The Two Blokes Talking Tech podcast – Episode #756 – The Apple Show – live from Los Angeles

TBTT #756 – The Apple Show – live from Los Angeles

Podcast: Two Blokes Talking Tech
Date: 29 October 2026
Hosts: Trevor Long & Stephen Fenech

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[00:00:00] Trevor Long: It’s great to be with you again. This week’s movie will be recorded virtually as well. Yeah. Wow.

[00:00:05] Stephen Fenech: Technology is amazing. Using, using technology to do our jobs, mate. That’s pretty good.

[00:00:10] Trevor Long: It’s pretty useful that the two blokes talking tech do use technology. I think people accept and admire that about us.

[00:00:17] Stephen Fenech: Can you explain where you are right now? Where are you? I know you’re in LA, but where in LA are you?

[00:00:23] Trevor Long: Somewhere on Sunset.

[00:00:24] Stephen Fenech: Somewhere on Sunset. Okay. That’ll be your little thing in the strip on the bottom of the screen. Trevor Long, somewhere on Sunset.

[00:00:30] Trevor Long: If I was doing a Today Show, I’d just say somewhere on Sunset.

[00:00:33] Stephen Fenech: Somewhere on Sunset.

[00:00:34] Trevor Long: Well, I can tell you this, and you know me and food and events, right? Yeah. So we’re in a— we’re— I’m here with a guest of Apple, obviously. Full disclosure. It’s a building outside. It says Paramount and Edelman and some other things. But essentially there’s a little theaterette here as well as 3 floors of just, I don’t know, cafe rooms, display rooms. I don’t know what it is normally. And Apple’s taken over. But what you know is that catering is a bit fancy. Yeah. So there’s no Coca-Cola. It’s some sort of, you know,

[00:01:07] Stephen Fenech: really

[00:01:08] Trevor Long: new age cola or something. And so I had an hour’s break and I said, just confirming to the Apple guys, I said, I’ve got an hour, don’t I, before the next briefing? They go, yeah. I left. I went across the road, got a pizza. So one of them said to me, have you had something to eat? Oh yeah, I had a pizza. We had pizza here. I went, no, no, I got— I went out. And I go, was the food not good enough? Yes.

[00:01:31] Stephen Fenech: No, mate. Do they know about your dietary requirements? You know, when they ask you dietary requirements, you’re going to say make sure there’s, there’s party pies. Is that what you’re requiring?

[00:01:42] Trevor Long: The other non-Two Blokes Talking Tech show conversation is a bit pre-show is there’s something in my schedule tonight that says special, special celebration, including live performance. And, and I thought to myself, oh, you know what I mean? I’ve got to go, right? Because I could be anyone. I mean, could be. That’s Apple Music, right? Could be Taylor Swift or someone. Yeah. So this morning the schedule comes out and it says featuring Zedd, Z-E-D-D. And I just went smoke bomb. Yeah. Because my Game 5 of the World Series is on this afternoon.

[00:02:17] Stephen Fenech: So. Okay.

[00:02:18] Trevor Long: The Brewers.

[00:02:19] Stephen Fenech: Hang on, has the World Series started or the qualifying for the World Series?

[00:02:22] Trevor Long: No, World Series Brewers v Tampa Bay. It’s on now. Already. Yeah. The Brewers had won the first 3 games, like swept the first 3 games. And last night, if they’d have won, they’d have won the World Series. Yeah, they’re playing in Florida. So Tampa Bay, it’s tight, like up to the 8th innings. It goes 12 innings and Tampa Bay wins in the bottom of the 12th, walk-off. Brilliant. So it’s 3-1. So tonight again is in Tampa Bay. I mean, I don’t care who wins. I just love good sport. This one, they go back to Milwaukee with Milwaukee leading 3-2. I think it’d be cool. So, so yeah, I’m going to go back to the hotel soon and I’ll decide whether I pop in tonight for a quick photo and just prove I came.

[00:03:05] Stephen Fenech: Is it far from where you’re staying? Oh yeah, you’re staying in West Hollywood.

[00:03:08] Trevor Long: 15-minute Waymo, so no big drama.

[00:03:11] Stephen Fenech: Nice.

[00:03:12] Trevor Long: But I’d much prefer to be tucked up in my bed watching the World Series anyway. Yeah, it’s a simple life I lead. Because of my schedule today, I don’t have the bandwidth to insert an intro or any sting. So we’re raw dogging this show, folks.

[00:03:29] Stephen Fenech: We’re going to raw dog it all the way.

[00:03:31] Trevor Long: So we’ll get straight into the show, Stephen. It’s episode 756, if my memory serves. Thanks to the great people at Arlo and JBL, and we’ll tell you more about them a little bit later. I am here as a guest of Apple for an Apple event called Pro and Tell. We’ll talk about that product in a moment. I think we can’t not address the story of the week, which is iPhone Duo going on sale, but also having some woes. So it’s a, it’s a funny one because anything Apple can get overreported, it can be overegged. The first thing that I looked at wasn’t to do with the screen cracking. It was actually JerryRig doing his video as usual to smash things and Mate, I don’t know if you’ve watched that, but, you know, he obviously does all these endurance tests, scratching things and everything. But then he pulls—

[00:04:22] Stephen Fenech: didn’t it fail? Didn’t it fail his endurance test?

[00:04:25] Trevor Long: He pulls a kilo of dirt and sand over it and rubs it into the front and the back and opens and shuts it. And I’m like, mate, even if I took this phone to the beach, it’s, it’s going to get a grain in, not 6 million grains. And so then when he does the bend test, it actually fails. Dismally because the screen has lines and everything through it. And you open it up and you’re like, mate, it’s because of the dirt. And so, yeah, look, he classes that as a massive failure. I personally think I’d like to see him do the bend test again before he does the dirt ingress test. So yeah, that’s my feedback on that. But little Harry, 15-year-old, turned to me the other day on Saturday, probably maybe Sunday, and showed me someone’s Instagram post or something. They had an iPhone and it had this line through it. And I went, oh mate, it’s someone in China who’s put a rock in. Inside it, shut it, and broken the screen. That’s— that was my initial reaction. I thought that’s what it looked like to me, you know, something had been in there. But then as I saw video after video, photo after photo, it became very clear that the line was appearing in the exact same spot in all of these failed Duos. Did you notice that?

