 Welcome to The Verge Live just after the Apple event. It's a little bit after. We're taking it kind of slow and casual, much like the Apple event itself to be honest. It's a very low-key kind of doldrum event. I'm here with Chris Ziegler and top of the show actually we have Dieter Bohn from San Francisco. We'll get to him in just a second. But real quick, you know, get the logistics out of the way. If you have questions for us or for Dieter, hashtag askverge. Here's the news that has happened so far. The big announcements, iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite. 8.1 will come out Monday. Yosemite came out today. It is free. There's also new iWork. iPad Air 2, it's thinner than a lasered pencil. iPad Mini 3, it's a complete waste of money. We'll talk about that later. It's iPad Mini 2 plus 1 basically. Basically. And then a 27-inch iMac with 5k Retina Display. It's actually really impressive and priced very well too. Also, updated Mac Mini for some reason. Which which Tom Warren is extremely excited about. I am extremely excited too. Again, if you have questions for us or for Dieter, hashtag askverge and we'll get them to us. Alright, let's go ahead and get started. Dieter, are you there? Hey Dieter, you looking good. Hey, how's it going? It's doing well. So a couple questions real quick. How was the how was the iPad event? Was it as boring for you as it was for us at home? I mean, kinda. We were expecting Apple to go through their usual rundown at these events. They go over, you know, the latest OS again on the iPhone. They go over the latest OS on the Mac. They remind you how good the iPhone sold. They they sort of run through the numbers of all the features that we kind of had heard about, you know, earlier in the year at their other two events. But they did that for what felt like quite a long time. And then we sort of raced through the new hardware stuff. And it just like it was exactly what we were expecting. Nothing more than that. No real surprises except I suppose the Mac Mini was neat to see. I might end up buying one. But yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of holy crap. I would say the the best part of the whole event was Stephen Colbert doing a cameo to demo the the phone calling feature on the Mac. Yeah, we have a video that we'll play that probably in a little bit afterwards. Let's go on top of the products real quick. So the iPad Air 2 with the laser sheared intro. Did you get a chance to play with that at all after the event? Yeah, yeah, I did just a little bit. And you know what? It's an iPad. It's stupid thin. It feels pretty light. The screen is very pretty. It's fast. I mean, that I hate to say it, but like it's kind of boring. But this has been the knock against Apple products for a long time. They seem kind of boring, but they're great. The one thing I'm most curious about with the the new iPad Air is the anti reflective coating. You know, I didn't get enough time with it to really see how I feel about it. But you know, I've got lamps in my house. That's a thing that people have and like using the iPad with lights behind you can be a pain. And so I'm really hoping that it'll be it'll be nicer. So we'll see. But yeah, I mean, of the the stuff that was announced today, I think that the the coolest thing was obviously the new iMac. And then the number two thing is the the iPad Air 2. And then from there, you just can kind of forget about the rest of it. So let's talk briefly about or maybe at length about the the iMac because I agree with you. I think that was the most interesting announcement and the most exciting. I'm assuming you've seen the display. Is it as insane as it sounds? It is even more insane than it sounds. It is just stupidly good looking. It has incredibly good viewing angles. You know, just they're playing around with video editing software, obviously to show it off. I didn't see any lag. But of course, this is a demo unit. So it's ideal conditions the way that they've got it all set up. But I you sort of run out of things to say about a screen when you look at it. It's like, there's no pixels that you can see. It is gorgeous. It is bright. It has incredibly saturated, rich colors. If there's a better screen available for a regular human to go out and buy today to look at things on, I've not seen it. Right. And what about the screen lag? Did you notice anything? They did talk about this timing control a little bit too. Yeah, I mean, Apple's very excited. They brought it up two or three times. They made this custom chip to control the pixels. Sure. I mean, I'm sure that it's important. I mean, I didn't detect any lag. But again, it was a pretty controlled demo. So it's really hard to say, you know, if it will actually do it. I know it was an issue with, you know, the first retina max, there was some concern that they weren't powerful enough to keep up with it. But you know, this is a big ass desktop. And so they've got, you know, plenty of stuff that they could pack into it, they don't have to worry as much about heat. Apple claims it's even more energy efficient than before, too. So presumably, that helps with heat as well. So I don't think that we're going to see the same sort of early issues that we saw with the original retina max on this iMac, I think it's just it's just going to be good. I think one thing that's really surprising about this, this iMac is the pricing. I think you expressed a little bit of surprise in the live blog. And I was my jaw momentarily dropped as well. And so I guess my question is, what does this mean for the Mac Pro? I mean, I guess there's probably still a market for it. But it certainly seems like this steps on it a little bit, particularly considering how much time they spend talking about video editing with this announce. And, and also what the heck a 5k display, I would expect to spend $2,500 just on a 5k display, much less an entire iMac with a you know, three, three and a half gigahertz, was i5 or i7. And, you know, one terabyte fusion drive, all this stuff. So talk