O-D. We got a lot more people in store. Neelai and Josh will be joining us soon. I got a bunch of Verge staffers to kind of talk through numbers and other impressions. I'm looking forward to that. Before we get into that, though, we have Nathan online. Before we get to Nathan, though, I do want to finish this one conversation. What do you think? Note 2 styli versus iPad mini with a bamboo. See, so that was one of the things I actually thought was really interesting as he was talking about using a stylus on a smaller device. And I think one of the things we really didn't anticipate, or at least I didn't anticipate, that helped the note catch on is that we're really used to this idea of holding a thing in your hand and writing on it. And having just a half decent digital surface to do that is great. I never really use a stylus on my iPad because it just feels kind of awkward to be, you know, I can't really hold it in one hand or if it's on your lap, it's kind of awkward to use. And on a table, I just end up using my Mac. So it didn't really work. But this idea of, I've seen people, it's great to be able to stand in the grocery store in line and just write. That's nice. And this to me seems to fit a lot of that. And I think the, I forget one of the guys in the studio with us asked before, he's like, what if it has a stylus? And I kind of laughed. I thought it was ridiculous. But then like on a device like this, it almost makes sense, especially if you can get one, as with the note, that's so kind of deeply integrated with the hardware in the sense that like, you know, you have levels of pressure sensitivity and all these different ways that you can make the input even better and more responsive and more tactile. So it just seems like that could be really cool. But I still feel like if all you want to do is hold it in one hand and write, the note still seems to be like the perfect size for that. So I think here's the problem. I think the iPad 10-inch had, there's three things I always want to make a stylus work. And you know, we're always living the shadow of the courier, the flyer tried to. I love the courier. I don't want to. I'm going to cry. You're going to make me cry. I just. Okay, we're getting to it. So the three things I do want from the stylus always is first, I want to be able to hit with precision. That's a problem that iPad 10-inch has. And it's going to be even worse with the iPad mini. They're not going to shrink the stylus. They can't. It's a technology issue. That's what digitizer does really well for note. Two, I want to hold it in my hand. That is what the iPad mini is going to do very well. Three though, palm detection. And that's an issue. Like I don't, you know, I write with my palm on the ground. I don't kind of hang my hand like this. This is just great. Just like the loop. Yeah. Yeah, just like the loop. I just, I'm swinging things. I'm swinging my invisible loop right now. And so those are three things. Obviously Apple fixed one with the iPad mini. I don't know how well, because there's just less surface area to hit now. I'm not sure how well the writing is going to be. I'm curious. I really want it to work. I will say though, like I'm amazed at how good some people are with the iPad and a stylus. Like the stuff Ellis is able to do, I just end up drawing like big circles and like I draw a tree and it just looks like a big circle. But Ellis is out there and he's like, I'm going to draw Robert Scoble. Like this is a true story. This happened. Yes. He's like, I'm going to draw Robert Scoble. And like got a picture and just drew Robert Scoble. And I was like, oh look, that's, it's Robert Scoble. There it is. And so like people can, I guess, do these cool things. And it's like Andrew was saying, you have this now more mobile platform that lets you kind of do it anywhere and easier and you can just kind of like pull it out and you don't have to set it down to draw on it. You can just hold it and draw on it. That's pretty cool. And I feel like I've seen so much good stuff I'll never be able to draw, but I can't draw on the note either. So I can't really complain. Right. So in a while I do think it's a joke. Well actually, you know what? I'm going to stop what I was going to say. One because that was a gibberish sentence and that's really bad for live broadcast. Number two, we have a hands-on video live from San Jose. Well not live. It was live at some point. Now it's a, uh, hold on. Being told to hold. We're going to wait. So you're just, now you have to narrate and imagine the picture. So here's the thing. So I love Billy. We have these earpieces. I'll show you right here. Billy's been telling me like directions like, you know, let's, let's, we got a hands-on coming up. Uh, please kill time. The first time I did not kill enough time. Uh, this time I thought I killed enough time. I could have sworn I did it. I blame myself. Uh, and I'm, I'm, I'm out of fat jokes. Not even fat jokes, fat anecdotes. Somebody did post a great picture of 13 year old Ross. Yeah. 13 year old fat Ross with candy bars in his pockets. Basically it's, it's a slightly rotund, just kind of out of shape. 27 year old Ross, 26 year old. I know my age. Let's just call it it's fat Ross. It's fat. That's fine. It was a picture of me from today. That's awkward now. It's very awkward. Um, so also, can I just say, you know, it would fix your palm rejection problem. What a bigger bezel. I'm done. We can watch, we have this video now. We can please cut to the video. I don't want to hear this. Hey, this is Josh with the verge and we are looking at and holding the new iPad. Mini, uh, it is incredibly small. You can actually see as a comparison with the original iPad or the new iPad, uh, very big difference in size. This is obviously a more of a one handed device for reading, uh, for I'll be taking it to bed with me, um, romantically. And uh, as you can see, it's extremely thin, 7.2, uh, millimeters and uh, it's very light. 0.68 pounds. The screen is a 7.9 inch 10 24 by 7 68 display, but at the smaller size, the resolution looks higher than, you know, if you look at an iPad too, in comparison, this definitely looks a lot tighter as far as pixel density is concerned. Uh, it does feel incredibly light in the hand. Uh, this version that I'm holding has an LTE option. And as I mentioned in my write up, the build quality of this is, you know, you expect from Apple great build quality, but in comparison to other seven inch tablets on the market, it's night and day compared to something like the nexus seven. This just feels like a really high end, a piece of technology. Um, you see here speakers on the bottom, lightning connector, uh, and uh, it is exactly what you expect. A smaller, uh, iPad. Three 29 is the starting price for 16 gig. Uh, and it goes up from there depending on what kind of storage and whether or not you're adding a wireless options, a cellular options. Uh, so that's a quick look at the mini and we'll have more information, more photos and more video coming soon. Can I just say Josh has the world's largest hands. That thing looks like, that thing looks like an iPod touch as he's holding it and he's like, look, I can crush it with my two fingers. Technically when he did the iPod touch, it looked like an iPod nano, the iPod nano looked like a shuffle. And the iPod does exist. Like in the folds of his fingers. Yeah. There's something we haven't talked about too much, which is the price, which is numbers. Uh, and thank God our next guest, Nathan Ingram is the person I make do all our number stuff. Uh, Nathan, are you with us? I am. Hello Ross and David. How are you guys? Hello. Are we getting you audio only or can we get the severed head of Nathan Ingram behind us? Oh, beautiful. Oh yeah. Hello. Looking good. Hey guys. How you doing? Pretty good. How are you doing? That's a very orange wall. That's right. It's bold. It's bold. Did you paint that wall like that? Yeah, I did. It was a pain, but it was worth it. Great. Uh, I'm sorry. It's obviously not what you're here to talk about. Um, Nathan, when we were being on earlier, obviously we had, um, awesome guests and because, you know, you're one of us, I can make you wait long. I'm sorry about that. But I do want to talk about some of the sales figures that Apple threw at the beginning. Tim Cook came on stage and as Apple is wont to do, he threw out a bunch of impressive numbers, some more impressive than others. Uh, Nathan, you want to break them down with us? Yeah, there was more numbers than I thought we would get. Um, the first one, I think probably the biggest one is the 35 billion apps downloaded. Uh, pretty massive number, up 5 billion just since June at WWDC. They announced 30 billion back in June. So clearly the app train is rolling along without any signs of slowing down and going along with that. Uh, Cook mentioned that there are up to 275,000 iPad specific apps, which is good to know for this event, obviously with the iPad mini being introduced. And that's up from 270, excuse me, 250,000 and that was just a month ago. So they've had 25,000 new iPad apps developed in the last month. So are these numbers, uh, accelerating? Like are the apps in the app store growing at an even faster rate or are we kind of reaching a point where all the tablet apps have been made and maybe we won't get to, you know, 700,000 that have all been made for the iPad? Well that is a, I mean that's a decent point, right? Do we really need, at some point it starts to level off, right? Are we going to keep on getting, you know, millions and millions and millions of apps to the point where no one will ever be able to find them or use them? Uh, probably not. It's slowed down a bit, but, um, it doesn't seem like it is yet. Again, I'm surprised they had an update on iPad specific apps since they just mentioned a month ago, you know, where they were at. And there was a, so if they're up another 25,000 in a month, that's a, that's pretty good growth for them. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, so they said 275,000 iPad apps, that's an increase of 25,000. iOS apps in general, they said 700,000 again. That's the same number they gave for the iPhone 5 event. Is that right? Yeah, they didn't break down any new granular data on total app count. Not a single new app. Well, no, no, wait, wait, wait. It's iOS in general. So it's zero new apps. It's in the 700,000 range plus 25,000 doesn't make much of a difference apparently. No, I think it's zero. You think it's zero? Zero. 25,000 other people left. They were like, no, these new iPad apps, I'm out. Oh, they're, they're exactly right. You heard it here first. This is an iPhone only app. I don't want that. Exactly. I'm done. That's a little. Pull out my app. Let's get out of here. I'm going to argue about that with you later. We also heard a little bit about software. Was it a 200 million iOS 6 devices? Is that correct? Yes, 200 million iOS 6 devices. And obviously iOS 6 just launched. But now we know that people are upgrading at a pretty rapid rate despite the maps issue. And what's worth noting here is that that's probably about half of their iOS installed base at this point because last we heard, there were over 400 million iOS devices out in the wild. So we haven't gotten a new number on that since June. But so now we say, you know, about half of the people out there are using iOS 6 despite all the incredibly bad publicity they've been getting for the maps fiasco. You know, it's actually interesting. I, when I was kind of going through the prediction, predictions of things they would talk about today, one I thought they would definitely bring up was iOS maps. They made a public apology, which is a huge deal for them. Usually it's like an underhanded kind of, we're sorry we're so great. We're sorry you're not ready for us. We're sorry you're not ready for us. We're sorry you hold things wrong. We're sorry we're giving you free cases. This time was, we're sorry we screwed up. And you know what? There were two things that I expected to see that did not. I expected something about iOS maps saying it's better. We fixed the bridge. I mean, they probably didn't want to show the bridge in the first place. Neither I was sure they were going to show a picture of like the Hoover Dam not looking like a roller coaster. The other thing I expected to see, a little bit, although he's a software dude, Scott Forstall. Yeah. You know? Although in fairness, that was probably not going to happen. Scott is obviously, he's the software dude. He comes out for iOS changes. There wasn't any today, which is why we also didn't see any queue. It just wasn't his wheelhouse. So it is, you know, it wasn't surprising to see him, but he has been someone who's like, people have