[00:05:32] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I did. Yeah. And you see all the— mate, it’s been on social media and people, people posting photos of it everywhere. It’s the exact same area on the screen where it’s cracked sort of about two-thirds of the way down the hinge is where the crack— it’s apparently like a, some portion, some component on the hinge that break— that’s broken.

[00:05:52] Trevor Long: And it’s quite fascinating because even in the keynote, if you go back to the keynote event where the Duo was launched, they showed like a cutaway of the device, you know, the internals. So when it was actually when they were announcing the, the A20 processor for it, they were showing it like highlighted and you could see the beautiful hinge design and the hinge is consistent all the way through except except for this one little bit in the middle. And so then I saw a guy in China pull it apart and show this little bit of hinge had broken. So this— it’s kind of a wider bit of hinge that it snapped. And, and it becomes very clear that’s exactly what’s snapping in the hinge on these screens. Now, my question is, do we— we don’t know how. I don’t think it’s happening because of the opening and closing. I think it’s happening because people are putting their thumb in the middle at that spot to close it.

[00:06:44] Stephen Fenech: Are you right? Okay. Is that what you think? I think so. Well, if it’s— well, it’s super consistent though, where, where, where it’s happening. So that could be the possibility. But Apple’s addressed it and they said they’re aware of an issue impacting the inner display on a small number of iPhone Duo units. And they’re saying that if a user experiences— if users experience issues with their iPhone Duo display, they should contact AppleCare for a replacement.

[00:07:12] Trevor Long: And let me tell you how quickly this evolved. So Monday morning I was flying out at 10:30. I did the Today Show at 7:40 with the iPhone Duo. Now, Apple representatives were with me because I wanted multiple devices for the team to play with and I just had the one. So it was great. They came in and they had them. And I, you know, I’m very open. I didn’t say anything directly. I was going to publish anything, but I said, listen, I think you’re going to need a statement. Just looking at how it’s bubbling away, I think you’re going to need a statement because I think it’s going to be an issue that you’re going to need to at least comment on. Tom on air did say something to me about it and I gave my thought on what I thought was potentially causing it. And by the time I landed here in LA, it was only 3 or 4 hours later that they came back with that statement. So I think it’s the right thing to do. Absolutely. The worst part is bloody Samsung again. I saw a social media video of them just opening and shutting their phone a million times as if to say ours is fine. But like CNET here is running a livestream of a machine opening and showing that thing. And it’s done 100,000 opens already, right? Because Apple doesn’t give you a number. Do you remember Samsung and others would talk about 100,000, 300,000 tests that they’d done? And I also said this to Apple. I said, you got to, you got to take someone into the testing labs and show— remember, they’ve shown like the water test and all those things. Yeah. Show the folding test. Yeah. So that you tested it.

[00:08:36] Stephen Fenech: And you know what, though,

[00:08:37] Trevor Long: essentially

[00:08:38] Stephen Fenech: The whole Samsung— that’s Samsung. That’s not Samsung Australia, by the way. That’s Samsung, you know, head office. But do you remember, I think John Ternus, the new Apple CEO, had— when they introduced the Duo, he was— he called the Android foldables cheap and crappy in an interview. And yeah, so that’s not— it’s not aging well, that comment.

[00:09:04] Trevor Long: No, not at all. And look, I feel like they’re weathering the storm.

[00:09:07] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it is. I don’t think it’s a storm though, mate. It’s not that big. It’s a very small number of units that it’s— well, mate, I don’t think it’s big enough to be a gate yet, and it’s not big enough to be like a recall or anything. It’s an issue that I reckon there was like a batch that came off the line that had this problem. And let’s That’s what I’m assuming is the issue.

[00:09:32] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:09:32] Stephen Fenech: So you’re saying it could be a user-induced problem with the people closing it?

[00:09:39] Trevor Long: Think about, think about reviews. And you remember Samsung, let’s be very clear, Samsung’s first foldable made it to reviewers and then did not come to market. They fixed a problem that the reviewers were peeling off a screen protector, right? So,

[00:09:51] Stephen Fenech: yeah,

[00:09:51] Trevor Long: you know, Samsung had that problem early on too. But there’s that many journos that have got these phones that I feel like even if it is a small percentage of that percentage, surely it would have hit one of us by now and it doesn’t appear to have. So, so for that reason, I think you’re right. It could be a batch issue. And yeah, I think so. We talked last week, we were talking about factories and how supply was a problem and, you know, consistency of delivery was a problem. Yeah, the yields were low. Someone messaged and said the word you were looking for was yields.

[00:10:22] Stephen Fenech: Yields. Correct.

[00:10:23] Trevor Long: And so it may be that they What they’re doing right now is reassessing their, their QC, their quality assurance processes in the factories before they ramp up and they’re more cautious about yield. I would say that’s what they’re doing now, as well as just quickly making sure that the first next batch of products goes into retail for replacement. So make sure that every store, every telco, every place has a device so that if anyone comes in with this specific area, they can just go, There you go. Like, it’s just, it’s got to be a no-questions-asked. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s got to last. You know, Australia is good. We’ve got Australian consumer law, we’ve got protection, right? So if you have this problem with your Duo in 18 months, let alone 2 years, forget AppleCare. You don’t need AppleCare. You’re covered by the Australian government. We’re lucky. You are. They don’t have that in America, right? And so Americans are freaking out that after 12 months, will they get it replaced? Honestly, if you’ve got a first-generation Duo, in America in 18 months, it shows that exact issue. I bet you they still replace it.

[00:11:23] Stephen Fenech: Of course they will. Yeah, I think— yeah, but, but just like I said, the, the consistency of the crack, you know, it’s like two-thirds of the way down, line to the bottom, line to the— across the right-hand side of the screen.

