The case for the iPad Pro | The Vergecast - video Dailymotion

The Verge

Today on the flagship podcast of tandem OLEDs: The Verge’s David Pierce and Chris Welch discuss the new iPad Pros with an OLED screen, Sonos’ controversial new app, and Sonos’ leaked headphones.   The Verge’s Will Poor buys a bunch of broken iPhones on eBay, and pits the Apple Store against independent repair techs. David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about why some people think the iPad should be a Macbook replacement.

Transcript

00:00:00Welcome to the Verge cast, the flagship podcast of Tandem OLED.

00:00:03I'm your friend David Pierce and I am outdoors at a coffee shop testing iPads.

00:00:08I try when I review devices to use them the way that people use them.

00:00:13So that means like trying to do work, playing games,

00:00:16using the pencil even though I'm a terrible artist.

00:00:18But I feel like for me when I think about the iPad,

00:00:20the single most like charming, romantic, iPad-y use case you hear for the iPad

00:00:26is the people who just bring their iPad to a coffee shop,

00:00:29get a cup of coffee, sit and do the Sunday crossword.

00:00:32I love it.

00:00:33That's what iPads are for.

00:00:34So I am here.

00:00:36I have coffee.

00:00:37I have the iPad Pro.

00:00:38I have the iPad Air.

00:00:39And I have a ham and cheese croissant.

00:00:40And I'm going to do the crossword.

00:00:42I have a Monday crossword on the iPad Pro.

00:00:44I have a Sunday crossword on the iPad Air.

00:00:47I'm worried that I'm going to kill the battery in the air before I finish the crossword.

00:00:50Not because the air's battery life is bad,

00:00:52but because I'm very bad at Sunday crosswords.

00:00:54It's going to be something.

00:00:55But anyway, we have a lot coming up on the show today.

00:00:57We're going to talk to Chris Welch about OLED screens on the iPads.

00:01:01We're going to talk about Sonos because there's a lot of stuff going on with Sonos.

00:01:04We just have a lot to catch up on with Chris.

00:01:05So we're going to do that.

00:01:06We're also going to talk about right to repair.

00:01:08Will Poore, our producer, as you've heard a few times on this show,

00:01:11has been deep in the right to repair world over the last few months.

00:01:14And this time he has a really fun,

00:01:16different kind of update on what it means for us, the device owners and users,

00:01:21when we can actually have them repaired in new ways.

00:01:24Super fun story.

00:01:25Then we're going to get to the hotline.

00:01:26Like I said, lots to do in this episode.

00:01:28All that is coming up in just a second.

00:01:31But seriously, I have a lot of crosswording to do.

00:01:34And I only have this one cup of coffee and that one croissant.

00:01:37So it's possible it's not going to happen, but I'm going for it.

00:01:41Wish me luck.

00:01:42This is the Verge cast.

00:01:43See you in a sec.

00:01:46Welcome back.

00:01:46All right.

00:01:47I crushed the Monday crossword.

00:01:49Just crushed it top to bottom, like eight minutes, nailed it.

00:01:52Everything was great.

00:01:53And then I did so badly on the Sunday crossword that I gave up almost immediately.

00:01:58My mom can just sort of sit down with a pen and do the Sunday crossword.

00:02:01And I think it's remarkable.

00:02:03It's like watching somebody who's really good at Excel or PowerPoint or something,

00:02:06just sort of use their tool.

00:02:08Like somebody who knows all the keyboard shortcuts for Photoshop.

00:02:11I am not one of those people.

00:02:12I found a bunch of words I had never heard before in the clues and was like,

00:02:15this isn't going to happen.

00:02:16So I gave up.

00:02:17I came home.

00:02:18Here we are.

00:02:18Let's get into the show.

00:02:19I don't know if you noticed it yet, but it's kind of officially become gadget season over

00:02:24the last couple of weeks.

00:02:25We had a quiet couple of months there, but now it's developer conference time.

00:02:29Graduations are happening.

00:02:30So there's deals everywhere.

00:02:32Back to school starts shockingly soon.

00:02:34Everybody's got stuff they want to sell you for Christmas that is somehow already coming

00:02:38out, even though it's May.

00:02:39It's just going to be a deluge of gear for the next few months.

00:02:43And to be clear, that is awesome news.

00:02:45But this week, there are two particular gadgety topics that I'm especially interested in.

00:02:50I want to talk OLED screens now that I've reviewed the new iPad Pro.

00:02:53And I want to talk Sonos because a lot has been happening in Sonos world the last couple

00:02:58of weeks.

00:02:58Some of it exciting and some of it extremely not exciting.

00:03:02And there is no one better to talk about either of those things with than the Verge's Chris

00:03:06Welch.

00:03:06Hi, Chris.

00:03:07Hello.

00:03:08We haven't done this in a while.

00:03:09It's like we have a lot to catch up on.

00:03:11We haven't subjected anybody to terrible microphones in a while.

00:03:14Oh, yes.

00:03:15We're very overdue on that.

00:03:16We are.

00:03:17We have a bunch to catch up on.

00:03:18Basically, two big things I want to talk about while we're here.

00:03:21I want to talk a little about iPads, and then I want to talk a lot about Sonos.

00:03:24But let's start with the iPads.

00:03:25And I want to talk to you in particular because you were very intrigued from the beginning

00:03:30with the new iPad Pro.

00:03:31Tell me why.

00:03:32I just use the iPad Pro quite a lot, honestly, for work, for photo retouching, for lots of

00:03:38stuff.

00:03:38There's no device quite like it among all the gadgets that I have.

00:03:41Like the new 13-inch model has definitely caught my interest.

00:03:45It looks kind of samey, but also much nicer at the same time, which I can appreciate.

00:03:50That's kind of the story of the iPad.

00:03:51Like samey, but much nicer in a way I can appreciate.

00:03:53It's like a perfect summation of the whole review I wrote of the iPad Pro.

00:03:58I mean, you've held it.

00:03:58You've used it for a while now.

00:03:59What are your thoughts?

00:04:01What's your takeaway?

00:04:02I mean, it's exactly that at this point for me, right?

00:04:05And I think part of the reason I'm curious for your thoughts is you're more of an OLED

00:04:09expert than I am.

00:04:10So I'm curious how you read it.

00:04:11But my takeaway so far has been that in a certain way, this is like the platonic ideal

00:04:16of an iPad.

00:04:17Like it's very powerful.

00:04:18It's very thin.

00:04:19It's very light.

00:04:20Like I don't know how you'd spec this thing better than it is currently specced.

00:04:25And yet I feel like that has increased my enjoyment of the iPad Pro by like 1%.

00:04:29It's like the iPad is just really good.

00:04:31And it's been really good for a really long time.

00:04:33And now here we are.

00:04:35But you, again, part of the reason I wanted to talk to you about this is when Apple talks

00:04:38about like who uses the iPad, they like literally describe Chris Welch, right?

00:04:42Yeah.

00:04:43Like do some work tasks, a lot of photo retouching.

00:04:46It's like it's a great sort of creative canvas.

00:04:49And I feel like you use it more fully than most people I know.

00:04:53And this is, again, where the OLED comes in.

00:04:55Like for you as a photographer and person who spends a lot of time with photos, what

00:04:59does this new screen do for you?

00:05:01I mean, the brightness is pretty much the same as the prior one, but there's no more

00:05:05blooming, which is nice.

00:05:06You've got those perfect OLED blacks and whatnot.

00:05:09I haven't seen it that much in person, but I'm certain there are going to be a bunch

00:05:12of people who obsess over the uniformity of the screen.

00:05:16There are these forum posts where people go into a dark room with their iPhone and load

00:05:19up a gray screen and see how uniform it is.

00:05:23Is one side slightly warmer?

00:05:25People obsess over the smallest panel issues.

00:05:30So that's going to be a whole new wave with this one, I'm sure, once they actually get

00:05:33out to customers.

00:05:34There's just so much of it to look at now.

00:05:36Two OLED panels.

00:05:37That's kind of cool.

00:05:39I don't get the whole thinness thing.

00:05:41I wish they had just put more battery.

00:05:44They've said 10 hours for years and years and years at this point.

00:05:47That's true when you use it as an iPad.

00:05:49But once you do laptop tasks with it, you're not getting 10 hours anymore.

00:05:53So I wish they'd kept the same thickness as before, but added more battery.

00:05:58But we say that about their stuff all the time.

00:05:59I know.

00:06:01It's been true for so many years at this point.

00:06:03I have found that argument somewhat compelling over the years, because I think in most cases,

00:06:08thinner genuinely is better in a lot of cases, and especially lighter is better for the iPad.

00:06:14Lighter, especially.

00:06:15But I think at this point, we might have tipped to, I would actually take slightly heavier.

00:06:19It's so light and so thin.

00:06:22It feels amazing.

00:06:23But then I pick up last year's Pro, and that also felt great.

00:06:27I still have zero complaints about it, even compared to this new one.

00:06:30So I'm like, just if I were to hand back a little bit of that thickness and weight,

00:06:34and we can get rid of the camera bump and more battery, I think I'd make that trade.

00:06:40But yeah, we've been asking for that trade for years now.

00:06:43I don't think we're ever going to get it.

00:06:44How's the keyboard?

00:06:45Dude, it's so good.

00:06:47They got rid of my favorite smart keyboard folio.

00:06:48I know.

00:06:49Very upset about that.

00:06:51I'm hoping it'll still work.

00:06:52I haven't tried it, so maybe it'll still work.

00:06:54I have to confess, I have zero feelings about the smart keyboard folio.

00:06:58Just none at all.

00:07:00Tell me all of your feelings.

00:07:02Because it was like a perfect on-the-go keyboard.

00:07:04It was lightweight, so lightweight.

00:07:05And the keyboard was very mediocre.

00:07:08But it was there when you needed it.

00:07:09And when it wasn't, you would just flip it behind and use the iPad for other stuff.

00:07:13Whereas with the Magic Keyboard, you're just constantly taking it off, putting it on,

00:07:16taking it off, putting it on.

00:07:17There's no natural secondary mode.

00:07:20And so I wish there was some kind of keyboard accessory that had that same kind of versatility.

00:07:26That is fair.

00:07:26I will give you that.

00:07:27The Magic Keyboard now, even though it's lighter, is still heavy.

00:07:31And it doubles the size of the iPad, essentially.

00:07:34And the thing I liked about the folio, the folio was the one you could actually pull

00:07:38the keyboard off and just have the case be a kickstand, right?

00:07:41No.

00:07:42Oh, that wasn't that one.

00:07:43See, there's so many accessories.

00:07:44How am I supposed to keep all of these straight?

00:07:46The folio would just fold behind.

