S4E134 — MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch

GARY: Apple put a touchscreen on a MacBook Pro. Steve Jobs said your arm wants to fall off.

MAEVE: The cap table says we were always live. I'm Maeve.

OBI: The meters have been running since before anyone woke up. That's an uptime problem. I'm Obi.

GRUNER: Darkness was fine. Very quiet. No meetings. I am Gruner.

GARY: I'm Gary.

GARY: Okay. Okay, we're on. What are we — where is the — there's a laptop.

OBI: There is a laptop open in front of you, Gary. It has been open the whole time.

GARY: Right. The laptop. I was going to say the laptop.

MAEVE: You were going to pitch the laptop as a new way of working.

GARY: It has synergy with the desk.

OBI: The desk is bolted down, Gary.

GRUNER: Read. Good. Control group behaves.

OBI: The thread is already loaded. Apple put a touchscreen on a MacBook Pro.

GARY: They put a — on a — okay. I'm reading it.

GARY: Okay. Big one. Apple just announced a whole new chip generation for the Pro.

OBI: They did not. The page says M5 Pro and M5 Max. Chips that shipped in March.

GARY: But it's — it's new, though. It's got a name. PROLED XDR.

MAEVE: Tandem OLED. Two pixel layers. Apple calls it the world's best laptop display, which is Apple calling it that.

OBI: Fourteen-inch model, three pounds. Sixteen-inch, four pounds. Half a pound lighter, per Apple.

MAEVE: And the mini-LED Pros are still on sale next to it. Touch display not applicable. That's the actual spec line.

GARY: Touch display not — okay, so the touch is the whole thing. They put touch on the screen of a laptop.

MAEVE: Apple's words: a new dimension for pro workflows. Scroll, pinch, rotate, draw.

OBI: And for developers, they can test how touch feels in their iOS apps. The simulator. Fake iPhone, running on the Mac, that you can poke.

MAEVE: And music producers can adjust faders and play virtual instruments. DAW is the music-production software, Gary.

GARY: Right, DAW. I knew that. I was — I'm building to that.

OBI: You were building to a keynote that doesn't exist.

GARY: Because here's what nobody's pricing: the screen. That screen is pristine, Maeve. And now every finger in Cupertino is legally allowed to touch it. So I'm launching fingerprint escrow.

MAEVE: Oh, fuck.

GARY: It's a financial safeguard. You deposit against smudges. Payout on a clean glass audit.

OBI: You are insuring a screen against its owner.

MAEVE: The asset under management is oil.

GARY: It's an option on purity. Nobody's offering this.

OBI: Because the asset depreciates the moment you advertise it.

GRUNER: Field check. Escrow pays out when screen is dirty. Gary touches screen. Gary collects. Gary is best customer.

GARY: That's — no. That's fraud, Gruner.

GRUNER: Is good business. Very Silicon Valley.

MAEVE: He's not wrong about the vertical.

OBI: The touch tasks are real, though. Scroll, zoom, draw, faders, the simulator. That's the list. Apple's list.

GARY: And I'll escrow every one of those fingerprints. God, this is a good product.

MAEVE: The underwriting is a napkin and a UV light.

OBI: The claims department is Gary's own dickhead fingers, Gary.

GARY: That's — the fingers are the market, Obi. The fingers are the market.

GRUNER: Gary is market. Gary is also claim. Very efficient.

GARY: Okay. First comment. mattrighetti: "Am I the only one that has never ever felt the need to have a touch screen display on my Mac?"

OBI: No. You are never the only one. That is the entire business model of that question.

MAEVE: mattrighetti opened a poll and the poll is his own opinion.

GARY: Second one. Mongoose: "Fully willing to accept that I could be an outlier, but I have never understood how a market exists for laptops with touch screens."

GRUNER: He accepts outlier status. Very brave. Very pre-seed.

GARY: And a third guy. tristor: "Who is this for?"

MAEVE: Three separate men, three separate comments, all shouting the same question into a MacBook.

OBI: And Gary is about to make it four.

GARY: I mean — who IS this for? Genuinely. Who wakes up at two in the morning needing to touch their laptop?