[00:11:34] Trevor Long: And the thickness of the line across the screen is the thickness of that little hinge part that’s broken. And to, to credit Samsung, I’ve seen people show the— I think it might have been Zach from JerryRig also show the pull-apart of the Samsung hinge design, and those larger supportive hinges appear to be at the top and the bottom of the display, not in the middle. My guess is that it’s a component of the display that actually gives it that tautness that, um, that allows you to have it at different angles. I reckon it’s— I reckon it’s a component of the hinge that is unique to Apple in that sense.

[00:12:04] Stephen Fenech: The people— the people— I think there was one guy in Australia, one bloke in Melbourne, who was saying that he, um, he’d open— hadn’t even closed it before, so he shut it for the first time and couldn’t open it again. It was— it was like— I

[00:12:19] Trevor Long: mean, that’s— and then when you tried to—

[00:12:21] Stephen Fenech: yeah. Yeah, of course. So when he tried to open it again, that’s when he heard a crack. And yeah, that then the problem is we’ve seen. So I think it’s, it’s pretty consistent. But you know what, that’s probably a good thing for Apple knowing that if it’s only that one localized area, then it’s an easy fix for them.

[00:12:38] Trevor Long: And that’s a great point because if it was happening in all parts of the screen and it would be much harder to narrow down and account for. So you’re right, they’re probably in a good position that way. So for that reason, you’re not calling it a gate. Is that what we’re saying?

[00:12:50] Stephen Fenech: No, definitely not a gate. Not gate-worthy at the moment.

[00:12:53] Trevor Long: Yeah, it’s okay.

[00:12:54] Stephen Fenech: If we see cracks on other areas of the hinge, then we’re entering gate territory.

[00:13:00] Trevor Long: Okay, but we’re not— but also, would it enter gate territory if the number goes up? So,

[00:13:06] Stephen Fenech: oh yeah, of course, if the number does go up, of course. Yeah, but that, um, yeah, I don’t know, that Apple won’t tell you how many, and I haven’t been able to keep track of the number of individuals that have had problems, but No, it wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be more than 100. And considering how many—

[00:13:21] Trevor Long: probably right. Yeah.

[00:13:22] Stephen Fenech: How many millions they’ve sold. They sold— what are they, sold millions by now or not? Are they up to millions?

[00:13:26] Trevor Long: Great question. How do you know? Yeah, how the hell do you know?

[00:13:29] Stephen Fenech: Because I read that if they’re on the way that the sales are going now and pre-orders, that they could within one year sell more foldables than Samsung has in 8 years. In

[00:13:41] Trevor Long: their first year. I’m going to be very cautious what I say, but I understand from people in the industry that Apple’s preorder slash first weekend was 3x what Samsung did.

[00:13:57] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:13:58] Trevor Long: In their early days. Like,

[00:13:59] Stephen Fenech: well, that’s no surprise.

[00:14:01] Trevor Long: And it is no surprise. But you see, that’s not something that you’ll hear because we don’t hear sales numbers and stuff. So before we get on to this week and the launch stuff, just quickly, you’ve had it now, you’ve published a review. Yeah. Video and full review at protechguy.com.au. Any additional thoughts since, since our show last week that have, have pulled at you? I mean, I would say app updates have been consistent but still very poor in some cases. Like the biggest companies in the world, Google still unsupported. And by the way, Uber checking.

[00:14:32] Stephen Fenech: Uber has an update.

[00:14:33] Trevor Long: Just checking on— I arrived here on Monday. By Monday night LA time, I got called to recode that StickTime app that I built in Berlin to be Duo compatible with a whole new feature for Duo. And it got approved that, that night. It’s already in the store. So I don’t believe that these companies are even trying because it’s not hard. It was— in fact, it— the menus that need to move from the bottom to the right of the screen, it happens organically because it knows it’s a menu and it knows where it’s meant to be. And so I think people have over-coded their apps before Duo and they’re having to really come back to the Apple ecosystem and recode. But I just think it’s disappointing that Google Mail, for example, Gmail is still not done. And, well, there is a Google—

[00:15:16] Stephen Fenech: I’ve just refreshed it now. There is a— on Google Chrome, Google Home.

[00:15:22] Trevor Long: No, Gmail is still not— not— it’s full screen, but it’s not actually 27.1 compatible with— does it fill the— does it fill the side of the screen is what I look at.

[00:15:38] Stephen Fenech: Yes. And yeah, Uber still— they’ve got an update here, but it doesn’t mention anything about Duo. But I’m going to run them all right now. By the time we finish talking in a few minutes, by the time we finish the show, I’ll be good.

[00:15:49] Trevor Long: It is amazing how many updates there are every single bloody day. But anyway, so yeah, look, I still— I got to tell you, editing videos on it, phenomenal. I’m absolutely loving it. And someone asked me today, and something we haven’t mentioned, by the way, is Apple Pencil support. And I didn’t mention in my review because I would never use an Apple Pencil on a device like this. But also it’s not supported yet. It’s in a future software update. But

[00:16:12] Stephen Fenech: I have seen people using it online.

[00:16:15] Trevor Long: Yeah, I think you’ve got to have the developer beta basically. It’s the next beta along. I did think today though, when I was using Edits to make a video, I thought to myself, you know, when you, when you’re using something like Edits or Trim on a video, you’ve got these little tiny bars you’ve got to pull. I thought to myself, you often get that wrong with your finger. That might be where I could be convinced to use a pencil, but where am I going to carry the bloody thing around with me? Like, that’s— Yeah. That’s the challenge.

[00:16:39] Stephen Fenech: Someone needs to come up with an arm that works. You can’t just magnetically attach it to the side of it, can you? It’ll fall off.

[00:16:42] Trevor Long: Well, it’s enormous. The pencil will be twice the size of the bloody Jura in height.

[00:16:45] Stephen Fenech: And it’s only the pencil with the USB-C port that works with it. Correct. Yeah,

[00:16:49] Trevor Long: that’s right. Yeah.

[00:16:50] Stephen Fenech: Which is the Apple Pencil Pro. Is that the Pro?

[00:16:54] Trevor Long: I don’t know what it’s called, mate. The most expensive one. They call it in brackets USB. Yeah. So iPad Jura going well despite the long wait, right? Yeah, loving it. No, no. In some places.