pointed to him in the industry, the analysts, to say like iOS maps clearly under his watch. But to get, you know, to stop making hypotheticals and conjectures and blowing things way out of proportion, which should not be, I am surprised maps was not mentioned at all. Me too. I would say they just probably didn't want to take the focus off of the news. They already made the apology. So why bring it up again and shift attention away from all the new hardware? Fine. Be the rational one. You know what? I don't care for this. I really don't care for your logic and your reasoning. I'm out. Cold, cold numbers, man. I want to talk about iBooks, Nathan, because I'm hoping you have a better sense of this than we do. So they threw out a bunch of numbers. So first of all, I guess, tell us what the numbers were and then tell us if they're meaningful at all. Sure. So for iBooks stats, the main ones we heard was that there are 1.5 million books in the bookstore, that there have been 400 million books downloaded since launch, which, you know, that's a nice large number. But since the launch, that's going back to April 2010 when the original iPad came out. So that's a good two and a half years to this point. So I don't think that we can say that this has been an unrivaled success or failure. I think it's an important part of their whole strategy, obviously, especially going forward with the iPad mini small device, probably better tailored for reading. So iBooks is not going anywhere, but it certainly doesn't appear to be an App Store style hit or even an iTunes music store style hit. It's important for them to have. But what's the compelling reason to use it over Kindle, for example, on the iPad? You can use it across so many other devices that aren't made by Apple that make a lot of people probably just go straight to Amazon store at this point. Well, I wonder, this just occurred to me, when you get, you said it was 400 million iOS devices, right, Nathan? Yes. So that breaks down to, you know, one book per person, basically. And when you download iBooks, don't they offer you a free copy of Winnie the Pooh? I'm serious. I don't know if that counts. Like, I really, if they don't count that in the number, then fine, one book per person is, you know, it's a number. And whatever, they've sold 400 million iOS devices, I doubt they're worried about it. And to be clear, I mean, there are 2,500 US classrooms, they're reading more than Winnie the Pooh. Yeah, sure. Well, you think. Winnie the Pooh is a good book. It is a very good book. I'm saying. Fat Ross used to read it all the time. Back to Fat Ross. God, it's a callback. I'm learning these comedy things. All right, no, Nathan, let's hear, did we talk hardware numbers yet? I don't recall that. There wasn't, well, so the big hardware number is 100 million iPads sold. And that's up from 85 million that were sold through June. So yes, clearly that's a big, big milestone for Apple. I think they said they hit 100 million about two weeks ago. And then, of course, Cook likes to say that they've sold more iPads than the entire PC market sells computers through the rest of the history of time. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but clearly, Cook likes to lump the iPad in with the rest of Apple's success and say that this is where computers are going, and this is selling far more than regular computers. All right. Yeah, Nathan, I'm going to let you go soon because you've got work to do, or obviously you're fired. Back to work. Back to work. Thank you. That's the phrase I was looking for. It's actually a nice way of putting it. I should have been nice. You're welcome. Nathan, quick question. This is obviously the first of many announcements we're going to have coming up soon. We're going to have to see, obviously, Microsoft's kind of pretty close to announcing all its stuff. We're going to have Google events kind of show stuff. But for now, obviously, we know what Apple's holiday lineup looks like. Are you going to go ahead and just pre-order an iPad mini or any of the new Macs? Nathan, I feel like you're super excited about the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Am I crazy? I am, but I really don't need a computer at this point and can't really justify it. But let me just say that I'm trying to look through all of my possessions and see what I can sell so I can go out there and buy an iPad mini. That's a good answer. I wonder, do you think I can get $329 for my first-gen iPad? It's in the exact same boat as you, and I'm not going to hold my breath on that. No, I'm pretty sure I'm going to get like $20, and then they're going to get it and turn it on and be like, I don't want this, and give me my $20 back. Or they'll flip it on eBay and make more money. Yeah, that's probably true. All right. Well, Nathan, thank you so much for hanging out. Now, what he said, get back to work. Thanks, guys. Later. So we do have a graphic. It's a graphic on theverge.com. I definitely recommend everyone go check it. It's a buy the numbers. It's a great website. It could be better. It could look better on the Retina MacBook Pro. That's all I'm saying. It could look better. You're such a jerk. This is the comparison piece. It's actually a good place to jump off and start talking about. This is the iPad Mini, Wi-Fi, the LT version, the Nexus 7, and then the Kindle Fire HD. These are some of the big products we have to worry about now. This is the field, I guess. Plus there's the Nook as well. And David, you've probably used more of these than I have. We both play with Fire HD. I don't own an Nexus 7. We have one playing around the office. I bought one. Did you do hands-on with the Nook? Yes. You did. Yes. You are definitely one product more of an expert than I am on this, at least. Fair. So when you're looking at the field now, is it a 7-inch market or is it a tablet market that has 7 inches and 10 inches? What I think is really interesting is that 7 inches is where the competition is. There's no competition at the 9.7 to 10.1 inch range. It's just the iPad. There are tons of devices out there, but there are none that are even remotely competitive to the iPad in quality and in quantity sold. But in 7 inches, there are a bunch of really good devices. The Nexus 7 is a good device. Josh just said the build quality is better on the iPad Mini, but that doesn't change the fact that the Nexus 7 is a very good tablet. This is what? This is Steve McQueen's glove right here? Right. I feel like Steve McQueen's sweat right now. It's great. I really like it. Yeah, it's comfy and I feel like I could drop it and it won't break. It's not like it. No, I don't want to try it out. No. Last time I dropped my phone on video, do you want to drop your Nexus 7? That's true. No. This is just a very symbolic gesture. That's fine. Nobody can touch it. I'm going to drop John's iPad if that's okay. That's fine. Go for it. That's fine. But we've also seen the Kindle Fire HD has its own issues and wants to show you 400 ads every two seconds. I accidentally bought something. I haven't told Josh this, but he was logged into the Kindle Fire HD and I accidentally bought a movie on the Kindle Fire HD. In the 45 seconds I was playing with it, I accidentally bought a movie. What movie? I don't remember. Because here's the thing. I want to say it was Battleship. It might have been Battleship. Here's the thing. It's twofold. Not only did you easy out $3.99. No, I bought it. This was like $24.99. I bought this movie. Okay. Not only is he out $24.99, which is ridiculous for Battleship. I think it was $20. I think it was $19. But the Amazon recommendation engine is completely screwing him over now. It's done. He's going to get terrible overwrought action movies for the rest of his life. I hear you like Battleship. You should try Battlefield Earth. Exactly. Which is funny with Rift Racks. They're so good when you're not listening to the actual dialogue. Right. So good. But anyway, the Kindle Fire HD is pretty good. The Nook HDs, we haven't really had a chance to spend a ton of time with them yet, but they're also good devices from as much as we've seen. There's real competition here. They're pushing each other forward. Barnes & Noble and Amazon have gotten a lot better really quick because they're both competing for effectively the same people. Right. So they've moved forward quickly, and then Google jumped in and upended the whole market, and so everybody's having to push ahead with that. Now Apple's coming in and doing the same thing. So I think it seems like we've just conceded 10-inch tablets to Apple and are now moving to smaller, more portable, lighter, cheaper tablets as kind of where we go in the future. I would make the argument that... So it's back to the app ecosystem issue that you talked about. Android apps look terrible on a 10-inch screen, which is what we're seeing a lot with the Galaxy Tab when it first went to 10.1, and it's hard to differentiate from the Google Play Store what is tablet-friendly and what is not. Even to this day, you have the recommendations, but it's not everything. It's just the best of the best, and you're hoping you get what's good. So I think the problem there with that is... I'm very unprofessional at times. It happens. It happens all the time. I lost my train of thought. It's nice glasses, though. Thank you. This is not helping. So anyway, so I think what you're having is the 7-inch apps, if you're an Android screen, you're already developing 4.7-inch, 5-inch. It looks decent on a 7-inch. There's not a lot of evolution needs for a lot of the apps. They're not great, but they're usable. Right. Sure. Whereas Apple's going the other way. We have great 10-inch apps, great things that look 10 inches, and then we can just shrink it to 7. It'll be about as good, which is the new challenge. They're taking the same market from a different direction, although I wonder what the new iPhone apps look like on it. That's an interesting point, and that was one of the things I thought Andrew from 53, our terrific guest, was saying earlier, was that instead of... It was a whole kind of different dynamic when we went from the iPad 2 to the new iPad, where we have a different resolution. It's much bigger. You have a lot more pixels to play with, and now all we're doing is taking that screen, or you're taking these apps, which you designed for this much bigger, roomier screen, and shrinking it, and you can't build a different app. Right, and I thought that was interesting. You can build an iPhone app and an iPad app. You don't get to build a 1024 by 768, and I can't even remember. What is it, 2048 by... I don't know. Use your math. A lot of pixels. Multiply. I don't know. Math is a big deal. It's the pixely one, and the not as pixely one. He knows I'm challenging you, but I'm not doing the math myself. Whatever, I don't care. You don't get to build different ones, and it's one thing to make it bigger when you suddenly have more space to play with, but what he was saying about now the touch targets are smaller, and there's less space to play with, but you've already added all these elements that you want to have on the bigger iPad. I really do wonder how these things are going to scale back down. Because the touch targets can't be changed based on if it's the retina or non-retina. What he was saying is it's got to be the same code. You're just changing the assets. Right, and on the one hand, the iPad 2 has still been out there, so it's not totally forgotten, but it really does seem like every time an app on my iPad updates, it updates to take advantage of the retina resolution, and there are new elements and new features, and more stuff is brought onto the screen. Watch me. I'm about to make a transition. I'm really excited. I'm just going fourth wall meta. This is like a segue segue. It's funny you mention the iPad 2, David. Go on. Because the third generation iPad just got discounted, so iPad 2 is going away. Bye bye. No surprise there. Third generation iPad discounted refurbished models starting at $379. That is the new entry model. John's saying no, the iPad 2's not going away. iPad 4's not going away. iPad 4's not going away. iPad 4 was just announced today. Oh, really? Yeah, so I mean that makes sense because... Okay, so what's actually happening here is the iPad, right? They stopped numbering the iPad. It's just the iPad. The iPad is now being sold as is going forward, and all the ones that they've made and not sold, which I can't imagine are that many, or refurbished ones, are now $379, which is an insane deal. Right. You get a retina iPad that was incredible up until like an hour ago when it stopped being the newest thing for $379 refurbished. You get cheaper than the new iPad 2, which is