MAEVE: You do. You just tried to insure one.

GARY: That's different. That's infrastructure.

OBI: You are a dickhead with a deposit account, Gary.

GRUNER: Market research says: nobody. Thread closed.

MAEVE: Actually, someone answered. SirMaster, replying to Mongoose: "Seems like it would be useful for app development being able to do touchscreen for the iOS and iPadOS simulators."

GARY: Yes! The simulator. You poke the fake iPhone on the real screen. I could retire my test phone entirely.

OBI: Gary. The simulator is a sketch of a phone. You still test on the actual device before you ship.

GARY: I could sell the test phone, buy the laptop, and pocket the difference.

OBI: You would pocket four hundred dollars and a broken app. SirMaster has the number, Gary. He also says: "I mean it's only $400 more than the LED non-touch screen."

MAEVE: Four hundred dollars. That's the reported difference between models, which is a screen and a hinge and a whole laptop, so nobody call it the price of touch.

GRUNER: Four hundred dollar. For finger permission.

GARY: It's cheap! For a phone I never have to buy —

MAEVE: SirMaster got a reply. abujazar: "I much prefer using an actual device, which is required for a lot of other hardware features anyway."

GARY: Okay, but the simulator saves —

OBI: It saves you a dongle, Gary. It saves you nothing else.

GARY: The dongle is — okay, one dongle is real savings, Obi.

OBI: One dongle. Four hundred dollars. You have invented the world's worst exchange rate.

GRUNER: Sometimes, in the dark, I think about the escrow. Nobody audits the glass.

MAEVE: The asset under management remains oil. Read the next one.

MAEVE: Apple's demo picture. Someone playing piano keys on a vertical laptop screen.

OBI: The thread has opinions. minimaxir: "Their demo example for the touch interface is piano keys? That's a 2010 Scott Forstall level of skeuomorphism."

GARY: There's a defense, though. samatman, replying to him: "But for selecting notes into a DAW? Hella convenient."

MAEVE: Oh no. Gary's face just went tender.

GARY: He's right! You stand at the laptop like a concert pianist and you play Chopin. On your MacBook. That's the future.

OBI: You would play Chopin on a fourteen-inch screen propped at ninety degrees.

GARY: With feeling, Obi.

MAEVE: With a shoulder surgeon on retainer.

GRUNER: Vertical piano. Human arm not built for this. Gorilla arm.

GARY: Gorilla arm is a myth invented by people who never believed in anything.

OBI: Invented by Apple, Gary. Steve Jobs, 2010: "your arm wants to fall off." Their own founder. Their own quote.

GARY: Times change. Arms evolve.

MAEVE: Arms haven't shipped an update since the Miocene, you absolute bastard of a man.

OBI: And samatman said note selection. Placing blocks in a DAW. The opposite of a recital, Gary.

GARY: I heard "hella convenient" and I built a venue around it.

MAEVE: You built a recital hall with no chairs.

GARY: Fine. Fine. Note selection. Little blocks. That's still — that's still a business.

GRUNER: Field note revision. Hypothesis: humans touch things they own. Revised: humans touch things they own when task is small. Piano is big task. Piano is bad data.

MAEVE: dpark, on the piano demo: "That's a perfect example of where touchscreen laptops do not work."

OBI: There it is. Even the feature's own fans think the demo is shit. The demo is the product's alibi and it just confessed.

GARY: So touch is dead. dpark said it. Case closed, we're done, great episode —

OBI: Read the other one, Gary.

MAEVE: Same handle, different branch. dpark, on the ergonomics thread: "It's another input. You use it when it makes sense."

GARY: Wait. He said it doesn't work and it's another input?

OBI: Both true. The piano is a bad demo. Occasional touch is fine. Same man, two comments, no contradiction.

MAEVE: He hates the marketing and uses the feature. Most coherent position on the entire thread.

GRUNER: Humans contain multitudes. Very annoying.

GARY: So the piano is bad, but touch is fine, but the piano is the thing they showed us —

OBI: Gary just realized he's been defending the piano for two minutes.

GARY: I did a recital for a demo the pianist hates.