[00:17:05] Stephen Fenech: And what I’ve done of the Touch ID issue, I’ve been wearing my Apple Watch lately to unlock it with Apple Watch. That’s sort of—

[00:17:12] Trevor Long: that’s someone a lot of people say that. Yes.

[00:17:15] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. A bit less friction.

[00:17:16] Trevor Long: My issue with that is just being like your, your banking app doesn’t unlock again. It unlocks the phone. No, but it doesn’t unlock apps that use it. And then I know another app you need to still use Touch ID. Yeah, I’ve looked at my phone like that and gone, can you open? And it didn’t. It is so annoying. Yeah.

[00:17:33] Stephen Fenech: How many— has everyone of these vendors got a Duo? Everyone there’s got Duos, mate.

[00:17:37] Trevor Long: They’re flashing Duos. I’ve seen a couple of photos taken of like a coffee table or table at dinner with, you know, 6 Duos on it and stuff like that. But it’s still interesting how many people aren’t rocking it as their primary device, even though I know they’ve got one or using it. So I don’t know.

[00:17:50] Stephen Fenech: I have seen a lot of people though. You know, every second video, my algorithm is just all bloody Duo stuff now. But I have also seen videos of people saying, look, I’m a big Apple fan, but I’m taking it back. It’s not for me. I’ve seen a few people.

[00:18:04] Trevor Long: I was going to say, I’ve seen a few people. One of my moderators, Howie, bought one. He’s taking it back, but he bought it through his telco, so he’s got to wait like a month before they can give him an iPhone 18 Pro Max. And look, with the greatest respect to Howie, he doesn’t listen to podcasts, so he won’t hear this, but he’s blind. Like, he’s got one eye. And so he uses like full accessibility. Like, his text is at the max. It’s like crazy. And so he said to me, a lot of the accessibility is just not coming through. You’ve got this massive screen and it’s not actually utilizing it. And here’s one to notice. You look at it open in portrait mode, there’s so much blank space in just the— is there ever— make the icons bigger. Like, why are we not— can you do that?

[00:18:42] Stephen Fenech: Is that a setting you can— you can adjust that? Can you adjust that?

[00:18:45] Trevor Long: If anyone would have looked, it would have been Howie because he’s literally using the visual aids for it. So, but yes, I’ve seen several people want to take it back and that’s, that’s fine. It’s not for everyone. I’ve never thought that. Yeah. It is what it is.

[00:19:00] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it’s— no, I think— but you know what, the level of fascination for it is— it reminds me when I got the first iPhone back in ’07 and cracked it and was showing it to people. It’s got that sort of fascination again, that same vibe. Have you found that? Yeah, that’s a jewel.

[00:19:17] Trevor Long: Sitting on a bench outside the hotel waiting for a Waymo and a lady out the front who would have worked for the hotel, like a kind of say concierge essentially, but a greeter saw me. She goes, is that the new iPhone? And I said, here, have a play. Look, open it up. You know, she was like, oh my God, you know. And so it’s probably got months worth of that in it because of the limited supply, the, the, yeah, the excitement of it. Shout out to Bruce. I’m sorry, mate. There’s going to be another full Apple episode because I am here and there’s been a lot of news this week. Let’s move on to the news because today, so strange week and we’ll get to the, we’ll get to the iPad Mini, the iMac and the MacBook Pro 14-inch. With M6 shortly. But this event that I’ve come to is an event to announce a product. There wasn’t a video keynote. It was a slideshow by the, by the CEO. Like he had a clicker on stage clicking through the slides,

[00:20:13] Stephen Fenech: which

[00:20:14] Trevor Long: wasn’t broadcast.

[00:20:15] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:20:16] Trevor Long: Oh, wasn’t it?

[00:20:17] Stephen Fenech: No.

[00:20:17] Trevor Long: Right.

[00:20:18] Stephen Fenech: No. If it was, they didn’t, they didn’t let me know when, where I could see it.

[00:20:23] Trevor Long: Right. So, you know, it was fascinating to me that it was that way. It was— it was standing room only except for a small number of benches on the side. Thank Christ there was somewhere for me to sit on my laptop and everything, because let’s be clear, this is a creator’s event. 97% of people here just want their mobile phones, whereas I’m sitting here with a laptop. I’ve got to write a couple of articles, right? That’s what you normally do is you sit and write an article. So there was none of that. But, you know, he quickly recapped the things we’re going to talk about shortly. And then he said, We’re going to re— we’re going to make the— our Pro laptop even more pro and we’re bringing touch to the MacBook Pro. So it is exactly what was rumored and speculated for some time. The MacBook Pro with ProLED XDR. So they’ve called their new thing ProLED XDR. So the title of the product does not have the word touch in it. It’s not some new name like Touch or Ultra or anything. It’s just with Pro LED XDR, Pro LED being a play on Pro and OLED put together because it’s the first MacBook Pro with an OLED screen as opposed to the mini LED backlighting that you get on your existing MacBook Pros. And yeah, so it is when you compare the specs and everything, it’s still got the same options for the M5 Max and Pro chips. It’s got a slightly better sound. There’s a better bass capability for it. It is ever so slightly thinner and smaller in footprint. It, it has the same battery life. It is lighter by about 170 grams. But the screen, mate, chef’s kiss. It’s beautiful. Like the 10 million to 1 contrast ratio.

[00:22:00] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:22:00] Trevor Long: And I mean, I, I just saw it side by side with a competitor a Windows computer, which they claim was the best one you can buy and blew it out of the water.

[00:22:12] Stephen Fenech: You’re talking about the Surface, the new Surface.

[00:22:15] Trevor Long: No, it’s— it was a big Lenovo. Yeah, I don’t remember.

[00:22:18] Stephen Fenech: Windows used to have this, their Surface Ultra or whatever they call their new Surface, claiming it’s the most powerful computer they’ve ever built.

[00:22:26] Trevor Long: They’ve spent time on how they engineer the panel. So it’s a tandem OLED, but it’s all about, you know, nanometers and micrometers of, of organic materials and Oh, you know, a vapor chamber and a vacuum chamber as big as a football stadium to do it. All this crazy stuff going on.