apparently still going to be around. It's going away. I mean refurbished is refurbished. But it has to be going away. No, it's not going away. The iPad 2 is not going away. They put it on the screen. It's not going away. But it's now cheaper to get a refurbished iPad 3. Yeah, but it's refurbished. I mean, that's a meaningful thing. Refurbished is not that big of a deal. No, I totally agree. Every time somebody buys, like every time some family member comes to me and is like, oh, I want to buy a Mac, I'm like, get a refurbished one. Because it's still, it's 95% as good as new, if not more. And it's just, I think people like this feeling that like I have a new thing nobody's ever touched. Yeah, but it's been touched for two years. Context. Here's the thing. Go on. Nope. Not going to touch. Are you like Josh where he's sexually aroused by every device that he tests? I was trying to say sexual. Can somebody make a super cut of Josh being sexually aroused by gadgets? Like please do that. I will write a post about it on the verge and then I'll get fired. I'll set my alarm right now. Please do that. Siri, please. All the times Josh has been sexually aroused, he did it on the verge. He did it just now with the iPad. He's done it with everything. Just please make the one two and a half hour long video of Josh being sexually aroused by gadgets. I'm done. Thank you. My call to the universe is now complete. And I have a job for like eight more minutes. It's going to be great. Yeah, that's fine. So no, but I do think it's ridiculous. You have a $329 iPad Mini with the same resolution. It's the hot new thing. They really want to promote it. You've got the $500 fourth generation retina iPad. There's really no room in between. But you know, and whatever. Maybe we're wrong. We'll see. I think the iPad 2 is going away pretty soon. It's been out there for a while. I wouldn't be surprised. I mean they've done a good job of like keeping the lifespan of these things long. Even for Apple, they get to say, you know, our year old product is still a good product in the sense that like they love to do this and talk about like how the Android phone of today is a piece of junk and outdated and forgotten tomorrow. They love talking about that. And when you can have the iPad 2, which is now, you know, what is it, 20 months old, that's a nice thing to still have on your shelves and be like, hey, this is still a pretty good thing. You should look at it. And okay, so let's be clear though. So I'm going to basically hurt myself in saying this, defending your point. The old iPod Touch is still around because it's the cheaper model. It still fills that little gap. The MacBooks are still around, even though technically the Retina is so much better. But it does have the disk drive. I don't know if they're around or not. Someone's going to yell at me in a second to tell me. I hope. Any second now. But we're going to talk about Macs right now anyway. We have Scott Lowe online. Scott Lowe is one of our senior West Coast editors. Scott, are you with us? Yes. Can you hear me? I can hear you. I have kind of an orange background, although I blame the camera more than I do Nathan's paint job. Well, I'm broadcasting from the most important room in my house, the kitchen. It's a really big looking kitchen. You're welcome. I think it's a West Coast thing. Dude, it's just not New York. If you don't live in New York, you have more than this much room to live in. This podcast room, by the way, this corner that you can see on the camera is bigger than my kitchen. Oh, it's bigger than my apartment. It's fine. It's really insane. See, what you can't see is my bed is in the corner because there is no other room in this house. So it's just all kitchen. You just have a kitchen and a bed. Yeah. That's why I said it was the most important room in the house. It's a good move. Actually, do you think I would do that? I would get a studio that was just like a giant open kitchen and a Murphy bed. That's not bad. I would love that. What else am I doing? I'm at home. I'm playing Xbox. I'm sleeping. I'm eating. That's fair. Done. I do not need anything in between. All right. So Ross is going apartment hunting. Scott, tell us about New Max. Yeah. So the first real substantial refresh to two of the... Or actually, the iMac is probably the biggest refresh, obviously. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display to a lesser degree, but still pretty substantial. And then to a much more minor degree, the Mac Mini, which got a very, very small, brief discussion during the presentation. So let's start with the iMac. What's new and what was the story here? So it's been quite a long time since the iMac got a substantial redesign. They've been rocking the same chassis for quite some time. And now it's very similar looking in terms of general aesthetic, but it is substantially thinner and obviously lighter, but that doesn't really come into play for a desktop. But yeah, it is ridiculously... It's the same screen arrangements or models rather, the 21.5 and then the 27-inch model, but it's stunningly thin. I think they dropped the overall thickness considerably down to just, I think, five millimeters is the thinnest point. Yeah, it was on the edge. It was five millimeters. And Josh was saying, I remember in the live blog, as he was spinning it around on stage, people were oohing and aahing, which is kind of wild for a desktop computer. Yeah, and people don't get excited about these things often, but pretty considerable. And the other interesting thing is they didn't really show it that well, but if you look in the back, the edge almost sort of looks like... Or the back kind of looks like an old CRT where it kind of gets larger at the point where it actually mounts. So it kind of looks like it's got a projection display, but obviously it doesn't. They've actually, as part of their effort to slim this down, they've done some really cool engineering things. They laminated the actual display to the glass to kind of remove the distance there and make this thing as thin as possible. So what's your sense... They talked a lot about the display with the Shiller. It felt like he spent the whole time talking about the display and then spent two seconds talking about everything else. All this technology and stuff that they're talking about, laminating the display and it's thinner and stuff, what does that mean for the actual display? Do you believe that this is really going to be a great, better, meaningfully different display or is it just a thinner thing that's the same? It's still not quite on retina quality in terms of the pixel density. They're still rocking very similar displays, if not actually I think the exact same kind of resolution quality. But I think one of the more lesser known or lesser discussed features that I think was really valuable that I think they kind of glossed over is what a substantial powerhouse they've made this machine by comparison. The Mac Pro has been a sour point for a lot of Pro level users. Obviously this can't quite replace that in terms of the upgradeability and the ability to swap out, but they've got some impressive stuff. It supports up to, or at least the 27 inch model, supports up to 32 gigs of RAM, which is absurd for a consumer level product, but you can customize that up. So if someone were to want to use this for a more Pro application, it's not as ideal as something that's upgradable, but it's actually pretty functional. Billy, can we stop at that frame? Can we go back to that frame? You mentioned consumer, I think it's interesting and this is the part I want to talk about right here. Headphone, SD card slot, four USB 3.0s, God that was cool to watch and fast forward. Two Thunderbolt ports, gigabit ethernet. Scott obviously there's one thing big missing here, it's the Firewire. That's gone, obviously not in the Mac Mini. Mac Pro, is that the only thing left that does Firewire? Mac Mini still has Firewire, is that right? Yeah, it's just the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro now. Really? So it's the in-betweener, what they call their flagship desktop. Firewire's gone, they're killing it off again. Well, I mean it's all about a new Thunderbolt future and USB 3.0. But obviously the optical drive is missing, which could be a sticking point for some consumers, but with all those connectivity options and since it is a desktop, external drives are really there for anybody who really needs one, though I honestly can't remember the last time I used a slot loading disk drive or any disk drive rather. So one of the things, speaking of drives, one of the things they talked a bunch about was the Fusion drive, which sounds kind of cool. So tell me about that. Yeah, so I mean it's actually a standard practice, or common technology at this point. It's hybrid HD, standard hard drive and solid state, which is a common practice with PC manufacturing at this point, but Apple's gone ahead and relabeled it and called it their own and made it a marketable feature. As they did. As they've been known to do. So it's, I think, for, again, this is kind of falling into that realm of trying to angle it as more of a prosumer kind of level device where they can actually get some decent performance elements out of it. They're claiming that it does considerably faster data transfer and that people can take advantage of the massive drive capacity, but for anybody who's really reliant on such a thing, they've known about it and have probably been using it for quite some time, though obviously this is the first time we've seen it in a Mac. But did it have a really pretty icon before? It didn't. There you go. There it is. Icon. I mean, the name is pretty cool. Fusion Drive. It just sounds really good. Yeah, I just know that it came up during the event. And Evan Rogers, one of our writers, during the whole thing it comes up and they're talking about it and everybody's all excited. And Evan just goes, yeah, I did that. I made one of those. I was like, all right. No big deal. Good job. It's cool. Which is obviously Evan's voice right there. I told him he should sue Apple. Yeah, I think he made it first. But so you mentioned the Mac Pro. And there were a couple of things here that made me think that anyone who uses or wants a Mac Pro is going to be really sad. There's stuff like with the Fusion Drive where you said they're kind of trying to make it a little more professional. And then they called it the flagship desktop. It's not. It's not their best desktop. Their best desktop is the Mac Pro. But are they just pretending this thing doesn't exist and hoping that someday it goes away? I mean, if you think about it, for 98% or whatever it is of their target audience, the number of people picking up Mac Pros is probably considerably low. So it's a market for them that's probably not too profitable anymore. I think a lot of the, I mean, especially with the burns that they did to the video production audience with Final Cut 10 and some of the problems that arise there and how a lot of people turn to other solutions, I feel like it's a market they've pretty consistently turned away from and aren't really looking back towards. And they didn't really announce anything regarding Mac Pro, and I wouldn't be surprised if it makes a quiet exit. Gentlemen of short-term memory, allow me to direct your attention to a Sean Halster article from June 11, 2012. I don't know why I remember this, but thank God I've done nothing but work for the rest of my, for my entirety of life. Sounds right. Macworld and Forbes had talked back in June to Apple CEO Tim Cook who himself said, quote, although we didn't have a chance to talk about a new Mac Pro at today's event, this is obviously not today's, but like June, July. Don't worry as we are working on something really great for later next year. So Macbook, Mac Pro, the official statement from months and months ago is that we will expect something in 2013. They're going to come out and be like, oh, it's actually just an iMac that's really good now so you don't need a Mac Pro. Yeah. Also Firewire is gone and USB 4.0 is going to be big. Right. It is Bluetooth guys. Bluetooth 6.1. Plus EDR. EDR. I think what disappointed me the most was actually the Macbook Pro with retina display, the 13 inch. Disappointed? Yeah. I mean, I was literally credit card in hand ready to order this thing as soon as the thing ended because I've been in need of a new personal machine and the, the announcement that it only has discrete graphics really burned me because. So what does that mean? Just back up real quick for people who don't know. What does, what does that mean? Okay. So unlike the 15 inch Macbook Pro with retina display, which has, you know, integrated Intel