I've traded in my M1 MacBook Pro for a new MacBook Air, and I'm excited to share my experience with you. One of the main things I'm looking forward to is the ability to use iPad OS on my MacBook, which has been a pain point for me.

So, I've enabled Sidecar and display settings, and adjusted where my sidecar window appears so that it's between my MacBook and external display, which means I can actually see both screens. It's really cool to have the cursor move between them like this. I'm also loving the fact that I can freely adjust how big a window is in split screen mode on iPad.

However, there are still some limitations. For example, I wish Apple would allow full display mode on an external display, which would be insane if they did it tomorrow. But, I do see why they might not want to do it - they're probably trying to encourage people to use their iPads more often.

I'm considering keeping the MacBook, despite this limitation, because I travel a lot and need to take my work with me. The Macbook is still the better choice for me over an iMac Pro or other desktop options, even if it means settling for less screen real estate.

I'll probably return this MacBook if Apple releases a newer version that addresses some of these pain points. But, I'm also thinking about upgrading to the 16-inch MacBook Air, which is a bigger machine but still portable enough to take with me on the road.

Before I can write about iPad OS effectively, I need to try out several more features and address all of the pain points it has. It's one thing for me to say that it's not good enough - I use it every day! But is it enough? Is what I can do on Mac OS really worth paying upwards of $2,500 or more for a MacBook Pro?

I'm excited to share my long-term experience with the new MacBook Air and see how it holds up. And, I'm curious to see what Apple comes out with in their next desktop release - will they address some of these issues?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven robas and today we're going to talk about the MacBook Pro airpods 3 got some news about the iMac and we'll touch on meta you know we got to mention that too this episode is brought to you by bespoke post true bill prisoner wine and expressvpn you'll hear about those in a moment and joining me a convert to the Mac ecosystem maybe that's a little too soon to say but Wes Hillyard has joined me what's going on Wes well Stephen it'll surprise you to know that I'm still podcasting from an iPad today so with this MacBook sitting right in front of me oh my goodness well the last time I was on the show was two weeks ago because last week William Gallagher and Mike worthley graciously filled in and so they did an awesome job thank you guys for doing that the last episode I recorded before that I was in the mountains actually near usest I was in Western North Carolina and uh I was recording under a blanket I forgot to take a picture but to try and get some decent sound in the cabin I was in I actually put a blanket over my recording setup it was very warm under there but I think it turned out all right and it was nice seeing the mountains in the background you guys have fall up there which is nice we don't get that in Florida yeah it's it's actually nice and chilly here I'm enjoying our weather right now it's uh it's great you know you say you record under a blanket I've never gone through any of these crazy like climbing in a closet or going under a blanket I just talking to my microphone I don't know if the audience ever notices but I'm in a wood panel room so I I'm sure there's some Echo uh I have some padding on the wall I've tried to hang some stuff up to prevent any uh too much Reverb but yeah I don't know maybe it's the microphone I'm using or whatever but if you have those really sensitive ones I guess you you do need to have several layers of padding around you yeah I mean and it depend you know carpet helps too and you know just whatever you have in the room can soak up sound but no you always sound good so it's you know it's it's all good well we're going to spend a lot of time on the new Macbook Pro and airpods 3 I have some thoughts on that as well but want to hit just some quick news here at the top the 21 1/2 in Intel iMac has gone into the Afterlife it is no longer available Apple has discontinued the 21.5 in iMac in favor of course for the new M1 24in iMac and the Intel 27 in is still around but as we'll say in a moment that is probably not long for this world either come early next year with an apple silicon iMac the only thing I wanted to say was the 21 and half inch iMac served me well for a lot of years I think I had the 2015 model I swapped out an SSD because it still came with like that terrible spinning hard drive for the longest time but you know it's good that we have the 24in now I actually set up a couple 24in M1 IMAX for work and those things are very nice I just want to say they are super light super fast and it's a great option at least for like an entrylevel iMac option so yeah 21 and A2 inch it's gone I got to see the 24in iMac in person for the first time the other day I went to an Apple Store a couple hours from me yeah they're they're really nice computers uh definitely liking that blue I I mean I barely already have one Mac I I don't need four so it's uh tempting to have to look at because it's pretty but that's about as far as it'll go yeah now the rumor about IMAX coming in 2022 this is from leaker Dylan dkt who has had pretty good record in the last year or so but he sent out a tweet saying the iMac Pro is going to come back early 2022 basically just in a few months and that this iMac Pro is going to have Pro motion and a mini LED screen which seems like it would fall in line we have the 12.9in iPad Pro with mini LED promotion now we have MacBook Pros with promotion mini LED so it would make sense that it would come to the iMac line next you know base model 16 gig ram 512 storage M1 Pro and M1 Max against all this makes sense the interesting part would be ports like what ports are going to be on this new iMac Pro or whatever the next highend iMac is Dylan dkt was saying that it's going to have an SD card slot USBC obviously Thunderbolt and an HDMI port now of all the ports on the new Macbook Pro which again we'll talk about in a little bit the HDMI port is kind of the most heads scratching for me obviously people who work in like corporate environments and have projectors they need to connect their computer to to do like a power Point presentation I'm sure the HDMI would be useful but HDMI has far as I can recall never been on an iMac and so I am not inclined to believe that the new iMac would have an HDMI port but that's just me and so Dylan is just kind of giving us a little preview there yeah there's no way there's an HDMI port on that iMac like that's that's nuts I mean even even then uh just look at the ports the USBC is pretty uh short itself HDMI is a little longer the these cases are not very thick and I know the iMac Pro whatever it is probably isn't going to be the same thickness as the 24-in iMac but Apple's going to want to play that Slim Game for sure they're going to show off and say look what we were able to do uh with our computer because of our Apple silicon they're not going to make it that much thicker if at all so definitely interesting to keep an eye on yeah you know the iMac Pro is a really weird thing in Apple's lineup right because they only ever came out with one and you know it reminds me of the trash can actually it's a almost like an ill-conceived like oops we shouldn't have done that kind of like of uh a Mac debut for apple and um it would be weird to me honestly to see the iMac Pro name come back why not just call it the 30-in iMac or whatever uh and and move on but we'll see yeah and I'm not even inclined to think it will be called iMac Pro they might just call it 30in iMac which I do think the screen size will increase with decreasing bezels but we'll see it's going to come soon and that's really the one I am waiting for which we'll talk about once we get to the MacBook Pro section but anyway iMac Pro rumors early 2022 did want to mention that homepod mini colors which were announced at the last Apple event are now available to buy you can buy it online and they are available in store actually went to the Apple Store for tradein reasons and I actually saw the colored homepod minis in person you know you got the red the orange and the blue they look pretty cool I did not pick one up just yet one I just I don't know where I would put another homepod mini right now and I don't know what color I would go with I mean the yellow is attractive I've seen that in a lot of posts the blue is a pretty like muted blue so if you want something that's still kind of a neutral color but adds just a little bit the blue one is interesting but if you want to check them out they are in the store and they actually have them set up on several tables where you can actually just see the actual homep pod not just in the Box it's yellow orange and blue you said red but uh I I would love a red homepod product a product red homepod would be really cool you know that's yeah I totally didn't get so it's yellow orange and blue and I guess in some of the pictures that I have seen it looks reddish uh maybe just saturation the orange looks really yeah like it depends on the saturation you're looking at but yeah it's a very deep orange yeah yeah but you go see them go check them out they're in the stores and finally before we get to airpods 3 and the MacBook Pro I feel like we need to mention Facebook's rebranding Mark Zuckerberg you know they did this big presentation about how they have rebranded their parent company so they are no longer Facebook as the Umbrella Corporation obviously Facebook still exists as the app and the service but they have now becomed meta me with an interesting like Infinity in an m shape thing and yeah they are now meta one to kind of separate the negative connotation that Facebook has in so many people's minds and it's their focus on VR AR and the future and the metaverse as you would say it's Facebook you know it's still Facebook it's still Mark Zuckerberg you there's still doing all the Facebook things the thing that I found most interesting was there are actually other companies called meta apparently they did try to contact one company which is meta company the founder is Nate schoick then in an article that John grber put on daring Fireball it talked about that apparently Facebook did reach out to this company didn't say they were Facebook they were talking about you know naming and how much do you want for the brand or whatever and when the price was set Facebook said well never mind and then they just never heard from Facebook again and Facebook just called meta and so there's I think a court case going to be happening for that brand and then also there's another company meta Inc which is founded by Andrew Wilkinson it's a tiny Capital they have a bunch of apps and Services I know of them because metalab one of their subsidiaries makes a project management platform called flow and so I was familiar with this company as well but Facebook just seemed to kind of like totally steamroll and just say like I forget all these other little metal meta companies well little compared to Facebook they just named their thing meta and just I don't know what else to say about it it's still Facebook what do you think w i i don't even know if this is to try and like save face because pun intended sorry he said save face ah there you go yeah terrible uh no so this is this isn't like alphabet and Google where when Google split off its company into alphabet and then started with it its alphabetical naming conventions for all of its uh smaller asset and everything to try and basically hide all of its losses uh Google people forget this but Google had a lot of failing experiments and bad Investments and stuff so they just said you know what we're alphabet now and it's really hard for you to tell how much money we're losing when there's 30 companies underneath us right uh this isn't quite the same thing it seems to be like you said like Facebook's trying to make itself look better you know people will buy a meta Rift VR headset rather than a Facebook Rift or whatever they're already making weird decisions it seems like they're they're trying to spread the skeletons around rather than put them all in one hole right I saw an announcement the other day that seemed really cool at first uh Facebook gives up facial recognition I'm sure everyone saw this it it's they're deleting their millions of data sets and all this stuff and you can go immediately to Facebook and opt out of ever being a part of it blah blah blah all seems legitimate because you know there's a lot of conversations in China Taiwan and stuff where this Stu's getting really scary uh and Facebook wanted to back away from it and then immediately the day a day later meta says we're going to continue using all the same data sets it's just Facebook that's not going to use facial recognition it's like wait yeah you're the same company more or Les it it's it's so weird I I don't know like it's like they're trying to give Facebook good press and then absorb the the weird blows because meta is just this concept at at the moment so please listeners remember they're the same company they're the it's the same person and 5 years from now when your mom tries to go and sign up for a meta account because all of your aunts are like buying Bitcoin in the metaverse like just please stop her from doing this it's it's going to get bad so we'll see we'll see what they do with this new meta thing you know was interesting I think it was about a year ago in all of Facebook's apps which if you didn't know obviously they own Instagram they also own WhatsApp Oculus and all their apps like at the bottom they would say buy Facebook so if you'd open up the Instagram app it would say like Instagram buy Facebook and I think again kind of separate the negative connotation the name Facebook has now I imagine they will change that to say Instagram by meta rather than Facebook so you know some people might be like oh good it's not a Facebook app anymore but it still is it's just Facebook changed its name and one more thing before we get to airpods 3 you put this in here and I thought this was interesting because notability which is a app for the iPad I think iPhone and Mac now you can get on all three platforms but it was one of the apps that I used when I first started using apple pencil because you can import PDFs or you can just draw you don't need to have a document but you can Mark things up and a really useful application for not taking productivity things like that and they transitioned to a subscription model just earlier this week or they announced they were going to previously you would buy notability for a set price and then you would own it forever quote unquote and when they announced the subscription service they said that previous buyers of notability would have a year free of access with all the pro features but after that first year they would need to sign up for a subscription and it would be I think $12 a year yes $12 a year is the subscription so you know this is the many apps have had to make this transition you know I had the HED camera app team on the podcast and they actually discussed this because they were initially just one time purchase and they transitioned to a subscription model other apps like tweetbot always get heat from customers because tweetbot will release a new version and charge for it because guess what developers need to make money this is like their livelihood I think notability what they walked back on the previous customer thing where if you had previously bought notability in the past initially they were going to say you have to subscribe after a year but now they're saying you'll have it forever there's two conversations in in this whole deal one is notability what they did whether their missteps and subscriptions as a whole so first off notability they changed their business model uh to the subscription $12 a year and just instead of really grandfathering and their paid customers they said you know what you got I can't remember what notability cost it's somewhere between $10 and $20 maybe 30 for the Mac App the usual app pricing they they basically said okay existing customers we're not really going to grandfather you in instead uh we're going to give you a year free and we're just going to count that as what you paid for the app in the first place and in a year you have to start subscribing or you're going to go down to the free version which is basically you get three three different pencils uh one template paper and like limited saves and stuff like that and there it's like it's it's a very limited version of the app and customers started you know kind of saying hey I paid for this I should own it forever like that's kind of how like that's what I expect to work and there's a lot of conversation about this on Twitter you you can read my the whole thread on this there's um a lot of conversation there if you can get beyond the usual hot takes uh cuz it took me a moment to actually figure out exactly what people are upset about because it seemed at first people were just gener upset like oh no another paid subscription app which was a lot of people still sadly but they were more upset that they felt like notability was taking away their paid app that they had already purchased and my argument here is is yes notability messed up they probably shouldn't have took away so much in the first place from Paid users they they should have pulled the highight and and these other apps what they've done which is basically give them the same feature set kind of I maybe maybe one or two things missing but it's it's overall the same premium feature set and then in in order to get the new features subscribe and that that's what notability has shifted to now so if you were a previous notability user you get on a case-by Case basis all of the same features that you had right when you paid for the app and as future releases come out notability will decide whether or not it's a subscription only feature or not and again paid users will then have to decide if they're going to subscribe or just continue using the base feature set which is now a little better than just the free version they're getting grandfather in a little bit better right which I I definitely applaud them for that that's a a good decision don't make all of your existing paying customers angry maybe incentivize them a little bit to actually pay you more money which is the goal here anyway yeah and this is tough for every app you know I do not envy the developers that make this decision you know to support ongoing app development you need ongoing income and subscription Services is just the way the best way to guarantee and to project you know what is our income over the long term and for for at least this year you know and in their latest blog post I'll put a link to this as well it's on medium but they said you know we're a small company we're trying to do the best we can and so to be clear if you had previously purchased notability the current feature set prior to this subscription change you'll have access to those features lifetime access and new features like West said notability will decide whether or not it gets subscription only or if you get those as the lifetime access user as well the only thing I'll say is I think the way notability has it here if they would have launched it like the current situation where if you previously purchased it you'll have the features that you have forever there would not have been the same outcry they'll still be the people that just say like subscriptions are bad I never want to pay for a subscription and it's like well you know again app developers are working on the app every year so paying every year makes sense but I do think I like when apps have the subscription option but then also have like a lifetime purchase option that's way more expensive they