[00:22:43] Stephen Fenech: My understanding is that the screen has like layers and the touch, they’ve configured it in a way where the touch is like instantaneous. There’s no latency whatsoever.

[00:22:54] Trevor Long: Mate, it feels— it’s funny because I haven’t used one for a while. So, you know, I think I’ll need to sit it side by side with the Windows one to really appreciate it. But just when you’re doing things like zooming in and out and moving a map around and stuff like that. Yeah, it doesn’t feel any different to doing that on a tablet or a phone or anything else.

[00:23:12] Stephen Fenech: Right.

[00:23:12] Trevor Long: So they have mastered that instantaneous. And that’s something to do with, again, how they’ve compressed the layers together. And it’s essentially the touch is built into the, the panel. It’s not a layer of glass sitting in front of the panel. They talk about it as if to say when you’re touching a touchscreen from another company, you don’t feel like you’re actually touching the screen because there’s this gap between your finger and the screen. Whereas with this you are touching the screen. And so it’s all about the screen, the brightness levels that it can achieve, the contrast levels. They’ve put a Dynamic Island in instead of the notch. It’s all in this part here. It’s all in that upper part of the screen. The, the bezel around the outside isn’t crazy noticeable, but it’s smaller. There’s a lot of little things like that make it, you know, about $1,700 more than its equivalent MacBook Pro with M 5 Ultra Max or Pro. But mate, this thing can have a 16TB hard drive in it. Yeah, right. Spec’d to the max, it’s a $22,000 laptop.

[00:24:11] Stephen Fenech: You can buy a car or a MacBook Pro with 16TB.

[00:24:14] Trevor Long: Yes.

[00:24:15] Stephen Fenech: So, but also too, I understand they’ve adjusted the hinge as well. So when you’re reaching out and touching the screen, there’s a bit more stability. Is that right?

[00:24:23] Trevor Long: Yes. And I’ll demonstrate to you purely for you how what they’re talking about, if you If you’re on a Zoom call and you touch the screen, see how my screen is shaking?

[00:24:31] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, it’s shaking.

[00:24:31] Trevor Long: So they’ve basically built in— I assume it’s software because it can’t be stabilization built into hardware, but it’s stabilizing. Now, to be clear, it’s not stable. It’s just far more stable than your average Windows laptop. That’s what they’re going for. They are absolutely comparing themselves to everything else on the market, and rightly so, because this is a, this is a phenomenal moment because there are quotes online from Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, John Ternus, Phil Schiller, everyone talking about how they’ve looked at it and it’s, it’s not something they want to do, but like literally going back a decade or more. So it is a bit of a backpedal in some ways. Yeah. And they never said why. They never said what, what it was about. And in all their demonstrations, there’s no real use case that’s been demonstrated. So all the gestures on screen are the same as what you do on your trackpad. So your three-finger swipe to go between spaces, you zoom, you rotate, it’s all the same. And even in my few minutes of mucking around with it, I found myself doing it on the trackpad instead of the screen. It’s a learning.

[00:25:38] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, but I think the, the other advantage, I guess, is that the trackpad’s only so small, you know, trying to replicate the movement on the trackpad on the screen. Now you can actually just touch the screen and do it on the screen. So it gives people be more— no question, a bit more access.

[00:25:52] Trevor Long: But I think people who do 3D design and graphic design and stuff are going to love the fact that they can interact with— there’s a dude upstairs here that builds— it looks like a spaceship and it’s got a garden in it. I don’t even know what it is. There’s some weird— like, think of the term hyperbaric chamber, but it’s something, uh, something like that for keeping flowers alive longer, right? And he makes one a year. That’s how complicated this thing is. And you got this 3D modeler He’s from Japan. He couldn’t speak English. They had a woman there just talking for him, and he was just showing how he can look through his model. I get it. I get it. But you can also do that on a tablet. You know, remember the iPad Pro?

[00:26:26] Stephen Fenech: Do that on the iPad. That’s right.

[00:26:28] Trevor Long: Is touchscreen. It has an unbelievable processor in it. It can do all this stuff. And I don’t know, it’s just there was no compelling reason given as to why this is needed other than they can do it now. They can do it now with no latency, with a great screen, and without compromising things like battery life. Because normally if you add touch to a backlit display, you are going to drain the battery life ever so slightly. Because of the, the ability to gain battery life back through OLED, the compromise is unseen because the battery life is the same as your traditional MacBook Pro.

[00:27:04] Stephen Fenech: So have you noticed a little bit of a pattern here where The Duo was their first foldable. They’ve come in the market way later than others. And now the, the, the new MacBook Pro with touch. And like, how, how many years has there been Windows laptops with touch?

[00:27:23] Trevor Long: I had a quick look. I think it’s a decade, 2012. So 14 years, I think.

[00:27:27] Stephen Fenech: 14 years roughly. Okay.

[00:27:28] Trevor Long: I would say a decade since it’s been mainstream and common. Yeah, is the way I would look at it. But, you know, we’ve talked about this before. Apple’s not first at almost anything, right? 5G, wireless charging, the iPod, the music player. None of these things were first. They just do it better. And what they’re doing here is they’re pushing the industry to say, okay, is your touch responsive? Does your screen have a 10 million to 1 contrast ratio? Like they’re referring to this OLED panel as a reference monitor. They’re referring to this in such that, like, if you think of a movie pipeline. We’ve seen shots of people making movies and there’s, you know, the rough cuts are seen on set on a MacBook and then it goes off to be color graded, all that stuff. And it’s normally the last person that color grades it and signs off on it. And what they say is, look, all the way down the process now, people can go, hang on a minute, there’s not enough detail there, we need to shoot it again. So there’s benefits in the entire production flow as opposed to just at the end. I mean, a reference monitor is normally a $30,000 thing. So for it to be in a laptop is a huge achievement. It can’t be underestimated.

[00:28:33] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, the, you know, the developers who’ve demonstrated how they can do touch and do it really well. Where do you think this is going to maybe extend to other products? Do you think that we might get like an iMac with touch now and maybe a Studio Display with touch? And where does it stop? Is it going to— I suppose they’ll see how successful this one is, but would, would you, would there be a market for like a touchscreen iMac, for example?