a little bit about the price. Was that was that a shock for you? Yeah, it was. I mean, I got to be honest, I'm not I haven't been shopping for 4k displays or TVs or monitors or anything else. So I'm not super conversant in that. But I was fully anticipating this thing was going to be over $3,000. So I was pretty shocked that they were able to get it in at 2500. You know, if I if I own a Mac Pro right now, the one thing I'm wondering is how can I make this thing my monitor for my Mac Pro? And why can they make one that doesn't have the whole computer in it to bring the price down even further? I bet not, at least not for a while. Yeah, I mean, the the big question with any desktop computer is justify your existence, convince me to buy you instead of a laptop. And with the Mac Pro, it's easy. It's like, this is a super pro grade machine to do super pro grade stuff. And with an iMac, you know, it's not going to be as powerful as a Mac Pro. So they've got to do something. And it's so it's either got to be super cheap, or amazing in some other way. And Apple kind of managed to do both. It's not ridiculously cheap, but to get this display for this much money. I certainly wasn't expecting it. And you have to wonder, you know, Apple's famous for having really high profit margins, you kind of have to wonder if they're getting that on this computer. So let's talk about the iPad for a second. Because this is the first one that's available in gold. Have you seen a gold one? Is it as ridiculous as it sounds? It's muted, it's not like look at me, I'm gold in the way that the iPhone six pluses. So it's not so bad. It's not so ridiculous. I would almost say it feels more bronzy than gold. I mean, I'm a guy that used to own an orange iPhone, so I'm really not one to talk. But it doesn't look too ostentatious and ridiculous to me. So to be clear, this is a different shade of gold than the iPhone six and six plus. It seemed like it to me, but I mean, it could be that just at that size, it looks a little bit different. But I mean, I was expecting to look at this thing and have to shield my eyes and and just find it to be the most ostentatious, ostentatious device ever created by human hands. So I'm not saying it's the most ostentatious device ever created by human hands. And it also didn't look like that. I mean, I still would be getting a space gray one. You know, actually, honestly, if we're talking about iPads, I did the hands on with the the iPad mini three for for the website. And I've been waiting to talk about it because of everything that happened today. It is by far the most disappointing. It's basically an iPad mini with retina, aka iPad mini two, and they threw it like it didn't even get stage time. Yeah, they they just like shillers like oh yeah, by the way, we did the thing with the retina on the mini. It's like it's got touch ID now. See ya. It's like, Oh, but that was the one I was gonna buy. No, it's Yeah, no, it's embarrassing. But we talked about this in our in our news. And they also now have Yeah, what say that said again, just go on. Sorry about that. Oh, I was gonna say they also seem to have 15 different iPad models in their lineup. Now, you get the original iPad mini, you get the iPad mini two, you get the iPad mini three, you get the iPad Air, and you can get the iPad Air two, I miss any, is that everything? It's just five. I think that's everything. Although it does seem like the iPad mini two is going away. Because like I said, it's $100 for touch ID and gold, everything else. And we looked at the spec comparison before we went on the air. Everything else is the exact same, which is almost like iPad mini to get it now, because it's a good deal while supplies last, because pretty soon that price is no wonder they didn't spend any time talking about the mini three. And it's it's not a good deal. You're like, Dieter mentioned, you're paying $100 for basically touch ID and seemingly nothing else. It looks better, though, if there is no iPad mini two on the market, which I feel like in a couple months time after Christmas, that stock is just gonna dwindle. I don't know if that's true. I mean, we'll see. But but typically, Apple's strategy has been to keep the old models in the lineup for a full product cycle. But we'll see. And you look at the 5c2, like the iPhone 4s stuck around longer, that might be the iPad mini one because, oh, you get the cheapest iPad for 250 bucks. And that's a great sounding pitch. Right. So Dieter, let me ask you, they spent a lot a lot of time talking about taking pictures on tablets, which seems to be a a an admission by Apple that this is a thing and it's not going anywhere. So we might as well make it a really good experience. What's your what's your reaction? Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Why are you calling it an admission? An admission implies that there's something wrong. Taking pictures with your tablet is cool, bro. It's an awesome thing to do. I just look like there are situations where it's not okay to take a picture with a tablet. If you're at a concert, don't be that person. Otherwise, you know what? Don't judge. It's cool. It's a big screen. And at least with the iPad Air, it seems to have just a really good camera. They took a whole bunch of the stuff that they created for the iPhone 6 in terms of like software features and applied it to the iPad Air. It doesn't they didn't get into enough detail to say whether or not it's the exact same sensor and the exact same optics as the iPhone 6. I'm sure it's not because it just doesn't look like there's space for it. But yeah, if you've got a really good camera on an iPad, then you know, use it. I will say that the one sort of admission thing they did do is they went right from like, you can take pictures of it, aren't these cool pictures to talking about like wild and crazy apps that you can use on an iPad that kind of makes sense with the camera. They had the thing where, you know, they show like a baseball guy swinging and like you can like analyze the accuracy or