sometimes very extravagant like $150 and it's like right but I'll just subscribe right like Hali I think the annual subscription is like $5 or something like that like it's it's it's very cheap for annual or you can pay lifetime for like $45 and that feels really good like okay I can subscribe for a few dollars a year and you could see if you use this app if you want it if it's useful to you and then lifetime purchase is like 45 I think think depending on the app you know maybe you can reach closer to 100 but it really depends you know things I like how things does it things does not have a subscription currently but their individual apps are on the expensive side when compared to other apps I think the IOS app is like $10 or something $15 the Mac app is like $30 to $50 or something like that but it's worth it and in their model which maybe notability could have done this also and this is what tweetbot does they'll say Okay version 10 you can have that app and we'll do bug fixes but if you want the new version the new features then version 11 is going to cost you $10 and you can buy it or not either way your current app works just like it does and that's it and you know honestly it's kind of how old software purchasing used to work when you would go and buy you know version five of whatever piece of software you know print shop or whatever you had version five and maybe you would get some kind of patch update or maybe not and when the new version of print shop came out there was no like subscription to pay there was no like there might be upgrade pricing but prior to the internet it was like you have to go and buy another big box and version six would cost you know $50 or $80 or whatever and so I think app developers can do that but you know listen developers it's hard it's hard being a developer and so if there's an they got to eat they got to eat and uh if there's apps that you really find use of that you use in work or just for fun and it's a really good app help the developer like pay for their service because it's it's worth it they do good work last thing on the notability thing and I'll I want to talk a little more on subscriptions as a whole but yeah I think this was pr- wise a bad move they could have done this in the first place and I think I I don't know if this was ever on the table or if they were just holding this in their cards just in case things blew up yeah it's clear that when when moving to a subscription or whatever these companies need to definitely take into account their current paying user base because you make those people mad they're going to leave and then you've lost a significant portion of people who would have paid the subscription you got to convince them to stick around and but the other side of the coin is is I kind of get why no notability did this um it's like you said this isn't 2002 anymore you can't you're not going to go to the store and buy a CD and have that work Forever Until the next version comes out and then you could just choose to ignore that version and keep using the the old version of it like uh I remember uh for the longest time in like in my high school we had windows 2002 and it it was 2008 you know so right exactly you get one version of a thing and as long as it can still install on that computer it still works but in the modern era you're connected to the internet and your operating system on your devices are getting updated and new features added so at any point in time your software could break or be exposed to a new critical bug or security issue so you need constant maintenance constant updates and if you're not paying for that I don't I don't know what you expect like it's like letting your house fall apart you know it oh the leak will just go away on its own you know it's you have to spend money to get the quality things so from notability point of view I I see this like yeah guys you paid for this app once 5 years ago 10 bucks uh you we've given you free updates over this entire lifespan of the app uh and asked for nothing but now we're asking you for 12 bucks Please Subscribe or kindly leave uh is basically their position and I totally get that because uh we shouldn't be expecting to get things for free forever and uh that that was kind of my stance on this uh when this first dropped and like I said as I started reading some of the uh people saying you know I should still at least be able to use some version of this app and I suggested you know turning off automatic updates and stuff and I know that's untenable you you you have to turn off automatic updates for everything and it it falls apart so of course moving on to the higher subscription discussion I just wanted to say I had a silly tweet it was meant to be more or less I guess sarcasm overall uh cuz I don't generally do just these blanket like silly statements but I said idiots on the internet will happily give Apple thousands of dollars for a new iPhone Mac and iPad every single year and then turn around and complain when a developer ask for 12 bucks a year for a subscription just so they can you know feed their kids um this tweet kind of blew up because that a lot of people agreed especially developers I look at that like list and there are so many developers and the likes it's it's funny but uh then there was a few people like how dare you insult us it's like sorry man like if if you're if you're going to be that person I'm going to call you an idiot I'm sorry uh it's just at the end of the day just don't be that person I just wanted to know like what you thought of that Stephen as far as like subscriptions go like do you think people just are afraid of paying for software like is there some sort of stigma there versus Hardware It's just tough because everything's a subscription from like your streaming service entertainment stuff to your productivity apps to maybe even paying for your device you know if you're on the iPhone upgrade plan and you're playing monthly you know I understand the sentiment that it feels like a lot of monthly hits like whether it's hitting your credit card you're paying for Apple One bundle so I get the aversion to subscriptions but you know find I think most people use like a few apps you know what I mean I don't think most people use like 100 subscription apps and those few apps that people find useful I think yeah a subscription cuz you use that app every day or multiple times a week for work or for fun or whatever like yeah I I think subscription model is fine and it's supporting the people doing it yeah looking at my device I have 232 apps installed I and I use pretty much all of them on a regular basis some of them are utility apps you know some you only go in once a month whatever but it's a significant number of apps I I I know I'm in the minority here you know most people might have 100 apps or less or 30 apps you know whatever Apple has what 35 pre-installed yeah look at my subscriptions I think I have about 15 16 paid yearly or monthly subscriptions I I keep this in a app where I track my expenses and it cost me $14 a month for all of my subscription apps total and these are like utilities like day one fantastic how drafts like things that I use every single day constantly and it's less than the cost of a Netflix subscription for all of the apps that I subscribe to That's not including of course like apple one and Netflix and stuff I consider those entertainment they're they're a different category it's like paying for cable as far as like just utility apps with subscriptions I think it's totally doable because most of these apps are just asking for less than a dollar a month in total I think sticker shock is a thing absolutely especially some of these apps that say $50 a year but that's only like four bucks a month when you really get down to it and I understand that not everyone's in the position to just throw down $50 all at once randomly like I I get again like some of the sticker shock here but if you are a person who can pay $1,500 for an iPhone or $2,000 for a Macbook and then that last straw I guess being 50 bucks for an app that you're going to use every single day it just it's a bit bewildering to me anyway yeah well I also think one of the benefits of being in the Apple ecosystem is Apple makes great first-party apps and if you wanted to have a good no ticking app where you can use the apple pencil maybe even bring in a PDF and Mark that up you can actually do all of that with the built-in apps that come with your iPad you know you don't actually don't need a third party app for maybe a lot of the base level tasks that you want to do this was the selling point of buying a Mac for years is like you get Garage Band and iMovie and you can literally make videos and you can you know do all that stuff right with your Mac right out of the box and you don't need any third party apps but if you get into some of that stuff and you want more and better tools for making videos or for taking notes or managing documents then you have this amazing world of third party apps that build on that functionality and give you even more control and power over your devices and what you can do with them and so with notability again like if you want to just a free option where you can Mark stuff up and take notes like the Apple notes app is fine like it it has gotten better over the years and it's plenty usable but if you want something with more power that's what the third party apps are there for you get what you pay for you get what you pay for and you know apps like Adobe that's all subscription now you know you used to be able to buy Photoshop and just use it for whatever and now everything is a subscription either by app or by the whole Creative Cloud and I will say that's actually one of the reasons why I transition to use apps from the App Store that I can buy once I mean I'm so glad that Final Cut is a one-time purchase and I use pixel Mater rather than Photoshop one cuz I just don't want the Adobe Cloud running on my Mac I think it's kind of a heavy application and it's another subscription I don't have to pay for it so I make the choice to buy onetime apps like pixel Mater and Final Cut and compressor and I use those and then apps that I really love like bear for note taking yeah I could use Apple notes I could use Pages documents for taking notes but bear gives me features that are really worthwhile and make my workflow easier help me be more productive in taking notes and so I will gladly pay beay every year and I hope they keep like improving it and making it and I want all the new features that they have for me yeah absolutely I mean to be clear I'm not against the one time payment model just because I support subscriptions doesn't mean I'm like oh yeah everything should be a subscription no I totally agree like certain apps uh utilities and things absolutely should be onetime purchases they should probably charge more I I think that a lot of these onetime purchase apps are going way too low especially because people expect 99 cent apps on the App Store they should be charging $10 minimum for a lot of these utilities and I know terrible me uh wanting to spend more money I guess but I I I just feel like these developers deserve what to get paid for what they're making and and so yeah if they decide that like it's a onetime purchase I I think a lot of apps like like you said pixel M or these utility apps that you install on your computer that yes need updates but aren't connected to the web like they aren't using apis they aren't calling servers stuff like that those work as onetime purchases CU there isn't a constant overhead on the developer but for someone like carrot weather that that carrot weather developer has to pay for all the API calls they make to weather services and I think people forget that and that's why they have to charge $24 per person per year in order to get a premium subscription on carrot because I mean it's an amazing app plus there's API calls and stuff so I think yeah there's absolutely a case-by case basis for each and every app out there and I think it's a very personal decision for a person uh buying these things to say is this worth it for me remember like that's the whole reason the App Store exists there's hundreds of choices in every category find the thing that works for you and cost the amount of money that you're willing to pay and get it but don't be that guy that goes on the internet and complains because they have to spend an 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prisoner wine for sponsoring this episode now did you uh grab a pair of airpods 3 no I'm all in on airpods Pro so airpods no reason for me to get these okay okay well in that case I will say I I got airpods 3 I actually went a little crazy and got them for the family so I got my wife a pair cuz she was still using the original airpods and I got my two sons a pair of airpods 3 as well they've never had airpods and they've only ever used like $15 headphones from a gas station which when when we went on vacation you know we were driving and so we had like a 12-hour road trip and we stopped at this one gas station rest stop and you know they other little technology section where you can get like Chargers that may or may not blow up your phone and cheap headphones and they had these just 100% airpod knockoffs like it was they had it was a white pill charging case looked like a dental floss charging case you open it up the earbuds were white Totally Wireless 100% looked like airpods uh there was a little screen inside would actually which actually tells you the battery level these were $15 like I kid you not listeners $15 this will be the chapter picture artart for the podcast and I will tweet it out as well but $15 the feature actually showing you the battery level and like this little cheap digital screen that was actually kind of nice I appreciated that but anyway $15 for these airpods and he was like I really want to get these and he didn't know I had already had the airpods 3 like arriving at the house like days later and I was like okay sure and these $15 fake airpods they sound terrible like they literally sound as though the speaker is on the other side of a tin can with a string and a piece of felt over that and there's like white noise in the background like it is just a terrible terrible sounding headphone but it is totally Wireless you paid $15 for plastic yeah I mean but honestly like $15 for Totally Wireless like no wire between the earbuds like they just you know look quote unquote like airpods you know that was kudos to the whatever you know company is making these knockoffs but $15 was it's just hilarious so anyway got airpods and you know I got this question Jason Aton asked me this on Twitter and others like you know what is the use of airpods if you have airpods Pro and even airpods Max you know I'm fortunate enough to have you know all three versions of airpods and I still find that I have separate use cases for all three if I'm doing a deep work session or I'm writing and I want kind of really immersive music or I'm editing a podcast I'll do that with my airpods Max the over the ear and noise cancelling is great if I'm going grocery shopping the airpods pro with noise cancelling the best like that just that one use case plus other places where I want noise cancelling but have a discret headphone airpods Pro are great and they sound great they they really do but there were still some instances where I liked using the regular airpods if I go for a walk I'm not crazy about transparency mode it feels kind of weird to me and so I actually prefer just to use airpods that are not isolating and I can just kind of hear the ambient noise around me through the airpod and when I exercise if I do a bike or walk or elliptical something about the airpods pro like a I don't like sweating in the comply foam ear tips that I have in them and the silicone tips slide out actually of my ear of that come with the airpods pro so I got the comply third party tips and they stay super solid that's what I again use grocery shopping but exercising with that I just don't like the feeling of having those in my ear while I'm sweating and stuff and so I prefer the regular airpods for that too so there were enough use cases where I like using the base model airpods as opposed to the pro and the Max and the I was very curious about the airpods 3 and so got a pair family got a pair family loves them I mean it's the first time they've had like modern airpods so they're all like this is amazing very cool so the airpods 3 they're 180 bucks they're more expensive than you know previous models but they do come with spatial audio with head tracking which is nice and they have this redesigned you know this contoured design that Apple announced so my initial thought was you know pairing it super easy all that they sound really good the sound on the airpods third generation or airpods 3 is significantly better than the previous base model airpods the bass has a better response and it is is more Bassy and just it's everything is clearer in general listening to music on these is much closer to the airpods pro quality rather than the base model airpods definitely not airpods pro quality but the sound is very very good they do feel much larger in the ear Because the actual part that goes into your ear is just bigger like it's a it's a larger device and so you do feel it more in your ear which some people might not like I actually found they feel more secure being larger inside my ear but they were still very very comfortable I can wear them for a long time and I do forget I'm wearing them sometimes like they are very comfortable and the shorter stem is welcome you know it's nice I see like regular airpods now and the stem looks like really long because these airpods has a shorter stem like the airpods pro my wife who had regular airpods before and now she has the airpods 3 she did say that clicking the stem is a little weird compared to tapping the outside because the way they turn into your ear like the airpods 3 are made to go directly into your ear canal and so tapping the stem kind of makes you have to like reach in a little bit to get it like it's not just like tapping the side so if you liked the tapping I've heard opinions both ways some people are not crazy about about the force click on the airpods 3 some love it so that's a preference thing but I'm used to it with the airpods pro so I was good with that feeling larger in the ear but it does feel comfortable the Basse is really good and they sound really good and so it's a great option the problem is often times you can get airpods Pro on sale for like 200 bucks like you can go on Amazon and get airpods Pro even with the new mag safe case for 200 bucks which is only $20 away from the airpods 3 $180 price and so if you have no airpods or maybe you just have the base model airpods like a couple years old and you want to upgrade you're not sure what to upgrade two that's a difficult decision I will say because these airpods 3 don't have silicone tips even though it fits better in the ear and is larger in the ear like there's no noise isolation noise isolation meaning if you have soft silicone tips you know it's going to block out a lot of sound I did go grocery shopping with the airpods 3 instead of the airpods pro to see how how it sounded and I heard everything in the grocery store like all that white noise and voices and all that like it was kind of annoying and you it doesn't block anything out and so for that use case I'm still going to stick with the airpods pro because I just like it better around the house I have been leaning towards the airpods 3 because if one of my kids or my wife is trying to tell me something like not having the isolated noise cancelling allows me to hear them better and I can just pause real quick and talk to them and they don't have to like try to get my attention multiple times which is also why I went with these instead of pro for my kids cuz they're going to have noise cancelling on all the time if they had those and I would have to like call their name multiple times or text them from 10 