00:07:47And so you'd hold the iPad and the keys would be in your fingers, which was kind of strange.

00:07:51But I got used to all of it.

00:07:52It was quirky.

00:07:53It was made terribly.

00:07:54That material they use just got awful.

00:07:56But the keyboard felt so nice.

00:07:59And it was waterproof and had a lot of benefits.

00:08:01I mean, it's not as nice as the Magic Keyboard, by any means.

00:08:04But $300 for a keyboard in any context is kind of silly.

00:08:08Oh, it's lunacy.

00:08:10I mean, and I continue to be in a hard position with all of this iPad stuff.

00:08:15If I recommend that you buy an iPad, I'm basically saying you should buy an iPad Pro

00:08:21plus a Pencil Pro plus the new Magic Keyboard.

00:08:24And at this point, I've just recommended $1,800 worth of gadgets to you.

00:08:27What size iPad Pro, though?

00:08:29I'm personally forever a fan of the 11-inch.

00:08:32Like, the 13 feels great this year.

00:08:34It's much more wieldable than it was.

00:08:38But I still, for my own uses, the 11-inch is the one.

00:08:42The keyboard's a little smaller, but I can hold the thing a lot better.

00:08:46It's a little just more manageable for me, personally.

00:08:49But I would imagine for you, the 13-inch is the only one.

00:08:52Yeah, just that bigger canvas.

00:08:53I love those rumors of a 15-inch iPad and a 16-inch iPad.

00:08:56Give me that tomorrow.

00:08:57I'll absolutely get that.

00:08:59So yeah, just make it bigger and bigger, and I'm here for it.

00:09:02But yeah, I can see a case for the 11, especially now because the screen is the same,

00:09:05the OLED, on the 13-inch.

00:09:07Yeah, one last thing on the OLED, and then let's switch and talk about Sonos.

00:09:11This whole tandem OLED idea, you've been covering the TV world for forever.

00:09:15There's been this sort of march of OLED in those devices forever, OLED in gigantic TVs.

00:09:21It's getting a little cheaper and a little better.

00:09:23Where does what Apple's doing fit into the overall OLED universe for you?

00:09:28It seems pretty innovative.

00:09:29There aren't too many TVs that do that at all.

00:09:32So I think their thinking is that two OLEDs can get brighter and stay safe longer,

00:09:38whereas if you push a single OLED panel that hard for years and years, it might not age as well.

00:09:43So it seems like a smart way of going about it.

00:09:44I haven't seen it in person.

00:09:45I'm sure people are going to do all sorts of close-ups and deep dives on the tech there.

00:09:50But it's pretty cool.

00:09:51It's a very Apple-y thing to kind of put that in the iPad.

00:09:54Do you think if this is the sort of thing that works,

00:09:56we might start to see it other places?

00:09:58Like a tandem OLED television, is that a thing that makes any sense over time?

00:10:01I don't think it makes sense for the TVs,

00:10:03because they're already pretty bright past 2,000 nits these days.

00:10:07So they don't really need that up of laptops.

00:10:09Maybe I could see it being a thing, certainly.

00:10:11So we'll see how it goes and see if it has burn-in or any kind of negative effects over time.

00:10:16But yeah, for now, it just looks very pretty.

00:10:18Yeah, the timeline of all of this is going to be interesting.

00:10:21I've had the iPads for six days now.

00:10:24And you can do a lot with an iPad in six days,

00:10:26especially like we've used a lot of iPads for a long time.

00:10:28But the two biggest questions I have are,

00:10:30A, are there going to be burn-in issues on this screen because it's OLED?

00:10:33And Apple's theory about why that might not happen tracks,

00:10:37at least sort of philosophically.

00:10:38But we just don't know.

00:10:39And in six months, it'll be really interesting to see.

00:10:42And then the other one is literally just like breaking and bending.

00:10:45Every single morning, I take this thing out of my backpack

00:10:49or my suitcase, as it was over the weekend,

00:10:51or just pick it up off my desk and just look at it.

00:10:54I'm like, did it bend? Are we good?

00:10:55And so far, it's fine.

00:10:56So far, it's fine.

00:10:58But am I going to be shocked?

00:10:59I saw some story that there's some kind of new steel rib inside there for added strength.

00:11:04So it's got some kind of a new component in there to keep it from bending, ideally.

00:11:08Because we started that whole new cycle back in 2018

00:11:11when they were shipping bent out of the box,

00:11:13which was pretty lousy.

00:11:16I'm sure there are those pictures of the bent ones still

00:11:19like haunt the memories of people at Apple.

00:11:22It's good stuff.

00:11:23Yeah.

00:11:24All right, let's talk Sonos for a little bit.

00:11:25Because Sonos has been, I would say largely because of you,

00:11:27very in the news the last couple of weeks.

00:11:30Let's talk about new products.

00:11:31And then I want to talk about the app and the kerfuffle around the app.

00:11:33Oh, the app.

00:11:34We're going to get to that.

00:11:35But the big new thing that you have revealed is coming,

00:11:39and that has been kind of a semi-open secret for a while is coming,

00:11:43is the long-awaited Sonos headphones.

00:11:46Tell me about the headphones.

00:11:47They're called the Sonos Ace.

00:11:49There are photos on the site.

00:11:50They look very nice.

00:11:52They seem pretty high-end.

00:11:54They're going to cost around $450, I believe is the rumor.

00:11:57They're going to have like noise cancellation,

00:11:58all the usual high-end headphone stuff.

00:12:01They're going to do tie-ins to your home theater.

00:12:03So if you own like a Sonos Arc, you'll be able to hear TV audio

00:12:06and do like spatial audio with head tracking for Atmos content.

00:12:10And so, yeah, Sonos wants this to be their next big hit because they kind of need it.

00:12:14They've had like a few soft quarters and people aren't buying their speakers

00:12:17as much as they were during COVID lockdowns and all that.

00:12:20So they really need some kind of pick-me-up,

00:12:22and they're really hoping that this is going to be that.

00:12:25So I can imagine a world in which Sonos basically just says,

00:12:29we're very good at making audio products.

00:12:32We've made home audio products.

00:12:34Now we're making a different kind of audio product.

00:12:36Is there more to the advantage of buying headphones from Sonos

00:12:40other than just they will probably be very good because Sonos is making them?

00:12:44What in theory do you think people gain by buying Sonos headphones as a Sonos thing?

00:12:50I think we'll see what they say once they actually announce them.

00:12:54But yeah, I think it's going to be just a story of,

00:12:56you know, we built our brand on audio, we know audio.

00:12:58But it's hard to compete with like Bose in terms of noise cancellations.

00:13:01Come out of the gate and challenge Bose in terms of ANC or Apple,

00:13:05you know, has the best transparency mode on the market.

00:13:09And it sounds like Sonos thinks that they have the best everything.

00:13:12So we'll see how that actually bears out in practice.

00:13:15But in terms of what they'll offer, some kind of tie-in with home theater,

00:13:18I don't think they're going to play like Wi-Fi, audio, or anything like that.

00:13:22So it's going to be somewhat limited, the tie-in to the Sonos ecosystem.

00:13:26But we'll see.

00:13:27I don't know.

00:13:28They look cool.

00:13:29And they had to put out this new app because of the headphones.

00:13:31So that's why there was a rush to get the new app out.

00:13:36And the Sonos community has not received it that warmly.

00:13:40All right, fine.

00:13:40You want to talk about the app?

00:13:41Let's talk about the app.

00:13:42It's fine.

00:13:43We waited long enough.

00:13:44Let's talk about the app.

00:13:45Yeah.

00:13:45So the story is, I understand it.

00:13:47And I confess, I am a Sonos user to the extent that I have Sonos speakers

00:13:51and I play them through the Spotify app.

00:13:54So I have almost no knowledge of the Sonos app,

00:13:57except that it is the thing I use to set up my Sonos speakers

00:14:00and then essentially ignore because I just use Spotify.

00:14:02What has happened with this app?

00:14:04What is going on here?

00:14:05So they redesigned the whole thing to make it faster and easier to get to your speakers

00:14:10and just change settings and search for music.

00:14:13So it's got a whole new coat of paint.

00:14:15But they've taken out many, many features.

00:14:18Local music search is gone.

00:14:20You can't edit your cue.

00:14:22If you make a playlist, you can't do something that basic until June,

00:14:24they're saying, that'll come back.

00:14:26So people are going to have to wait a month for some pretty basic.

00:14:29The cue thing is wild to me.

00:14:31I think I want to come back to the local music thing

00:14:33because I have both questions and a lot of thoughts about that.

00:14:37But I honestly feel like one of the core benefits of a Sonos system

00:14:44is the way the cue works.

00:14:46And it's a thing people love.

00:14:47It's a thing they like to manage.

00:14:48It's a very good system.

00:14:50And it is of all possible features to leave out for Sonos.

00:14:55I would put that like near last on the list.

00:14:58It's so wild to me that that wasn't here.

00:15:00Yeah, it's a music app.

00:15:03And they took that out.

00:15:04But yeah, stuff like sleep timers are gone until like May or June, late May or June.

00:15:07So it's just stuff that's been taken out just so this app could be more,

00:15:11you know, somewhat faster.

00:15:12I think Nelight likes it quite a bit.

00:15:13So it depends like how you use your Sonos app.

00:15:14Some people don't have local music to deal with,

00:15:17or some people just use AirPlay to play stuff on their Sonos gear.

00:15:20So if they do that, then I doubt they even care.

00:15:23But yeah, there are a lot of downgrades, you could say.

00:15:25Like the accessibility has gotten worse,

00:15:27which is terrible for people who need those features.

00:15:29And so that'll be hopefully fixed by the end of this month.

00:15:32But stuff like that just has people asking like,

00:15:34what the hell was the rush here?

00:15:36Like, why didn't you put this out as like a beta option

00:15:38and like have the old app still there alongside it?

00:15:40You know, which are fair questions, honestly.

00:15:42Versus just like forcing everyone onto it right away.

00:15:44Yeah.

00:15:45What is your sense of the backstory there?

00:15:46I think this does seem like a somewhat surprising

00:15:50kind of own goal from Sonos on this front.

00:15:53Like what is your sense of what's going on there?

00:15:55Yeah, I think it's all about the headphones, really.

00:15:57I would just kind of strange that they're like putting

00:15:59all this like pressure on a product that no one owns yet.

00:16:01And so they're like making life less convenient for people

00:16:04who have bought their stuff and their speakers,

00:16:06just in the name of these Ace headphones once they're out.

00:16:08So why do the headphones require this new app?

00:16:11Like the last time they did a big update like this,

00:16:13it was to basically change the whole infrastructure

00:16:16of the system, right?