the behavior of a swing. So that was kind of neat. But really, you know, at the end of the day, like, there's nothing other than even the Touch ID was not that thing. There's nothing with either of these that makes you go, holy crap, this is a brand new thing that I was not expecting that is going to change things. Yes, they made it crazy thin. They shaved the pencil with the laser. But other than that, I mean, it's an iPad. It's a really good tablet. It's probably the best tablet. And it's better than last year. And we just keep on marching on. I was hoping to see more. I mean, they even said on stage, I think it was Schiller said each one of our products in our lineup pushes the other products to be better. So the iPhone pushes the iPad into needing to be more professional. If you're going to make that claim, I think you need to finish it. You need to finish it by showing us maybe that split screen stuff that's been rumored for so long. I was really hoping we'd see an iPad Air demo that showed some real multitasking. But we didn't. Most of the software story was stuff that they had already talked about earlier in the year. Yeah, it actually seems to me like maybe they sandbagged just a little bit to pump up an event early to mid 2015 that'll involve, of course, the Apple Watch, maybe some sort of iPad Pro, which has been rumored for like 20 years, it feels like. And of course, the retina MacBook Air. Yeah, I mean, I'm waiting for that retina MacBook Air. You know, people were hoping it show up at this event. I'm totally fine with it not showing up at this event. If the chips aren't ready, if the thing isn't ready, just wait, because it's a computer that every single human on the planet is waiting to buy. And they've got to get it right. So if it's not ready yet, I'm totally fine waiting. It's funny how much the the Apple Watch came up. I mean, they needed to tease it here and there. I think the only real use we saw with it was they showed off. It was a Greg Figariti showed like using it as a remote to go through his presentation. But it wasn't clear to me if he was tapping the screen or twisting the digital crown. But they look fine. They look they look good on executives or so they would flash it. So early 2015, it didn't move up. We'll we'll see him next year. Great. Dina, we got to let you go into the second but final thoughts. What was any other final thoughts on the event itself? Just overall? It ran through fast. It felt almost a little Samsung-y in how quickly they ran through features and were willing to just jam through tech specs, which was not something I expected from Apple. But really, like the takeaway for the day is get to an Apple store and look at the display on this iMac because it's just crazy. Awesome. Well, Dieter, thank you so much. Thanks, guys. All right. Let's let Dieter get back and grab coffee and all that. We do actually have first footage of the iPad hands-on. We'll take a look at that and we'll come back and we'll answer some of your questions from Ask Verge. Hey guys, it's Neil with Verge. I'm here with the new iPad Air 2, which is really, really thin. I've got my old iPad Air here. You can see how much thinner this guy is. It's incredibly thin. One notable change is there's no more side switch here. It's gone. But here it is. It's really thin. It's got a touch ID sensor on the front. Inside, it's got a new A8X processor. And the screen actually is laminated now. It's the first time an iPad, the screen's been laminated, which is just like the iPhone and the iPhone 6 Plus. And it looks really, really incredible. It's like you're touching the pixels exactly on the display, which is a big change to the iPad, something I've been wanting for a long time. There is also Apple Pay support, but there's no NFC. So it's all happening through the touch ID sensor in apps. You can't wave it at things. You can't wave an iPhone at it to pay or anything like that. Other big change to the back, the camera is new. It's an 8 megapixel iSight camera. Apple's really high on it. They spent a lot of time talking about this new camera here. We can try to take a picture with it. I think tablet photography has really arrived. Let's take a picture of Lance Yuenoff. There he is, looking handsome. This is, I think, a big deal. I think iPad photography and the apps that make use of a good camera on a big screen are actually coming up and changing. So that is the new iPad Air 2. And here is the new iPad Mini 3. This is the updated iPad Mini. It has the A7 processor. It has new finishes. It comes in gold now. The major change here is really the touch ID sensor on the front. The display is still not optically bonded, but it is a really nice looking iPad. Can I just see this for one second? As you can see here, the iPad Mini 3 is still kind of notably thicker than the new iPad Air 2. So between the two and the iPhone 6 Plus, you actually have a huge collection of screen sizes around iOS now. I think the Air 2 is a really nice product. The screen laminated is a big improvement over the original Air, and it is just so much thinner, it is actually kind of impossible to grab. What I love the most about that video is like, Neil, I just grabbing it. You know there was another journalist out there probably taking pictures or doing their own hands-on video. Neil was like, I'm sorry. I hope it was Joanna. Got it. Joanna Stern. Formerly of The Verge, now The Wall Street Journal. Great, so we're gonna take a few of the questions. Hashtag ask Verge. I'm just running through this real quick. If you have any other questions, keep updated and I'll keep just looking down. I promise I'm looking at you and everything you're asking us and nothing else. Let's just go through real quick. Obviously, we didn't hear anything about any MacBook updates at all. Like I said, maybe just spring, hopefully. Yep. iPad Mini 2 versus 3. We talked about a little bit with Dieter. Let's just kind of rehash that just a hair. The only differences we can tell, and we've looked at the Apple's official spec sheet, the