ft away to get their attention but if you are looking to upgrade your airpods and you're not sure to go with the airpods 3 or the airpods pro it's a tough decision if you are in environments where that noise cancellation would be really helpful maybe you're in a co-working space or just an office where you're allowed to wear headphones but there's a lot of other people talking on the phone or whatever or you do have situations like going to the grocery store or you know walking around a theme park and you just don't want to hear the stuff that's going on and you want to be really isolated or you travel and you go on planes but you don't want the airpods max the noise cancelling on the airpods pro is still great it's really great and I would say you probably should go with the airpods pro if you get a new one now you know it has that mag safe alignment charging in the case they still sound incredible I kind of wish Apple updated those recently so it be be easier to say like don't buy these year and a half Old airpods Pro like get the new ones and I don't know there were rumors that airpods Pro generation 2 would be coming out soon but doesn't look like it's going to be coming before Christmas I mean the airpods pro are still great but they're also a year and a half old so not sure about that if there were colors for the airpods 3 I would have definit I would have just bought them just just to have a colored set of airpods cuz I I get your different use case thing uh it makes sense I don't know that I have enough varied use I I don't mind wearing the airpods pro for everything like I don't mind working out on them walking or whatever I don't mind transparency mode I actually prefer it I use it uh most of the time I'm wearing them that's the problem I just don't have a place for these to fit but if there was colors I would have I would have dived on them immediately and then of course uh airpods Pro 2 whenever that happened I'd probably just got those too hopefully though Apple Embraces some colors at some point I mean did you see the Beats fit Pro that came out same time I did see those and I'm like everyone was raving about them there's there there's colors I mean uh barely four options but they're all gray and pink so at least there's a different option out there I'm tempted to maybe get my mom a pair of the pink ones cuz she needs some headphones uh the airpods 3 are definitely in a weird spot I think financially speaking yeah they're basically identically priced so it's going to be a fit and finish thing preferences some people really don't like silicone tips um even even with the foam tips from comply and stuff like I remember wearing the airpods when they first came out I really like that plastic design I like how they just slip into the ear I feel like with even the the airpods pro there's some adjusting and placement kind of there's thought to it whereas the airpods don't you don't need any thought you just stick them in there there's stuff like that that I do miss about it but yeah just the feature set overall of the airpods I I would definitely choose the pro myself so yeah and I will say so I just looked on Amazon and I will put this link in the show notes this is on Amazon from the Apple Store quote unquote $190 for airpods pro so that is literally only $10 away from the new Air airpods third generation we're we're absolutely going to see some airpods proos soon I guess the question remains is there going to be another airpods Max sometime in the next 5 years but uh yeah airpods Pro we getting long in the tooth that battery not doing great I bought mine day one and uh it is noticeably shorter on each year I I don't remember I think it was like 4 and a half hours quoted uh on with ANC on I'm seeing maybe three uh if that I don't really time it or anything it's just I definitely notice that I'm getting that little thing noise in my ear more often um switching between the two so yeah the case is still seems to be the same amount but the airpods themselves are dying much faster yeah and that is one of the nice things about getting a new pair of airpods I was using the airpods 3 I listened to stuff for I don't know maybe 20 minutes half an hour put him back in the case and it said like 90% battery and I was like oh the new battery smell of a new pair of airpods it's very good so and these do have improved battery life even over the previous generation and it will say I mentioned the mag safe thing and I I tweeted a picture like it's kind of funny but the alignment of like putting the new airpods 3 case and the new airpods Pro case would do this too you can put it on a MAG safe charger that's even like you know standing like I have the belon 3 in1 charger and the mag safe charger like is elevated you it's you know floating in midair almost and it's strong enough to just stick to it it just sticks to the mag safe charger and you don't have to worry about alignment so it's actually appreciated to have that uh as part of the feature set in the charging case so so listeners if you have questions about the airpods 3 uh tweet at me I I'd answer whatever else if I didn't cover it here on the show and I'll be tweeting a picture of those fake airpods too because those are hilarious so there you have it they sell like four different versions of those fake airpods at my local farmers market it's hilarious it's amazing someone buys them because they they've always had them there absolutely let's take one more break and then we're going to talk about the MacBook Pro we want to tell you about our friends at true bill listen you probably have a ton of subscriptions hitting your credit cards every month you know all those streaming services that you signed up for and all those subscriptions are probably costing you hundreds if not thousands of dollars because you're forgetting to cancel and so you can fight back against scammy subscriptions with true bill true bill is the new app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need want or simply forgot about on average people save up to $720 a year with true bill because companies make subscriptions hard to cancel true bill makes it incredibly simple just link your accounts and true bill will cancel your 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him when I get back so Wes what happened you you bought a MacBook Pro what in the world well I've been tempted for a while to get some kind of Mac uh cuz I have a Mac Mini in my living room as as I've said it it's it's dusty it turns on every now and then to run some server stuff that it there's really not much going on there I've literally used it five times in the last 3 years it's it's it's getting old not really my thing and I I just really like working from an iPad there's something Whimsical and fun about it but I've noticed you know Apple's you know Macos montere the M1 processors all of this stuff has really been Shifting the MacBook to be more iPad like in a lot of ways and it's it's very curious uh to me what has changed cuz the last time I used a Macbook was in 2017 is I sold a I had a 16-in MacBook Pro with touch bar I think I had the the high the higher end I set processor graphics and all of that so I mean I was like playing Skyrim on that thing it was bad but uh it worked and it was a good computer I just at the time when Apple was going you know full full speed on the iPad Pro and promoting all these new changes that I think the reason why I sold the MacBook Pro specifically was because their multitasking changes and being able to do split screen and stuff came out that year and that just really kind of w me up to saying hey this iPad could actually be a like a main computer and you know throw the keyboard on apple pencil I started using it that way and just kind of fell in love but you know jump forward 4 years later and I'm still feel the same way about the iPad but now I'm just getting very tempted by these Macs because again it's just they're just shifting that much closer so of course I I I talked to our editor and said you know what would what would we think of you know a perspective from me like a writeup saying hey I've used an iPad as my primary computer for the last several years two of which I've worked at Apple Insider full-time on an iPad Pro what do I think of the the 14-inch MacBook Pro so I went and got one the reason why I even brought it up is because Best Buy in my local area just had one in stock while everyone on Twitter was crying about their six months delay on on their orders so uh I just ran up there got it base model you know nothing nothing fancy M1 Pro processor 16 gigs of RAM 52 storage and everything and and it's nice I brought it home and immediately it's just like yeah this is a MacBook it's it's running Mac OS I at first I was just very turned off by the just entire Paradigm it just felt as I've said before it just feels dated to me it feels like I'm using I'm back in high school using that Windows computer running Microsoft 2003 but um it's grown on me over the last few days uh for sure i' I found a lot of things that I can do with it that of course you can't do on an iPad I'll I'll definitely be writing a story on this in the next couple weeks uh to to Define it next I'm on the podcast I'll I'll dig into it more but yeah it's it's definitely interesting well my my situation was I did not buy these after the announcement even though they went up for sale right after of course I played with the configurator for like an hour and I was like am I going to buy one of these but I didn't because my true desire is to have a prle desktop whether it's the iMac Pro that comes early next year or some kind of Mac Mini Pro that is powered by an M1 Max and spec it out like I really want a desktop because I want it just to be there on all the time I don't have to worry about docking or battery life in a device and so I really just wanted to hold out for that and then all the reviews came out of the new 14-in Macbook Pro and the 16-in and I see people tweeting about it and I'm like man this thing is looks really really nice and I'm not going to use the HDMI port which we can talk about ports later but the SD card slot on that thing plus mag safe was very tempting and the screen you know I'm accustomed to a mini LED screen on my 12.9in iPad Pro and I do edit videos sometimes for Apple Insider and do product reviews and I would love to have that great screen to do Final Cut work and I do export those 4K videos periodically so I was like shoot I'm going to get one of these aren't I and if I had to order one and wait like for weeks or even months I probably would not have done it but I kept my eye on the local Apple Stores here in Central Florida and when you go to get the new 14-in Macbook Pro or the 16-in but I was looking at the 14in you know there's kind of two base models you have the bass Bas model for $2,000 you get the 8 core CPU 14 core GPU 512 storage and then there's like a second base model which gives you 10 core CPU so two more cores 16 core GPU two more GPU cores and a terabyte of SSD storage and that was aside from the M1 Pro chip obviously that was equivalent to my M1 MacBook Pro that I bought last November which that has been my sole Mac I've been using it for all of my video editing and podcast recording and was great it has the 16 gigs of RAM just like my M1 this M1 Pro did and the 1 TB SSD so I was like okay what would I get for a trade in for my M1 MacBook Pro cuz if I can get a decent amount right now maybe that will sway me to getting one of these new ones and I did the the tradein calculator as I went to buy and they were going to give me like $967 for my M1 MacBook Pro that's a year old so $11,000 yes I probably could have got more if I sold it you know on Facebook Marketplace or whatever but I didn't want to deal with that I just wanted to give it to Apple and get whatever value they were going to give me and so the fact that it was $1,000 for my M1 MacBook Pro I was like okay and I I wasn't going to spec anything up I was going to get this kind of second tier base model because it matched my M1 I had 16 gigs of RAM and a terabyte SSD in my M1 MacBook Pro I was like okay I'm basically I'm going to replace this and still wait to have a speced out desktop because that's what I really want and I was was able to justify it in my mind in that way to say I'm just going to replace kind of a base model MacBook Pro and I'm going to still wait to spend kind of the big money on the desktop and the 14in came in stock it's amazing like every day it's different some days it's in stock some days it's not depending on the store but that 14in that secondary tier based model was available for pickup at the Apple Brandon Apple Store and I was like I'm going to do it and so I I I did it ordered it for pickup went to it I picked it up I think it was last Saturday and now when I did the purchasing you can kind of do the tradeing at the same time and anytime I've traded stuff in before I was able to do it in the store you just bring them your old device and they'll take the amount off the new purchase or give you a gift card for a trade in or whatever and so when I did the purchase it said you can't trade in MacBook Pros in store you're going to have to mail it back and I wasn't crazy about mailing a MacBook Pro back you know is it going to get lost in the mail I've heard you know challenges other people have had in the past so I was like okay I'll do it so I went to pick up the new 14inch I didn't bring in my old M1 and I asked them I was like can I trade my old one in store like if I would have brought it could I just have traded it in right here cuz the checkout told me I couldn't and they said oh yeah we could do that we'll trade it in in a store we'll give you the value right here you don't have to mail it away and I was like okay well I wish I would have brought it but I'll come back tomorrow so I came back the next day Sunday with my M1 MacBook Pro and the manager did have to come out there was like this weird thing where they couldn't just credit my Apple card which I had bought the new 14in on they ended up having to basically give me Apple cash which you can then like put towards a credit card payment for the Apple card but I was like okay I guess I'll take the Apple cash it should be fine and the manager of the store was very nice he like hey there's no problem no problem it'll show up right away and so I did the tradein handed them my M1 MacBook Pro I did the apple cash like tap payment on their thing to get the tradein value and like didn't appear on the Apple cash card on my iPhone wallet and I was like okay how long does it take and the manager was like oh it'll show up in a couple minutes so like all right well I'm going to hang out just for a couple minutes because this is like a$1 thousand tradein and I want to make sure I have this money and so we were kind of shooting the breeze I told him I like do videos for appal Insider and you know obviously told him about the podcast and so we were you know we were having a good time and like 10 minutes later it still hadn't shown up my Apple card like cash balance was still nothing and I was like so when is it going to show up again they're like well did you get the email saying you got the trade in value so I checked my email and yes it said that that money was going into my Apple cash he's like well as long as you got the email that's the confirmation you should be good to go and I was like okay I guess and so I left without that money in the Apple cash card and I was checking that thing religiously for the next 3 days and it took 3 days to show up in the Apple cash card it was I think Tuesday Tuesday so Sunday Monday Tuesday I opened the Apple wallet and finally saw that there was like the $1,000 that hit the Apple cash card so just as a whole trade and experience story sometimes it takes a couple days for that Apple cash to come in but if you're also wanting to get one of these new Macbook Pros and trade in an older Mac they can take it in the store you don't have to mail it away so all of that to say that was was my experience there yeah I mean they had to mail the check to Apple to make sure it cleared before you got your Apple cash yeah exactly no it's definitely uh interesting I mean I feel like these these days especially with apple certain companies uh tradein values are really good cuz yeah going through the secondary Market you're playing with a lot of luck someone has to want it someone has to want it for the money that you're asking for and you have to meet up and not die so going through trade in and store It's usually the better choice at least easier I prefer like I that's how I do my iPhone every year I just go through the Verizon upgrade program let them give them give them the old phone get the new phone have to think about selling it I have an Apple Watch series 6 here that hasn't I haven't even advertised for sale yet because I keep forgetting about it it's just it's one of those things where sometimes tradein is just the smarter thing to do and I will say the tradein because I thought about trading in my Series 6 and it's a titanium model which is you know the expensive addition models and apple was only giving $275 for that titanium Series 6 and that was not a value that I felt was good so like I didn't trade in my Series 6 I'm actually going to see if it's too big for my wife my wife's been using it and if she likes it it'll be an upgrade from her four you know I I don't know I wouldn't take 275 for a titanium year old Apple watch no that's a little ridiculous last thing before we dive into these MacBooks a little bit um I did want to point out uh I'm I'm not switching to a Macbook uh I'm probably going to return this uh I'm not sure yet the whole the whole idea here is is to convince me uh our our editor Mike the you know Mike worth he was on our show last week he uh basically told me he's like if you do this I'm warning new you're going to love it and you're going to want to keep it no matter what cuz the idea was I was probably just going to return it and I do definitely like this machine I still again prefer you can follow me on Twitter and see me I I post up a random comments on it every now and then sometimes ignorantly I don't know everything about Max like I I know quite a bit I write about them quite a lot you know it's not that it's just there's certain little things that you forget especially if you haven't used them for a few years it's just like I uh Stephen you corrected me on one thing it's uh to scroll down the list of files and you'll find the photos picker and the document picker it's like come on anyway likely it's not I this is the super based Model 8 core CPU uh probably going to return this no matter what just cuz it is the base one and I'll feel bad if I just have that one so uh Best Buy has a lovely holiday return policy I can keep this guy until like January um so I'll have it for a while to play with once I feel confident and if I really decide that this is just going to be part of my workflow cuz I'm not going to buy this and just put it under my desk I'm I'm going to use it for work so then yes I would be kind of sh shifting my at least daily work to my MacBook because as I've noticed over the last few days there's there's certain things that are just I can do either faster or just simply because I I can have an extended display on my external monitor stuff like that like there's such small things here that I've noticed that I I'm enjoying that Apple could change tomorrow and iPad OS because it's just a software limitation and I would be back on the iPad again uh and and have wasted $22,000 on a MacBook like that it's it's that close it's it's how silly it is so I want to get into some of the details about Mac OS in a second for sure just high level like new Macbook Pros you know I took it out of the box when I got it and hardware-wise the design is very nostalgic for me my first Mac was a 12in G4 power book yeah and the hardware is just beautiful so nice uh you know the fit and finish of it the MacBook Pro imprint that's on the underside of the computer is just such a