00:16:17And that's always gonna be challenging.

00:16:18I get that that is a thing you eventually have to do.

00:16:21It's gonna be messy.

00:16:22I don't know that Sonos handled it perfectly,

00:16:24but like, I feel like that went fine.

00:16:25And everybody hemmed and hawed

00:16:27and then kind of got on with their life.

00:16:29This one seems like it just could have been easier

00:16:33and Sonos kind of whiffed it.

00:16:35What is it about the headphones that is forcing all of this?

00:16:38I think they're trying to make it

00:16:39so you can like set them up easier out of the house.

00:16:41You know, like most Sonos gear,

00:16:43you have to be home on your Wi-Fi before you set it up.

00:16:45Whereas like headphones,

00:16:46you don't want to have to deal with that.

00:16:47So I guess that was part of the sack that they had to change.

00:16:50But as far as like why a whole new app design was necessary,

00:16:53or like if these things just kind of like

00:16:55happen to coincide at some point.

00:16:57But yeah, people are upset.

00:16:58Very, very mad.

00:16:59If you go to the Sonos subreddit or their forums,

00:17:01they're saying we're listening.

00:17:03And they're like talking to like their customers,

00:17:04like on the forums and stuff.

00:17:05And they're saying like,

00:17:06this is when this feature will come back.

00:17:07This is when this feature will come back.

00:17:08But yeah, I don't know.

00:17:09It just seems like a very big unforced error

00:17:13that they've made here.

00:17:13And it's kind of shaken, you know,

00:17:15trust in them again after the S1, S2 thing,

00:17:17which was overblown, like you said.

00:17:18They never like killed any products.

00:17:20They left some of their very oldest devices

00:17:23on the S1 platform.

00:17:24And like everything else is still supported on S2.

00:17:26So that was kind of ugly, but they did it.

00:17:28And it was fine.

00:17:28This is just different.

00:17:30It's like a change for the sake of change.

00:17:32And I think that's just not going over super well.

00:17:34But yeah, maybe the headphones will come out

00:17:36and like they'll be mind blowing.

00:17:37And you know, all will be forgiven.

00:17:39Yeah.

00:17:40Let's see.

00:17:40I mean, I think part of the reason I'm so hung up

00:17:42on the local music side of this

00:17:43is that it feels like a microcosm of Sonos

00:17:47sort of losing its core audience.

00:17:49Right.

00:17:49That like this company has been the company for people

00:17:53who are willing to spend.

00:17:54Some of their oldest customers, especially.

00:17:56Yeah.

00:17:56And who are willing to spend a lot of money

00:17:58to get really good audio.

00:17:59There was just nothing like it

00:18:00for a really, really long time.

00:18:02And people spent a lot of money.

00:18:04They bought into these systems.

00:18:05They did a lot of work to maintain these systems.

00:18:07And then it feels like sometimes for good reasons

00:18:10and sometimes for bad reasons

00:18:11and recently for very bad reasons.

00:18:13Sonos has just kind of blown all of that up.

00:18:16And it feels like it's like when Apple forgets

00:18:18about the Mac Pro for like a decade at a time.

00:18:20It's just like all you have to do

00:18:22is just sort of keep reminding these people

00:18:24that you love them.

00:18:24And all that means is just to keep supporting local music.

00:18:27Like just let people upload their MP3s to your thing.

00:18:30And there is a set of people on earth

00:18:31who will love you forever.

00:18:32I'm one of those people.

00:18:33Yeah.

00:18:34And I can't tell if Sonos is like trying hard

00:18:38to push away from those people

00:18:40in the name of like finding a much bigger audience

00:18:41with things like headphones

00:18:43or if it's just screwing up unintentionally.

00:18:46But it's just a really odd move to me

00:18:49to look at the people who have had your stuff

00:18:51for damn near 20 years at this point

00:18:53and are like the people who care the most

00:18:55about their music.

00:18:56Yeah.

00:18:57And just say,

00:18:58oh, we redesigned an app and we have nothing for you.

00:19:00That seems nuts to me.

00:19:02I don't think it was intentional.

00:19:03I think it was just like they had their,

00:19:04they just like really mixed up their priorities

00:19:06as they were building this app.

00:19:08And now they're hearing about it, obviously.

00:19:09There are good parts of this app,

00:19:10like don't get me wrong.

00:19:11So there's a web app now, which is very cool.

00:19:13You can like access your system from like anywhere.

00:19:16And so that wasn't a thing before.

00:19:17So that's great.

00:19:18There are other odds and ends.

00:19:19Like it is faster to like move around your system,

00:19:20like access your speakers and stuff like that.

00:19:24But it's just like lots of change all at once.

00:19:26And I think like people are fair when they say like,

00:19:28you should have just done a beta

00:19:30or had them, you know, side-by-side

00:19:32or, you know, like a preview app for a while

00:19:34just to kind of like ease people in

00:19:36versus like, just here's the new app.

00:19:39Half the stuff is missing

00:19:40and it'll be back in like two months.

00:19:42So, you know, that's never gonna go over well.

00:19:44And it hasn't.

00:19:45But I think they're learning again,

00:19:47their second painful lesson after the S1 and S2 fiasco.

00:19:50And now we're here.

00:19:51So.

00:19:51Yeah.

00:19:52Yeah, let's hope.

00:19:53We'll see where things wind up in like late June.

00:19:55Hopefully it'll be at parity with the old app again.

00:19:57Yeah.

00:19:57I mean, again, it's just been,

00:19:59I think I'm really sensitive to it right now

00:20:01because we had Humane and Rabbit both being like,

00:20:05oh, don't worry.

00:20:06Our products are awful now,

00:20:07but they're gonna be so good this summer.

00:20:09And then it was like for Sonos to basically come out

00:20:11and say exactly the same thing.

00:20:12It's just like, oh no,

00:20:13like I've heard this too many times now.

00:20:15I just don't believe you.

00:20:17And also if that's true, why did you ship it now?

00:20:21Just support everything for two months.

00:20:24It'll be fine.

00:20:25Exactly.

00:20:26The other product that you scooped

00:20:29is a new Bluetooth speaker coming from Sonos,

00:20:31which is, I would say of all of the new Sonos stuff,

00:20:34maybe the one I'm most excited about.

00:20:36What's going on there?

00:20:37The Room 2 is coming soon as well.

00:20:39It looks just like the old one.

00:20:41Not much has changed there.

00:20:43Still very small.

00:20:44I have one.

00:20:45I like it fine.

00:20:45I think the Move 2 is my favorite Sonos overall product.

00:20:48That's bigger, obviously.

00:20:50Can't quite travel with it the same way as you can with the Room.

00:20:52That's the one with the big handle, right?

00:20:53Yeah.

00:20:54That thing is a brick, but boy, that's a brick.

00:20:56Yeah.

00:20:56But the Room is like a perfect shower speaker, like you were saying.

00:20:59So that could be an option for you.

00:21:01But I think it's just pretty samey.

00:21:04There's a new button on the back so you can pair it easily.

00:21:06Whereas before, again, you had to be on your own Wi-Fi

00:21:09so you could set up a Bluetooth speaker.

00:21:10It's like, what are we doing here?

00:21:12So now there's a button.

00:21:13You can just set it up right away and that'll be simpler.

00:21:16So that's the main change from the first gen model.

00:21:18But yeah, there were some concerns with the battery over long term.

00:21:21So hopefully they've fixed some of that stuff so it'll last longer.

00:21:24But yeah, it's a tiny little thing.

00:21:25Sounds decent for its size.

00:21:27I think that'll be out sometime this summer as well.

00:21:29So yeah, tis the season for new speakers.

00:21:32I'm curious whether you think Sonos is pushing more towards

00:21:38trying to be a company like Bose that just has a lineup of very good audio products

00:21:42or is going to keep trying to find a way to build a whole system.

00:21:46Because the thing that worked for Sonos for so long,

00:21:49was that it got better the more Sonos stuff you used.

00:21:52But then I look at things like the headphones and the Roam and

00:21:56again, any push that Sonos is going to make to make a true mainstream product,

00:22:02seems like it pushes up against this idea of

00:22:05building a beautiful little walled garden system for people who love good audio.

00:22:09Do you think, can Sonos be both of those things?

00:22:11Or is it just going to have to lean into,

00:22:14we just sell audio products, the end?

00:22:17I don't know.

00:22:18I think they certainly can make a very, very good speaker.

00:22:21We've learned that before.

00:22:22Can they stand toe-to-toe on headphones with Bose and Apple and Sony and whoever else?

00:22:28That remains to be seen.

00:22:28And there are all these rumors of a TV streaming device.

00:22:31It's like, how can Sonos really play in that world and stand out versus Apple TV or Google TV?

00:22:36It's like, can you really make a statement there?

00:22:39I forgot about that.

00:22:40Yeah, that's kind of curious to me.

00:22:42What does Sonos Streamer look like and why?

00:22:44There's just a question of why as they go into these new product categories.

00:22:48I'm sure they're going to have a great reason for the headphones.

00:22:50But as far as a TV streamer, I don't really understand what Sonos could

00:22:54do to really stand out from the pack.

00:22:56But we'll see.

00:22:57I mean, they do want to build out, obviously.

00:22:59So it should be a pretty fascinating next year for the company.

00:23:03And it does that strategically.

00:23:05I can see the idea of just saying, we make very good audio products.

00:23:09We would like to make audio products that are accessible to more people.

00:23:12That totally tracks for me.

00:23:14But then I honestly had totally forgotten about the TV streamer thing.

00:23:17And now all of this is pouring back.

00:23:20Sonos is trying to be like, we are an operating system company.

00:23:23Our main thing is the platform, which I feel like is such a fundamental misread of what

00:23:27people like about Sonos that they've tolerated crappy apps for so long because the sound is

00:23:33great.

00:23:33And now Sonos is being like, forget the sound.

00:23:35It's all about the apps.

00:23:37Yeah, I don't know if people want Sonos to become Roku, but we'll see.

00:23:40We'll see what that looks like.

00:23:42Yeah, yeah.

00:23:43Boy, I don't want anybody to become Roku right now.

00:23:46All right.

00:23:46So what's your sense of when are these headphones coming out?

00:23:49Any news?

00:23:50The rumor is June, so it should be pretty soon, honestly.

00:23:53So hopefully we'll get a pair and be able to do our tests and review.

00:23:56And we'll see how that microphone compares to competition.

00:24:00I'm really curious to see how the soundbar integration works and the home theater support.

00:24:05People love private audio from the Roku and stuff.

00:24:08And so I think that would be a pretty compelling feature.

00:24:10So yeah, June sometime is the belief.

00:24:13And yeah, should know more then.

00:24:16Fair enough.