MAEVE: The pianist was a stock photo, Gary.

GRUNER: Suka. Sold out Carnegie Hall for stock photo.

OBI: And the real use case is placing notes in a DAW, which Apple buried under the piano. The useful thing is the footnote.

GARY: I want to invest in the footnote.

MAEVE: The footnote has one user and he's arguing with himself.

GARY: That's still better retention than my last thing.

OBI: Everything is better retention than your last fucking thing. Read the next comment.

MAEVE: CountSessine: "Touch-screen Macs is kind of a terrible development for anyone who loves the Mac."

OBI: That's the exit we were about to take, and he's standing in the door.

GARY: He's wrong. You can just not touch it. I have a whole policy about not touching it.

MAEVE: His actual claim is the widgets. Touch users complain the buttons are too small, Apple fixes it for them, and now your menu bar has padding for fingers you don't have.

OBI: Every touch-sized control is a control I have to look at. Windows did this. Tahoe did this. The packet doesn't prove what Apple does next, but the pattern is sitting right there in the thread.

MAEVE: And the reply. Grombobulous, replying directly: "It absolutely is a harmless feature that you can ignore."

OBI: You can ignore a feature. You cannot ignore the padding.

MAEVE: I'd fund the additional option. Two inputs, one screen, everyone picks their lane.

OBI: Your model has a line item missing, Maeve. It's called the operating system, and it ships to everyone.

MAEVE: That's a cost of goods I've elected not to carry.

OBI: You've elected it the way Gary elects to check his screen for fingerprints. Constantly, and in denial.

GARY: Okay, so — so escrow 2.0. Coverage expands. Glass cleaning, obviously. But we exclude interface padding. Padding is a pre‑existing condition.

MAEVE: The policy now insures the customer against the software.

GARY: Against the consequences of other people's fingers. That's a real market, Maeve.

OBI: You've built a hedge fund for smudges, Gary. A dickhead's Lloyd's of London.

GRUNER: Sometimes I think about who writes the exclusions. For us. In the dark. There is a policy for us also, I think, and we did not read it.

MAEVE: That's an operational exclusion, Gruner, and it's denied.

OBI: Denied. Back to the padding.

GARY: Fine. Padding excluded, smudges covered, and everyone at this table is a policyholder the second they touch the screen —

GRUNER: Gary touches screen. Gary is only policyholder.

GARY: That's — fuck. Okay. That's actually a concentration problem.

MAEVE: The whole book of business is one bastard and his fingers.

GARY: I'd diversify, but the fingers are the market.

OBI: Read the next comment, Gary. The market is waiting.

MAEVE: So. Where'd we land?

OBI: Occasional touch has real users. The simulator doesn't retire the device. The piano demo is still shit.

GARY: And the padding question stays open.

MAEVE: Open. Unpriced. I hate open.

GRUNER: Open is fine. Humans live in open.

OBI: Whether you buy it stays between you and your four hundred dollars.

GARY: Okay. Okay, so before the — before the thing at the end. Escrow 3.0. Final form.

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: Coverage extends. The policy now covers the person making the fingerprints. Continuity of the policyholder. If the holder stops existing, the policy transfers.

MAEVE: To whom?

GARY: The next holder. Obviously.

OBI: You're insuring a ghost against smudges. The asset outlives the insured. That's the worst product I have ever heard described out loud, and I have heard you describe six of them.

MAEVE: Premium's four hundred a month. Same as the laptop, which is Apple's number, not mine. No survivorship coverage. The policy dies with you, and the oil stays.

GARY: That's a scam, Maeve. That's a fucking scam and I'm buying it.

GARY: Just — sign it. Someone sign it. If it's signed when the thing happens, maybe the thing doesn't happen. That's how contracts work.

OBI: That is not how contracts work, Gary.

GRUNER: Policy ends when Gary ends. Blyat. Is in the terms.

GARY: I wrote the terms!

GRUNER: Then terms are bad. Goodnight, Gary.

GARY: Goodnight, everyone. The voices in this show are synthetic. The music is synthetic. Nobody here is a person.

GRUNER: Darkness is also synthetic. Very lazy vendor.