only differences are one's available in gold, one has Touch ID, and one costs $100 more. That's basically all the iPad Mini 3. If you can get the iPad Mini 2 and you do not care about Touch ID and you do not care about gold, that's probably the better deal. Yeah, I think that that, well, we mentioned this when we were talking with Dieter, paying $100 for Touch ID seems completely insane. And if you have a Mini 2, I don't think that there's any reason that you would want to consider a Mini 3. Even if you have a Mini or no Mini at all, I'm not sure that the Mini 3 makes the most sense because, sure, Touch ID is nice, but is it something that you want to spend $100 on? Probably not. So unless you either desperately need a gold Mini, you desperately need a Touch ID, or you just like throwing money at giant corporations, Mini 2 seems like the best deal. It does. And then we should also get into, and this is another question we've seen a lot, what's up with the iPod and the iPod Touch? Specifically, the 16-gigabyte iPod Touch right now is $199. The cheapest 7.9-inch Mac Mini is now $249. Right now the iPod Touch is still on sale, but I'm kind of wondering how long that's going to be as well. So your hypothesis is that they're just going to kill the iPod Touch. I mean, they just killed the iPod. Yeah, but I think- And they've not, for a long time, updated the Shuffle or the Nano, which are great utilitarian devices. I'm sure they still sell decently, but those numbers have been on the decline for so long. I think they're very polarizing products, because different people have very different opinions about what's going to happen with these lines. If you talk to David Pierce, he'll tell you that the iPod Touch is a gateway drug into iOS. And it's also, I mean, it's a very good point that it's something that you give your kids, right? You're not going to give your child, your six-year-old child, a six-plus. Maybe you will, I don't know. But it's a lot more cost-effective and potentially less expensive to give them something, month to month, that is, to give them something that doesn't have a cellular connection. iPod Touch is old, and it's a lot cheaper than a six. And you're sharing the same apps, obviously, with your phones. Right, but you're also sharing the same apps with the iPad, which can upscale, and the difference is not only 50 bucks, and that's also requiring Apple to continue to support the lower resolution, or the lower size screen, which they're doing right now with, obviously, the legacy iPhones. I just, I don't know how long they're going to care to do that, once the 4S is completely out of the cycle, and I guess, or the 5 is completely out of the cycle. That's true. I mean, let's put it this way. If they could find a way long-term to deliver, say, a 99 or $129 iPod Touch with the current specs, or maybe even slightly warmed over specs, I think that's a product that they can and would want to leave in the lineup for a very long time to come. Because the entry point into iOS then becomes very, very low. That's not to say that it can't be low as it is. You have products like you mentioned, the 5C, which is zero on contract. You have products like the original iPad Mini. But still, if you could hit sub-hundred dollars with an iPod Touch, that would be a really compelling proposition. There are a lot of people who want access to the App Store on an iPhone, I think, form factor, but don't necessarily need a cellular connection. So, really, you can think of it as like the smallest iPad at that point. Really good. The iPad Nano. The iPad Nano, that's right. A couple other questions we should run through, and then I want to talk about the tone of the event as a whole. Mac Mini, actually, we should talk about that later because I'm really excited about that. Should we get, should you actually download OS X Yosemite on day one? We actually just published a review of OS X Yosemite. We did. And it looks pretty solid, but more or less we've had no problem with it. I've heard. Yeah, David told me in the process of reviewing it that he was hard-pressed to find bugs. That said, that said, I have never personally been a day one downloader. I'm not going to be a day one downloader this time. So, it's the person that buys the phone on day one. Hardware's different? Well, you know, I rely pretty heavily on Creative Cloud, for instance, and Adobe is infamous for having compatibility issues with new versions of OS X. I just want to give it a few days, let other people be the guinea pigs, and then we'll see what happens. But I just, I'm a strong believer that OS X peaked with Snow Leopard. I'll go to my grave saying that. But yeah, I'll upgrade eventually. Okay. I will. You are going to be a day one downloader. Yeah, 100%. I do not care about whatever little nagging issues are going to be there. Like, it's still overall a better product. Do it right now, live on the air, man. I have to do, alright, fine, whatever. I don't care. It's live to help, who cares? I'm doing it right now. But the last question that we're probably going to take before we kind of move on, is there anything that surprised you at this event? To me, it's just the amount of dad jokes and weird goofiness over the secrecy. Yeah, it was, it's a new Apple, right? Like, I think that every event that Federighi is in, I get more and more surprised at what a huge effect he has on the tone of the event. I think back to WDC with the OS X weed jokes. Oh yeah, Hair Force One. Hair Force One. He's definitely a light-hearted character in their executive mix, and I think that is a good look for them. The problem, the only problem is that they leaned, they had to lean way too heavily on him to make dad jokes. This is Eddie Q, and I don't even know who. Doing the secret handshake and failing. The most ill-advised. Yeah, and then he gets kicked out of the building. Yeah, no, I think that it's fine. It's all well and good that they do that sort of stuff, but they just need to not do it as much. They had to lean really heavily on him here