00:24:16They do look good.

00:24:17The pictures you got, they're like simple.

00:24:20They have that sort of like almost a prototype look in a way that I really like.

00:24:24They're sort of undesigned in a very designy way.

00:24:26I'm pretty snazzy, not as heavy as the AirPods Max, thankfully, because the AirPods Max are

00:24:33they're heavy on your head after a while.

00:24:35So these will be less heavy than that.

00:24:36But yeah, they look nice.

00:24:37So how they'll sound, we should know in a few weeks.

00:24:40Yeah.

00:24:41All right.

00:24:41Well, when you get them, I'm thinking for the next mic test,

00:24:43we're going to send you in like a cave somewhere

00:24:46and just do the most echoey possible situation we can.

00:24:50We're going to have you test a bunch of mics.

00:24:51It's going to be a lot of fun.

00:24:52I'm here for it.

00:24:53Until then.

00:24:54Thank you, Chris.

00:24:54Appreciate it as always.

00:24:55Thank you.

00:24:57All right.

00:24:57We got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about right to repair.

00:25:00We got a fun update for you on that front.

00:25:02We'll be right back.

00:25:07Welcome back.

00:25:09We've been covering right to repair a lot on this show over really the last couple of years.

00:25:14And it turns out just in the last couple of months, a lot of stuff has been happening.

00:25:18Oregon just passed what is probably the strongest right to repair bill we've seen yet,

00:25:22which includes a ban on parts pairing.

00:25:25Apple is slowly and somewhat sketchily starting to change some of its repair practices,

00:25:30especially around parts pairing.

00:25:32There's just a lot going on.

00:25:33And the right to repair industry is changing really fast.

00:25:36Will pour on our team has been looking into this for a while and is now back,

00:25:41I think, after breaking several phones.

00:25:42Will pour.

00:25:43Welcome back.

00:25:44Hi, thank you.

00:25:45Yeah, I have a growing drawer full of really brutalized iPhones after doing this story.

00:25:52And we will get into why.

00:25:53But I am now going to be a used iPhone broker myself after all of this.

00:25:59So we'll see how that goes.

00:26:01So what have you been up to?

00:26:02So I have been following all this legislation that you're talking about and the company's

00:26:07changing policies, all this really high level stuff.

00:26:09And it was starting to just feel abstract to me.

00:26:12And so as I have been following it all, wanted to just take a break and get some stuff fixed

00:26:19to just see what these repair practices actually look like in real life and see what repair

00:26:25issues bubble up over the course of doing real repairs.

00:26:29So my idea was to just collect a bunch of broken iPhones, take them to the Apple store

00:26:34first for kind of an official diagnosis, and then take those same phones with the same

00:26:38problems to an independent repair shop and see what repairs each store offered, how knowledgeable

00:26:45the Apple store was and an independent store was, how much the repairs would cost.

00:26:50I just wanted to see what repair advocates are fighting for specifically and why they're

00:26:55fighting so hard for these independent shops.

00:26:58So that was the plan.

00:26:59And for the record, I know a lot of the issues we're going to talk about here are not unique

00:27:03to Apple.

00:27:04But as we've talked about, Apple products are just so ubiquitous that so many of these

00:27:08repair shops literally live or die based on how repairable Apple devices are.

00:27:13And the company has just fought against repairability so hard for so long that Apple is just the

00:27:19center of this story.

00:27:20So lots of iPhones in this story.

00:27:22Yeah, that's a good caveat.

00:27:23I forget who it was, but somebody a while back said to me, basically, Apple is not the

00:27:27only company that matters in right to repair, but none of the other companies' cumulative

00:27:32matter as much as Apple does.

00:27:34So it is the center of the story.

00:27:36It feels like exactly the right way to describe it.

00:27:38It's not the whole thing, but it is the most thing.

00:27:40Yes.

00:27:41And every repair expert I talk to will say the exact same thing, and then all the examples

00:27:46they'll use are Apple.

00:27:47Okay.

00:27:47So I love the first task of this, which is that you had to find a way to have a bunch

00:27:51of broken phones.

00:27:53How does one acquire a bunch of broken phones?

00:27:56I mean, I started with the company Slack.

00:27:58I started asking friends and family.

00:28:01It was like a really weird thing to go looking for.

00:28:04It turns out eBay, the answer is eBay.

00:28:05There are one million phones that are broken in very specific ways on eBay.

00:28:10What's the lineup that we ended up with?

00:28:12So I saw a ton of broken screens and dead batteries.

00:28:17I wanted to skip those because we know the Apple store will repair those.

00:28:21They've got the prices listed.

00:28:23They have this DIY repair program for those.

00:28:25Independent shops will do it.

00:28:26That is the most common churn for repairs.

00:28:30So I went looking for, I don't know, slightly more interesting repairs than that.

00:28:35The things that I found, one, I bought a working iPhone 8 with a broken charging port.

00:28:40Okay.

00:28:41That I hear happens a lot.

00:28:42We're just going to call that one the charge port phone.

00:28:45The second one was a second gen iPhone SE with a cracked screen that also, for some

00:28:51reason, the listing said just rebooted itself every few minutes.

00:28:54Oh, weird.

00:28:55So that seemed interesting.

00:28:56We're going to call that one the boot looper.

00:28:58Okay.

00:28:59And then one wild card that I could not resist buying was a really nice looking

00:29:04iPhone 14 Pro that the listing said was, quote, in salt water for a while.

00:29:10I had to see what everyone would say about that one.

00:29:12We're going to call that one rusty.

00:29:14In salt water for a while feels like a euphemism for how terrible this thing is that I'm now

00:29:19very worried about what's going to happen to this phone.

00:29:21This is the thing.

00:29:22It looked really nice.

00:29:23It just had this kind of artful corrosion along the metal rim of it.

00:29:27It actually looked really nice.

00:29:29I was really hoping that I could get it fixed, just that I could use it myself.

00:29:33What was the total budget for the broken phones here?

00:29:36What did you end up spending for these three phones?

00:29:38Too much because I fell into the eBay trap.

00:29:40I saw these phones and I wanted them because I thought that they would be fun storytelling

00:29:46devices.

00:29:47The first two were fairly cheap.

00:29:50I think I spent $40 on one and $60 on another or something.

00:29:55The 14 Pro, I think I spent like $75 on.

00:29:59Oh, that's not bad.

00:30:00I mean, that's last year's phone.

00:30:01I almost expected it to be significantly more than that, actually.

00:30:05Yep.

00:30:05All right.

00:30:05So we're a couple hundred dollars in.

00:30:07You've got some deeply busted phones.

00:30:10And step one was you said you were going to take them to the Apple Store, right?

00:30:13Yes.

00:30:14Step one was just walk into an Apple Store.

00:30:15So I made an appointment.

00:30:17I showed up at the store with these three phones in my bag.

00:30:21I didn't even try to get permission to record at the Apple Store because I didn't want to

00:30:25be like, I'm a journalist doing an experiment.

00:30:27So I had to just go in and go out and then just record some voice notes.

00:30:32But I can tell you exactly what the Apple techs said about each one of these phones.

00:30:36So first, the iPhone 8 with the bad charge port, just not repairable by Apple.

00:30:42Charge ports are not a thing that they fix.

00:30:45Instead, their best offer was $350 for a refurbished iPhone 8 if I traded this one in,

00:30:53which didn't make a lot of sense.

00:30:55Walmart sells the same model and the same configuration refurbished for like $125.

00:31:01And then their other option was a new SE for $430.

00:31:05So that's the charge port phone.

00:31:07The rebooting SE 2 with the cracked screen, I explained what was going on.

00:31:11They did try to run a diagnostic on it, but the phone kept rebooting before the test could finish.

00:31:17So instead, they poked around in the settings and they saw that the phone had a third-party

00:31:20battery in it.

00:31:21And that was kind of it for them.

00:31:23They decided that must be the culprit.

00:31:25They didn't say why a battery would cause a boot loop.

00:31:28They were just like, third-party batteries cause problems.

00:31:31And that was the end of the conversation.

00:31:33So they said that they could replace the battery for $89.

00:31:36But they also said that the screen would shatter when they tried to remove it.

00:31:40So I'd need to pay another $269 for a new display.

00:31:44So grand total for that phone was $358.

00:31:48And fingers crossed that the battery was actually the problem and that it would fix it.

00:31:52Or again, I could get a new SE.

00:31:54They kept on trying to sell me a new SE.

00:31:57So that was that one.

00:31:58And then the iPhone 14 Pro was just a full nah.

00:32:03The guy checking me in at the store told me that they just don't repair anything with

00:32:08water damage.

00:32:09Which was a little surprising to me because water damage is a repair category on the Apple

00:32:15repair website.

00:32:16So long story short, that was the Apple store.

00:32:18I was in and out in 10 minutes with zero phones fixed.

00:32:22So on the one hand, I'm not shocked by that.

00:32:24On the other hand, I'm starting to think, what does Apple fix?

00:32:28You mentioned batteries and screens.

00:32:30These are fairly straightforward.

00:32:31Is there a list, sort of official or unofficial, of the repairs Apple actually will do at an

00:32:38Apple store?

00:32:39You can't really tell from their website.

00:32:43Whenever I ask an independent repair tech about this, they tell me to just go to the

00:32:48schedule a genius bar visit page because it has these big buttons for selecting the repair

00:32:54that you need.

00:32:54There's a cracked screen button, a dead battery button, camera problems.

00:32:58And they basically say, if there isn't a button you can press, then they're not going to do

00:33:02the repair.

00:33:03So this is a successful case, potentially, for why there should be other people in the

00:33:08world repairing these things than the people at the genius bar.

00:33:11And that's where you went next, right?

00:33:13Yes.

00:33:13Yeah, basically, I live here in Seattle.

00:33:15I poked around on Yelp.

00:33:16I landed on a place called Jet City Device Repair.

00:33:20They've been around for more than 15 years.

00:33:22They've got a couple locations in the area.

00:33:24They've got good reviews.

00:33:26So I made an appointment to bring my phones in and chat with the owner.

00:33:30Can somebody respond to Julia and let her know that if she's close enough and can make

00:33:34it in by 5, we can still take her in?

00:33:36If not, we have plenty of time tomorrow.

00:33:38So the shop was like the opposite of an Apple store.

00:33:41It was a little cramped, a little messy, a little scrappy.

00:33:43There was this cushy front of house where customers can hang out on a couch and wait

00:33:48for the repairs.

00:33:49And in the back were three or so people working at desks that had mats and lights and microscopes

00:33:55and some tools.

00:33:57And then in the back, there was a storeroom with like a million tiny little bagged parts

00:34:01for every major cell phone that you could really name.