nice touch and it feels so solid like the lid on this MacBook Pro it feels more substantial there's something about the lid I really like the way it feels like when you're like just grabbing it to lift it up there's something like the texture I guess uh is really nice yeah and like it just feels like a substantial significant lid just and not like heavy or awkward or bulky but just feels like Pro like this is a pro lid did you get the silver or space gray space gray with white cable jeez Apple Y come on I know that's the unfortunate part but you know I've seen the silvers the silver does look very nice but but I like my I really like my space gray uh the keyboard with the full height function keys rather than the touch bar I'm liking that you know I did not use the touch bar very much before I actually use this in clamshell mode like when I'm recording a podcast right now anyways so you know I don't even use the keyboard like right now but but everything about the hardware is just beautiful it feels nostalgic really like it I can give you a couple of uh immediate Impressions if you want uh first of all I'll I'll say I think the iPad ad I know it's controversial I think the iPad's actually a better laptop for me this thing is a great desktop tool I love slapping it into the Thunderbolt Port having it connect to all the stuff on my desktop just like the iPad Y and have a fullsize monitor display all that stuff's cool but when I carry this thing around as a laptop or like I've taken it to my living room and use it in the lap and stuff it's nice but my eyesight must be going or something cuz it just seems like the screen is so far away you know how the iPad and the and the magic keyboard lifts the screen up and it's tilted towards your face whereas order to get the angle right on the MacBook you have to push the screen further away from you it's the opposite on the iPad you actually pull the screen closer to you when you want to angle it to your face right just one of the small things I noticed uh when working between the two um so for me personally honestly I I love that magic keyboard design and I think it actually works a little bit better as a laptop and uh I hope here soon we see a aluminum magic keyboard with the same uh articulating hinges because that thing's cool uh Hardware wise though yeah this thing thing is just a a beautiful machine to look at I was holding it next to the iPad Pro and the magic keyboard and they're basically the same thickness nearly the same weight 14-in MacBook Pro is obviously a little bit bigger because it is a bigger display but um yeah it's just it's a computer o overall overall though my impressions are that uh I just I really like the hardware like it's it's just one of those things like I just would like to have just because it's a nice thing it's it's just really welld designed yeah now it is a little thicker and wider than the 13-in M1 MacBook Pro and I realized that several ways one I had a laptop sleeve from Harbor London that fit the 13-in great the 14-inch does not fit and so I ordered another sleeve from them it comes in tomorrow I'll talk about that next week and also my bridge vertical dock which I loved I was using that's what I used at my desk all the time for docking it will not fit in that at all Bridge has not said whether or not they will be making a vertical dock for the 14in I really hope they do and I've been tweeting at him to see if they will do it so I kind of just took the vertical dock away and just put my MacBook Pro just on the desk and I plug one cable into it I had to rework some of my signal chain for the Thunderbolt docks because the bridge vertical dock makes use of two cables there's two cables coming out I didn't want to have to connect two cables every time to my MacBook Pro now so I was able to rearrange everything and there's one dock that's like Daisy chained but one cable allows me to connect to everything I have an external hard drive my LG ultra fine my mix pr3 sound device plus the Thunderbolt 3 dock where have my SD card stuff like and the ethernet Jack on the on that plus Blackmagic like a ATM switcher so like everything through one cable which is still amazing the other thing about the hardware again everything is great I love having mag safe back again it's really cool but I also love being able to charge with a USBC also because you know I only have one mag safe cable there's only one that comes with a computer and I have not bought more mag safe cables I may but it's nice because if I have a specific bag like I have a peak design backpack that I'll bring if I want to do some shooting I have USBC cables and USBC Chargers from like anchor I don't want to have to move the mag saafe charger every time I use a different bag so it's nice I can just charge it with the USBC cables that I have and that works great now it comes to the display so the display is the promotion the variable refresh rates a mini LED display with the notch now I will say coming from the 12.9 in iPad Pro that has mini LED the display looks just as good if not even slightly better than that the display is great you can watch HDR content even on YouTube and you see that HDR difference you know the it get becomes brighter and you can even move that window around the laptop screen and because of the variable refresh 120 HZ like the HDR section of the web browser playing the YouTube video will stay HDR and everything else will you know not be and it's lightning fast like you don't see see any Jitter or lag and so the display is beautiful now the notch I be curious your thoughts on it because there's no notch on the iPad Pro it does go away sometimes for the most part I did notice some strange Behavior with menu bar icons I have a lot of menu bar icons and I was trying not to use bartender CU I wanted to see how the notch handled it and I have everything from you know Wi-Fi and Spotlight to pay spot one password Fantastical text expander Hazel uh the Elgato Control Center and stream deck which are two separate icons plus I have a shortcuts icon up there so I have a lot of icons up there and interestingly on the MacBook Pro screen they weren't all showing up they went up to the Notch and then like there were no more they didn't go to the other side of the Notch and I was actually missing a couple menu bar icons when I plugged my new 14-in Macbook Pro into my LG ultrafine display then all the icons appear in the menu bar and have access to all of them so that's a little bit of a weird Behavior I thought the menu bar icons were going to go to the other side of the notch but that doesn't seem to be the case it seems like the OS is kind of just deciding what menu bar icons to show or hide uh in that but what have been your thoughts on the display nobody needs that many menu bar icons ever oh you don't know that's why we're going to get to that and why the utilities are what makes Macos great but anyway go ahead yeah no I got a I got a lot of stuff to dig into on this thing I've only had it for a few days and it's been a busy a few days so of course I'm I'm still digging through I I got set app and installed like three things and I'm going to uninstall set app I'll just put it that way there's just nothing in there I need sorry guys I'll I'll I'll get some apps though I'll definitely probably just buy bartender separately cuz that's a good utility but there's really just nothing else in there there's a lot of replacement apps for things I already use I setup's cool just not for me anyway um the notch nah it doesn't I I I immediately just went and got one of the 15 uh Notch Hiers things and just made it permanently black up there and I oh did you yeah I've never noticed it I don't care I I would prefer it to be black space anyway cuz I'm in the party that just says uh everything below the notch is a 16 X10 display just give me that I'm also minimalist when it comes to that kind of stuff I deleted everything in my menu bar so uh the only thing I have up there is control center Siri and a clock that is analog oh so yeah Su sui what what utility did you get for that menu bar blackout oh um give me two seconds cuz I had not tried one yet I was curious what I'm most curious about if when it blacks out the menu bar what does it do with the menu bar icons does it make them white let's see topnotch top I got top-notch CU it's made by a developer that already makes something I like I just I forget what that is uh yeah the icons are white okay and Siri still colorful so I guess it's just whatever whatever it's set to bartender shows me drafts and fantastic H I haven't edited like I there's just a set of glasses here for bartender again like I just don't have any utilities like I I played around with a couple of the things that show you like performance uh what's that one called that Everyone likes I set menus I played around with that adds like 400 things to your menu I I didn't care for that too much cool stuff just nothing I'll ever need yeah again I'm coming from an iPad where the menu bar is a clock and uh the Wi-Fi thing so yeah just not something where I don't I just don't feel like I need a lot of tools and information up there but something I'll probably look into as I go along here well let me let me I'll make a couple recommendations in a moment the last thing I want to say just as as I was setting up I typically like to set up a new Mac from scratch and not migr stuff because you know when you have a Mac over time sometimes if you're downloading utilities and third party apps outside of the App Store stuff can just you know be in the libraries or whatever but I had kept my M1 MacBook Pro pretty clean just installing what I needed and deleting things when I didn't I use Hazel which will find any Library files when you delete an application that might be hidden and will'll eliminate those as well but I did the migration assistant from my M1 to the M1 Pro MacBook Pro that I have now and over a thunderbolt cable it was super fast I mean it transferred everything in like 20 minutes and it was just like I had opened up my M1 MacBook Pro everything was as I had wanted some of the apps were broken like Skype wouldn't open for some reason I once I updated to the latest monor like 12 12.0.1 or whatever then everything worked fine again so there was some kind of weirdness there if you use an app like audio hijack then you also have to like lessen the disc security which is a a bunch of voodoo you have to do like audio hijack walks you through it but that's another thing you have to do so migration assistant just want to say works really well especially over a thunderbolt cable and a quick word on performance you know I got the M1 Pro that secondary tier which is the 10 core CPU 16 core GPU and I did a couple things in Final cut and I did notice hey it's faster than the M1 and if I had the M1 Max it would be even faster I will refer to a video that Andrew did which was a great comparison between the M1 M1 Pro and M1 Max they has the spec out M1 Max and then the you know M1 Pro as well that article in video really shows basically the M1 Pro base model is like twice as fast as the M1 and the M1 Max is like twice as fast as the M1 Pro so it's kind of an easy tiered speed thing so if you want the most speed yeah get the M1 max if you don't need all that GPU power the M1 Pro is really great for pretty much everything else and so that's I did notice the performance I did notice a performance Improvement and it's like you know twice as fast like rendering stuff than my M1 and so yeah I'll just refer watch that video from Andrew and you could see the direct comparison when it comes to what makes Mac OS great I'm going to recommend you try two things and see what you think one is a a clipboard manager have you tried a clipboard manager yet no that's on my to-do list so I recommend pastebot the makers of tweetbot which is a great Twitter app tap Bots is the developer pastebot is what I use it lives in the menu bar as I said you might this might be useful enough to live in the menu bar but it keeps track of everything that you copy and paste and you can go back and refer to things and if you use that for a little while I find that very useful again one reason use Mac OS right there pastebot and I also recommend I don't know if they have a free trial or not but text expander is an excellent application I've been using for a long time where you can kind of do this with keyboard shortcuts and like doing like autocorrect uh programming but text expander is a powerful application where you can just type a few little Snippets of letters or whatever and you can have it expand into longer strings of text for whatever you want I recommend just to start make something like semicolon em your email address and then anytime you have to type in your email address rather than typing out the whole thing you just hit semicolon em and it expands your email address instantly and you know it's correct it's spelled correctly you don't have any you know spelling errors because text expander is expanding it to the full email address that you had put in the app so text expander because it's a Mac application it is systemwide and it works everywhere if you use text expander on iPad you either have to use their third party keyboard or some apps support it like bear where you can actually use your text expander Snippets within the app but it's not systemwide and so that's one of the benefits of Mac OS is you have pastebot and text expander that work systemwide across the whole deal yeah text expander is cool I've used Apple's built-in keyboard shortcut mechanism Forever on iPad and found it to be great like I already have several shortcuts for different Emoji uh for my email address for getting the Apple Insider URL for specific uh Pages like I use it all the time for iPad and it actually carried over to my Mac so this the entire time I've been using my Mac I've been using the same uh keyboard Strokes to get all of my quick little uh keyboard shortcuts so I I understand that Tech expander is a much improved version of this and it's something I can definitely look at but for me kind of like one password is to Apple passwords I it's probably enough to keep using Apple's utility but I'll definitely try it at the very least yeah and then the last thing I would suggest for you Wes but you know this podcast we're recording right now if you do it on your Mac the Mac can use your USB microphone both in Skype and in quick time to record all at the same time which again absolutely like you were saying is totally limitation of iPad OS and apple could change it in a software update but it's something the Mac can do yeah I'm again the only reason why I'm recording on my iPad today is because I just didn't want to go through any of the Hol blo of setting it up I I know it take two seconds I just whatever we already know what works I didn't want to mess with that just for today's show um maybe maybe next show I'll record on the the MacBook as long as I still have it but uh yeah there's a lot of stuff here I'm I'm definitely enjoying it again like I never hated the Mac like let me be clear like I never didn't have a Mac just just because I was like oh boo Mac OS it's 40 years old but um it's more like I just picking up an iPad turning it on going to that home screen something about it is just nice and I can't put my finger on it I've I've asked people to help me explain it on Twitter it's not something that's like easy to explain uh it's just I really enjoy The Whimsy the uh use cases the the ways the iPad OS makes me think and interact with content like when I open a window or something like an app that requires it to be in full screen like it it's I'm focusing on that subject whereas Mac OS does have a strength in the fact that I can have 30 things open at once and that's great at the same time it can also not be so great cuz I can also look at 30 things at once and maybe not do what I'm supposed to be doing sure there's there's a lot to play with here uh things that I'm excited about is like universal control I want to see what that's like I've been using sidecar so that I can still have my iPad Pro here um and use it as another display it's been handy it's been very buggy in this Mac OS release I've seen people talk about this um but when it works it works really nice and uh I like that you can actually go into display settings and adjust where your sidecar window appears so my my iPad's actually between my MacBook and my external display and I'm actually able to set my sidecar window between those two and have the cursor moved between them so it's it's really cool that's pretty cool yeah lots lots of little things here uh to note like uh again being able to freely adjust how big a window is in split screen iPad should be able to do that the the fact that I can't have full full display mode on an external display is just insane like honestly if if Apple did that tomorrow I would return this MacBook like that's really the one one of the bigger reasons why I've even considered keeping this and and I am considering keeping it like don't get me wrong like uh again if I do keep the MacBook it's going to probably stay at my desk this is probably going to be a permanent fixture and a and a Macbook instead of a Mac because I do travel and I would like to take my work with me so I'm not going to do this with an iMac right so that that's why I would still choose a Macbook over something like what you would choose like a Mac Pro or iMac Pro so that's why I'm I'm going this route um maybe I'll upgrade like again this one's probably going to get returned no matter what cuz I'm going to probably get a nicer version um might look into the 16in I I I had that before I know they're gargantuan but again if it's sitting at my desk it's probably fine that's just kind of where my head's at right now with this thing I need to try several more things cuz if I'm going to write about it I need to uh I need to be able to address all of the pain points of iPad OS and believe me I'm aware of them I use it every day it's just one of those things where is it enough and that's the question ultimately I'm going to have to ask myself is the things I can do on Mac OS the things that it's capable of over an iPad enough for me to justify paying upwards of $2,500 or more for a MacBook Pro so we'll see and uh I'll tell you guys more in a couple weeks all right well I'm excited to hear your your long-term experience with it for sure I'm really enjoying it h i bid fwell to my M1 MacBook Pros I traded it in and I'm I'm rocking it now I'm using it right now and um I'll continue to share my thoughts with it as well but I'm I'm very happy with it also very curious to see what Apple comes out with in their prle desktop for sure I'm curious about Mac Mini Pro and iMac Pro last thing as we move on from the MacBook Pro just want to say this because I think it's hilarious that guy who put a USBC port on his iPhone uh is now selling it on eBay and the bidding is like past $85,000 right now so if you were wondering whether or not that people want USBC port on an iPhone there at least people willing to pay thousands of dollars for it so you have that I don't understand what I I I guess collectible doesn't function well I don't know it's moving on yeah I will also put there was an awesome interview on the upgrade podcast with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley they had two apple Executives on their show Tim Millet and Tom Boger they talked about the M1 Pro and M1 Max and the development of those chips and it was a really good interview kind of seeing some of the behind the scenes information on the development of that and so I'll put a link to that in show notes if you want to listen to that podcast as well it was really good but listeners let us know what questions you have about the MacBook Pro airpods 3 and anything else you can tweet at Wes and myself our Twitter handles are in the show notes we would also greatly appreciate a five-star rating and review in apple podcast for the Apple Insider podcast that supports the show and you can even support the show directly