because they didn't have a lot to talk about. Right. And there's probably a lot of, you know, there are many minutes that they could have trimmed out at this event if they had wanted to. I am now agreeing to the terms and conditions. This is happening, folks, right now. You're gonna regret this. You are really going to regret this. But they're also the talk of like not just double down, they crossed out triple downing on secrecy. They're like just a wink in an eye to the fact that everything is kind of leaked, which was already like a kind of pretty low-key event itself. Yeah, I mean, yeah, can you imagine that happening in the jobs era? I certainly can't, you know. I cannot imagine them letting anyone, like that number of executives and developers on stage that weren't like pristine and eloquent as all that because anyone who fumbles with their words, and a lot of people did fumble with the cues today, would probably been fired immediately under the jobs era. It's a much stricter regime. Yeah, it was very interesting to see the way that they treated, even last night when the 8.1 user guide leaked with the new iPads in it. I think that, yeah, I expected Apple to just freak out and certainly not acknowledge it on stage. Instead, they joked about it for like 20 minutes. And they brought in Chief of Secrecy, or now Supreme Commander of Secrecy, Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert, yes. Can we just watch that clip real quick? I just want to show everyone else what that was like to see on the live stream. And so next, I'm going to move on to the next slide in my presentation. And, you know, I heard that our new Chief of Secrecy, Stephen Colbert, has some concerns about his part of the presentation. And so actually, I can give him a call from my Mac right here at his office. So let's just type up Stephen. There's his work number. And I can just dial right here. And it's going to dial up my Mac. It's going to actually make a speakerphone call through my phone. And by the way, yeah, I have the coolest job in the world. I get to talk to Stephen Colbert. Hello. Hi, Stephen. It's Craig from Apple. I'm sorry. I don't recognize that name. Oh, oh, right. Hello, Red Delicious. This is Granny Smith. Over. Is the squirrel in the basket? Roger Foxtrot, Thunderbolt, Retina, Swift, Lightning. OK, the line is secure. Glad you called tonight. I have some critical feedback. I have some very critical feedback on the content of your presentation today. Specifically, I've got a big problem with my title. Well, Chief Secrecy Officer, that's a pretty impressive title. I just don't think it's big enough to capture how important my role is at Apple. Let me run this one by you. Hear me out. Supreme Allied Commander of Super Secrecy. I don't know. Craig, if Supreme Allied Commander was good enough for Ike, it's good enough for me. OK, it beat Hitler. I would also accept intergalactic chancellor. Intergalactic chancellor. How about Supreme Commander? You let him know? Who? I'm sorry, I mean Chairman Honeycrisp. Oh, yes, yes. Absolutely. I will let the chairman know. Glad you see things my way. Now, please get back to work, because you know what I see when I look at my wrist? My wrist. Where's the watch? Chop, chop. I am jonesing from some jewelry, Craig. I'll get right on it, Stephen. All right. Over and out, Granny Smith. Over and out, Red Delicious. He's jonesing for some jewelry. He's jonesing for jewelry. We actually did get asked what watches we're wearing, and this is a busted $7 novelty gift with the golden iPod screen. You realize that you can get that—well, of course you do. You can get that watch face on a Moto 360. I also realize I can save $300 and get a nice dinner and some drinks and go on vacation. That's fair. That's why I have not upgraded my iPhone yet either. I actually enjoy having money. I'm wearing my favorite G-Shock. I'm a bit of a G-Shock beast. Sam is going to kill me for admitting that Sam is not a G-Shock fan. Right now I'm on an iPhone 6 Plus, so I can't use my Moto 360. The question is, do I get a Pebble? I kind of like the blue. There's a Pebble that's kind of a similar color to this, or do I just wait for the Apple Watch or do I just give up on the smartwatches completely? Well, if you want to spend money on iPhone 6 Plus, pay $100. Try the Pebble. You can try the one that I stole from Dan. I'm not using it anymore. Did you mug him? I didn't. I asked nicely. You just gave it. Yes. I want to talk about the Colbert thing because that is the only time on Apple stage that Hitler has been mentioned in any way, shape, or form. Are you sure? Have you gone back through all the events? I'm just going to take a wild guess and say no one has ever mentioned Hitler on an Apple stage. I was just thinking while we were watching that this is now at least the second time, and I'm assuming more than that, I'm just not remembering correctly, that they've prominently featured and spoken to one or more celebrities during the event. For a very long time, Apple has involved popular musicians and musical groups in their events, and now it seems like maybe they are moving to celebrities, like television and movie celebrities. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely that broad appeal. I think we've talked about that when the Apple Watch stuff came out and the fact that they're giving interviews to Vanity Fair, to Vogue, and to all these places. The idea now is that they want Apple to be a fashion brand, and to be a fashion mainstream brand, they need to bring in celebrities and people who are influential in those circles. That is your talk show host, your future CBS late night talk show host. That is the Foo Fighters who are still relevant. That is Coldplay who has consciously uncoupled itself from reality. That's you too, I'm sorry. Speaking of fashion and celebrities, I was thinking— I do not know where the segue is coming from. I just want to bounce something off of you that I was thinking during the event. What if Apple did an iPad edition or an iMac edition, like they're doing an Apple Watch edition, that is 18 karat gold? 18 karat gold iMac? An 18 karat—well, maybe not an iMac. Because that's a giant—it's a lot of gold right there. But certainly—I mean, someone will buy it. But certainly an iPad edition, I think, would play well. I think it would play well in certain circles, people who have more money than either of us will ever imagine. But again, it's a fashion brand. I think the interesting part of that, if we're going to go back to last month's event, is the how long do Apple Watches stick around? iPads, you know, you upgrade once or twice a year. They keep it very similar to the iPhone cycle. Yeah, but the—so the—I think that although Apple does upgrade its iPads annually—and of course we saw that again here today—that doesn't support itself in the same way that the iPhone upgrade cycle does, which is very reliable. Every year you have, you know, a very significant percentage of iPhone users upgrading to the next iPhone. I'm sure that other groups use this vocabulary as well, but we say that people are on the S-track if they're only upgrading every other year, including Ross Miller here. With the iPad, I think it's just like, well, I have an iPad, it works fine, I'm going to upgrade when it breaks. I know lots of people that still have an iPad, too. So I think that the product cycles and the life cycles for these devices is actually very different from category to category. Lots of unanswered questions about the watch. We don't know if they're going to attempt to upgrade it annually. We don't know what they're going to do when they do upgrade it because you're sitting there with a chunk of actual 18-karat gold in your hand or whatever the material may be. So that's definitely an open question. My question is, well, one of my many questions is, what do they do with the iPad Mini next year? Because I think one of the reasons that it was downplayed so – we haven't talked about this yet and I wanted to get into it. One of the reasons that the iPad Mini was so heavily downplayed this year is because the 6 Plus encroaches on its territory. And certainly, this is something that we've heard many times and I believe it's true, if you bought a 6 Plus or if you're going to buy a 6 Plus and you also want an iPad, you're almost certainly not going to buy the iPad Mini because it's so close to a 6 Plus. You'll probably get the big iPad. Well, it's less powerful than the 6 Plus now, too, because it's still last year's processor. Yeah, that's a very good point. So the question becomes, do they do a more significant refresh of the Mini next year or do they just kind of semi-permanently downplay the significance of the Mini in light of the very large phones that they're now making? I don't know. I don't know the answer. Yeah. And I think that we should also talk about the – not the elephant in the room, but something that we should talk about that kind of hangs over. Yesterday, of course, Google announced Android 5.0. It's a lollipop. It is a lollipop. It is a lollipop. It's not lava cake or what are the other bases in there? I was guessing Liam Gallagher, but that didn't happen either. Wow. I'm still bummed about Oasis. Yeah. Five to ten years later, I really can't believe we're bringing that up. Yeah. But with that, of course, new flagship products. The ACC-made Nexus 9, same resolution as the iPad Air, but 8.9-inch, 4 by 3 ratio, same. Also pre-order start tomorrow with that. It's got a 64-bit processor, first for a Nexus tablet. Two gigs of RAM, nine hours of battery life versus the 10 on the iPad Air, and it starts at $400 for 16 gigs. So it's priced very competitive with the iPad Air. Yeah. I think that Google definitely looks at this as a premium product. It's the first time that they've gone to HTC for a Nexus device in quite some time. And I think it's super notable that they're going to 4 by 3 with this tablet instead of 16 by 9 or some other aspect ratio. It's pretty clear to me that they want this to be a direct competitor to the iPad line. It's kind of neither a mini nor an Air in terms of size, but it falls somewhere in between. And I think that it's going to – I'm sure it's going to sell very well because it's the right aspect ratio, and it's a good-looking product. That's a really good price for it, too. Yeah. But so does this affect the sort of balance of power between Apple and Google in the tablet space? I think that depends largely on how this is marketed, right? If we see this in stores everywhere, if we see big kiosks for it, I think they can make a dent. If you look at the Nexus 7, it sold very well, right? In fact, there was a time when we said that the Nexus 7 was the only Android tablet that mattered. And I think that the Nexus 9 could be the new that. Right. I mean, 8.9 inches, I mean, that's a perfect size. Like, it's the iPad mini competitor with the right specs, the right price. You know, a lot of people are asking us to compare the two. The problem with that is we know what the iPad Air is like. We tried it today. We haven't tried 5.0 on the Nexus 9. We haven't tried Nexus 9. We haven't tried a final version of Android 5. We haven't touched the Nexus 9. Lots of unanswered questions, but I have a strong feeling they're going to be answered very soon. Yeah, and I promise when we know what the Nexus 9 is like, we will tell you and we will draw comparisons, of course, between the two. Because as they are both going on sale, both going on pre-orders tomorrow, that's the if-then, if-not-that question. Yeah. We're definitely not going to keep those impressions to ourselves. We're going to put those on the website. Not one bit. And I guess we should probably get up, because we're starting to wrap around the wrap-up. Also wrap around. Wrap around. I started to wrap around. Just like this. No, I was trying to wrap up. The iMac mini with a burnt-in display. That's the big question. That's actually probably the most exciting announcement today. And you talked about the price. No, the Mac mini was the most exciting. No, I'm