00:34:05Jet City's owner, Sivash Bhopal, brought me back to the storeroom to check out my phones.

00:34:11So I brought a couple of things to look at.

00:34:13I figure I can just show you what I brought and tell you what the Apple store said about

00:34:20each of them.

00:34:21That's exciting.

00:34:22So first, the charge port phone.

00:34:24The Apple store said it was a non-starter.

00:34:26But Jet City fixes charging ports all the time, in a lot of cases because the Apple

00:34:31store won't.

00:34:32Sivash quoted me $90, which is getting kind of close to a similar used phone online.

00:34:38But I don't know, it'll keep one more phone out of the garbage dump.

00:34:41So I said, go for it.

00:34:43So Sivash took the phone and used his microscope to look at the tiny little pins inside the

00:34:48lightning port.

00:34:49What are you seeing?

00:34:50I'm seeing all the pins are damaged.

00:34:53They weren't great to begin with, though, because they have a little bit of corrosion

00:34:58on them.

00:34:58From what Sivash has seen, the Apple stores just aren't built for a repair like this,

00:35:04even though it's a really common one.

00:35:05Instead, he says Apple has this wildly over-engineered process for just a few select repairs like

00:35:13screens and batteries.

00:35:15It's like extra with like extra X's.

00:35:18You know, it's just so much.

00:35:20What do you mean by that?

00:35:21They have this one device that sort of holds the whole phone together so it doesn't move

00:35:28around.

00:35:28There's another device that holds the screen open for you while you're removing the screen.

00:35:33It's like so much going on that you don't really need.

00:35:36And you see my kit is this tiny little thing.

00:35:39His toolbox is one of those pencil cases you used in grade school.

00:35:43I see a toothbrush.

00:35:44I see an exacto knife.

00:35:45Yeah.

00:35:46So for the repair, Sivash took two little screws out of the bottom of the phone, then

00:35:51slid a little plastic tool around the edge of the screen and popped it off to reveal

00:35:55the guts of the phone.

00:35:56And then he just starts removing screw after screw from different components to get down

00:36:01to the charging port.

00:36:02So why do you think a charging port is something that is just outside of Apple's supported

00:36:10repairs?

00:36:11It's complicated.

00:36:12There are a lot of screws.

00:36:14God, those are tiny.

00:36:16Yeah, they're very small, and you don't want to mix them up because most of the screws

00:36:19are different from each other.

00:36:21I actually just combed through an iFixit repair guide for this model of iPhone, and I counted

00:36:2614 different sizes and kinds of screws for this charge port repair.

00:36:31You have to remove the entire motherboard to get access to the port.

00:36:34Then the port itself has a bunch of screws.

00:36:37Does it just feel like it is just not worth the time and effort if you're Apple?

00:36:43I think they're incentivized to focus on selling rather than repairing.

00:36:48So if they can say, hey, we provide repairs for batteries and screens, then they can say

00:36:53we do provide repairs.

00:36:55But if it's anything else, you're just going to have to buy a new device.

00:36:58They're incentivized to do that because it's a sales conversion.

00:37:03I asked Apple about charge port repairs, and Brian Nauman, who is the VP of Apple's

00:37:08repair business, told me that the company does offer them if you have an iPhone 12 or

00:37:13newer and if you mail the phone directly into Apple.

00:37:16He didn't explain why they don't work with older phones.

00:37:19Which is interesting because as we got deeper into the repair, we ran into a hint that Apple

00:37:25might not want anyone fixing this part.

00:37:28So this connector, when you remove it, there is a tape.

00:37:33Tiny little piece of tape.

00:37:35Well, the neoprene actually hides a screw underneath this.

00:37:38So you don't even realize that there's a screw down there.

00:37:41We didn't realize that until like we couldn't figure out why the board wasn't coming up.

00:37:45Yeah.

00:37:46And these are delicate boards.

00:37:47So if you don't have experience, you're going to apply a little bit too much pressure and

00:37:51it's going to end up cracking.

00:37:53Gotcha.

00:37:53And is there, can you think of a design reason for that little piece of tape there?

00:37:59No, because it's not coming into contact with any metals.

00:38:02Yeah.

00:38:02Or any like anything exposed.

00:38:05So the only reason is to hide that screw.

00:38:08Brian Nauman from Apple disputed that the tape was meant to hide anything.

00:38:12He said it was grounding tape there to, quote, protect the electrical circuitry.

00:38:17Anyway, Sivash fished a new charge port out of his wall of bagged parts.

00:38:21He connected it to the phone, tested it, and put the whole thing back together again.

00:38:26So just like that, we're up and running again.

00:38:28What, 90 bucks later and you have a working iPhone 8?

00:38:32Yeah, absolutely.

00:38:33How long did this whole thing take?

00:38:34It took us like an hour, but that was because I was literally like looking over Sivash's

00:38:39shoulder and asking him questions every 30 seconds.

00:38:41He says he can swap a charge port out in like 20 minutes because he's done a million of them.

00:38:46I'm sure he loved you during this whole process.

00:38:48He's like, leave me alone.

00:38:49Let me do my job.

00:38:50I know it's a very Zen process of keeping track of all of these screws.

00:38:54And I am not a Zen person when I am just on the best of days,

00:38:57but especially not when I'm interviewing.

00:38:59So I can't imagine that went well.

00:39:01Yeah, fair enough.

00:39:01All right.

00:39:02Well, Repair Shop one, Apple Store zero.

00:39:05What's next?

00:39:05Yes.

00:39:06So next is the boot looper.

00:39:07This is the phone that just reset itself for no reason.

00:39:11I explained the problem to Sivash and I gave him the Apple Store's diagnosis.

00:39:16Their best guess was that it was a battery problem.

00:39:20It's the charging port.

00:39:21It's either the charging port or the power volume button.

00:39:24Wait, Will, is everything a charging port?

00:39:26Like is the secret to repairing your phone just that the charging port is always the problem?

00:39:30I mean, apparently this is what happens when you like genuinely

00:39:34buy broken phones and don't know what it'll take to fix them.

00:39:37Sometimes you just end up with a bunch of broken charging ports.

00:39:40The deal here is that it's not the charging port per se.

00:39:43It's the sensor that sits on the charging port.

00:39:46The quote charging port is actually a whole bunch of

00:39:49different components that are all bundled together.

00:39:52There's the port.

00:39:53There's the sensor.

00:39:54There's some speakers.

00:39:55There's the vibration motor.

00:39:57So that's all one part that you can swap in and out.

00:40:00Got it.

00:40:00So it's basically like that sort of bottom stripe of your phone

00:40:03is all one thing and whatever breaks, the whole thing breaks.

00:40:06That's the replaceable thing.

00:40:07That's the thing that you can buy replacement parts for.

00:40:10Got it.

00:40:10Anyway, as soon as I told Sivash that the phone was rebooting quote every few minutes,

00:40:16he said, oh, it's every three minutes.

00:40:18This is a thing that he's seen a lot.

00:40:20And it usually means there's a bad temperature sensor somewhere.

00:40:23What happens is when the device shuts off every three minutes,

00:40:28there are temperature sensors around the device that report what the temperature is.

00:40:33If one of those sensors fails and it can't report,

00:40:37then the device as a safety precaution will turn off.

00:40:41It'll turn back on and then the same thing happens.

00:40:44And it checks every three minutes.

00:40:46He booted up the phone and he found the device's analytics files,

00:40:50which I had no idea existed.

00:40:52And for the record, the Apple tech did not do.

00:40:55The files are actually not that hard to find.

00:40:57They're in the privacy and security settings screen.

00:41:00But you've got to know what you're looking for when you look at them

00:41:03because it's one of those walls of gibberish text.

00:41:06And then you want to find where it says panic.

00:41:08OK, that's the panic is the reset.

00:41:10Yeah, and then when you go there in that first big block of text,

00:41:15it'll say missing sensors.

00:41:17The panic log told him that, yep,

00:41:19the culprit is probably a sensor on the charging port.

00:41:22So yes, we needed to replace this phone's charging port too

00:41:26and just see if that stopped the reboot.

00:41:29So same process as the last phone.

00:41:31Although one notable detail,

00:41:33this is the phone with the cracked screen that Apple said,

00:41:36oh, if you open it up, it'll totally shatter the screen.

00:41:38So you have to replace that too.

00:41:39But I don't know.

00:41:40I watched Sivash pop the screen off without any problem

00:41:43for whatever that's worth.

00:41:45Anyway, we plugged in the replacement part

00:41:46and we turned on the phone to see if it would stay on this time.

00:41:50We'll make it a five minute timer.

00:41:52All right.

00:41:52So now we've got five minutes to figure out if that is the culprit.

00:41:58But after exactly three minutes, the phone reset.

00:42:02Oh, a little phone.

00:42:03We tried.

00:42:04That meant that the problem might actually be in the motherboard,

00:42:08which for a phone that's worth maybe $100

00:42:11is probably too much trouble to fix.

00:42:14But we wanted to rule everything else out.

00:42:16So just in case the replacement part also had a bad sensor,

00:42:20we tried a couple more identical parts from Sivash's inventory.

00:42:24All of those failed too.

00:42:25We also verified that the battery was fine

00:42:27since that was Apple's guess.

00:42:29It was fine.

00:42:30At one point, we actually lost track of the timer

00:42:33and we thought that we had a working phone for a second.

00:42:36Oh, it worked.

00:42:39But it reset again.

00:42:40Motherboard.

00:42:42Motherboard.

00:42:43So that was it for the boot looper.

00:42:46So we gave up on this one.

00:42:48It was the end of the boot looper.

00:42:49It was the end of the line for the boot looper.

00:42:51Yeah, motherboard problem is bad news.

00:42:55Right.

00:42:55And in this case, I suspect it ends up just being

00:42:57a pretty straight financial decision.

00:42:59Like, yes, you could replace the whole thing

00:43:02and sort of like ship of Theseus your phone into a new phone.

00:43:05But at that point, it is probably a lot more expensive

00:43:08than just taking whatever deal Apple would have given you.

00:43:10Yeah, exactly.

00:43:11Or even if you don't take Apple's deal,

00:43:13there are cheaper phones online.

00:43:14Just walk away.

00:43:16Yeah, go buy a different broken one on eBay.

00:43:18Fix that one.

00:43:19Yeah, just go through it all again.

00:43:21Have better luck.

00:43:22Okay.

00:43:22All right.

00:43:22So we're at one to one.

00:43:24It's tiebreaker time.

00:43:25Can we fix these phones?

00:43:27We have one that works, one that is broken forever.

00:43:31How are you feeling at this point in the process?

00:43:33I feel like at the very least,

00:43:34you've been given access to a lot more information

00:43:38and process with the independent repair

00:43:41than you were at the Apple store.