with $5 a month either directly on Apple podcast or patreon.com inssider you'll get an adree uninterrupted version of the show plus Early Access there and we also have a private Discord Channel where going to be posting some stuff in there very soon you can check that out and also don't forget to listen to homekit Insider with Andrew O'Hara and myself where we talk about smart home and homekit products thanks for tuning in this week it's good to be back we'll catch you next timewelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven robas and today we're going to talk about the MacBook Pro airpods 3 got some news about the iMac and we'll touch on meta you know we got to mention that too this episode is brought to you by bespoke post true bill prisoner wine and expressvpn you'll hear about those in a moment and joining me a convert to the Mac ecosystem maybe that's a little too soon to say but Wes Hillyard has joined me what's going on Wes well Stephen it'll surprise you to know that I'm still podcasting from an iPad today so with this MacBook sitting right in front of me oh my goodness well the last time I was on the show was two weeks ago because last week William Gallagher and Mike worthley graciously filled in and so they did an awesome job thank you guys for doing that the last episode I recorded before that I was in the mountains actually near usest I was in Western North Carolina and uh I was recording under a blanket I forgot to take a picture but to try and get some decent sound in the cabin I was in I actually put a blanket over my recording setup it was very warm under there but I think it turned out all right and it was nice seeing the mountains in the background you guys have fall up there which is nice we don't get that in Florida yeah it's it's actually nice and chilly here I'm enjoying our weather right now it's uh it's great you know you say you record under a blanket I've never gone through any of these crazy like climbing in a closet or going under a blanket I just talking to my microphone I don't know if the audience ever notices but I'm in a wood panel room so I I'm sure there's some Echo uh I have some padding on the wall I've tried to hang some stuff up to prevent any uh too much Reverb but yeah I don't know maybe it's the microphone I'm using or whatever but if you have those really sensitive ones I guess you you do need to have several layers of padding around you yeah I mean and it depend you know carpet helps too and you know just whatever you have in the room can soak up sound but no you always sound good so it's you know it's it's all good well we're going to spend a lot of time on the new Macbook Pro and airpods 3 I have some thoughts on that as well but want to hit just some quick news here at the top the 21 1/2 in Intel iMac has gone into the Afterlife it is no longer available Apple has discontinued the 21.5 in iMac in favor of course for the new M1 24in iMac and the Intel 27 in is still around but as we'll say in a moment that is probably not long for this world either come early next year with an apple silicon iMac the only thing I wanted to say was the 21 and half inch iMac served me well for a lot of years I think I had the 2015 model I swapped out an SSD because it still came with like that terrible spinning hard drive for the longest time but you know it's good that we have the 24in now I actually set up a couple 24in M1 IMAX for work and those things are very nice I just want to say they are super light super fast and it's a great option at least for like an entrylevel iMac option so yeah 21 and A2 inch it's gone I got to see the 24in iMac in person for the first time the other day I went to an Apple Store a couple hours from me yeah they're they're really nice computers uh definitely liking that blue I I mean I barely already have one Mac I I don't need four so it's uh tempting to have to look at because it's pretty but that's about as far as it'll go yeah now the rumor about IMAX coming in 2022 this is from leaker Dylan dkt who has had pretty good record in the last year or so but he sent out a tweet saying the iMac Pro is going to come back early 2022 basically just in a few months and that this iMac Pro is going to have Pro motion and a mini LED screen which seems like it would fall in line we have the 12.9in iPad Pro with mini LED promotion now we have MacBook Pros with promotion mini LED so it would make sense that it would come to the iMac line next you know base model 16 gig ram 512 storage M1 Pro and M1 Max against all this makes sense the interesting part would be ports like what ports are going to be on this new iMac Pro or whatever the next highend iMac is Dylan dkt was saying that it's going to have an SD card slot USBC obviously Thunderbolt and an HDMI port now of all the ports on the new Macbook Pro which again we'll talk about in a little bit the HDMI port is kind of the most heads scratching for me obviously people who work in like corporate environments and have projectors they need to connect their computer to to do like a power Point presentation I'm sure the HDMI would be useful but HDMI has far as I can recall never been on an iMac and so I am not inclined to believe that the new iMac would have an HDMI port but that's just me and so Dylan is just kind of giving us a little preview there yeah there's no way there's an HDMI port on that iMac like that's that's nuts I mean even even then uh just look at the ports the USBC is pretty uh short itself HDMI is a little longer the these cases are not very thick and I know the iMac Pro whatever it is probably isn't going to be the same thickness as the 24-in iMac but Apple's going to want to play that Slim Game for sure they're going to show off and say look what we were able to do uh with our computer because of our Apple silicon they're not going to make it that much thicker if at all so definitely interesting to keep an eye on yeah you know the iMac Pro is a really weird thing in Apple's lineup right because they only ever came out with one and you know it reminds me of the trash can actually it's a almost like an ill-conceived like oops we shouldn't have done that kind of like of uh a Mac debut for apple and um it would be weird to me honestly to see the iMac Pro name come back why not just call it the 30-in iMac or whatever uh and and move on but we'll see yeah and I'm not even inclined to think it will be called iMac Pro they might just call it 30in iMac which I do think the screen size will increase with decreasing bezels but we'll see it's going to come soon and that's really the one I am waiting for which we'll talk about once we get to the MacBook Pro section but anyway iMac Pro rumors early 2022 did want to mention that homepod mini colors which were announced at the last Apple event are now available to buy you can buy it online and they are available in store actually went to the Apple Store for tradein reasons and I actually saw the colored homepod minis in person you know you got the red the orange and the blue they look pretty cool I did not pick one up just yet one I just I don't know where I would put another homepod mini right now and I don't know what color I would go with I mean the yellow is attractive I've seen that in a lot of posts the blue is a pretty like muted blue so if you want something that's still kind of a neutral color but adds just a little bit the blue one is interesting but if you want to check them out they are in the store and they actually have them set up on several tables where you can actually just see the actual homep pod not just in the Box it's yellow orange and blue you said red but uh I I would love a red homepod product a product red homepod would be really cool you know that's yeah I totally didn't get so it's yellow orange and blue and I guess in some of the pictures that I have seen it looks reddish uh maybe just saturation the orange looks really yeah like it depends on the saturation you're looking at but yeah it's a very deep orange yeah yeah but you go see them go check them out they're in the stores and finally before we get to airpods 3 and the MacBook Pro I feel like we need to mention Facebook's rebranding Mark Zuckerberg you know they did this big presentation about how they have rebranded their parent company so they are no longer Facebook as the Umbrella Corporation obviously Facebook still exists as the app and the service but they have now becomed meta me with an interesting like Infinity in an m shape thing and yeah they are now meta one to kind of separate the negative connotation that Facebook has in so many people's minds and it's their focus on VR AR and the future and the metaverse as you would say it's Facebook you know it's still Facebook it's still Mark Zuckerberg you there's still doing all the Facebook things the thing that I found most interesting was there are actually other companies called meta apparently they did try to contact one company which is meta company the founder is Nate schoick then in an article that John grber put on daring Fireball it talked about that apparently Facebook did reach out to this company didn't say they were Facebook they were talking about you know naming and how much do you want for the brand or whatever and when the price was set Facebook said well never mind and then they just never heard from Facebook again and Facebook just called meta and so there's I think a court case going to be happening for that brand and then also there's another company meta Inc which is founded by Andrew Wilkinson it's a tiny Capital they have a bunch of apps and Services I know of them because metalab one of their subsidiaries makes a project management platform called flow and so I was familiar with this company as well but Facebook just seemed to kind of like totally steamroll and just say like I forget all these other little metal meta companies well little compared to Facebook they just named their thing meta and just I don't know what else to say about it it's still Facebook what do you think w i i don't even know if this is to try and like save face because pun intended sorry he said save face ah there you go yeah terrible uh no so this is this isn't like alphabet and Google where when Google split off its company into alphabet and then started with it its alphabetical naming conventions for all of its uh smaller asset and everything to try and basically hide all of its losses uh Google people forget this but Google had a lot of failing experiments and bad Investments and stuff so they just said you know what we're alphabet now and it's really hard for you to tell how much money we're losing when there's 30 companies underneath us right uh this isn't quite the same thing it seems to be like you said like Facebook's trying to make itself look better you know people will buy a meta Rift VR headset rather than a Facebook Rift or whatever they're already making weird decisions it seems like they're they're trying to spread the skeletons around rather than put them all in one hole right I saw an announcement the other day that seemed really cool at first uh Facebook gives up facial recognition I'm sure everyone saw this it it's they're deleting their millions of data sets and all this stuff and you can go immediately to Facebook and opt out of ever being a part of it blah blah blah all seems legitimate because you know there's a lot of conversations in China Taiwan and stuff where this Stu's getting really scary uh and Facebook wanted to back away from it and then immediately the day a day later meta says we're going to continue using all the same data sets it's just Facebook that's not going to use facial recognition it's like wait yeah you're the same company more or Les it it's it's so weird I I don't know like it's like they're trying to give Facebook good press and then absorb the the weird blows because meta is just this concept at at the moment so please listeners remember they're the same company they're the it's the same person and 5 years from now when your mom tries to go and sign up for a meta account because all of your aunts are like buying Bitcoin in the metaverse like just please stop her from doing this it's it's going to get bad so we'll see we'll see what they do with this new meta thing you know was interesting I think it was about a year ago in all of Facebook's apps which if you didn't know obviously they own Instagram they also own WhatsApp Oculus and all their apps like at the bottom they would say buy Facebook so if you'd open up the Instagram app it would say like Instagram buy Facebook and I think again kind of separate the negative connotation the name Facebook has now I imagine they will change that to say Instagram by meta rather than Facebook so you know some people might be like oh good it's not a Facebook app anymore but it still is it's just Facebook changed its name and one more thing before we get to airpods 3 you put this in here and I thought this was interesting because notability which is a app for the iPad I think iPhone and Mac now you can get on all three platforms but it was one of the apps that I used when I first started using apple pencil because you can import PDFs or you can just draw you don't need to have a document but you can Mark things up and a really useful application for not taking productivity things like that and they transitioned to a subscription model just earlier this week or they announced they were going to previously you would buy notability for a set price and then you would own it forever quote unquote and when they announced the subscription service they said that previous buyers of notability would have a year free of access with all the pro features but after that first year they would need to sign up for a subscription and it would be I think $12 a year yes $12 a year is the subscription so you know this is the many apps have had to make this transition you know I had the HED camera app team on the podcast and they actually discussed this because they were initially just one time purchase and they transitioned to a subscription model other apps like tweetbot always get heat from customers because tweetbot will release a new version and charge for it because guess what developers need to make money this is like their livelihood I think notability what they walked back on the previous customer thing where if you had previously bought notability in the past initially they were going to say you have to subscribe after a year but now they're saying you'll have it forever there's two conversations in in this whole deal one is notability what they did whether their missteps and subscriptions as a whole so first off notability they changed their business model uh to the subscription $12 a year and just instead of really grandfathering and their paid customers they said you know what you got I can't remember what notability cost it's somewhere between $10 and $20 maybe 30 for the Mac App the usual app pricing they they basically said okay existing customers we're not really going to grandfather you in instead uh we're going to give you a year free and we're just going to count that as what you paid for the app in the first place and in a year you have to start subscribing or you're going to go down to the free version which is basically you get three three different pencils uh one template paper and like limited saves and stuff like that and there it's like it's it's a very limited version of the app and customers started you know kind of saying hey I paid for this I should own it forever like that's kind of how like that's what I expect to work and there's a lot of conversation about this on Twitter you you can read my the whole thread on this there's um a lot of conversation there if you can get beyond the usual hot takes uh cuz it took me a moment to actually figure out exactly what people are upset about because it seemed at first people were just gener upset like oh no another paid subscription app which was a lot of people still sadly but they were more upset that they felt like notability was taking away their paid app that they had already purchased and my argument here is is yes notability messed up they probably shouldn't have took away so much in the first place from Paid users they they should have pulled the highight and and these other apps what they've done which is basically give them the same feature set kind of I maybe maybe one or two things missing but it's it's overall the same premium feature set and then in in order to get the new features subscribe and that that's what notability has shifted to now so if you were a previous notability user you get on a case-by Case basis all of the same features that you had right when you paid for the app and as future releases come out notability will decide whether or not it's a subscription only feature or not and again paid users will then have to decide if they're going to subscribe or just continue using the base feature set which is now a little better than just the free version they're getting grandfather in a little bit better right which I I definitely applaud them for that that's a a good decision don't make all of your existing paying customers angry maybe incentivize them a little bit to actually pay you more money which is the goal here anyway yeah and this is tough for every app you know I do not envy the developers that make this decision you know to support ongoing app development you need ongoing income and subscription Services is just the way the best way to guarantee and to project you know what is our income over the long term and for for at least this year you know and in their latest blog post I'll put a link to this as well it's on medium but they said you know we're a small company we're trying to do the best we can and so to be clear if you had previously purchased notability the current feature set prior to this subscription change you'll have access to those features lifetime access and new features like West said notability will decide whether or not it gets subscription only or if you get those as the lifetime access user as well the only thing I'll say is I think the way notability has it here if they would have launched it like the current situation where if you previously purchased it you'll have the features that you have forever there would not have been the same outcry they'll still be the people that just say like subscriptions are bad I never want to pay for a subscription and it's like well you know again app developers are working on the app every year so paying every year makes sense but I do think I like when apps have the subscription option but then also have like a lifetime purchase option that's way more expensive they sometimes very extravagant like $150 and it's like right but I'll just subscribe right like Hali I think the annual subscription is like $5 or something like that like it's it's it's very cheap for annual or you can pay lifetime for like $45 and that feels really good like okay I can subscribe for a few dollars a year and you could see if you use this app if you want it if it's useful to you and then lifetime purchase is like 45 I think think depending on the app you know maybe you can reach closer to 100 but it really depends you know things I like how things does it things does not have a subscription currently but their individual apps are on the expensive side when compared to other apps I think the IOS app is like $10 or something $15 the Mac app is like $30 to $50 or something like that but it's worth it and in their model which maybe notability could have done this also and this is what tweetbot does they'll say Okay version 10 you can have that app and we'll do bug fixes but if you want the new version the new features then version 11 is going to cost you $10 and you can buy it or not either way your current app works just like it does and that's it and you know honestly it's kind of how old software purchasing used to work when you would go and buy you know version five of whatever piece of software you know print shop or whatever you had version five and maybe you would get some kind of patch update or maybe not and when the