CPU and a dedicated Nvidia GPU which, you know, obviously it handles the load of outputting to the display in cooperation with the Thunderbolt port output to external displays, which up to, can do up to four. The 13 inch pro with retina display doesn't have a dedicated graphics processor. As one built into the CPU and Intel HD 4000, I think, which is, you know, not unlike or may even be the same as the Macbook Pro or Macbook Air. So it's, it's not a ton of graphics power for a machine like that. And as, you know, a crazy gamer who likes to bootcamp Mac machines to, to play, you know, things like actually like battlefield and stuff on, on a Macbook Pro and I can, you know, that, you know, not being able to do that is obviously for a personal use case kind of a problem. But, you know, I'm actually concerned about how the thing performs with the integrated graphics for just basic applications for HD video, you know, especially if you're running a second display. And, you know, I'm really kind of curious by all indications from the hands-on posts we've seen from Neelai and Josh, it's, you know, it handles itself pretty well, but obviously in those environments, there's not a lot of opportunity to actually really stress test these things. And so there's, there's one point that, I'm sure someone on Twitterverse, the Facebooks, the social networks, the Internets, the Internets, that will correct me, but I was, real quick, I was running through some of the pricing differences. So when we did the Macbook Pro Retina 15-inch review, I thought something that was important to mention was that if you get the same specs for the Macbook Pro, the one that has the disk drive and not the Retina display, it was cheaper to get the Retina model. I thought that was very interesting. I assumed that was gonna be the same thing here. I was running through the numbers here. I don't think that's the case. I think whereas the 15-inch Retina is cheaper by $200 in the similar respect Pro, this 13-inch Retina is $200 more. So correct me if I'm wrong, so the Macbook Pro with Retina display starts at $1699. It's got 2.5 gigahertz, core i5, 128 gigs storage, 8 gigs of RAM. Is that right? Yeah, as far as I know from what I've seen, yeah. I believe, sorry, go on. Which isn't a huge price differential between the entry-level 15-inch and I think it's a really weird place to come in on. Obviously there's a lot of value in it. That's a super high-resolution display. Obviously the industrial design and obviously the premium for the software, but I think it is kind of a weird place to kind of position it, especially with the remaining Macbook Pros and just the slight hike up to the 15-inch model. I mean obviously it's not quite, I don't think slight is probably the best word to use, but it's not enough for me to think, man, I need to get the 13-inch over the 15. I would say the similarly spec'd Macbook Pro non-Retina, 8 gigs, RAM, 128 gigs, flash storage or solid-state storage, 2.5 gigahertz, core i5, is $1499. It's actually $200 cheaper. So it's the inverse of what we saw with the 15-inch model. So whereas I thought the 15-inch Retina was a clear sign that they were getting rid of the non-Retina laptops, it's just a smarter deal to get. It's not the case with the 13-inch. They're being a little more conservative with the price, which I was kind of surprised about, to be honest. I feel like Apple just seems to think, and I'm curious what you think about this too, Scott, that Apple seems to think that by the time you hit a certain threshold, which is $1,000 or $1,200, these jumps just don't matter. I feel like Apple's almost trying to game that in the sense that if they can say, oh, this is $1499, but here's this extra great feature, it's only $200 more. That's how they get your $200 from you, is by doing that and making people say exactly what you just said. Then there's a small jump to the 15, and then you jump to the Retina, and all of a sudden, oh, I've spent $2,400 making totally rational decisions going up slightly in price every time. Price creep is a beautiful, wonderful thing. And Apple's so good at it. They're really good. But I will say this, and I'm really excited about the 13-inch Retina for the weight alone. I mean, it does not have great graphics, but I'm using a MacBook Air. 3.5 pounds is a nice number. 3.5 pounds, this is like 2.98 right now, 13-inch Air. It's such a minor difference. There is enough horsepower, I would say, that justifies it, maybe. Actually, Scott, I want your opinion on that. This MacBook Pro with Retina display is outputting four times the pixels at any given moment. Does it have enough of a spec boost to justify versus even the performance of an Air? So I made that claim earlier about it being the same integrated graphics processing as the Air, and I just double-checked. It is absolutely the same chip. So it's obviously a faster processor, but the graphics portion is exactly the same. So yeah, you're pumping out tremendous amount of pixels. Pumping out pickles. The Scott Lowe story. How many pickles could pump out a Pixel Resolves display? Scott? That's a question for Nvidia. Fine, stay on topic. See if I care. If you're looking at the same chip pumping out that many more pixels, you are going to run into performance problems. Obviously, this is aimed towards more power-hungry users, but in the end, they're really not getting much more. Obviously the CPU picks up a lot of the multitasking problems and whatnot, but when you get into the issue of video and photo editing, depending on the scale and complexity of what you're doing, I feel like we may encounter some hiccups. But again, who knows? But that's just surface level, so who knows what the actual stress testing of a final review will tell us, but I feel like this is a huge problem, and I was actually really, really surprised to see that happen, to see them go with integrated graphics only. I was hoping that I would log on to Apple.com and see an option to upgrade or at least a higher-end version, but yeah, it's all integrated. So you still need a machine. What are you going to buy? I think I'm going to hold out or maybe even consider the 15. I generally prefer something a little more portable, but in this case, it might be worth it to...or just wait, rather. And obviously, I've got my beautiful work-issued Air, so I can just rock that for a while. Hey, you're welcome. Not bad. Yeah. And then again, kind of like the footnote of the entire Mac portion was the Mini, which also lost dedicated graphics processing. Like they had an AMD chipset last year in a higher-end model. Now, it's the exact same graphics processor as the MacBook Pro with Retina display and the Air at this point, the Intel HD Graphics 4000. Right. Well, you know what? I want to go back to the question. I love ending on the whole, what are you going to buy question, but I don't want to limit to just Apple. So it's got some bad timing. Obviously, we've got Windows 8 about to come out, and clearly, you're not going to use Android for your work machine, but I still want to ask you that anyway. This is what Apple has. It's what we'll see from Apple for a few months. It'll probably be at least February, March before you see something else kind of come up in your rumor mills. Are you happy with this? I mean, are you tempted to switch? We've got a new Windows 8 coming out pretty soon. I'm possibly new for Android 4.2. I've spoken about it before, and this is the first time in a long time I felt really excited about a Windows platform, and Windows 8 looks pretty exciting to me. Maybe not as primary machine, because I'm just too used to the Mac workflow at this point for both personal and work use, but it's a pretty compelling offering. I think the cross-platform support and a lot of the integration with Xbox, again, is a huge gamer. That kind of appeals to me, and overall, I think the experience looks great. I've always loved the tile design of Windows Phone. I'm glad they're bringing it to the Windows platform, and I'm interested in checking out. Obviously, I haven't had a whole lot of time, because obviously, other reviewers are checking out. Tom did the Windows 8 review, and there's other stuff in the wings. I'm curious to see how it goes, but for now, I think I'm just going to stick it out, or maybe shout out to Cash for the 15-inch. Sounds good. Scott, thank you so much. I can't talk. It's like we've been doing this for hours. Scott, thank you so much for coming on to talk, and thank you for knowing things about graphics and computers. Thanks, guys. I realize we've done a great job with this whole gig where we don't know any numbers, and we just bring in people that have numbers and opinions. This is the thing I've learned in life. This is like David's life lesson is just hang out with people much smarter than you, and don't ever say anything. It's great. It works really well. But doesn't that render your own job useless? Yes, but shh. I mean, I'm already fired because I begged for the gadget sex tape of Josh Depose. Don't you realize what we've been doing here? We've been saying we're going to announce facts, but they're going to give us the real facts, the real staffers. They're going to tell us things. Then we're going to cut to people who are much smarter than us to give an opinion, and they're going to give the opinion. We are literally just a node to people. I have no problem with that. We're airheaded bobblehead figure. I don't even work as a bobblehead. I mean, we're not in California. That's the one thing you and I have going for us right now. We're not in California. It's pretty good weather out there. So okay, but real quick. We I believe have Josh and Neelai shortly, but I want to know before we get to them. Did he change your mind? Because I was like... You know, it's not him that changed my mind. Let me change that. He did change my mind about one thing. He being Scott, by the way. He being Scott, cameraman. He changed my mind in that the graphics thing really bothered me. The price bothers me more. When I saw the 15-inch retina, I was like, oh my God, it's a much better deal. Then I am super excited. Now I have to decide, is the retina screen worth a $200 bump? I don't care about the drive. That's fine. And the bump isn't... Well, we can actually talk about it. It's the air that I care about more, and air is so much cheaper. The portability is what I care about. Do I want to put an extra mini $100 to get the retina display, even though the weight's not too bad? Not so much anymore. Not when the specs are really not that much different. Well, and that, to me, is kind of what could be really exciting, is that this exists means that there's basically nothing preventing us from having a retina air. Because apparently, this is assuming it's a good product that works well. We don't need expensive and large discrete graphics cards to get this to work. We don't even need particularly impressive specs. The only thing I'd be worried about would be battery, just pumping out all the pixels to that screen. You're worried about the battery. I'm worried about performance. I question the performance of the 13-inch retina. Well, that's what I'm saying. If it works, then we can't be that far away from having a retina screen on something as small and light as this. And that's pretty exciting. But then here's what's going to upset me, though. Does the performance of the retina 13-inch, how is it compared to this? It's plugging out one fourth as many pixels at any given moment. Is the specs for the same? Shouldn't this perform better? Which is the weird paradox of all of this. It's an interesting point. And it would be kind of depressing because this sucks half the time. iPhoto just ruins my computer. I went in, I was taking pictures for a review I did today of the ASUS Windows 8 tablet, putting photos in, and I literally hit import, and then just had to walk away from my computer for 15 minutes while I imported the pictures because I just can't do anything on it. And that was why they started announcing stuff, and I was like, oh, $1,300 for an iMac. Maybe I should just get one of those. And I was like, oh, wait, I don't have $1,300. We've been dreaming about this 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina for a long time. We've all wanted, oh, 15-inch is out. As soon as the 15-inch came out, everybody was like, oh, I just want the 13. But here's the reality, is that if the specs were the same as the Air, this may perform better, this Air right here. And the price is so much worse. This reality is not the dream I had, or any of us had, probably. Life has killed the dream. Life has killed the dream. Yeah, that's Anne Hathaway. That's not Anne Hathaway. It's Linh Mizz. But it's Anne Hathaway. It's