00:43:42Totally.

00:43:43That is absolutely true.

00:43:45You know, walking out of the store that day,

00:43:47I was like, well, I found a good stumper on eBay.

00:43:51I was sort of hoping that we would go through this process

00:43:54and triumph at the end.

00:43:56But the utter brokenness of the phone

00:43:58revealed a lot more along the way.

00:43:59So yeah, on the one hand, it was funny

00:44:01that the end result is the same.

00:44:03Both the Apple store and Jet City were like,

00:44:06this is not a phone that's worth fixing.

00:44:08But as you say, the journey to get there

00:44:10was just totally different.

00:44:13As soon as Apple saw that there was

00:44:14a third party part in their phone,

00:44:17they were like, case closed.

00:44:18And that was the end of it.

00:44:20Whereas Sivash found the log files,

00:44:22he opened the phone up,

00:44:23he tested like four different parts.

00:44:25He really worked the problem,

00:44:27which was what I was looking to see.

00:44:29And it drove home, you know,

00:44:31one big argument for independent repair shops,

00:44:34which is that they'll repair things

00:44:35that manufacturers never intended

00:44:37to be repaired in the first place.

00:44:40There's one really wild case in point

00:44:42while I was there.

00:44:43While Sivash and I were chatting,

00:44:45over his shoulder,

00:44:46I noticed this industrial looking device

00:44:49next to his workbench

00:44:50that was shining a bunch of lights on an iPhone

00:44:53that had a totally shattered back glass.

00:44:56And I asked Sivash, what is up with that?

00:44:59That's the laser.

00:45:00Oh shit, what is that doing?

00:45:01It's lasering off the adhesive from the back glass.

00:45:04No kidding.

00:45:06You don't want to stare too long into the white.

00:45:08I'll let you wear this.

00:45:09He handed me a pair of tinted glasses.

00:45:12And then you can stare at it while it's lasering.

00:45:15So for most iPhone models,

00:45:17there's no official way to fix that back glass.

00:45:20It's glued to the phone.

00:45:22But that's where indie repair shops are like,

00:45:24okay, challenge accepted.

00:45:26You buy a laser and you zap the phone

00:45:28to loosen the adhesive,

00:45:29and then you manually scrape the glass off

00:45:32and install a new plate.

00:45:33And that's just what it takes to repair something

00:45:36in spite of the design of the thing.

00:45:39Did you buy this laser specifically

00:45:41for this kind of repair?

00:45:42Or does it do other things?

00:45:43No, just for this.

00:45:44First of all, that rules.

00:45:45Everyone should have a laser in their house

00:45:47that just does one job.

00:45:49Yeah, it's a single purpose laser.

00:45:51I have one for my cat and I want more now.

00:45:53Yeah.

00:45:54So that was really notable.

00:45:56The other notable thing to me

00:45:57about the repairs that I brought in

00:46:00is that as much as I was looking for stumpers,

00:46:03they were actually pretty simple in one regard,

00:46:06which is that the parts that we replaced

00:46:09were not programmed by Apple

00:46:11to resist the doing of the repair.

00:46:14Oh, is this the part

00:46:14where we get to talk about parts pairing?

00:46:15I've been wanting to scream parts pairing

00:46:17ever since you said third-party battery hours ago.

00:46:20Yeah.

00:46:21So this is the parts pairing part of our program.

00:46:23This is the parts pairing part of the story.

00:46:25It's like when we talk about the smart home

00:46:26and we have to get really upset about matter

00:46:28for 15 minutes.

00:46:28This is the part of the right to repair story

00:46:30where we have to talk about parts pairing.

00:46:32Yes.

00:46:32And I was very naive.

00:46:34I was like,

00:46:35okay, I did a parts pairing story last time.

00:46:38This story isn't going to be about parts pairing.

00:46:40I'm going to talk about other stuff.

00:46:41But I learned very quickly

00:46:43that you just can't talk about iPhones

00:46:46without talking about parts pairing.

00:46:48Any repair of just about any part of an iPhone

00:46:51will eventually lead a repair tech

00:46:53to talk about parts pairing.

00:46:55So without doing a whole other segment,

00:46:57parts pairing in brief,

00:46:58your phone can basically sabotage your repair

00:47:01if it figures out that you didn't use Apple parts

00:47:04installed by Apple techs.

00:47:05So if you replace the screen,

00:47:07it might lose the true tone feature.

00:47:09If you replace the battery,

00:47:10it might not track its health over time anymore.

00:47:13Replaced touch ID or face ID components

00:47:16will just fully fail.

00:47:17Again, we've talked a lot about this,

00:47:19but being in a repair shop

00:47:21made me appreciate just how much parts pairing

00:47:24has undermined them over the years.

00:47:27These bugs have been popping up in iPhones

00:47:29generation after generation.

00:47:31And it's not like Apple announces them to everybody.

00:47:34They have to get discovered and shared.

00:47:36And it happens when repairs just start going haywire

00:47:39for no reason at all.

00:47:40So just to name one example,

00:47:42a few years back,

00:47:43a YouTuber named Hugh Jeffries

00:47:45noticed something really weird

00:47:46when he replaced the cameras in an iPhone 12.

00:47:50After changing the camera,

00:47:51two functions are now completely unusable.

00:47:54Portrait mode only works for the front camera

00:47:56with the back one only flashing still images

00:47:59and a black screen.

00:48:00You can see panoramas also don't work

00:48:02when using the 0.5x zoom.

00:48:04There was no warning about non-genuine parts.

00:48:07The new cameras were just flaky,

00:48:09which is a thing Sivash noticed.

00:48:11So it mimicked a quality control issue

00:48:14rather than an intentional interference

00:48:17with the functionality on Apple's part.

00:48:19And so your immediate gut instinct,

00:48:21even as a technician,

00:48:23is going to be,

00:48:24man, there's no reliable parts for them.

00:48:26With serialization,

00:48:27you can actually program failures

00:48:29that are intermittent

00:48:30and mess with people's heads.

00:48:32Wait, hang on.

00:48:33How did they know in this process

00:48:35that it wasn't some sketchy part

00:48:37causing the problems here?

00:48:38Well, he knew because the YouTuber

00:48:40took the parts straight out

00:48:41of another brand new iPhone 12.

00:48:44Oh, that would do it.

00:48:45Yeah, he actually took two phones

00:48:47right out of the box

00:48:47and swapped their components

00:48:49and both the phones had these issues.

00:48:51So Apple eventually fixed that specific bug

00:48:55with a software update,

00:48:56though they added that non-genuine

00:48:58parts warning instead, of course.

00:49:00And actually, just last month,

00:49:03Apple did announce some plans

00:49:05to relax some pairing restrictions

00:49:08on used Apple parts,

00:49:10though it's only on select models of iPhones

00:49:12and there are just a lot of specifics

00:49:13that they haven't talked about.

00:49:14But it does mean in the future,

00:49:16you might be able to pull a screen

00:49:18off of one iPhone

00:49:19and drop it in another

00:49:20without any problems.

00:49:22So we'll have to see about that.

00:49:23But even if that happens,

00:49:25aftermarket parts are probably

00:49:27still going to cause problems.

00:49:29And this is the thing.

00:49:30Maybe some of those problems

00:49:32will be genuine.

00:49:33Aftermarket parts don't always work perfectly

00:49:35with the original hardware

00:49:37and you can make a mistake

00:49:38during a repair

00:49:39and that can cause a problem.

00:49:41But the repair techs just feel

00:49:42so gaslit by Apple

00:49:44after this history of bugs.

00:49:47Now there's like this healthy paranoia.

00:49:49Yeah.

00:49:49Where you don't know

00:49:50if that was something else

00:49:52or if it was intentional sabotage.

00:49:54Over the years,

00:49:55the community has found

00:49:57some pretty clever workarounds.

00:49:58There are ways to restore true tone

00:50:00if you're comfortable

00:50:01physically moving microchips around.

00:50:03There are aftermarket home buttons

00:50:05that are explicitly built

00:50:07to get around the phone security checks.

00:50:09Sivash can even make a third-party battery

00:50:11play nice with an iPhone,

00:50:13but it is a process.

00:50:15You see that tool right there?

00:50:16The red thing with the...

00:50:18Yeah, that's a welder, spot welder.

00:50:20Okay.

00:50:21And so you have to cut

00:50:22the battery electronics

00:50:24from the old battery

00:50:26and then you have a new battery

00:50:28without the electronics.

00:50:29Yeah.

00:50:29And you spot weld

00:50:31those two points back on

00:50:34and then roll them like a cigar

00:50:36and then tape it up again

00:50:38and then put it together.

00:50:39The upshot is that shops constantly

00:50:42have this really tough choice to make.

00:50:44Either they have to jump through

00:50:46all of these absurd hoops

00:50:47to outsmart the devices

00:50:49that they're fixing

00:50:50or they have to ask their customers

00:50:52to live with bugs.

00:50:54And that choice,

00:50:55more than anything else,

00:50:57infuriates Sivash.

00:51:00We do better work than Apple.

00:51:02Jet City Device Repair

00:51:03does better work than Apple.

00:51:04We've done better work than Apple

00:51:06for a very long time.

00:51:07But because of these limitations,

00:51:10sometimes it appears

00:51:11as if we do worse work.

00:51:17All right, I feel Sivash's pain.

00:51:19I really do.

00:51:20But Will, you have led me up to

00:51:22what I hope is now

00:51:23the grand finale here,

00:51:24which is our good friend Rusty,

00:51:26the iPhone 14 that has spent,

00:51:28what was it?

00:51:28Some amount of time in saltwater.

00:51:31I actually reached out to the eBay seller

00:51:33after I bought it,

00:51:34and it turns out they just found it

00:51:36in a bay in Florida.

00:51:39So some time is really putting it lightly.

00:51:42Somewhere between 10 minutes

00:51:43and two years in saltwater.

00:51:45Between 10 minutes

00:51:46and the release of the phone.

00:51:48Love it.

00:51:49So Rusty, what happened with Rusty?

00:51:51So I, you know, I told you,

00:51:53I had really high hopes for Rusty.

00:51:54And Sivash, again, to his credit,

00:51:56was totally happy to open it up and see.

00:51:59But it's like leaking corrosion.

00:52:03The guts of the phone

00:52:04were just totally coated

00:52:05in this toxic looking

00:52:07white and brown gunk.

00:52:09It was disgusting.

00:52:10Oh my god.

00:52:11I can hear, I mean,

00:52:12I can hear the sound that it's making.

00:52:14Guys, you want to see a record breaking?

00:52:17That's like a coral reef in there.

00:52:18Yeah. Corrosion phone.