[00:29:00] Trevor Long: I don’t know, mate. I think I look at it and I go, okay, let’s, let’s stay in the laptop sphere for a minute and go, would you ever need a touch Neo? Right now, if it’s a $1,700-odd premium to get touch in a 14-inch display, it’s still going to be $1,500, $1,400 to put it into a smaller display. I just don’t know. How the economics of it work until they’ve progressed so far down the road with the technology.

[00:29:27] Stephen Fenech: Because you know what, Apple’s good at showing you something that you suddenly think, oh, I want that, you need that. And with the introduction of this is sort of that they’re calling it new dimension in pro workflows as they’re saying in the releases. If this catches on, like a pro might think, well, you know, it’s a lot easier to do this than to click a mouse. So this, this could lead to— yeah,

[00:29:55] Trevor Long: I describe the MacBook lineup as crowded now. You know, like you’ve got this, you’ve got a couple of Neos, you’ve got a couple of Airs, you’ve always had multiple Pros. You know, you’ve got Pros that are for the entry level, then you’ve got Pros for the pros because you’ve got the Pros with the, the standard M processor and then you’ve got the Pros with the better M processors. And now you’ve got this thing on top. It’s the, it’s the top of the tree. It’s a crowded space in their own lineup. And so personally, I don’t think that for a couple of years we’re going to see any movement on this touch cascading down unless they can democratize it in terms of price. I think this is the, the pro of the pro.

[00:30:34] Stephen Fenech: But the Apple look, that’s called the Apple effect, right? We’ve seen it with Duo. We’ve seen it now with um, even though Samsung— and what I said in my reviews was that the advantage that Apple have here is that they— Samsung don’t own Android, so they can’t direct Android to their only their devices. Apple’s advantage is that they, they do have that control and that, that link to their hardware. Now, as we’ve seen with Duo, yes, there’s been Android folds for 8 years, But no developer has really stepped up and thought, I’m going to make something that’s just a whiz-bang for the front screen and the inside screen, whereas Apple’s developers thought, okay. And you’re seeing all these fascinating, you know, what we, you know, the Deckman and the Toasty and all these cool apps. Is this going to have the similar effect to the developer community and just the pro users? Are they now going to step up and sort of show people what they can do with it now.

[00:31:36] Trevor Long: I don’t think we’ll see it because it will be at such a pro level, be like at Vision Pro numbers, very small, because the, the kind of applications are those, you know, those CAD modeling programs, those 3D modeling programs. There was a guy here upstairs who worked for a fashion brand, used to work at Dyson apparently as an engineer, and he had a 3D printer going, he was printing a shoe. And he said, we use this 3D modeling software and I’ve created a version of it that I want anyone to be able to use. And he was showing how using the screen, he was manipulating things, and it was, it was unbelievable. And I can imagine mucking around with it and building a 3D model. That’s still super niche. Um, the only real development stuff I see happening here is developers, uh, recoding apps for touch. So the most remarkable thing about macOS is that when you use your mouse and you click on the menu bar at the top, that looks the same. But if you click the exact same menu with your finger, the menu’s all stretched out just a little bit, just enough to make there be a gap for your finger to do things. And I think that’s smart. They’ve thought through that because on a Windows laptop, it doesn’t matter whether you’re clicking with your mouse or your finger, that button is the same. You know, the three, the red, yellow, and green buttons on the window control of a Mac are tiny. And when you, when you go to touch them, they get huge. So you can’t make the mistake. That’s smart. That’s simple. But I don’t think it is Duo-style game changer for a development community personally. This is pro, pro stuff, man. I, you know, this is expensive. This starts at what, $5,499? That’s the entry-level 14-inch version.

[00:33:11] Stephen Fenech: It starts at $5,000.

[00:33:13] Trevor Long: $5,499.

[00:33:16] Stephen Fenech: Wow. Surprise.

[00:33:18] Trevor Long: Let me just triple check that for you, buddy. The 14-inch— sorry, I was wrong. Well, with M4 Pro, 14-inch MacBook Pro with the touch with M5 Pro is $4,599. The 14-inch with M5 Max starts at $6,999, and the 16-inch starts at $5,499.

[00:33:39] Stephen Fenech: Wow, that’s iPhone Duo pricing.

[00:33:42] Trevor Long: Yeah, mate. Absolutely. And they know that, look, they’ve got a market. So

[00:33:48] Stephen Fenech: yeah,

[00:33:49] Trevor Long: you know, they know what they’re doing, I guess.

[00:33:52] Stephen Fenech: And you said it’s slightly thinner and slightly lighter, I believe. Like it’s like 0.3 of a kilo lighter.

[00:33:58] Trevor Long: 70— it’s 170 grams lighter and it is 5mm thinner and its floor space, so its footprint is also you know, millimeters in the fractions of a centimeter smaller as well. So it’s all very awesome.

[00:34:17] Stephen Fenech: The first design change we’ve seen to MacBook Pros. So does it look out when you look at it? Does it look different? You wouldn’t notice it.

[00:34:24] Trevor Long: You wouldn’t notice it. No. Like, well, I was walking around the hands-on area and they’ve got— even though this event announced the Pro OLED XDR touchscreen MacBook Pro, what a stupid name. Because of all the other stuff that was announced this week that was also here to muck around with, right? So I walked up one point, I thought, perfect, there’s not many people here, I’ll have a play with this and do a video. No, it was the, it was the 14-inch with M6. So, and I like, it just looks like a MacBook. Like, yeah, it’s ever so slightly different. I’m sure once I get a better look and sit them side by side, I’ll notice something different about it that makes it obvious. I tell you, it’s when the screen’s on. Firstly, the Dynamic Island is a dead giveaway, and also down the bottom of the screen. It’s, it’s also curved. So the all four corners are curved. Oh, weirdly, that’s not the case on the current MacBook Pro. So it is on the touchscreen version.

[00:35:14] Stephen Fenech: The glowing Apple icon is back on the lid.

[00:35:18] Trevor Long: It’s been 11 years, 10 years at least. Really? That long?

[00:35:24] Stephen Fenech: Wow. Amazing.