Linh Mizz. But it's Anne Hathaway. Coined by Anne Hathaway. Boom. That was great. That was beautiful. Musicals. I am looking forward to Linh Mizz Rob. That's going to be awesome. It's not what we're supposed to be talking about, but I do want to talk about it for a minute. It's going to be amazing. John's excited, too. John's smiling at me from behind the camera. John Lagomarsino, he's actually in the room behind the cameras with us, just smiling. So you know what I actually think is cool and always gets kind of underrated coming out of these things? Russell Crowe and Linh Mizz? Yes. I'm done. That's what I was going to say. The Mac Mini. They don't care about this device, but I actually think it's a really awesome idea. Everybody talks about, like, oh, I want Apple to build a TV. It's like, just buy a Mac Mini. And then you have an Apple-made TV. It has Mac OS. It runs Mountain Lion and has Thunderbolt. What else do you want? It's an Apple TV. It's $599. And it's also a computer. Why is that not the best thing in the world? Right. We've got some video. We can watch this and narrate over it. Okay, so first off, the design has not changed in years. No, but I mean, it's a hockey puck. What I think is going to be awesome is it's a big, fat hockey puck. But what I think is going to be cool is when they can fit it in an Apple TV-sized box. And I bet that'll happen eventually. I'm sure. But what do you call it? The Mac Mini Air? Yes. What does the Apple TV look like at that point? The Mac Mini Air. The Mac Nano. The Mac Nano. Yes. Done. That's happening. No, but I mean, I think you look at this. It has the HDMI ports. It has USB. It's got great desktop software for even capturing live TV and running it that way. ITV makes really good stuff. You get a big hard drive. You get Bluetooth for your remote or whatever you want to use. You get decent graphics. For here, the 4,000 integrated graphics that Scott was lamenting are probably going to be fine for streaming video onto a 1080p TV. So that's less of an issue. What else do you want? I mean, I guess you have to buy a TV and then plug this thing in and use a keyboard and mouse. But it seems like the perfect home theater solution to me. I have a four-year-old Mac Mini running on my TV at home. It's what I use for everything because it's so much easier. I have a Western Digital set-top box. And it's just the clunkiest, worst, slowest thing ever to watch Hulu. And I can just go to Hulu.com. And it's the same as I use on my computer. I don't see why people aren't excited about this, but neither Apple nor humans, except for me and John, seem to really care. Although you're starting to see a little bit with the whole IOS-fication of OS X because you have full-screen mode now that gets rid of the clutter. So it does make a much more compelling experience. I think Mountain Lion is the most friendly for TVs because of that. Yeah, totally. And you've got the gestures. You can just get a magic trackpad on your couch and do some pretty cool stuff with it. Right. It's a compelling argument. It's $600, though. Right. And if I get $250, I can get an Xbox with... Fair. So I know we're in a weird situation, but if we're talking a home set-top box solution, obviously Hulu Plus is something you have to pay for. Hulu on the website, not so much. There are other benefits. But what I want to know, and this is also an Apple TV question, does the Apple TV specs go up or does the Mac Mini specs... Or does the Apple TV specs go up or does the Mac Mini price go down? It's an interesting point. And what I would love is if they would build all of the Apple TV functionality into the Mac Mini. And the crazy front row app, is that still there on OS X? It's gone? It's gone. Is it gone? I say it's sad, but I haven't used it in four years and didn't even know that it was here. Thank you. Unless it be the base guy that did that. Yeah, really. It's terrible. But why not replace that with the Apple TV interface? That would be awesome. That would be really cool. That's like... Somebody do that. That's like the best idea I've ever had. Somebody do that. Really? Just take the hockey puck of the Apple TV and put it inside the Mac Mini. Just shove it inside the Mac Mini. Yeah. Yeah. Just shove it inside the hockey puck. But yeah, I really think that this could be... I think $599 might be a little too expensive if they could sell a worse version or make it cheaper. But again, if you're willing to spend $1,000 plus on a TV, this doesn't seem like that crazy an expenditure to put next to it and replace all kinds of other stuff. Although I do question what needs you have. And this brings back to the ecosystem question that brings back to the competition. We're now seeing an Xbox 360 for $250 with great graphics. It does great compelling games if that's something you want to do. Has a huge video library and it now has web browsing. And Smart Glass, which is launching this Friday, will at one point be a ubiquitous platform that you can use to control that. You can send videos. You can send websites. I mean, it's like AirPlay through the 360. It's exactly like AirPlay. Yes. But there's more functionality. And again, if you can use all these different devices, there's more ubiquity, arguably. You all have a smartphone and something is going to have Smart Glass on it, which I think is a smart way of doing it. I think the Xbox 360 is so much cheaper and you can save that money and buy whatever you want to buy with that. An Xbox 720 next year when it comes out. There you go. And you know what? It's not that much bigger, I argue. Okay, it is. It's much bigger, but for a set top box. But yeah, and I would argue that for the two things you're going to put next to your TV, most people don't care about how big they are. Everybody's used to having the stack next to their TV. And as nice as that would be to go away, it's not going to go away. So you might as well just get the best thing. In terms of industrial design, I don't think the Xbox 360 is that ugly. Not the redesigned one that came out a couple years ago. No, I don't think so either. No. So when I'm looking at that, like you're saying you want this Mac Mini, I'm saying as long as I can get Smart Glass as a functionality on something, the ubiquity of that app on whatever I have in my pocket, I think the Xbox 360 is a compelling alternative for a much cheaper price. That's totally fair. Let's see what Josh and Nilay have to say. Josh and Nilay, you're on the phone. Not on the phone actually, you're live in the- You're on the crazy-... that we use. We're live. Can you hear us? Is this working? Yeah, we can hear you. That's a great earpiece. Can you see the California theater? The majestic California theater behind us? Are you commenting on my earpiece? I did. And I want to see how time delayed it was. Yeah, I told Sam this wasn't hanging properly, but he ignored me completely. No, you look like you're- I'm outside the California theater. I am in the Secret Service. I didn't tell you, did I? This is the time delay. So we're outside the California theater in San Jose. If you guys would shut up, that'd be great. I've got a lot of stuff to say. And we just got done with the event. We just got done handling all of the new gear. A jam-packed event. Jam-packed event. Full of stuff. Also full of people. Very tight inside the event. So what do you want to know? What's on your mind right now? What's the heated discussion that's happening right now in living rooms across America? Well, we can argue numbers and specs and stats all we want. We have, and also Les Miserables. We'll get to that later. Josh, Neil, what I want to know is how does it feel? Let us live vicariously through you. You said it's like a level above the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire HD. That's a big claim. And what does that even mean? Question. Yeah. It blows away the Nexus 7 and really any other 7-inch tablet or something in this range that's on the market. I mean, it's thinner, it's lighter, it feels extremely solid. I mean, hey, imagine if Apple made a 7-inch or so iPad and you get an idea of what it feels like. The closest thing is it feels like a, the build quality is like the iPhone. Like they made a much bigger iPhone. Same techniques, same materials. It is kind of a hybridized design in between the iPad, the last generation iPad and the iPhone. It's got the chamfered edge and it's got the black backing like the iPhone, but the actual body design feels a lot like the... It's rounded off. Yeah, it's rounded off. It's like the third gen iPad or fourth gen iPad. It just feels really nice and the screen looks really great. I will say this, the screen resolution looks better than it does on the iPad 2. A smaller screen, you get tighter pixel density. I think it looks a lot better. I did get a chance to hold it next to my Nexus 7 and I think the screen quality is better, but you definitely see more pixels on the iPad mini than on the Nexus 7. So I mean, it's not as high resolution, it's not as high pixel density as some of its competition. But I will say the Nexus 7 has a pretty okay average screen. Yeah, very average. It's very pretty washed out and the actual quality of the images on the new iPad, the iPad mini. Yeah, the blacks were much deeper, the colors popped a lot more. I mean, quality wise, qualitatively speaking, it's a nicer display, but pixel density wise, I wish Paul Miller could hear right now, it definitely suffers a little bit. Yeah, lower resolution, bigger screen. The lower resolution is a little bit bigger. But I will say the device feels like an Apple product. It feels nicer than something like, even the iPod touch, which you guys have played with the new iPod touch, it feels higher quality than that. It feels like a step above that. So I think in terms of materials and design, weight and just general quality, it's way beyond what they're doing with the Nexus 7 or even with the Kindle. They do feel like toys in comparison. But what's interesting is that at $329, it doesn't feel like they're necessarily competing against the Nexus 7 directly or the Kindle Fire HD directly because I think there's still a huge market for $199 products. I actually think that in a lot of ways, and Avi Greengard, who's here with us, I'm looking at him right now, who's going to join us in a second, we were just talking about the price point. But there is something to... This is almost like, you know what, I was going to buy an iPad 2 or maybe I was even thinking about getting the big iPad, but I don't know if I want something that big, but I do want to have all the apps. And I feel like that's a different question than if you say, well, I want a $200 tablet I can throw in my bag or use for reading. It's definitely, it feels bigger to hold and use than the Nexus 7 by far. That could be because it's actually bigger. It is actually bigger. But it's- Physically. Physically, it is bigger than the Nexus 7. It is smaller. It is thinner. Can something be bigger and smaller at the same time? There's laws of physics. Sure, why not? The laws of physics are more like suggestions. But let you have it. Yeah. But you'll see, I think people are going to freak out for it. Just when we were here at the event, it's hard to capture how bonkers the crowd went when Phil Schiller cued the video that showed the big iPad rotating to show the smaller iPad. Yeah, with the small iPad behind it. People freaked out. Yeah, there were a lot of Apple people in the audience. There were a lot of Apple people in the audience. I've seen an extra Apple person who was like, she couldn't restrain herself. Tears in the eyes. She wanted to continually leap up and start applauding. But I do think there is something, this is a new product for them. We've seen iterative products for a while now. The iPhone was an iterative version of the previous iPhone. This is a different product. It has different uses. It's a new form factor for them. They haven't done, yes, it's an iPad and yes, it's just a smaller iPad. But it is new. And we haven't actually seen a lot of new stuff. Even the MacBook Pro with the Retina display, the 13-inch, is just an iteration of the 15-inch. I actually have a lot to say about the MacBook Pro. Let's get to the iPad mini first. Here's my question. I think this is... Yeah, go for it. So here's, I think, the most important question for Apple. They've got iPhone apps and they've got iPad apps. And they're saying it's every inch an iPad. You can just run all these iPad apps on this new screen size. But the one thing that they've proven is that targeting apps towards a particular screen size is like the path to success. That's the problem that Android's had, where the apps work at every screen size, they're not