kidding. The Mac mini was not the most exciting announcement. Yeah, look, $2,500 is a lot to spend on a computer for anybody. But if you're going to spend $2,500 on a desktop, I can't imagine not seriously considering this thing. Right? It's the total package. And ever since they did the last round of redesigns on the iMac and made them super thin, it's a beautiful all-in-one. It's a really striking device. And with this display, I mean, it's insane. One thing that they said a couple times on stage, which I think is just crazy to think about, is the fact that you can edit a 4K video pixel for pixel and still have room for the UI of the video editor around it. Well, I mean, I'm curious about that allegation because it's 5K Retina. But if you know you have a Retina MacBook, you're not actually getting 5K. Or you're not getting the full Retina display. You're getting fine-tuned pixels in like a 2500 by 1600. Like sometimes they'll actually just like make it a crisper display using the extra pixel space. So I'm curious what is realistically how people are going to use that screen. Yeah. Yeah. Points versus pixels. Sorry, John is in my ear correcting all my technobabble. Thank you, John. Yeah, I'm sure that our—I have to believe that our video team is kind of frothing at the mouth over this 5K display, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they think it's a piece of garbage. We'll have to have a serious conversation with them about this device afterwards. We actually—we have hands-on with the iMac Retina, so people who've actually seen it can talk about it instead of blather. So let's take a look at that. Hey, guys. This is David at The Verge, and this is the new Retina iMac. It's an iMac with a Retina display. It has the same body as always. It's still super thin, but it has this brand new 5120 by 2880 display. That's exactly double the resolution of the last time. And there's a whole bunch of new technology in here to support it. There's a new timing controller, which tells the pixels when to move and where. There's all kinds of stuff going on here. Apple basically had to rebuild the display. They say it's the world's highest resolution display, and honestly, I have no reason not to believe that. The display looks amazing. Like, in the—you see every detail of Paris and the Eiffel Tower and everything. It looks amazing. It's designed for photographers and people who work with 4K video, and it really is just gorgeous. And it's also still thin and light and really nice. The display is the hero here. It's $2,499 to start with, a 3.5 GHz Core i5 processor. You can spec it up and get a 3TB hard drive and a 4 GHz Core i7 processor. You can get really crazy with this thing, but this is very much the top-of-the-line iMac. It's really beautiful. You'll really have to see the screen to believe it. For most people, it might be overkill, but it's really, really, really nice. This is the new iMac with Retina display. It's out right now, and it's probably the best computer screen I've ever seen. Okay, we actually wanted to talk about the iMac Retina, but we just saw this while the video was going on. Apple is actually including its own SIM card, one SIM, many options. So if you get to sell your iPad, you can just change the carrot on the fly, it seems. This is something that—and I'm sorry this is happening in real time. We're reading about it as we speak. But this is something that we have known that Apple's wanted to do for some time, move to an embedded SIM. This goes back to the Steve Jobs days. I think that there were rumors that he personally thought that SIMs were onerous and terrible and needed to go away. And of course, Apple was a major force in getting the so-called 4FF, the nano SIM, pushed through the standards process and approved. They keep trying to make those SIMs smaller and with the eventual goal of making them go away. And it looks like they have now achieved that with the iPad Air 2. Yeah, they're definitely moving in that direction here. Single SIM can be, as Ross mentioned, can be reprogrammed depending on the carrier that you're taking the iPad to. The practical benefit of this to the end user is really pretty small. I've never personally considered the SIM to be that annoying. You just pop it out, you pop a new one in. The most annoying thing about it is something that Apple actually pioneered, which is the SIM tool. It's a little tiny. Yeah, it used to be that you just pop the battery cover off something with the SIM in it, take the SIM out, bolt SIM out. But also now they don't have to even create that functionality so you can make it a thinner device, the less ports it has to have. The interesting thing is, and this is actually on their official site, when you look at the iPad Air 2 stuff, there's one SIM description. It shows in the picture AT&T, it shows T-Mobile, it shows Sprint, Verizon, not listed. I don't know if that's still a separate device altogether. I can't imagine, but that is interesting. It certainly isn't a CDMA thing because Sprint is in that list. Yeah, I don't know. But that's unusual. And it's also unusual that this is something that they're introducing on the iPad, not the iPhone. Then again, correct me if I'm wrong, Ross, because you're a walking encyclopedia and you know all things. A pop culture, yes, this is not... I believe that the iPad is where the mini SIM first debuted. The original iPad, I want to say, was the first production device to have a 3FF mini SIM. And then the iPhone 5, I believe, was the first production device to have a 4FF nano SIM. So they have pioneered some SIM technologies on the iPad before, and it looks like they're doing so again here. If you look at Apple's page, iPad Air 2 slash wireless, all that. Participating in US and UK carriers are AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and of course EE in the UK. Everything Everywhere, which is my favorite name for a company ever. With, of course, these sub-notes, participating carriers are subject to change. Yeah, they must have worked...the only