[00:35:26] Trevor Long: Yeah. And it’s still because you remember that was kind of just emitting the light from the back of the backlight, right? So because it’s an OLED, there is no backlight. So I haven’t been able to understand it and someone will tear it apart. But yeah, it’s a light, but it still responds to your screen brightness. So if you turn the screen brightness up and down, it, it follows. And if you’re in a bright room and your screen dims or anything, it follows that as well. So it follows the ambient lighting and your choice of screen brightness.

[00:35:53] Stephen Fenech: You don’t want it to be a blaring bright light in a dark room.

[00:35:57] Trevor Long: I bet you any money there’s an on/off switch in the settings.

[00:36:00] Stephen Fenech: Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure.

[00:36:01] Trevor Long: Yeah. Well, look, it’s, it’s a solid set of, of features for a pro, pro laptop, but it is for the niche end of their MacBook market. Let’s be honest. Yeah. Neo is their big seller. The Air is their number one seller, by the way. They haven’t— they’ve never said that the Neo has outsold the Air. Remember, they always talk about the Air as the number one selling laptop in the world. Because of its single model, they’ve never said the Neo’s outsold it. So it must still be selling better than the Neo, even though I thought it would. I thought the Neo would do unbelievably well, but maybe no one’s ever asked the question. But yeah, all, all the products we’re about to tell you about and this product go on sale on the 6th of November and preorders are kind of happening right now. Stephen.

[00:36:44] Stephen Fenech: Righto. Okay. Well, Two Blokes Talking Tech is proudly supported by Arlo, arlo.com.au. If you’re in the market for some security cameras, they have quite a range now. My favorite has become the new pan-tilt. I’ve got some work being done on my back deck. They’re redoing the back deck, and the pan-tilt camera is just having a field day.

[00:37:08] Trevor Long: Gotcha. Yeah, gotcha.

[00:37:09] Stephen Fenech: I can keep an eye on them, but not that I need to. But yeah, it is one of those models that can, if you’ve got a large area to monitor. It can really track, and, and when it tracks movement, it actually— when it notices movement, it tracks the object that it’s, uh, it’s caught onto there. So, uh, tracking is excellent, uh, and covering that wider area, uh, but also you can, you can then, you know, can join, join the ecosystem with a doorbell or a wired floodlight, and so many to choose from. But they all tie together with the Arlo Secure Plan. So if you do have the subscription, you get so many more features It really ties this whole system together really well. You get access to up to 30 days of cloud storage for your videos, but you also get all those smart notifications as well. So you can see packages, animals, vehicles, people, and also recognizes people too. So rather than just saying person at the front door, it’ll say Joe Phoenix at the front door. So I don’t need to look at that notification because it’s my wife. So yeah, if you are in the market and you want to increase your peace of mind, improve your security at home, head over to Arlo.com.au.

[00:38:22] Trevor Long: And Two Blokes is also brought to you by the great people at JBL. And I spent a day in Korea last week with JBL celebrating 80 years of the business. And it’s fascinating. And I’d love you to spend 11 minutes of your time checking out the video I made. It’s on the EFTM YouTube channel, just looking at the history of JBL, because James B. Lansing, who created the company, did, did so in 1946, but he’d been making speakers for nearly 20 years before that. In fact, some of his components, the things that he made were in radios and theaters well before the JBL brand was created. But, you know, the iconic moments in music, iconic moments in sound are all part of the JBL history, which comes right through to today with all of their Bluetooth speakers, headphones, party speakers, and of course, their new Cove Wi-Fi speakers, which allow you to have amazing whole home sound, individual room sound, whatever you like. Fill a room or multiple rooms with sound thanks to JBL in your home. You can look up that Cove speaker range and all their existing speakers at jbl.com.au. Now, Stephen, the week started with press releases. It’s one of those, one of those weeks for Apple. It was like, okay, we’re going to give you a press release and then it’s like, hang on, this is going to happen all week. But the first one was iPad Mini and this— yep, 2. I don’t know. Screen.

[00:39:39] Stephen Fenech: It has, yeah. Now I think the— it was interesting how they, they launched this just days after the iPhone Duo went on sale. Duo has a 7.6-inch screen when you open it up. This has an 8.5-inch screen, so not much bigger than the Duo. But there, this is, yes, first with OLED, but also too has the nano texture, the same chip as the, as the iPhone 18 Pro and the Duo, the A20 Pro chip as well. And I think this is a really popular product because of its size. Now the ease of use and the ability to use it in the field. They’re talking, you know, this is what a lot of doctors use and people, you know, field service workers. Pilots.

[00:40:23] Trevor Long: Yeah, exactly. It’s the default flight book for a lot of pilots, especially in small aircraft. But you know, the OLED display, they’ve been able to make the display bigger, but the device smaller. Device the same size. Yeah, it’s basically just pushed the screen out a little bit, but the whole device is, is a bit thinner again. But you’re right, 4mm. It is Duo announcement time, or Duo availability timing versus this, because it’s like, this is now $1,099. Like, it’s—

[00:40:50] Stephen Fenech: yeah,

[00:40:51] Trevor Long: crazy more expensive. Obviously the chips and memory and all that stuff is coming into the factor here, but—

[00:40:55] Stephen Fenech: and the OLED screen. Yeah,

[00:40:57] Trevor Long: it’s It’s a lot. You know, this is no longer the device you go, I’ve got kids, I’ll give them a little iPad Mini. No, you get the default 10-inch iPad for the entry. It’s just that, you know, that’s $600, maybe a bit more now. But the iPad Mini is a— it is made for a market. And for some people it is because of the simple portability of it. And mate, the power of this thing, like that A20 processor means you’re getting all that Apple intelligence features, you’re getting that on-device stuff. I believe there’s apps now that you can get. I’ve not tested any that allow you to download a large language model and run some AI work, LLM work on the device, because obviously a lot of the AI work that Siri does happens in the private cloud compute, which is totally private, but it’s still using the internet. And so you could be offline and download LLMs here and use them offline. Because this thing’s so bloody powerful. Like, yeah, it’s amazing. But the timing is hilarious.