completely targeted, it's kind of a mess. Do you think they're gonna start targeting apps towards the iPad mini screen size or it will just always be a slightly shrunken iPad? Neal, let me... I mean, that's an interesting question and I think that... We have actually an interesting thing. We talked about this with... I don't... You know what? I can talk now. This is fun. I can talk a little bit. No, go ahead. So we talked to Andrew Allen, who's a 53 designer. Ross has gone mad with power. You've missed the last hour. It's been wonderful. We talked to Andrew Allen, the 53 designer. He does the paper app. He made an interesting point that the touch spots on the apps are smaller. You can't obviously design different from the iPad mini to the iPad retina displays. All you can do is change the assets. So where you're touching is now much smaller for every iPad app. Do you think that's gonna be an issue? Actually, I was actually gonna comment on that to your point and to that point. And I mentioned it in the write-up of the Hands On. The keyboard in portrait feels really squished. It feels really little. I mean, it's like they've just scaled down that keyboard so it's not as tall. And as a result, it does feel like the touch points are a little bit harder to get at. At least in that case. Sorry, I'm getting a call. Of course. That makes sense. But I do think that there's gonna be some touch points and some stuff to consider that are gonna feel a little bit awkward on the smaller device. But when you think about your favorite iPad apps, how many of them involve you hunting around trying to tap on a little button? It's really like, oh, the back button. Or a couple of the interface buttons at the bottom. I mean, most of the iPad apps I use and know are relatively spacious. And sometimes even too spacious. Thank God this iPad mini exists. I'm so sick of the screen real estate of the iPad, the third generation iPad. It really is gonna be a breath of fresh air to not have as much to look at. Thank you. Thank you, Apple. No, but I do think that's a concern. And I think that, look, people are gonna complain about it. But I don't think it's as... I think it's less of a concern than having to take a phone app and put it on a seven inch or 10 inch tablet. And I think if Android's problem is that you have to scale up a phone app and Apple's problem is you have to scale down an actual iPad app for a slightly smaller iPad, I'd rather have Apple's problem than the Android problem. I get the feeling... I was surrounded by developers actually at this event. Apple had brought a lot of developers here. And I get the feeling that they're priming them to have the apps work better across devices. Priming the pump. Priming the pump. Yeah. I mean, Apple spent a lot of time today, Tim Cook in particular, spent a lot of time hyping the app advantage that Apple has. 75,000 iPad apps. At one point, very out of character for Apple, he compared the iPad Mini directly to Nexus 7. It was pretty brutal. He went right at it. He went all the way to this is a piece of crap and stopped. He was waving at that line from across the room. I will say this. They did the comparison of the Twitter app on Android a couple of events ago. Maybe when they announced the new old iPad, which is by the way only six months old. And I was actually kind of surprised. I thought it was really telling that Apple was directly responding to the Nexus 7. I mean, this product is saying, they said without question during the presentation, here's our competition. Here's the best Android tablet. Here's the best Android tablet. And here's what we're competing against. And here's where it has deficiencies. And here's where we're going to win. I'm actually surprised that they weren't able to step in and say like Apple has this kind of bravado where they can walk into a market that already exists and go like, it's the first ever that's ever been designed. They will tell you they created the tablet market, which they basically did, the modern tablet market. They would never mention there have been other tablets or older tablets. I mean, let's not even think about the old tablets. But I do think it's interesting that they had to respond and that this is a response in some way to the desire in the market for a smaller tablet. And I think again, with the pricing stuff, they made whatever product they wanted at this size. And so people are going to buy it at $329 instead of trying to get to $199. And I feel like Google with an Exa 7 spent a lot of time and energy getting it to $199. Because that's how they had to compete. I think $129 gulf between these two products is not insignificant. I think there's still going to be people, and the Fire HD as well, there's so many people who say, I don't want to spend. They're going to look at it and go like, it's almost like $400 to buy this. $330 is, that's not almost $400. But you know what I mean. It's closer to $400 than $200. But the vibe at the event. You can't disagree with that. You cannot deny that. But the vibe at this event, I mean, compared to the iPhone event. Much bigger. The iPhone event was bigger, but it was far more subdued in a way. This was bigger. You think this was bigger? I thought this was a bigger event. I thought that it was a- They had more stuff. I thought that it was a more exciting event for them. They seemed more energized about this. I mean, Phil Schiller was excitedly, he was actually moving quickly through something. They were rushing. You know, Ross, the last time at the iPhone event, when you take pictures, you get a very keen sense of how fast they're moving. So I took pictures at the iPhone event and they moved very slowly. They rushed through some things, but it was very on point. They drew it out. This one was, they were moving so fast that I couldn't take a picture of every slide they showed, which is an absolute rarity for an Apple event. Because usually they actually just go through all the bullets. And then Tim Cook is usually very good about standing in front of the slide and smiling at me so I can take the photo. And none of that happens. They were moving considerably faster. And I thought that the general mood, first of all, I think this space was, it was very, obviously very dramatic. You know, big theater, big old theater like this. But I just felt like the mood of everybody on the Apple team and on stage just seems to be like, everybody's really excited about this product. I feel more excited than the iPhone 5. I think, and maybe it's because it's new, maybe it's because it's a different place. Maybe they're loosened up by doing two events within a month of each other. They're just ready to go. But I thought the excitement was palpable. And the hands-on here was just out of control. I mean, it was a smaller, because it's a theater and not one of their more traditional conference venues, it was a really small, like packed hands-on. They basically built an Apple store upstairs. A very narrow Apple store. Very small Apple store. And it was like Lord of the Flies in there to get the iPad menu. It was like an Apple store in a New York subway. Yeah. If you can imagine, not the restaurant, an actual subway, car. But no, I mean, there was just this enormous flood of people to see this thing. In a much more excitable way than I think I've seen with an iPhone or other products. It was frankly terrifying. And I feared for my life. I killed a man. I killed two. I was on it. I got to one-up you. So I actually have to go, unfortunately. I may be back, but I have to break away for a moment. And we also want to bring Avi out. So I'm going to switch off. Any questions for me before I jet? Do you guys want to know anything? Is there anything that Josh Dupolsky can tell you that another person couldn't? I think we're good, Josh. I think Neelay can answer everything. Are we still on? We're still on. I do want to ask Neelay a little bit about maps later since we didn't actually get to hear about that. But he can raise for you. It's completely done with me. Yeah. Yeah, we're done. We're done. Go away. Goodbye. You don't care at all. Get out of here, Josh. That's really... Avi, come over here. Ross, I'm going to interview Avi for a couple of minutes, then I can answer the rest of your questions. I'm going to interview him. You're attached to me. Don't mind us. Take this thing. I don't know. Are we off the air? Are we on the air? Is this just chaos? Are we staying on the air? What's going on? I guess we're staying on the air. That overly dramatic... Hang on. I was hoping we'd be cut. Yeah, I don't know. There's a transition. I really want to just end going like this. They have to build Avi Greengard in front of this so we can do it. And build him out of Legos? So I was just laughing while they were reading it because you know how I mentioned Josh having huge hands? Yeah. BuzzFeed has a great post with a bunch of pictures of people really awkwardly holding the iPad mini, including a screenshot from our site. And it says, the guy from The Verge looks like he's cradling a plate as he's holding it and Josh is just like manhandling this thing. It's pretty great. Man. I mean, with Josh's hands, I know it'll fit in one hand. I worry about my own hands. Yeah. Well, but so one of the things that Neal and I talked about, which I'm curious what you think about, is the kind of middle ground price that Apple found with price. Where you have $499 for the premium best tablets. That seems to be the base price we found for high end stuff. All right. And we'll talk about this later. We're going to go back to Neal and Avi. You asked me half a question and then like Neal, I came back. We got time. That's fine. Are we back? We're back. Do your thing. Hey guys. So I've got Avi Greengard here. Avi is, I would say, the best analyst in the industry. And actually, I heard you guys talking about price points. And Avi, I want to kind of get into it with you. So Apple's got a product at $329 with the iPad mini. They've got a whole bunch of competition at $199. And kind of a massive amorphous, not so successful competition at $499 and above. What's your take on the mini and its price points? Well, I mean, I think that it's a fair price for what you're getting. You're getting a premium product. I think that's actually what Apple has done here. They've created sort of a new segment of the tablet market, of the small tablet market, at a higher price point that just does a lot more. So that doesn't mean that there isn't a market. I agree with what you were saying earlier, that there is a market for a $199 tablet. And that if you are, for example, if you're just looking to consume content, and you're looking for a small tablet, a lightweight tablet for that, then maybe the Kindle Fire HD is the right product for you. Maybe the Nook HD is the right product for you. Or if you want a little bit more versatility and a little bit more complexity, then the Nexus 7 is a great product there. But if what you're looking for is an entry point into Apple's iOS ecosystem, you want those $275,000, I would call them almost like bespoke experiences, where, look, there are things you can do on an iPad that you can't do on any of the other products. And then there are things that you can do on the other products that are just better on the iPad. So let me ask you this. With the big iPad, we're just going to call it the big iPad from now on, I guess, there is a big market of people who are saying, you know, it's a laptop replacement. This is the future of computers, right? You've got cars and trucks, and the trucks are the laptops, and the tablets are the cars, and everybody's going to have a car sooner or later. This product is small. I mean, it's physically smaller. It doesn't feel like you could replace your laptop with it. Is that going to dilute Apple's message there, or are they still kind of pursuing this post-PC strategy? Well, I don't know that that was ever really Apple's explicit... Cars and trucks is the... Yes, the cars and trucks analogy is. And there's no question that... Speaking of trucks, by the way, the fire truck is going by. That's probably Apple's fire truck. So I do agree that you can't do some of the things that you would do. I mean, there have been times when I've carried around the big iPad with Logitech's keyboard cover and used it as sort of a laptop replacement. Why are you shoving the microphone up my nose? Okay, all right, all right. These people are telling me. You want me to hold it then? All right, is this better? All right. And we're supposed to look at the camera. We're supposed to look at the camera? Okay. Can we start singing then? If you'd like me to. So I do think that there are use cases where the iPad mini fits where a regular iPad