new version of print shop came out there was no like subscription to pay there was no like there might be upgrade pricing but prior to the internet it was like you have to go and buy another big box and version six would cost you know $50 or $80 or whatever and so I think app developers can do that but you know listen developers it's hard it's hard being a developer and so if there's an they got to eat they got to eat and uh if there's apps that you really find use of that you use in work or just for fun and it's a really good app help the developer like pay for their service because it's it's worth it they do good work last thing on the notability thing and I'll I want to talk a little more on subscriptions as a whole but yeah I think this was pr- wise a bad move they could have done this in the first place and I think I I don't know if this was ever on the table or if they were just holding this in their cards just in case things blew up yeah it's clear that when when moving to a subscription or whatever these companies need to definitely take into account their current paying user base because you make those people mad they're going to leave and then you've lost a significant portion of people who would have paid the subscription you got to convince them to stick around and but the other side of the coin is is I kind of get why no notability did this um it's like you said this isn't 2002 anymore you can't you're not going to go to the store and buy a CD and have that work Forever Until the next version comes out and then you could just choose to ignore that version and keep using the the old version of it like uh I remember uh for the longest time in like in my high school we had windows 2002 and it it was 2008 you know so right exactly you get one version of a thing and as long as it can still install on that computer it still works but in the modern era you're connected to the internet and your operating system on your devices are getting updated and new features added so at any point in time your software could break or be exposed to a new critical bug or security issue so you need constant maintenance constant updates and if you're not paying for that I don't I don't know what you expect like it's like letting your house fall apart you know it oh the leak will just go away on its own you know it's you have to spend money to get the quality things so from notability point of view I I see this like yeah guys you paid for this app once 5 years ago 10 bucks uh you we've given you free updates over this entire lifespan of the app uh and asked for nothing but now we're asking you for 12 bucks Please Subscribe or kindly leave uh is basically their position and I totally get that because uh we shouldn't be expecting to get things for free forever and uh that that was kind of my stance on this uh when this first dropped and like I said as I started reading some of the uh people saying you know I should still at least be able to use some version of this app and I suggested you know turning off automatic updates and stuff and I know that's untenable you you you have to turn off automatic updates for everything and it it falls apart so of course moving on to the higher subscription discussion I just wanted to say I had a silly tweet it was meant to be more or less I guess sarcasm overall uh cuz I don't generally do just these blanket like silly statements but I said idiots on the internet will happily give Apple thousands of dollars for a new iPhone Mac and iPad every single year and then turn around and complain when a developer ask for 12 bucks a year for a subscription just so they can you know feed their kids um this tweet kind of blew up because that a lot of people agreed especially developers I look at that like list and there are so many developers and the likes it's it's funny but uh then there was a few people like how dare you insult us it's like sorry man like if if you're if you're going to be that person I'm going to call you an idiot I'm sorry uh it's just at the end of the day just don't be that person I just wanted to know like what you thought of that Stephen as far as like subscriptions go like do you think people just are afraid of paying for software like is there some sort of stigma there versus Hardware It's just tough because everything's a subscription from like your streaming service entertainment stuff to your productivity apps to maybe even paying for your device you know if you're on the iPhone upgrade plan and you're playing monthly you know I understand the sentiment that it feels like a lot of monthly hits like whether it's hitting your credit card you're paying for Apple One bundle so I get the aversion to subscriptions but you know find I think most people use like a few apps you know what I mean I don't think most people use like 100 subscription apps and those few apps that people find useful I think yeah a subscription cuz you use that app every day or multiple times a week for work or for fun or whatever like yeah I I think subscription model is fine and it's supporting the people doing it yeah looking at my device I have 232 apps installed I and I use pretty much all of them on a regular basis some of them are utility apps you know some you only go in once a month whatever but it's a significant number of apps I I I know I'm in the minority here you know most people might have 100 apps or less or 30 apps you know whatever Apple has what 35 pre-installed yeah look at my subscriptions I think I have about 15 16 paid yearly or monthly subscriptions I I keep this in a app where I track my expenses and it cost me $14 a month for all of my subscription apps total and these are like utilities like day one fantastic how drafts like things that I use every single day constantly and it's less than the cost of a Netflix subscription for all of the apps that I subscribe to That's not including of course like apple one and Netflix and stuff I consider those entertainment they're they're a different category it's like paying for cable as far as like just utility apps with subscriptions I think it's totally doable because most of these apps are just asking for less than a dollar a month in total I think sticker shock is a thing absolutely especially some of these apps that say $50 a year but that's only like four bucks a month when you really get down to it and I understand that not everyone's in the position to just throw down $50 all at once randomly like I I get again like some of the sticker shock here but if you are a person who can pay $1,500 for an iPhone or $2,000 for a Macbook and then that last straw I guess being 50 bucks for an app that you're going to use every single day it just it's a bit bewildering to me anyway yeah well I also think one of the benefits of being in the Apple ecosystem is Apple makes great first-party apps and if you wanted to have a good no ticking app where you can use the apple pencil maybe even bring in a PDF and Mark that up you can actually do all of that with the built-in apps that come with your iPad you know you don't actually don't need a third party app for maybe a lot of the base level tasks that you want to do this was the selling point of buying a Mac for years is like you get Garage Band and iMovie and you can literally make videos and you can you know do all that stuff right with your Mac right out of the box and you don't need any third party apps but if you get into some of that stuff and you want more and better tools for making videos or for taking notes or managing documents then you have this amazing world of third party apps that build on that functionality and give you even more control and power over your devices and what you can do with them and so with notability again like if you want to just a free option where you can Mark stuff up and take notes like the Apple notes app is fine like it it has gotten better over the years and it's plenty usable but if you want something with more power that's what the third party apps are there for you get what you pay for you get what you pay for and you know apps like Adobe that's all subscription now you know you used to be able to buy Photoshop and just use it for whatever and now everything is a subscription either by app or by the whole Creative Cloud and I will say that's actually one of the reasons why I transition to use apps from the App Store that I can buy once I mean I'm so glad that Final Cut is a one-time purchase and I use pixel Mater rather than Photoshop one cuz I just don't want the Adobe Cloud running on my Mac I think it's kind of a heavy application and it's another subscription I don't have to pay for it so I make the choice to buy onetime apps like pixel Mater and Final Cut and compressor and I use those and then apps that I really love like bear for note taking yeah I could use Apple notes I could use Pages documents for taking notes but bear gives me features that are really worthwhile and make my workflow easier help me be more productive in taking notes and so I will gladly pay beay every year and I hope they keep like improving it and making it and I want all the new features that they have for me yeah absolutely I mean to be clear I'm not against the one time payment model just because I support subscriptions doesn't mean I'm like oh yeah everything should be a subscription no I totally agree like certain apps uh utilities and things absolutely should be onetime purchases they should probably charge more I I think that a lot of these onetime purchase apps are going way too low especially because people expect 99 cent apps on the App Store they should be charging $10 minimum for a lot of these utilities and I know terrible me uh wanting to spend more money I guess but I I I just feel like these developers deserve what to get paid for what they're making and and so yeah if they decide that like it's a onetime purchase I I think a lot of apps like like you said pixel M or these utility apps that you install on your computer that yes need updates but aren't connected to the web like they aren't using apis they aren't calling servers stuff like that those work as onetime purchases CU there isn't a constant overhead on the developer but for someone like carrot weather that that carrot weather developer has to pay for all the API calls they make to weather services and I think people forget that and that's why they have to charge $24 per person per year in order to get a premium subscription on carrot because I mean it's an amazing app plus there's API calls and stuff so I think yeah there's absolutely a case-by case basis for each and every app out there and I think it's a very personal decision for a person uh buying these things to say is this worth it for me remember like that's the whole reason the App Store exists there's hundreds of choices in every category find the thing that works for you and cost the amount of money that you're willing to pay and get it but don't be that guy that goes on the internet and complains because they have to spend an extra $5 a year to use a camera app that they like it's kind it's just a bad look yeah let me thank our friends at bespoke post they are a brand new sponsor we're so glad to have bespoke post with us and this fall you can get back into the swing of things with 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family so I got my wife a pair cuz she was still using the original airpods and I got my two sons a pair of airpods 3 as well they've never had airpods and they've only ever used like $15 headphones from a gas station which when when we went on vacation you know we were driving and so we had like a 12-hour road trip and we stopped at this one gas station rest stop and you know they other little technology section where you can get like Chargers that may or may not blow up your phone and cheap headphones and they had these just 100% airpod knockoffs like it was they had it was a white pill charging case looked like a dental floss charging case you open it up the earbuds were white Totally Wireless 100% looked like airpods uh there was a little screen inside would actually which actually tells you the battery level these were $15 like I kid you not listeners $15 this will be the chapter picture artart for the podcast and I will tweet it out as well but $15 the feature actually showing you the battery level and like this little cheap digital screen that was actually kind of nice I appreciated that but anyway $15 for these airpods and he was like I really want to get these and he didn't know I had already had the airpods 3 like arriving at the house like days later and I was like okay sure and these $15 fake airpods they sound terrible like they literally sound as though the speaker is on the other side of a tin can with a string and a piece of felt over that and there's like white noise in the background like it is just a terrible terrible sounding headphone but it is totally Wireless you paid $15 for plastic yeah I mean but honestly like $15 for Totally Wireless like no wire between the earbuds like they just you know look quote unquote like airpods you know that was kudos to the whatever you know company is making these knockoffs but $15 was it's just hilarious so anyway got airpods and you know I got this question Jason Aton asked me this on Twitter and others like you know what is the use of airpods if you have airpods Pro and even airpods Max you know I'm fortunate enough to have you know all three versions of airpods and I still find that I have separate use cases for all three if I'm doing a deep work session or I'm writing and I want kind of really immersive music or I'm editing a podcast I'll do that with my airpods Max the over the ear and noise cancelling is great if I'm going grocery shopping the airpods pro with noise cancelling the best like that just that one use case plus other places where I want noise cancelling but have a discret headphone airpods Pro are great and they sound great they they really do but there were still some instances where I liked using the regular airpods if I go for a walk I'm not crazy about transparency mode it feels kind of weird to me and so I actually prefer just to use airpods that are not isolating and I can just kind of hear the ambient noise around me through the airpod and when I exercise if I do a bike or walk or elliptical something about the airpods pro like a I don't like sweating in the comply foam ear tips that I have in them and the silicone tips slide out actually of my ear of that come with the airpods pro so I got the comply third party tips and they stay super solid that's what I again use grocery shopping but exercising with that I just don't like the feeling of having those in my ear while I'm sweating and stuff and so I prefer the regular airpods for that too so there were enough use cases where I like using the base model airpods as opposed to the pro and the Max and the I was very curious about the airpods 3 and so got a pair family got a pair family loves them I mean it's the first time they've had like modern airpods so they're all like this is amazing very cool so the airpods 3 they're 180 bucks they're more expensive than you know previous models but they do come with spatial audio with head tracking which is nice and they have this redesigned you know this contoured design that Apple announced so my initial thought was you know pairing it super easy all that they sound really good the sound on the airpods third generation or airpods 3 is significantly better than the previous base model airpods the bass has a better response and it is is more Bassy and just it's everything is clearer in general listening to music on these is much closer to the airpods pro quality rather than the base model airpods definitely not airpods pro quality but the sound is very very good they do feel much larger in the ear Because the actual part that goes into your ear is just bigger like it's a it's a larger device and so you do feel it more in your ear which some people might not like I actually found they feel more secure being larger inside my ear but they were still very very comfortable I can wear them for a long time and I do forget I'm wearing them sometimes like they are very comfortable and the shorter stem is welcome you know it's nice I see like regular airpods now and the stem looks like really long because these airpods has a shorter stem like the airpods pro my wife who had regular airpods before and now she has the airpods 3 she did say that clicking the stem is a little weird compared to tapping the outside because the way they turn into your ear like the airpods 3 are made to go directly into your ear canal and so tapping the stem kind of makes you have to like reach in a little bit to get it like it's not just like tapping the side so if you liked the tapping I've heard opinions both ways some people are not crazy about about the force click on the airpods 3 some love it so that's a preference thing but I'm used to it with the airpods pro so I was good with that feeling larger in the ear but it does feel comfortable the Basse is really good and they sound really good and so it's a great option the problem is often times you can get airpods Pro on sale for like 200 bucks like you can go on Amazon and get airpods Pro even with the new mag safe case for 200 bucks which is only $20 away from the airpods 3 $180 price and so if you have no airpods or maybe you just have the base model airpods like a couple years old and you want to upgrade you're not sure what to upgrade two that's a difficult decision I will say because these airpods 3 don't have silicone tips even though it fits better in the ear and is larger in the ear like there's no noise isolation noise isolation meaning if you have soft silicone tips you know it's going to block out a lot of sound I did go grocery shopping with the airpods 3 instead of the airpods pro to see how how it sounded and I heard everything in the grocery store like all that white noise and voices and all that like it was kind of annoying and you it doesn't block anything out and so for that use case I'm still going to stick with the airpods pro because I just like it better around the house I have been leaning towards the airpods 3 because if one of my kids or my wife is trying to tell me something like not having the isolated noise cancelling allows me to hear them better and I can just pause real quick and talk to them and they don't have to like try to get my attention multiple times which is also why I went with these instead of pro for my kids cuz they're going to have noise cancelling on all the time if they had those and I would have to like call their name multiple times or text them from 10 ft away to get their attention but if you are looking to upgrade your airpods and you're not sure to go with the airpods 3 or the airpods pro it's a tough decision if you are in environments where that noise cancellation would be really helpful maybe you're in a co-working space or just an office where you're allowed to wear headphones but there's a lot of other people talking on the phone or whatever or you do have situations like going to the grocery store or you know walking around a theme park and you just don't want to hear the stuff that's going on and you want to be really isolated or you travel and you go on planes but you don't want the airpods max the noise cancelling on the airpods pro is still great it's really great and I would say you probably should go with the airpods pro if you get a new one now you know it has that mag safe alignment charging in the case they still sound incredible I kind of wish Apple updated those recently so it be be easier to say like don't buy these year and a half Old airpods Pro like get the new ones and I don't know there were rumors that airpods Pro generation 2 would be coming out soon but doesn't look like it's going to be coming before Christmas I mean the airpods pro are still great but they're also a year and a half old so not sure about that if there were colors for the airpods 3 I would have definit I would have just bought them just just to have a colored set of airpods cuz I I