00:52:20There's nothing we can do with it,

00:52:21but I can share it with the company.

00:52:24They're going to have fun with it.

00:52:26It was so bad that he posted a photo

00:52:28of it to the company Slack.

00:52:29I was going to say,

00:52:30can we fix this 14 Pro Mac?

00:52:34So that was Rusty.

00:52:36Moment of silence for Rusty.

00:52:38I will say though,

00:52:39huge success on your part

00:52:40in a certain sense

00:52:41that you managed to bring this person

00:52:44a phone that they then shared

00:52:46with the rest of the company.

00:52:48It was so broken so spectacularly.

00:52:51If the goal was to find

00:52:52interestingly broken phones,

00:52:53like, oh boy, did you do it?

00:52:54I knew on some level,

00:52:55you know, that's making me feel better

00:52:57for spending the amount of money

00:52:58that I spent on a phone

00:52:59that was never going to be fixed.

00:53:02I knew that it was destined

00:53:03for something great.

00:53:04It will live on.

00:53:05Rusty lives on at the repair shop.

00:53:07He's probably in a frame

00:53:09on a wall somewhere.

00:53:10Just oozing corrosion.

00:53:12So foul.

00:53:15So what do you feel like you learned

00:53:16from this experiment?

00:53:17You went in trying to get kind of a real

00:53:19tangible sense of what the right

00:53:21to repair fight is like.

00:53:22What do you feel like you learned?

00:53:24So I feel like I learned

00:53:25a couple of things.

00:53:26The first thing is maybe obvious

00:53:29for people who have spent

00:53:30any time in this world.

00:53:32But as a consumer

00:53:33and an Apple device owner,

00:53:36it was new to me.

00:53:37And it's just that Apple

00:53:38is not the authority

00:53:40on its own phones in this context.

00:53:42It's people like Sivash who are.

00:53:45I've talked to a lot

00:53:46of independent repair techs

00:53:47over the course of this reporting,

00:53:50and they have all just put in the time

00:53:52to get to know these devices

00:53:54inside and out.

00:53:55And they literally have to

00:53:57to understand them better

00:53:58than the Apple geniuses.

00:54:00If they want to do all these repairs

00:54:01that either Apple doesn't care about doing

00:54:04or actively doesn't want them to do.

00:54:06That's the thing that that sets them apart

00:54:09from the Apple repair internal ecosystem.

00:54:12And that's what right to repair advocates

00:54:14are trying so hard through these laws

00:54:16and all these other things to protect.

00:54:18So that kind of turned my thinking around

00:54:20on the sort of internal,

00:54:22external repair ecosystem.

00:54:24The thing that keeps jumping out to me

00:54:25as you talk is there's such

00:54:27a different incentive here, right?

00:54:29Like Apple, even if you believe

00:54:31Apple would like to fix the things

00:54:33that it sells, you also would

00:54:35like to sell you new things.

00:54:36And so what you get, I think,

00:54:37my sense of your Apple store trip

00:54:39is very much that you sort of

00:54:41ran into a script.

00:54:42And when you said third party battery

00:54:45or they discovered third party battery,

00:54:47or it became obvious that it was water damage,

00:54:49it just immediately is like jump to end,

00:54:52which means we can't repair it.

00:54:53Whereas if you go to a repair shop,

00:54:54the one and only thing

00:54:55they are there to do is repair it.

00:54:58And so you just have set yourself up

00:55:00in a very different sort of adventure

00:55:02from the very beginning,

00:55:03just by the virtue of like who these folks are,

00:55:06regardless of their talent

00:55:07and resources and ability,

00:55:09just having this other thing

00:55:10where the only thing they are there to do

00:55:12is try and fix your gadget

00:55:14totally changes the way

00:55:15that they're going to work with you.

00:55:16Yeah, that's just their whole deal.

00:55:18The more people keep more older gadgets

00:55:20going for longer,

00:55:21the more that they need to be repaired.

00:55:24And the more of those repair shops

00:55:25are in business.

00:55:26So it's like it's absolutely

00:55:28a difference in incentive

00:55:29more than anything else.

00:55:30Totally.

00:55:30The other thing that I just found

00:55:32funny and weird is just how adversarial

00:55:35a relationship Apple has

00:55:37with these independent repair shops,

00:55:39given what they're actually doing.

00:55:41Like you would think that Apple

00:55:42was battling these super intense hackers

00:55:45who are trying to take the company down

00:55:47based on the way that they're acting

00:55:48and all of these bugs

00:55:50that they're putting into the phones.

00:55:52And these repair techs are not not hackers.

00:55:55I mean, you can look at what they're doing

00:55:57with these batteries

00:55:58and their touch ID buttons

00:56:00to get around everything that Apple is doing.

00:56:02Like they're really scrappy people,

00:56:05but they're not trying to destroy the company.

00:56:06They're just trying to fix

00:56:08the company's products.

00:56:10They're literally just like,

00:56:11we're going to fix your phones.

00:56:13Try to stop us.

00:56:14And I think that is a very strange

00:56:17group of people to pick

00:56:18such an intense fight with.

00:56:20And it sounds like not a group of people

00:56:22you want to mess with.

00:56:23No, very resourceful, very committed.

00:56:26And they have lasers.

00:56:27And they have lasers

00:56:28and they know how to use them.

00:56:29Will, thank you as always.

00:56:31Thank you.

00:56:41All right, we're back.

00:56:42Let's get to the hotline.

00:56:43As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11.

00:56:46The email is vergecast at theverge.com.

00:56:48We love getting all of your questions

00:56:49and we try to answer at least one of them

00:56:51on the show every week.

00:56:52Again, especially in this gadgety season

00:56:55we're about to have,

00:56:56we're going to be reviewing tons of stuff.

00:56:57We're going to be testing tons of stuff.

00:56:58I want to know everything you want to know

00:57:00about all of this stuff.

00:57:01That is one of the most fun ways

00:57:03for us to talk about products

00:57:05is to talk about the stuff

00:57:06that people actually care about.

00:57:07So keep all those questions coming.

00:57:09We'd love to hear them.

00:57:10This week, we have a question

00:57:11from a listener whose name is Lova.

00:57:14I'm really sorry.

00:57:14I'm pronouncing your name wrong.

00:57:16But we got an email and it says,

00:57:17why do people think the iPad

00:57:19should be a MacBook replacement?

00:57:20A lot of people have been waiting this

00:57:21for some years.

00:57:22And so far, the only argument

00:57:23that I've seen for this

00:57:24is that the processor is overpowered

00:57:25and the software is not.

00:57:26Apple has added some features

00:57:28like Stage Manager and Pro Apps

00:57:29like Final Cut over the years.

00:57:30But this move only blurred the line

00:57:32between the MacBook and the iPad even more,

00:57:33which is weird since they used

00:57:35to be different product categories

00:57:36for specific purposes.

00:57:37MacBook for productivity

00:57:38and iPad for entertainment

00:57:39and maybe some easy tasks.

00:57:41Sure, the new M4 processor

00:57:42inside the iPad Pro is way too powerful

00:57:44for the current iteration of iPadOS.

00:57:46But I feel like the same argument

00:57:47could be made about the A17 Pro processor

00:57:49from the iPhone 15 Pro.

00:57:50We'd love to hear your thoughts

00:57:51since this has confused me for a while.

00:57:53Unbelievable question.

00:57:54Love it very much.

00:57:55And this is actually,

00:57:56as I've been reviewing the new iPads,

00:57:58kind of the main question

00:58:00I've been thinking about.

00:58:01The short version of both iPad reviews

00:58:03is that they're excellent iPads, right?

00:58:05The iPad Pro is thin and light

00:58:08and just lovely to hold in a way

00:58:10that it's been a long time

00:58:12since an iPad has felt like that to me.

00:58:14The Air is everything you would want it to be.

00:58:16It's last year's Pro

00:58:17in last year's Air's body.

00:58:19The screen's very good.

00:58:20The battery is very good.

00:58:21The processor is very good.

00:58:22It gets the new pencil.

00:58:24It doesn't have a function row

00:58:25on the keyboard like the new Pro does,

00:58:26but it's a very good iPad.

00:58:28All of the iPads are very good iPads, right?

00:58:30And so I think the question is

00:58:32really what is the iPad for?

00:58:34And I think when you ask the question,

00:58:36why do some people think the iPad

00:58:37should be a MacBook replacement?

00:58:38I think it comes down to

00:58:40making a device that is good for everything

00:58:43is really hard.

00:58:44It might be impossible,

00:58:45but it's really, really, really hard.

00:58:47And if you're Apple,

00:58:49I think one way to think about it

00:58:50is that Apple has had a bunch of very versatile,

00:58:53but also sort of focused devices over time.

00:58:56Like the story of the Mac is easy, right?

00:58:58You can do lots of things on the Mac,

00:58:59but it is fundamentally a device for doing work.

00:59:02And you can define work

00:59:04as broadly as you want,

00:59:05but it is a productive, creative device.

00:59:08It's a device for doing things.

00:59:10The Apple Watch is a device

00:59:12that can do lots of things,

00:59:12but it has increasingly over time

00:59:14become a device about fitness and health.

00:59:16AirPods, headphones, that one's easy, right?

00:59:18The iPhone is the exception.

00:59:20It is a device that is fundamentally

00:59:24all things to all people.

00:59:25And as a result, this is, I mean,

00:59:27this is why smartphones have become so dominant, right?

00:59:29They are all things to all people

00:59:31and thus they are the most important device

00:59:34that almost everyone owns at this point.

00:59:36That's a very hard thing to replicate

00:59:38if you're Apple or if you're anyone.

00:59:40The smartphone won, like it just did.

00:59:43And so trying to do something

00:59:44that does all the same things a smartphone does,

00:59:46that is as varied and broad

00:59:48and able to accomplish so many different goals

00:59:51all in one package,

00:59:52just puts you in competition with the smartphone.

00:59:55It's a bad idea.

00:59:56Most people don't do it.

00:59:57What we're seeing actually is

00:59:59that even things like AI devices

01:00:01that try to do lots of things fail

01:00:02because they're worse than your smartphone.

01:00:04And instead what's cool and what's working

01:00:07is devices that take one feature of the iPhone

01:00:09and do it better.

01:00:10There's a bit of a resurgence happening

01:00:12in dedicated cameras, for instance,

01:00:14because you get more control and you get better images.

01:00:17But if your camera was like

01:00:19also trying to order you Ubers,

01:00:20that wouldn't make any sense.

01:00:22So what you're seeing, I think in the best case here

01:00:24is companies that say,

01:00:26okay, we're going to cleave off part of what the iPhone does

01:00:30or a smartphone does in general

01:00:32and try to do it better, right?