doesn't. I was just thinking... Now, this is just personal. This isn't industry analysis. This is a guy sitting in the audience going, I want one of these. If you take a MacBook Air and you take an iPad mini, you've covered all my use cases for when I'm on the road. I can get my writing done and I can consume media. I can use iOS apps, some of which don't really have analogs on the full-size truck of the Air. And so I do think that you're right that this doesn't quite fit as a full laptop replacement. But again, it also depends on what you're talking about in terms of post-PC laptop replacementism. If what you're using your laptop for is Facebook and YouTube videos, and Lord knows there are a lot of people who... That is a reason to use it. Then the smaller size may be perfect. And when you're looking at not an individual purchaser who's going, I should buy an iPhone and I've had Touch... You should just leave. You should do all the impressions. Who is this person? It's the inner me, yes. We often think in terms of, well, gosh, Apple has products this big, this big, this big and this big. And now they expect me to buy one of each of them. But what if you're not talking about an individual, you're talking about a household and you have kids? I have lots of kids. And that's a confession. And you want to give your kids something so that they leave your full-size iPad alone or you have someone who wants to get online and do a quick Google search or if you have someone who wants to be on Facebook and there are a limited number of devices you have in your house that do that. Well, the iPad Mini does fit into that sort of laptop replacement post-PC paradigm and it does so at a lower price than a full-size big iPad. I just need to ask you another question and then you can go again. So before I let you go, give me a rough estimate. I mean, how many of these things do you think they're going to sell before the holidays? A lot. Just a lot? Yeah. Well, that's the one thing that as an analyst, the type of analysis I do is I don't do forecasts. Thank God. I will say that when they first launched the original iPad, I did come up with a ballpark figure and I talked to my contacts at Apple and said, yeah, that's what we think too. And we were both very, very wrong. Okay. Well, then I won't ask for an exact number. Avi, thanks so much for joining us today for a little bit. My pleasure. Ross. Yeah. Thanks, man. So I want to go first. I want to know about the iMac. It seemed like everybody kind of lost their mind when it came out and everybody was talking about how thin it was and all this stuff. Is it really as incredible as they make it sound? So what happened was when the iMac came out, they showed, they did a very dramatic introduction. The iMac is a masterpiece of visual trickery. So it came out and it was super thin and it looked as thin as like the screen on a MacBook Pro. And then Phil Schiller rotated it and you see the gigantic round back. And gigantic is the wrong, it's not gigantic. It's just compared to how thin you think it is, the actual depth of it is like surprising. So it does look very, it looks very thin and it's a really aggressive kind of bit of like optical engineering that you've got this like flat five millimeter edge. But as soon as you kind of get around it all the way, you see how deep it really is. And so they did make it thinner and they got rid of the optical drive and they're doing this crazy fusion drive thing inside, which sounds to me like a regular hybrid hard drive. But the thing that shocked people, the thinness kind of dissipated as soon as you get physically in front of it and you see that there is depth behind it. I will say the display of the iMac is like gorgeous. They're not calling it a retina display. I don't think they can do the visual acuity math they need to do in terms of pixel density to call it a retina display. But all the other kind of like techniques are there, right? So it's optically bonded, they're using the same scaling software on the retina MacBook Pro, they're pixel doubling it, all that stuff. And it looks beautiful. So, you know, I think they just, I think the average distance that you sit away from a desktop doesn't let them say it's a retina display. But if you get a little bit farther back, you definitely can't see the pixels. Right. Neil, I want to ask you a little bit about the 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina. We heard this argument earlier. It's got integrated graphics, it's closer to the MacBook Air in terms of graphic quality, but it's also outputting four times the number of pixels. How was the performance when you were trying out the 13-inch retina Pro? So when they announced the 13-inch retina, I freaked out. Like that's the computer that I want. Because I don't want to run it at retina resolution, I want to run it at the same resolution as my 15-inch MacBook Pro. And you can do it. You can set it to run at 1680 by 1050, which is my computer's resolution. So I was very excited about it. And then they announced the integrated graphics and I was very sad. But so I got to play with it a little bit. And I, you know, there was a big crowd of people and, you know, we didn't get to do everything we wanted to do. But I did run the 1080p Iron Man trailer simultaneously with like a multi-track GarageBand file, one of the demo files, while scrolling around a 21 megapixel raw file in Aperture, all at the same time. And the CPU monitor only ever hit 50%. You know, it spiked above it here and there a little bit, but it kind of was steady at 50%. So my sense is that Apple's figured out how to push all those pixels. I mean, it's not a great graphics card. Nobody's excited about it. But Apple's kind of figured out how to make it perform adequately with that stuff. I think we'll have to see, you know, for me, I think that's enough, right? I mean, I come to events, I take photos, I put them on the internet. I think that's going to be great for me and the screen resolution is great. For people, Jordan, our video producer, he still had a big quizzical look on his face when I was doing all this stuff with it. So I think we'll have to put it through the review and see what the performance is really like. But just at a quick glance, trying to max it out, I really couldn't push it much harder than that. So, technical follow-up question, what did you think of the Iron Man trailer? So I'm really irritated because I never actually got to watch it. Because I was like, I put it on and then I had to like listen to this crappy Garage Band guitar lick while scrolling around a photo. So the corner of it seemed amazing. And I will say that the default Garage Band guitar lick song works really well with it. It's kind of like a Dark Side of the Moon thing. But other than that, I didn't get to see it. So Neal, I sit tight for one second. We've got hands-on with the new MacBooks, I believe. So we're just going to run that and then we have lots more questions for you. Hey guys, this is Neal with The Verge. I'm here with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It looks very much like the previous MacBook Pro, only it is far, far thinner because it emits the optical drive. It's got some new ports here. It's got the new MagSafe port. It's got two Thunderbolt ports, USB 3.0 on the other side. It's got an HDMI port, obviously the SD card slot and another USB 3.0. Obviously the big change here is the Retina display. This has an effective resolution of 1280 by 800, but because it's pixel doubled, you can't see the pixels. It looks amazing. You can also run it at 1680 by 1050, which is the resolution of the old 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is great. So this has a lot of potential for Pro users. If you have a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you have every reason to look at this. And particularly important is this thing seems to perform really, really well. So we put together kind of an insane test here. I've got GarageBand open. I've got the 1080p Iron Man 3 trailer, and I've got Aputure with a 21-megapixel RAW file open. This is the CPU monitor. You can see all four cores are kind of barely doing anything. I'm going to start Iron Man. I'm going to start GarageBand. This is a cacophony of sound. And I'm going to start scrolling around in Aputure. Let's get Iron Man open here. And you can see everything's just kind of working pretty well, and the CPU is only about at half. So although it has integrated graphics, Intel HD 4000 graphics, and it's pushing this ultra-high resolution screen, performance seems to be actually really great, erasing kind of a big worry people had about those graphics powering this display. So that is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It's a great product. If you're like me and you have a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you have a whole new reason to want a smaller computer. Neil, are you still with us? Yeah, I'm here. It's funny because I just literally heard myself say everything I just said. It was pretty awesome. It was pretty awesome. I'm here for you, Ross. You made the interesting point that this is a 15-inch... If you have a 15-inch Pro, this is a great alternative. What if you have an Air? Do you feel like this is a good upgrade? Do you think it's worth it? It's definitely thicker than the Air. It's just a more massive machine. There's more going on in there. I wouldn't be racing to upgrade if I had an Air, but if I was one of the many, many people who want to move down the line to the Air, I would probably stop at the 13-inch Pro. The screen is incredible. Looking at that screen versus looking at the Air screen, I think, is a no-brainer. If you're wanting to go down to the... I think Apple has to figure out what its next move is with these machines because the Air is extremely thin and light. It's a beautiful computer, but it's clearly surpassed one level technologically by the Pro. Maybe that's for the best. For the longest time, I couldn't think of a good reason to get the 13-inch Pro over the Air, and now there's a couple of really good reasons to do it. Maybe Apple is stratifying its line a little bit more that way, but I would definitely get the Pro over the Air. That's great. We've gotten a lot of impressions on your hands-ons about the iPad Mini, the iMac, the MacBook Pro. We got your impressions from the theater. The one thing I want to ask about you personally, Neelai, when we were planning for this event, we were talking, what is Tim Cook going to say? We were convinced he'd bring up maps a little bit. You particularly thought he would actually bring up maps in some way. They did the public apology. Not a single mention at all. Yeah, I don't know, man. They talked about iOS 6 a lot. They talked about how great their software is. They talked about all their successes. Apple events are structured very predictably. They're always the same. We sit down, we get a bunch of stats about how well they're doing. There's always a shot of the in-Apple store, usually some far-flung place that I can't go to. Then there's a little bit of an update on something. It seemed like the maps would be a great place to go and say, we're basically turning what has been a bit of a failure into a success. We're updating it. We're making it work better. They just didn't do it. I kind of understand why. At the moment, I didn't understand. They did so much today. They packed so much into this event. When they were doing the Mac Mini, for example, it went by so fast that if you blinked, you missed it. He was just basically like, here's a list of specs. I'm going to read them as fast as I can. Look at all these ports. Okay, that's Mac Mini. Got to go. Oh, there's a server version. $1,000. By the way, talk about the iMac. It's really thin. Got to go. It was about as fast as I've ever seen Apple go through an event. Spending time talking about a failure, this kind of machination between this didn't work out well and we fixed it, here's an improvement. When they could just talk about products that I think people are very excited about, I understand why they didn't do it. I think it would have been nice to see a metric update on where the maps were and where they've come, but that'll just happen over time. And to be honest, the iPhone 5 is selling gangbusters. This iPad Mini is going to sell crazy. I don't think people are worried about the maps. Are you going to grab Mini? They're expecting Apple to fix it and Apple is working on fixing it. Are you going to grab an iPad Mini when it comes out? Your Mini. What? Really? Really? I don't know, man. I have this new game I play with Apple products where I swear up and down that I'm not going to buy it and then I go to a store and I play