get your different use case thing uh it makes sense I don't know that I have enough varied use I I don't mind wearing the airpods pro for everything like I don't mind working out on them walking or whatever I don't mind transparency mode I actually prefer it I use it uh most of the time I'm wearing them that's the problem I just don't have a place for these to fit but if there was colors I would have I would have dived on them immediately and then of course uh airpods Pro 2 whenever that happened I'd probably just got those too hopefully though Apple Embraces some colors at some point I mean did you see the Beats fit Pro that came out same time I did see those and I'm like everyone was raving about them there's there there's colors I mean uh barely four options but they're all gray and pink so at least there's a different option out there I'm tempted to maybe get my mom a pair of the pink ones cuz she needs some headphones uh the airpods 3 are definitely in a weird spot I think financially speaking yeah they're basically identically priced so it's going to be a fit and finish thing preferences some people really don't like silicone tips um even even with the foam tips from comply and stuff like I remember wearing the airpods when they first came out I really like that plastic design I like how they just slip into the ear I feel like with even the the airpods pro there's some adjusting and placement kind of there's thought to it whereas the airpods don't you don't need any thought you just stick them in there there's stuff like that that I do miss about it but yeah just the feature set overall of the airpods I I would definitely choose the pro myself so yeah and I will say so I just looked on Amazon and I will put this link in the show notes this is on Amazon from the Apple Store quote unquote $190 for airpods pro so that is literally only $10 away from the new Air airpods third generation we're we're absolutely going to see some airpods proos soon I guess the question remains is there going to be another airpods Max sometime in the next 5 years but uh yeah airpods Pro we getting long in the tooth that battery not doing great I bought mine day one and uh it is noticeably shorter on each year I I don't remember I think it was like 4 and a half hours quoted uh on with ANC on I'm seeing maybe three uh if that I don't really time it or anything it's just I definitely notice that I'm getting that little thing noise in my ear more often um switching between the two so yeah the case is still seems to be the same amount but the airpods themselves are dying much faster yeah and that is one of the nice things about getting a new pair of airpods I was using the airpods 3 I listened to stuff for I don't know maybe 20 minutes half an hour put him back in the case and it said like 90% battery and I was like oh the new battery smell of a new pair of airpods it's very good so and these do have improved battery life even over the previous generation and it will say I mentioned the mag safe thing and I I tweeted a picture like it's kind of funny but the alignment of like putting the new airpods 3 case and the new airpods Pro case would do this too you can put it on a MAG safe charger that's even like you know standing like I have the belon 3 in1 charger and the mag safe charger like is elevated you it's you know floating in midair almost and it's strong enough to just stick to it it just sticks to the mag safe charger and you don't have to worry about alignment so it's actually appreciated to have that uh as part of the feature set in the charging case so so listeners if you have questions about the airpods 3 uh tweet at me I I'd answer whatever else if I didn't cover it here on the show and I'll be tweeting a picture of those fake airpods too because those are hilarious so there you have it they sell like four different versions of those fake airpods at my local farmers market it's hilarious it's amazing someone buys them because they they've always had them there absolutely let's take one more break and then we're going to talk about the MacBook Pro we want to tell you about our friends at true bill listen you probably have a ton of subscriptions hitting your credit cards every month you know all those streaming services that you signed up for and all those subscriptions are probably costing you hundreds if not thousands of dollars because you're forgetting to cancel and so you can fight back against scammy subscriptions with true bill true bill is the new app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need want or simply forgot about on average people save up to $720 a year with true bill because companies make subscriptions hard to cancel true bill makes it incredibly simple just link your accounts and true bill will cancel your unwanted subscriptions in one tap yeah you heard me right they will handle cancelling your subscriptions your Trill concierge is there when you need them to cancel unwanted subscriptions so you don't have to I've been using the trill app for several months 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use it on your iPhone your iPad your Mac even some smart TVs and wireless routers you open up the app on your iPhone or iPad or your Mac you click one button and you're protected so secure your online data today by visiting Express vpn.com slapple Insider that's expressvpn.com slapple Insider and you can get an extra 3 months for free expressvpn.com slapple inssider our thanks to expressvpn for sponsoring this episode now Wes you tweeted a picture of the MacBook Pro the new one as basically a like an elevated paper weight for your iPad and I was like wait a minute Wes hilard the iPad man has bought a new Macbook Pro and my I was on vacation I was like I don't even know what to think about this right now I'm going to have to talk to him when I get back so Wes what happened you you bought a MacBook Pro what in the world well I've been tempted for a while to get some kind of Mac uh cuz I have a Mac Mini in my living room as as I've said it it's it's dusty it turns on every now and then to run some server stuff that it there's really not much going on there I've literally used it five times in the last 3 years it's it's it's getting old not really my thing and I I just really like working from an iPad there's something Whimsical and fun about it but I've noticed you know Apple's you know Macos montere the M1 processors all of this stuff has really been Shifting the MacBook to be more iPad like in a lot of ways and it's it's very curious uh to me what has changed cuz the last time I used a Macbook was in 2017 is I sold a I had a 16-in MacBook Pro with touch bar I think I had the the high the higher end I set processor graphics and all of that so I mean I was like playing Skyrim on that thing it was bad but uh it worked and it was a good computer I just at the time when Apple was going you know full full speed on the iPad Pro and promoting all these new changes that I think the reason why I sold the MacBook Pro specifically was because their multitasking changes and being able to do split screen and stuff came out that year and that just really kind of w me up to saying hey this iPad could actually be a like a main computer and you know throw the keyboard on apple pencil I started using it that way and just kind of fell in love but you know jump forward 4 years later and I'm still feel the same way about the iPad but now I'm just getting very tempted by these Macs because again it's just they're just shifting that much closer so of course I I I talked to our editor and said you know what would what would we think of you know a perspective from me like a writeup saying hey I've used an iPad as my primary computer for the last several years two of which I've worked at Apple Insider full-time on an iPad Pro what do I think of the the 14-inch MacBook Pro so I went and got one the reason why I even brought it up is because Best Buy in my local area just had one in stock while everyone on Twitter was crying about their six months delay on on their orders so uh I just ran up there got it base model you know nothing nothing fancy M1 Pro processor 16 gigs of RAM 52 storage and everything and and it's nice I brought it home and immediately it's just like yeah this is a MacBook it's it's running Mac OS I at first I was just very turned off by the just entire Paradigm it just felt as I've said before it just feels dated to me it feels like I'm using I'm back in high school using that Windows computer running Microsoft 2003 but um it's grown on me over the last few days uh for sure i' I found a lot of things that I can do with it that of course you can't do on an iPad I'll I'll definitely be writing a story on this in the next couple weeks uh to to Define it next I'm on the podcast I'll I'll dig into it more but yeah it's it's definitely interesting well my my situation was I did not buy these after the announcement even though they went up for sale right after of course I played with the configurator for like an hour and I was like am I going to buy one of these but I didn't because my true desire is to have a prle desktop whether it's the iMac Pro that comes early next year or some kind of Mac Mini Pro that is powered by an M1 Max and spec it out like I really want a desktop because I want it just to be there on all the time I don't have to worry about docking or battery life in a device and so I really just wanted to hold out for that and then all the reviews came out of the new 14-in Macbook Pro and the 16-in and I see people tweeting about it and I'm like man this thing is looks really really nice and I'm not going to use the HDMI port which we can talk about ports later but the SD card slot on that thing plus mag safe was very tempting and the screen you know I'm accustomed to a mini LED screen on my 12.9in iPad Pro and I do edit videos sometimes for Apple Insider and do product reviews and I would love to have that great screen to do Final Cut work and I do export those 4K videos periodically so I was like shoot I'm going to get one of these aren't I and if I had to order one and wait like for weeks or even months I probably would not have done it but I kept my eye on the local Apple Stores here in Central Florida and when you go to get the new 14-in Macbook Pro or the 16-in but I was looking at the 14in you know there's kind of two base models you have the bass Bas model for $2,000 you get the 8 core CPU 14 core GPU 512 storage and then there's like a second base model which gives you 10 core CPU so two more cores 16 core GPU two more GPU cores and a terabyte of SSD storage and that was aside from the M1 Pro chip obviously that was equivalent to my M1 MacBook Pro that I bought last November which that has been my sole Mac I've been using it for all of my video editing and podcast recording and was great it has the 16 gigs of RAM just like my M1 this M1 Pro did and the 1 TB SSD so I was like okay what would I get for a trade in for my M1 MacBook Pro cuz if I can get a decent amount right now maybe that will sway me to getting one of these new ones and I did the the tradein calculator as I went to buy and they were going to give me like $967 for my M1 MacBook Pro that's a year old so $11,000 yes I probably could have got more if I sold it you know on Facebook Marketplace or whatever but I didn't want to deal with that I just wanted to give it to Apple and get whatever value they were going to give me and so the fact that it was $1,000 for my M1 MacBook Pro I was like okay and I I wasn't going to spec anything up I was going to get this kind of second tier base model because it matched my M1 I had 16 gigs of RAM and a terabyte SSD in my M1 MacBook Pro I was like okay I'm basically I'm going to replace this and still wait to have a speced out desktop because that's what I really want and I was was able to justify it in my mind in that way to say I'm just going to replace kind of a base model MacBook Pro and I'm going to still wait to spend kind of the big money on the desktop and the 14in came in stock it's amazing like every day it's different some days it's in stock some days it's not depending on the store but that 14in that secondary tier based model was available for pickup at the Apple Brandon Apple Store and I was like I'm going to do it and so I I I did it ordered it for pickup went to it I picked it up I think it was last Saturday and now when I did the purchasing you can kind of do the tradeing at the same time and anytime I've traded stuff in before I was able to do it in the store you just bring them your old device and they'll take the amount off the new purchase or give you a gift card for a trade in or whatever and so when I did the purchase it said you can't trade in MacBook Pros in store you're going to have to mail it back and I wasn't crazy about mailing a MacBook Pro back you know is it going to get lost in the mail I've heard you know challenges other people have had in the past so I was like okay I'll do it so I went to pick up the new 14inch I didn't bring in my old M1 and I asked them I was like can I trade my old one in store like if I would have brought it could I just have traded it in right here cuz the checkout told me I couldn't and they said oh yeah we could do that we'll trade it in in a store we'll give you the value right here you don't have to mail it away and I was like okay well I wish I would have brought it but I'll come back tomorrow so I came back the next day Sunday with my M1 MacBook Pro and the manager did have to come out there was like this weird thing where they couldn't just credit my Apple card which I had bought the new 14in on they ended up having to basically give me Apple cash which you can then like put towards a credit card payment for the Apple card but I was like okay I guess I'll take the Apple cash it should be fine and the manager of the store was very nice he like hey there's no problem no problem it'll show up right away and so I did the tradein handed them my M1 MacBook Pro I did the apple cash like tap payment on their thing to get the tradein value and like didn't appear on the Apple cash card on my iPhone wallet and I was like okay how long does it take and the manager was like oh it'll show up in a couple minutes so like all right well I'm going to hang out just for a couple minutes because this is like a$1 thousand tradein and I want to make sure I have this money and so we were kind of shooting the breeze I told him I like do videos for appal Insider and you know obviously told him about the podcast and so we were you know we were having a good time and like 10 minutes later it still hadn't shown up my Apple card like cash balance was still nothing and I was like so when is it going to show up again they're like well did you get the email saying you got the trade in value so I checked my email and yes it said that that money was going into my Apple cash he's like well as long as you got the email that's the confirmation you should be good to go and I was like okay I guess and so I left without that money in the Apple cash card and I was checking that thing religiously for the next 3 days and it took 3 days to show up in the Apple cash card it was I think Tuesday Tuesday so Sunday Monday Tuesday I opened the Apple wallet and finally saw that there was like the $1,000 that hit the Apple cash card so just as a whole trade and experience story sometimes it takes a couple days for that Apple cash to come in but if you're also wanting to get one of these new Macbook Pros and trade in an older Mac they can take it in the store you don't have to mail it away so all of that to say that was was my experience there yeah I mean they had to mail the check to Apple to make sure it cleared before you got your Apple cash yeah exactly no it's definitely uh interesting I mean I feel like these these days especially with apple certain companies uh tradein values are really good cuz yeah going through the secondary Market you're playing with a lot of luck someone has to want it someone has to want it for the money that you're asking for and you have to meet up and not die so going through trade in and store It's usually the better choice at least easier I prefer like I that's how I do my iPhone every year I just go through the Verizon upgrade program let them give them give them the old phone get the new phone have to think about selling it I have an Apple Watch series 6 here that hasn't I haven't even advertised for sale yet because I keep forgetting about it it's just it's one of those things where sometimes tradein is just the smarter thing to do and I will say the tradein because I thought about trading in my Series 6 and it's a titanium model which is you know the expensive addition models and apple was only giving $275 for that titanium Series 6 and that was not a value that I felt was good so like I didn't trade in my Series 6 I'm actually going to see if it's too big for my wife my wife's been using it and if she likes it it'll be an upgrade from her four you know I I don't know I wouldn't take 275 for a titanium year old Apple watch no that's a little ridiculous last thing before we dive into these MacBooks a little bit um I did want to point out uh I'm I'm not switching to a Macbook uh I'm probably going to return this uh I'm not sure yet the whole the whole idea here is is to convince me uh our our editor Mike the you know Mike worth he was on our show last week he uh basically told me he's like if you do this I'm warning new you're going to love it and you're going to want to keep it no matter what cuz the idea was I was probably just going to return it and I do definitely like this machine I still again prefer you can follow me on Twitter and see me I I post up a random comments on it every now and then sometimes ignorantly I don't know everything about Max like I I know quite a bit I write about them quite a lot you know it's not that it's just there's certain little things that you forget especially if you haven't used them for a few years it's just like I uh Stephen you corrected me on one thing it's uh to scroll down the list of files and you'll find the photos picker and the document picker it's like come on anyway likely it's not I this is the super based Model 8 core CPU uh probably going to return this no matter what just cuz it is the base one and I'll feel bad if I just have that one so uh Best Buy has a lovely holiday return policy I can keep this guy until like January um so I'll have it for a while to play with once I feel confident and if I really decide that this is just going to be part of my workflow cuz I'm not going to buy this and just put it under my desk I'm I'm going to use it for work so then yes I would be kind of sh shifting my at least daily work to my MacBook because as I've noticed over the last few days there's there's certain things that are just I can do either faster or just simply because I I can have an extended display on my external monitor stuff like that like there's such small things here that I've noticed that I I'm enjoying that Apple could change tomorrow and iPad OS because it's just a software limitation and I would be back on the iPad again uh and and have wasted $22,000 on a MacBook like that it's it's that close it's it's how silly it is so I want to get into some of the details about Mac OS in a second for sure just high level like new Macbook Pros you know I took it out of the box when I got it and hardware-wise the design is very nostalgic for me my first Mac was a 12in G4 power book yeah and the hardware is just beautiful so nice uh you know the fit and finish of it the MacBook Pro imprint that's on the underside of the computer is just such a nice touch and it feels so solid like the lid on this MacBook Pro it feels more substantial there's something about the lid I really like the way it feels like when you're like just grabbing it to lift it up there's something like the texture I guess uh is really nice yeah and like it just feels like a substantial significant lid just and not like heavy or awkward or bulky but just feels like Pro like this is a pro lid did you get the silver or space gray