01:00:33So they're taking in many cases, smartphone chips,

01:00:36they can run smartphone apps.

01:00:38They can do things that you do on a smartphone

01:00:40while on a touchscreen

01:00:41in similar ways that you do them on a smartphone,

01:00:43but you can just do more

01:00:44and you can do them dedicated.

01:00:46The iPad has always been the opposite.

01:00:48It's trying to be incredibly versatile.

01:00:52It's trying to be a jack of all trades.

01:00:54It's trying to be all things to all people.

01:00:56And I've come to think of it like this over time.

01:00:59Apple basically sees a core set

01:01:02of what you might call iPad things, right?

01:01:04And that's playing games.

01:01:06That's watching TV and movies.

01:01:09That's checking your email and browsing the web.

01:01:11This sort of basic, simple use case stuff

01:01:15that people have always done in their iPads.

01:01:17The same kinds of things that even like Steve Jobs

01:01:19is talking about in the very first iPad introduction.

01:01:22It's a device for sitting on the couch,

01:01:24casually using a computer.

01:01:26That's cool.

01:01:27That has been very good on an iPad for a very long time.

01:01:30It's also true that most of those things

01:01:33are almost as good,

01:01:34and in some cases better,

01:01:36on your phone,

01:01:36which is a device you already own.

01:01:38It's a device you have to buy before you buy an iPad.

01:01:40And it's a device that is almost in every case

01:01:44more likely to be close to you than your iPad.

01:01:47So what you have essentially is an iPad

01:01:48is now more work for slightly more benefit

01:01:51because you have to go get it.

01:01:52You have to keep it charged.

01:01:53It has to be updated.

01:01:55Whereas I think a lot of people just say,

01:01:56why would I do any of that?

01:01:57I have my phone and I already do all that stuff

01:01:59to have my phone work.

01:02:00So what Apple has been doing over the last several years

01:02:03is basically adding bits and pieces of functionality

01:02:06that you can't do on the iPhone

01:02:08in the hopes that not all of them

01:02:10will appeal to you specifically,

01:02:13but maybe one of them will.

01:02:14So this year you have things like the Pencil Pro,

01:02:17which has a new gesture called the barrel roll,

01:02:20which basically lets you preview the way

01:02:22that your brush tip is gonna look on the screen

01:02:24as you move it around.

01:02:25And it lets you turn the brush as you're painting.

01:02:28This is the kind of thing that if you're hearing that

01:02:30and it doesn't mean anything to you,

01:02:31that's fine, it's not for you.

01:02:32But there are a lot of people for whom

01:02:34that gives them a level of control doing artistic work

01:02:37that is really powerful and really important.

01:02:39That's not how you get giant swaths of new people

01:02:42to use the iPad.

01:02:43It's not a mainstream new use case,

01:02:45but it is a thing, right?

01:02:47And Apple, I think, believes that over time

01:02:50with enough power and enough work

01:02:51and maybe enough AI stuff,

01:02:54which is what's coming at WWDC,

01:02:56and I think we're gonna see Apple

01:02:57make some big swings at new features

01:03:00that only work on these super powerful,

01:03:02touch-enabled, ultra-portable devices

01:03:04that make it more compelling.

01:03:06And so rather than have one giant mainstream use case

01:03:10that appeals to everyone on earth,

01:03:11it wants to have a million different little ones

01:03:13covering sort of every niche at a time

01:03:16and hope that that adds up to everybody.

01:03:20So how does this come back to the MacBook question?

01:03:22I think the reason people talk about it as a laptop

01:03:24is because it is one obvious place for the iPad to go, right?

01:03:28You look at it, it's a 13-inch screen.

01:03:30I can drop it into my keyboard.

01:03:32It has a trackpad.

01:03:33It runs a lot of the same apps that are on my MacBook.

01:03:35So it's natural to say,

01:03:37well, okay, one thing this could do that it doesn't

01:03:40is be more like my MacBook.

01:03:41I actually have come to believe

01:03:42that that's the wrong answer,

01:03:44or at least it's the least interesting answer.

01:03:47I think Apple's strategy of trying to find

01:03:50a million small things that add up to one big thing

01:03:53is actually more exciting

01:03:54and means ultimately that the iPad can be a device

01:03:57that isn't just a touchscreen MacBook.

01:03:59I also think they should put a touchscreen on the MacBook,

01:04:01but that's what the touchscreen MacBook should be.

01:04:03It should be a MacBook with a touchscreen,

01:04:05not an iPad that runs macOS.

01:04:07I just don't think that's the right strategy.

01:04:09It's at least not the most interesting strategy.

01:04:11But we're in this position now

01:04:13where if you're looking at the iPad and you're saying,

01:04:15okay, this does a lot of stuff,

01:04:17but what would push it over the edge?

01:04:19What would make it an essential, important, game-changing,

01:04:23bring it with me everywhere,

01:04:24no matter what kind of device?

01:04:26Work is one obvious answer to that.

01:04:28That's why you see for creative people,

01:04:30it very much is that kind of tool.

01:04:32If you need to draw on a screen,

01:04:34the iPad is the best thing that exists.

01:04:35You can't replicate that on your phone.

01:04:36You can't replicate that on your MacBook.

01:04:38You need an iPad for that.

01:04:40And we're starting to see that for some filmmaking stuff

01:04:43that's happening.

01:04:43People are doing interesting monitoring

01:04:45and editing work on their iPads.

01:04:47It's a cool tool for photography, for editing photos,

01:04:50bits and pieces, like I'm saying.

01:04:52But if you then throw in this capital W work thing,

01:04:56whatever that means to people,

01:04:58whether it's I wanna have a desktop browser

01:05:00so that I can use all my browser extensions

01:05:02and Google Docs will be better,

01:05:04or I want full bore, full power Excel running on this thing

01:05:08so that I don't have to go back to my computer,

01:05:10or it means I wanna use the accounting software

01:05:13that I haven't updated in 10 years,

01:05:16but desperately need in order to do my job.

01:05:18If you pull all of that stuff down to the iPad,

01:05:21I think it changes the iPad,

01:05:22but it also makes it more essential

01:05:25to some people in a certain way.

01:05:26And so I think that is why people have been pushing Apple

01:05:30to turn it into like a laptop,

01:05:32is that it would make it something everybody needs,

01:05:35which I actually don't think is right,

01:05:37again, because laptops exist

01:05:38and MacBooks in particular are very good laptops.

01:05:41And so that is just a tricky thing for Apple to get right.

01:05:45Again, if it wants to be this one,

01:05:47all things to all people device,

01:05:50it's gonna have to do a lot of that eventually.

01:05:52And I think Apple is sort of hoping

01:05:54that work apps will get better

01:05:56before the iPad has to worry

01:05:58about all of that old compatibility stuff,

01:06:00but I'm not convinced that's gonna be true.

01:06:02So if I'm Apple, I'm saying right now

01:06:05that the versatility of the iPad is the point.

01:06:07And this is the thing that you hear from people at Apple.

01:06:09It's a thing that I've heard from people at Apple.

01:06:11The versatility is the point.

01:06:12They don't want this thing to be a device for anything.

01:06:16They want it to be a device for everything

01:06:17that everyone has a different subset of use cases for,

01:06:21and that that is what makes it special.

01:06:23That is an incredibly hard thing to do.

01:06:25I think the Apple watch

01:06:26is probably the most interesting comparison there,

01:06:29by the way, because for a time

01:06:30that was the pitch for the Apple watch too,

01:06:32that it was gonna do all the things your iPhone did,

01:06:34but in a better, more accessible way.

01:06:37The iPad is a pretty similar case.

01:06:39And what we discovered with the watch

01:06:40is that actually my phone's very good,

01:06:42but the watch does this subset of other things

01:06:45very well that compliment that.

01:06:47It does health and fitness stuff really well.

01:06:49And it's a very simple controller and I can use Siri.

01:06:52And so you're seeing Apple bet on those things

01:06:54more and more on the watch over time.

01:06:56Whereas on the iPad, it's kind of still stuck

01:06:59trying to be all things to all people.

01:07:01You can focus on the pencil and that's great,

01:07:02but the pencil market, I think is much smaller

01:07:04than the health and fitness market.

01:07:06Same goes for some of the like ultra performant apps

01:07:10that you're starting to see,

01:07:11whether it's like architects or 3D games

01:07:13or augmented reality.

01:07:15I think all of that stuff on tablets is fairly niche.

01:07:17So what Apple needs is either one big giant use case

01:07:20and maybe it is laptop replacement

01:07:23or just countless more of these little tiny niches

01:07:26that all eventually give everybody a reason

01:07:29to need an iPad, even though it's not the same one.

01:07:32That's a hard, hard, hard game to play.

01:07:35And it's a hard list of tasks to finish.

01:07:37But I kind of hope that's what Apple keeps doing

01:07:39because that to me is the most interesting

01:07:41possible future of the iPad.

01:07:42That said, I do wish Google Docs worked better.

01:07:45So just give me that and then I'll probably need an iPad too.

01:07:50All right, that's it for the Verge cast today.

01:07:52Thank you to everybody who's on the show.

01:07:54Thank you as always for listening.

01:07:55There's lots more on everything we talked about today,

01:07:57including my iPad reviews, all of Chris's, Sonos scoops

01:08:01and a whole bunch more on theverge.com.

01:08:03I'll put a bunch of links in the show notes.

01:08:04If you don't know, we've been doing much better

01:08:06show notes posts on the site recently.

01:08:09They tend to go up about nine o'clock in the morning

01:08:12on the days that we publish the show.

01:08:14Go check it out there.

01:08:15Leave us a comment.

01:08:16Tell us what you think.

01:08:16We'd love to hear from you.

01:08:18And as always, if you have thoughts or feelings

01:08:20or questions or just want to yell at me about iPads,

01:08:23you can always email us at vergecastatheverge.com

01:08:26or keep calling the hotline 866-VERGE11.

01:08:28We love hearing from you.

01:08:29Send us all of your thoughts and questions and ideas.

01:08:32Google I O is coming up.

01:08:32Microsoft Build is coming up.

01:08:34WWDC is coming up.

01:08:35I want to know everything that you're thinking about

01:08:37and interested in and want us to find out

01:08:38and want us to talk about.

01:08:40Keep it all coming.

01:08:41This show is produced by Andrew Marino,

01:08:42Liam James, and Will Poore.

01:08:44The Verge Cast is a Verge production

01:08:45and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

01:08:47Neal, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday

01:08:49to talk about whatever is about to happen at Google I O

01:08:52and a whole bunch more.

01:08:53We'll see you then.

01:08:54Rock and roll.

The case for the iPad Pro | The Vergecast

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