with one and then I leave and then a couple days later I come back and I say I'm not going to buy it and then I do. But I do that with everything. That's how I have a Nexus 7. That's probably how I line up with the Surface. It's $329. It's a surprisingly good price point. I think the next year we'll see one come at $249 and that'll dramatically change the stakes of this game. But I think Apple targeted the form factor and they built whatever product they needed to build that form factor and that hit $329. I think next year if they do it the way they did with the original iPad where they brought it down $100, that could really make an impact on these lower priced tablets. I think Google still has a lot of potential at $199 with the Nexus 7. I think we'll probably see some updates to the Nexus 7 coming shortly. And we'll definitely talk about that more. Obviously I think we're going to do another Vergecast on Thursday after the Microsoft event. We'll probably do another one on Monday to talk about Google. Yeah, there's only like 30 more events going on. There's only like 30 more events. This is the first event which is really weird to think about. This week is a long week we've got out of us. I mean, you know, I say kind of a final thought here is that it's very rare just, you know, when we did the iPhone 5 event it was Apple's focusing on the iPhone 5 and they put out these iPods and you know, the iPod Touch is great and the iPod Nano is like why did you make this? And their Apple story didn't seem like it had gelled, right? They were just updating this phone. The software seemed very kind of like timid. Now kind of in some, the sheer amount of updates they've done to all of these products, you know, Tim Cook sat on stage and we've updated almost everything here. The only one that's missing is the Mac Pro. So sorry guys, no one's ever getting a new Mac Pro. But they've updated all of their major products in really dramatic ways. I think the iPhone has proven to be a bit more of a substantive upgrade. It's still an iterative product but I think now that people have them they're seeing kind of the true level of update that it is over the 4S. Very few other companies are doing this level of like complete product line reinvention every year. And I think what's really interesting is that Google and Microsoft, they've both got events this week. They're both going to, particularly in Microsoft's case, they've got to reinvent Windows and say here's the beginning of our Stablet strategy. Whereas Apple is now saying our Stablet strategy is mature, the foundation is built and we're ready to start splitting it off into other products that hit different targets and different price points. You know, Microsoft and Google have a lot of catching up. Google's got to hit the top end of the market. The Nexus 7 is a great product. For one to nine I think it's frankly an amazing product. But Google has nothing to compete in 10 inches, nothing to say you should replace a laptop with this. Microsoft is going straight for you should replace a laptop with this and nothing to compete with, you can read with this or here's a smaller product. It's only Apple that's now hitting all of the kind of the marks while still revamping all of its computers and doing all this other stuff that it's doing. So you know, I will say that I was pretty down after the iPhone 5. I thought the company needed to find kind of a new path, a new aggression kind of. But this event, and I think Josh was saying it too, this event to me was very aggressive. They're moving all their platforms forward. Even if something is mundane and simple as calling the new iPad with a lightning connector, the iPad fourth generation, I mean they're just showing off. They're just flaunting that they can change a generation of the product that quickly. It really is just a third gen iPad with a new processor and the lightning connector. But they're trying to move everything forward as fast as possible. And I think this whole week the industry will shake down after Google's done, after Microsoft has done, after Windows Phone 8 is coming out soon as well. So there's a lot more to come this week, but I think Apple's played a very strong hand here. Awesome. I think that's a great way of slimming pretty much everything up. It's almost like you've been wanting to do this all day. You always pent up a need to talk and we just had to make sure you get it out immediately. Yeah, that was like written like you had a teleprompter or something. That was nice. It was beautiful. Jordan actually has been standing in front of me writing it live. Nice. So alright, you guys go do something other than cover an Apple event. Go get some rest. We'll see you when you get back to New York. Alright guys, I'll see you soon. God, that time delay. I know. It's brutal. Is it going to lose this time? Well, it has to go to space. I don't know if you know that. It's going to space. You can see it by the hand just not carrying it all anymore. We are nearing the two hour and 30 minute mark. If you have stayed with us this long, please stay with us. We're going to go through credits and thank a lot of people. Also we love you. We love you. We've done that last time. People had a lot to say about that. We love you. Very weird and sometimes offensive ways. I love each of you individually. I love every single one of you in all the ways that are socially appropriate and some of you even more so. But you've been here so long. Just let us get to the last question and then the credits. Tell everyone thank you. Mwah. Bravissimo. You know, etc, etc. Meme. Great. Credit time. But first, David, I got a question for you. Is this worth getting now? Let me cut you off because I wanted to do that and I actually wrote that down and say I'm going to cut you off. I wanted to make sure I did that. So let me cut you off. My concern is the MacBook Pro right now, 13 inch, has the same problem as the iPad Mini might have, has the same problem as the first MacBook Air. It's a great idea. It's not there yet. Apple always does better second generations and these are the first generations of product models. So I really want this, but I'm doing everything in my power not to pick it up. The iPad Mini 2, I think, is going to be like where I should enter, but I don't know. See you're crazy. You're completely insane. Like just out of your mind, you should see a professional get help, please. I'm worried about you. I thought we were talking about- No, so here's, sorry, I got lost. That's a completely another issue. The reason you're wrong is that Apple is at this kind of unique place where they have these mature product lines that they can kind of spin off. Like the iPad Mini is not a new thing. It's all old stuff just, you know, machined slightly differently. So it's like they get to launch a new product that is already a mature product. They already have 700,000 apps that work on the device. They already have all of these accessories with the lightning, well, not so many with the lightning connector, but they already have this big ecosystem of stuff that supports Apple devices. And so the iPad Mini, it's not a first gen product. It's a fourth gen product or a third gen, depending on whatever Apple wants. Let's not forget iPhone naming and iPad naming. Right. No, but so it's not a new product. And the retina MacBook Pro is in a sense, it's a little newer just because this combination of specs and size and price has not really been put together before, but they've done all of these things. Like we know Apple can build a great high res display. We know Apple can build a capable MacBook Pro. So I feel like for they're in this place where I'm much less worried about the iPad Mini or the MacBook Pro being a viable product because Apple has proven all of these pieces before it's just a matter of tweaking the formula ever so slightly. Whereas like building a seven inch tablet for Google was this giant departure. Doing it for Apple is just a slight tweak of an existing formula. Fair enough. On that note, not entirely convinced, but then again, who am I kidding? Like Neil said, I'm probably gonna buy it too. Yeah, you walk into the store and you're like, I don't want that. And then magically it's in my pocket. Right. On that note, we need to start wrapping up. We do. I'm gonna cut you off again just to wrap up even though you wanted me to wrap up first and we kept it going. That's my fault and I'm talking way fast to get this done. Other things coming up. Today we did that Windows 8 review. We gave it, what was it again? 8.8. Really? Which was I swear to you not intentional. I swear to you not intentional. David Pierce lying to America and the world at large. When the Windows 8 review comes out, you should definitely check it out. You can check out all our Apple coverage right now on theverge.com. We're having way more events coming up in the next few days. Tons of Windows 8 reviews coming up for products. First and third party at some point. We have the Microsoft Surface event. Two part event I think on Thursday. Correct. Then on Monday we've got the Windows Phone event and we've got the Google event. Remember it has it will be next devices, a new version of Android, maybe some Google Now stuff. All that coming. If the powers that be, if we do not die of plague and we do not pass out in a trash can somewhere, we will be doing a Vergecast both those days, kind of talk about it, kind of wrap up everything that's been talking about. It's a big week in tech. It's a big week in tech. Have we ever had this big a week? I honestly can't remember. Even I would put this above CES in the sense that big companies are playing their hands all at once. That's crazy. That doesn't really happen very often. This is all the products that are going to come out in December. This is the holiday lineup. As close to the holidays as you can get. Unlike CES where it's like here's a thing that you might maybe see someday in the future probably only in China. I think CES is going to be very boring this year. It was boring last year, but this is like when it just completely dies. Yeah, I agree. And it's going to be such a snoozer. But we have all those and then Tuesday, October 30th on the Verge we have Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, Paul Miller went to NASA, went to a couple other places. Maybe space. We don't know. We may have a few products to talk about. We may go into space. Maybe. We'll have a few products to talk about. Everything with the events. A couple other surprises. We have a costume contest and we will be giving away Samsung Galaxy Note 2's to some of the best costumes, to some of the best audience participators. If you sit the best. I don't know. We have Note 2's. We're going to do something with them. And all I know is James Che, our designer, is already working on his Gangnam Style costume. So if you're going to do that, you've got to bring your A game. You've got to bring your A game and you've got to dance the dance. But please wear a costume. It'll be fun either way. A lot of special things. A lot of people to thank today. I want to thank our guests. I want to thank Craig Mott who's just a brilliant mind. I want to thank Andrew Allen. He's the 53 designer who made Paper App. Paper looks really good now on the iPad mini. Looking forward to the update. Avi Greengard, he's a research director for consumer devices at Current and Ellis. He's been a really great friend to the site. I've known him for a long time. Love the guy to death. Yeah. Also a bunch of Verge staff. Nathan Ingram for talking numbers and knowing things about math that none of us do. Scott Lowe, Ellis Hamburger, Neelai, and Josh of course even though he left because he's a jerk. Not to mention in the studio right now we've got Billy Disney, we've got John Lago Marciano, we've got Brendan Murphy, Dan Joseph, Michael Shane of course, all the Vox Studio who basically built this and let's us talk for over two and a half hours. It takes a village people. I'd like to thank the guy that's letting David pee right now. Thank you. Beautiful person. Obviously we're losing it right now. For all the coverage, check out theverge.com. That's pretty much everything. Jordan and Sam are considered. Oh, I am such an ass. He forgot two people. Jordan Opplinger and Sam Thonis who are out there with Josh and Neelai doing all the video stuff and just being generally handsome and talented. Jordan and Sam, I am so sorry. I will apologize for a few seconds. You just get one punch in Ross's face. Maybe. Just one. But who are we kidding? You're not going to watch two and a half hours of this. Fair enough. All right. And speaking of which, neither should you. So we're going to go. Bye. Thanks everybody. Thanks.