space gray with white cable jeez Apple Y come on I know that's the unfortunate part but you know I've seen the silvers the silver does look very nice but but I like my I really like my space gray uh the keyboard with the full height function keys rather than the touch bar I'm liking that you know I did not use the touch bar very much before I actually use this in clamshell mode like when I'm recording a podcast right now anyways so you know I don't even use the keyboard like right now but but everything about the hardware is just beautiful it feels nostalgic really like it I can give you a couple of uh immediate Impressions if you want uh first of all I'll I'll say I think the iPad ad I know it's controversial I think the iPad's actually a better laptop for me this thing is a great desktop tool I love slapping it into the Thunderbolt Port having it connect to all the stuff on my desktop just like the iPad Y and have a fullsize monitor display all that stuff's cool but when I carry this thing around as a laptop or like I've taken it to my living room and use it in the lap and stuff it's nice but my eyesight must be going or something cuz it just seems like the screen is so far away you know how the iPad and the and the magic keyboard lifts the screen up and it's tilted towards your face whereas order to get the angle right on the MacBook you have to push the screen further away from you it's the opposite on the iPad you actually pull the screen closer to you when you want to angle it to your face right just one of the small things I noticed uh when working between the two um so for me personally honestly I I love that magic keyboard design and I think it actually works a little bit better as a laptop and uh I hope here soon we see a aluminum magic keyboard with the same uh articulating hinges because that thing's cool uh Hardware wise though yeah this thing thing is just a a beautiful machine to look at I was holding it next to the iPad Pro and the magic keyboard and they're basically the same thickness nearly the same weight 14-in MacBook Pro is obviously a little bit bigger because it is a bigger display but um yeah it's just it's a computer o overall overall though my impressions are that uh I just I really like the hardware like it's it's just one of those things like I just would like to have just because it's a nice thing it's it's just really welld designed yeah now it is a little thicker and wider than the 13-in M1 MacBook Pro and I realized that several ways one I had a laptop sleeve from Harbor London that fit the 13-in great the 14-inch does not fit and so I ordered another sleeve from them it comes in tomorrow I'll talk about that next week and also my bridge vertical dock which I loved I was using that's what I used at my desk all the time for docking it will not fit in that at all Bridge has not said whether or not they will be making a vertical dock for the 14in I really hope they do and I've been tweeting at him to see if they will do it so I kind of just took the vertical dock away and just put my MacBook Pro just on the desk and I plug one cable into it I had to rework some of my signal chain for the Thunderbolt docks because the bridge vertical dock makes use of two cables there's two cables coming out I didn't want to have to connect two cables every time to my MacBook Pro now so I was able to rearrange everything and there's one dock that's like Daisy chained but one cable allows me to connect to everything I have an external hard drive my LG ultra fine my mix pr3 sound device plus the Thunderbolt 3 dock where have my SD card stuff like and the ethernet Jack on the on that plus Blackmagic like a ATM switcher so like everything through one cable which is still amazing the other thing about the hardware again everything is great I love having mag safe back again it's really cool but I also love being able to charge with a USBC also because you know I only have one mag safe cable there's only one that comes with a computer and I have not bought more mag safe cables I may but it's nice because if I have a specific bag like I have a peak design backpack that I'll bring if I want to do some shooting I have USBC cables and USBC Chargers from like anchor I don't want to have to move the mag saafe charger every time I use a different bag so it's nice I can just charge it with the USBC cables that I have and that works great now it comes to the display so the display is the promotion the variable refresh rates a mini LED display with the notch now I will say coming from the 12.9 in iPad Pro that has mini LED the display looks just as good if not even slightly better than that the display is great you can watch HDR content even on YouTube and you see that HDR difference you know the it get becomes brighter and you can even move that window around the laptop screen and because of the variable refresh 120 HZ like the HDR section of the web browser playing the YouTube video will stay HDR and everything else will you know not be and it's lightning fast like you don't see see any Jitter or lag and so the display is beautiful now the notch I be curious your thoughts on it because there's no notch on the iPad Pro it does go away sometimes for the most part I did notice some strange Behavior with menu bar icons I have a lot of menu bar icons and I was trying not to use bartender CU I wanted to see how the notch handled it and I have everything from you know Wi-Fi and Spotlight to pay spot one password Fantastical text expander Hazel uh the Elgato Control Center and stream deck which are two separate icons plus I have a shortcuts icon up there so I have a lot of icons up there and interestingly on the MacBook Pro screen they weren't all showing up they went up to the Notch and then like there were no more they didn't go to the other side of the Notch and I was actually missing a couple menu bar icons when I plugged my new 14-in Macbook Pro into my LG ultrafine display then all the icons appear in the menu bar and have access to all of them so that's a little bit of a weird Behavior I thought the menu bar icons were going to go to the other side of the notch but that doesn't seem to be the case it seems like the OS is kind of just deciding what menu bar icons to show or hide uh in that but what have been your thoughts on the display nobody needs that many menu bar icons ever oh you don't know that's why we're going to get to that and why the utilities are what makes Macos great but anyway go ahead yeah no I got a I got a lot of stuff to dig into on this thing I've only had it for a few days and it's been a busy a few days so of course I'm I'm still digging through I I got set app and installed like three things and I'm going to uninstall set app I'll just put it that way there's just nothing in there I need sorry guys I'll I'll I'll get some apps though I'll definitely probably just buy bartender separately cuz that's a good utility but there's really just nothing else in there there's a lot of replacement apps for things I already use I setup's cool just not for me anyway um the notch nah it doesn't I I I immediately just went and got one of the 15 uh Notch Hiers things and just made it permanently black up there and I oh did you yeah I've never noticed it I don't care I I would prefer it to be black space anyway cuz I'm in the party that just says uh everything below the notch is a 16 X10 display just give me that I'm also minimalist when it comes to that kind of stuff I deleted everything in my menu bar so uh the only thing I have up there is control center Siri and a clock that is analog oh so yeah Su sui what what utility did you get for that menu bar blackout oh um give me two seconds cuz I had not tried one yet I was curious what I'm most curious about if when it blacks out the menu bar what does it do with the menu bar icons does it make them white let's see topnotch top I got top-notch CU it's made by a developer that already makes something I like I just I forget what that is uh yeah the icons are white okay and Siri still colorful so I guess it's just whatever whatever it's set to bartender shows me drafts and fantastic H I haven't edited like I there's just a set of glasses here for bartender again like I just don't have any utilities like I I played around with a couple of the things that show you like performance uh what's that one called that Everyone likes I set menus I played around with that adds like 400 things to your menu I I didn't care for that too much cool stuff just nothing I'll ever need yeah again I'm coming from an iPad where the menu bar is a clock and uh the Wi-Fi thing so yeah just not something where I don't I just don't feel like I need a lot of tools and information up there but something I'll probably look into as I go along here well let me let me I'll make a couple recommendations in a moment the last thing I want to say just as as I was setting up I typically like to set up a new Mac from scratch and not migr stuff because you know when you have a Mac over time sometimes if you're downloading utilities and third party apps outside of the App Store stuff can just you know be in the libraries or whatever but I had kept my M1 MacBook Pro pretty clean just installing what I needed and deleting things when I didn't I use Hazel which will find any Library files when you delete an application that might be hidden and will'll eliminate those as well but I did the migration assistant from my M1 to the M1 Pro MacBook Pro that I have now and over a thunderbolt cable it was super fast I mean it transferred everything in like 20 minutes and it was just like I had opened up my M1 MacBook Pro everything was as I had wanted some of the apps were broken like Skype wouldn't open for some reason I once I updated to the latest monor like 12 12.0.1 or whatever then everything worked fine again so there was some kind of weirdness there if you use an app like audio hijack then you also have to like lessen the disc security which is a a bunch of voodoo you have to do like audio hijack walks you through it but that's another thing you have to do so migration assistant just want to say works really well especially over a thunderbolt cable and a quick word on performance you know I got the M1 Pro that secondary tier which is the 10 core CPU 16 core GPU and I did a couple things in Final cut and I did notice hey it's faster than the M1 and if I had the M1 Max it would be even faster I will refer to a video that Andrew did which was a great comparison between the M1 M1 Pro and M1 Max they has the spec out M1 Max and then the you know M1 Pro as well that article in video really shows basically the M1 Pro base model is like twice as fast as the M1 and the M1 Max is like twice as fast as the M1 Pro so it's kind of an easy tiered speed thing so if you want the most speed yeah get the M1 max if you don't need all that GPU power the M1 Pro is really great for pretty much everything else and so that's I did notice the performance I did notice a performance Improvement and it's like you know twice as fast like rendering stuff than my M1 and so yeah I'll just refer watch that video from Andrew and you could see the direct comparison when it comes to what makes Mac OS great I'm going to recommend you try two things and see what you think one is a a clipboard manager have you tried a clipboard manager yet no that's on my to-do list so I recommend pastebot the makers of tweetbot which is a great Twitter app tap Bots is the developer pastebot is what I use it lives in the menu bar as I said you might this might be useful enough to live in the menu bar but it keeps track of everything that you copy and paste and you can go back and refer to things and if you use that for a little while I find that very useful again one reason use Mac OS right there pastebot and I also recommend I don't know if they have a free trial or not but text expander is an excellent application I've been using for a long time where you can kind of do this with keyboard shortcuts and like doing like autocorrect uh programming but text expander is a powerful application where you can just type a few little Snippets of letters or whatever and you can have it expand into longer strings of text for whatever you want I recommend just to start make something like semicolon em your email address and then anytime you have to type in your email address rather than typing out the whole thing you just hit semicolon em and it expands your email address instantly and you know it's correct it's spelled correctly you don't have any you know spelling errors because text expander is expanding it to the full email address that you had put in the app so text expander because it's a Mac application it is systemwide and it works everywhere if you use text expander on iPad you either have to use their third party keyboard or some apps support it like bear where you can actually use your text expander Snippets within the app but it's not systemwide and so that's one of the benefits of Mac OS is you have pastebot and text expander that work systemwide across the whole deal yeah text expander is cool I've used Apple's built-in keyboard shortcut mechanism Forever on iPad and found it to be great like I already have several shortcuts for different Emoji uh for my email address for getting the Apple Insider URL for specific uh Pages like I use it all the time for iPad and it actually carried over to my Mac so this the entire time I've been using my Mac I've been using the same uh keyboard Strokes to get all of my quick little uh keyboard shortcuts so I I understand that Tech expander is a much improved version of this and it's something I can definitely look at but for me kind of like one password is to Apple passwords I it's probably enough to keep using Apple's utility but I'll definitely try it at the very least yeah and then the last thing I would suggest for you Wes but you know this podcast we're recording right now if you do it on your Mac the Mac can use your USB microphone both in Skype and in quick time to record all at the same time which again absolutely like you were saying is totally limitation of iPad OS and apple could change it in a software update but it's something the Mac can do yeah I'm again the only reason why I'm recording on my iPad today is because I just didn't want to go through any of the Hol blo of setting it up I I know it take two seconds I just whatever we already know what works I didn't want to mess with that just for today's show um maybe maybe next show I'll record on the the MacBook as long as I still have it but uh yeah there's a lot of stuff here I'm I'm definitely enjoying it again like I never hated the Mac like let me be clear like I never didn't have a Mac just just because I was like oh boo Mac OS it's 40 years old but um it's more like I just picking up an iPad turning it on going to that home screen something about it is just nice and I can't put my finger on it I've I've asked people to help me explain it on Twitter it's not something that's like easy to explain uh it's just I really enjoy The Whimsy the uh use cases the the ways the iPad OS makes me think and interact with content like when I open a window or something like an app that requires it to be in full screen like it it's I'm focusing on that subject whereas Mac OS does have a strength in the fact that I can have 30 things open at once and that's great at the same time it can also not be so great cuz I can also look at 30 things at once and maybe not do what I'm supposed to be doing sure there's there's a lot to play with here uh things that I'm excited about is like universal control I want to see what that's like I've been using sidecar so that I can still have my iPad Pro here um and use it as another display it's been handy it's been very buggy in this Mac OS release I've seen people talk about this um but when it works it works really nice and uh I like that you can actually go into display settings and adjust where your sidecar window appears so my my iPad's actually between my MacBook and my external display and I'm actually able to set my sidecar window between those two and have the cursor moved between them so it's it's really cool that's pretty cool yeah lots lots of little things here uh to note like uh again being able to freely adjust how big a window is in split screen iPad should be able to do that the the fact that I can't have full full display mode on an external display is just insane like honestly if if Apple did that tomorrow I would return this MacBook like that's really the one one of the bigger reasons why I've even considered keeping this and and I am considering keeping it like don't get me wrong like uh again if I do keep the MacBook it's going to probably stay at my desk this is probably going to be a permanent fixture and a and a Macbook instead of a Mac because I do travel and I would like to take my work with me so I'm not going to do this with an iMac right so that that's why I would still choose a Macbook over something like what you would choose like a Mac Pro or iMac Pro so that's why I'm I'm going this route um maybe I'll upgrade like again this one's probably going to get returned no matter what cuz I'm going to probably get a nicer version um might look into the 16in I I I had that before I know they're gargantuan but again if it's sitting at my desk it's probably fine that's just kind of where my head's at right now with this thing I need to try several more things cuz if I'm going to write about it I need to uh I need to be able to address all of the pain points of iPad OS and believe me I'm aware of them I use it every day it's just one of those things where is it enough and that's the question ultimately I'm going to have to ask myself is the things I can do on Mac OS the things that it's capable of over an iPad enough for me to justify paying upwards of $2,500 or more for a MacBook Pro so we'll see and uh I'll tell you guys more in a couple weeks all right well I'm excited to hear your your long-term experience with it for sure I'm really enjoying it h i bid fwell to my M1 MacBook Pros I traded it in and I'm I'm rocking it now I'm using it right now and um I'll continue to share my thoughts with it as well but I'm I'm very happy with it also very curious to see what Apple comes out with in their prle desktop for sure I'm curious about Mac Mini Pro and iMac Pro last thing as we move on from the MacBook Pro just want to say this because I think it's hilarious that guy who put a USBC port on his iPhone uh is now selling it on eBay and the bidding is like past $85,000 right now so if you were wondering whether or not that people want USBC port on an iPhone there at least people willing to pay thousands of dollars for it so you have that I don't understand what I I I guess collectible doesn't function well I don't know it's moving on yeah I will also put there was an awesome interview on the upgrade podcast with Jason Snell and Mike Hurley they had two apple Executives on their show Tim Millet and Tom Boger they talked about the M1 Pro and M1 Max and the development of those chips and it was a really good interview kind of seeing some of the behind the scenes information on the development of that and so I'll put a link to that in show notes if you want to listen to that podcast as well it was really good but listeners let us know what questions you have about the MacBook Pro airpods 3 and anything else you can tweet at Wes and myself our Twitter handles are in the show notes we would also greatly appreciate a five-star rating and review in apple podcast for the Apple Insider podcast that supports the show and you can even support the show directly with $5 a month either directly on Apple podcast or patreon.com inssider you'll get an adree uninterrupted version of the show plus Early Access there and we also have a private Discord Channel where going to be posting some stuff in there very soon you can check that out and also don't forget to listen to homekit Insider with Andrew O'Hara and myself where we talk about smart home and homekit products thanks for tuning in this week it's good to be back we'll catch you next time\n"