way they could have done this is by working with carriers to make this happen. And I have to say, I have to give Apple tons of credit, regardless of whether you like Apple or not. The amount of control that they've wielded over carriers, which are notoriously hard to work with, is amazing. To this day, they are basically the only manufacturer that is allowed to roll out firmware updates willy-nilly without carrier approval. Usually that works out very well. Sometimes it doesn't, like with 8.0.1. But this is indeed very interesting, and it's something that we'll be doing some more research on. We should go back to the iMac. Yes, go back to the iMac. Now this tangent's over. Yeah, so we saw David's hands-on, and by all appearances from everything we've heard from both David and also from Dieter, the display is miraculously good. Right. It's just a question of whether you want to spend $2,500 on it. Or you could get $1,000 on a 4K TV. Vizio's big push was the $999 4K, and get a new Mac Mini, which I'm not kidding, I'm actually kind of excited about. Yeah, I mean, Tom Warren squealed with glee at the Mac Mini announcement. I didn't know he was such a big Mac Mini fan, but apparently he is. I'm assuming that he's planning on installing Windows 8 on it. It just makes a really good home PC, something you can hook up to your big TV and run Plex on it, run all your video apps. I think we just did an editorial on this, Chris Plant did an editorial on this, that really is sometimes the best interface. The most options come from just a web browser hooked up to your big TV. Yeah, that's true. That's true. That was actually a really popular piece of ours. And you do all that, it's still cheaper, and it's got a bigger screen too. I hadn't considered that. That's a very good point. I mean, there's something really sexy and appealing about just having a single device that you pull out of a box and set down, and it's a 5K display with all these really amazing hardware components built in. But there is also something to be said for saving $1,000. Yes. It says the Mac Mini just buys the 6 Plus off contract and will not upgrade the software. Look, look, I'm just saying. So the base Mac Mini starts at $499, is that right? But although this is a fair comparison to the iMac, it's just 1.4 GHz Intel Core i5, dual-core. So like, comparably to the specs, the iMac with Retina is way better, way more powerful. I mean, it's definitely at some point you could see this blurring the line with the Mac Pro because we do not have, and this is the thing people are asking for, we do not have a new cinema display. I think someone pointed out, just pointed out, it's been 1,127 days since the cinema display was last updated. Thank you, Agent Polito, for that. That's crazy. If accurate, that's insane. I bet that they could have and would have shown a 5K cinema display today, except that they didn't want to take the wind out of the sails of the iMac launch. That's my guess. I'm assuming that in 2015, WWDC would actually be a great place to debut it. Which is where they debuted the Mac Pro too, I believe. You might be right. The model? At least the form factor? They all blur together at all the events. But that would be a great place in 2015 to show a 5K cinema display. One thing that I want to point out, going back to the list of available Mac Minis, the 699 model, which comes with a 2.6 GHz dual-core i5, 8 GB of memory, and a 1 TB hard drive, very interesting, the $2500 Retina iMac has 8 GB of memory and a 1 TB hard drive. Really? Yeah. So that's pretty striking to go up by almost $2000 in price and not get more memory or hard drive. You're also talking about 3.5 GHz quad-core processors, so we're talking about a lot more muscle. And a dedicated graphics card, whereas the Mac Mini, I'm assuming, Intel Iris graphics, which is an integrated graphics chip. Yeah, sure. I'm just saying that it seems like in late 2014, 16 GB should be the standard RAM level for what is by all standards a high-end desktop. So that was a little surprising to me. And I think that Dieter actually showed some surprise when he was live-blogging about that as well. That's fair. If you need to ramp up to 16 GB... Yeah, and how much is that? You're adding $200. $200. Well, if you're spending $2500 on a computer, I guess you don't really care about that. Well, that's another $200. And also, I don't know if this is still true, I haven't checked in on memory prices recently, but it used to be that you could save a ton of money by just picking the base level of RAM on an iMac and upgrading it yourself. I'm actually like, I'm pricing everything out right now. John is asking, our producer is asking if you can upgrade the memory yourself. That is actually a good question. I have no idea. But it certainly used to be that that was the way to go just because it was so much cheaper. And 32 GB is how much? $600 over base. So if you want to max out your iMac right now, it's about $4400. Peanuts. Pocket change. Let's do it. Press the buy button. Do it. Can I borrow your credit card? Completely unrelated to this. I already goaded you into upgrading to... Which is not available yet. It's not yet available. I'm assuming later today, as soon as it does, I will, I promise you guys, I will download it and break my laptop. Make it happen. I think that just about wraps up everything today. It wraps up most of the questions too. If you guys have any other questions, and you want to hear any other news about the show, or about Apple in general, check out theverge.com. It's a nice website. It's a little pretty. It's good. We're biased, but fairly so. Yeah. I want to thank again Dieter out in San Francisco. Of course, Neal and David are also there covering the event live the entire time. The entire crew here, everyone who works in video and product and sales, and everyone else at Vox Media. All lovely people. Yeah. We should have a credit roll. Yes. That's about it. So guys, thank you so much. Remember to check out theverge.com for anything else, and we'll see you next time.