[00:41:56] Stephen Fenech: Incredible. Yeah. Yeah. And only available in two colors too. It’s

[00:42:00] Trevor Long: Midnight and Starlight. And again, it used to come in a bunch of colors, so it was like, okay, I’ll get a color for each kid. You know, like we used to— I used to have some demo units the kids used and they all had a different color. And that was how we knew who’d left theirs lying around or who hadn’t put theirs away. Well, they’ve just gone back to the old school. You know what? This is not a family device. This is a professional device. Yeah. And here’s the other thing. When you, when you go OLED display and nano texture is available on the, not on the 128GB model, but on the 256GB and 512GB. So nano texture is available, OLED display, A20 processor. It’s not an M chip, but mate, the performance of this thing compared to an iPad Pro, what are we talking about? You know, like it’s, it’s exceptional.

[00:42:42] Stephen Fenech: It’s up there. Why would you buy an iPad Pro when you get something as powerful as this?

[00:42:47] Trevor Long: The bigger screen, I guess, is what the iPad Pro has. Yeah, I get that. But it’s the same with MacBook. You know, I have this struggle all the time. People say to me, what do you think of the MacBook Air? Can’t do video. I’m sorry. Yes, it can. Can’t do 8K video because I tried. Struggle. Yeah, but it could do certainly HD and definitely 4K. Like it’s actually such a fringe thing to hit the limit of almost any Apple device. And a lot of that does come down to the fact that Apple has been on this silicon journey and this journey to own the product from every inch. Now, you know, funny thing is you get people and how many, how many TikToks have you seen where they’re like, oh, the Duo screens made by Samsung or, you know, even the OLED in the new MacBook we talked about. They say when I was talking about the engineering of it, they say working with our partner, I don’t know who that is, could be LG, but yeah, this is, it’s still them. Dictating what it is. The fact that another factory makes it means nothing. Yeah, yeah. It’s remarkable how much power they are able to put into a device like this for $1,000. It really is.

[00:43:47] Stephen Fenech: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, it’s, and that at that size, I think, yeah, that’s appealing to people who don’t really want a big screen, but there was something just as portable as this, slightly bigger than a phone or a Duo. Yeah, I think. Yeah. And the fact it’s thinner and lighter too, managed to give you more and, and the product is less. It’s smaller and lighter.

[00:44:09] Trevor Long: Yeah. Outstanding. I think they’ve, I think done a very good job with that as a once every 2-year update. It’s done the job, which is also essentially the same as the other 2 products that were announced the day after, which is the iMac, which still doesn’t have a Pro version or a larger version. We’re still just running with this 24-inch screen. So make of that what you will, because I think we’ve gotten to the point where people that want a bigger screen like me and you have just bought big screens and Mac Studios or Mac Minis, right? So I think they’ve realized that’s, that’s a market of its own. So they put the M6 chip into the iMac and they put the M6 chip into the 14-inch MacBook Pro.

[00:44:48] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. And just to be clear too, correct me if I’m wrong, the M6 chip is not as powerful as the M5 Pro and the M5 Max. That’s right. That’s true.

[00:44:59] Trevor Long: Yes. So that’s confusing. It’s weird, but it goes M6 and then M5, M5, M5 Max. You know, now M5 is obviously below the M6, but anything with a word after it is a step above the number before it.

[00:45:15] Stephen Fenech: Yeah. As easy as that to follow.

[00:45:17] Trevor Long: No, no, no, no. Anything with a word after it is a step above the number after it. So yeah, M5 Pro is better than an M6. Look, I think that’s because in the early days they were, they were in a, in a flow. It was like M1 and then M1 Ultras and then there was M2 and then, and then they got to this rut where they, they, they couldn’t push the boundary enough, I think, of the Pro and Max models. And it feels like they’re going to be every couple of years as opposed to being able to push the silicon boundaries with the default one a little more often. I guess

[00:45:46] Stephen Fenech: because the new— the new MacBook Pro, the Pro LED Touch one, that’s got the M5 Ultra and M5 Pro options, haven’t they? It’s M5.

[00:45:55] Trevor Long: So the big exciting MacBook of the week is the Pro with Touch, but that’s got the super pro-level M5s in it. So you would choose that if you’re a movie maker, animator, graphic person, whatever. Not to say, as I just said with all the other products, not to say that the standard M6 processor in a MacBook Pro isn’t going to do all the same stuff. Like, I’m at the point where I, you know, use a Mac Studio, which is generation old now, and I’m still blown away by how quickly it renders video. And, and it— yeah, sure, these newer ones do it faster, but that much faster? I don’t know. You know, it’s so incremental. But there was one point, I don’t know whether it was in a, in a briefing that I was in or whether it was in a video they released, but they talked about this, the M6 processor-enabled MacBook Pro. They talked about it from the Intel upgrader perspective. So they still acknowledge that there’s a bunch of people with MacBook Pros that have the Intel processor in them. But how many years ago was that? Because, yeah, but mate, how long do these things last? Forever.

[00:47:01] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, they do.

[00:47:02] Trevor Long: They are very durable devices. Like literally you can hang on to these things for 7 years. These— I think MacBooks are like TVs. They’re a 5 to 7 year product, whereas a PC is often much less, I think 3 to 5 years, right? Yeah. So I think there are Intel upgraders. I think there are. And I think that’s who these are targeted at. There’ll be people with the iMac in their, in their homes, Intel iMacs that are going, okay, now I can get it in pink, yellow, blue, purple, and it’s got the M6. And M6, absolutely. Yeah. It’s

[00:47:29] Stephen Fenech: AI, because the previous one, all these

[00:47:31] Trevor Long: different things,

[00:47:32] Stephen Fenech: previous iMac was M4, so they skipped a generation there.

[00:47:37] Trevor Long: Yeah, yep.

[00:47:37] Stephen Fenech: And, and the MacBook Pro, that’s only the 14-inch model. Yeah, that’s available in the—

[00:47:42] Trevor Long: they didn’t, they didn’t do a 16-inch with M6.

[00:47:46] Stephen Fenech: Yeah,

[00:47:46] Trevor Long: I think, I think there is a 16-inch, but it’s got M5.

[00:47:50] Stephen Fenech: Yeah,

[00:47:51] Trevor Long: is there still a 16-inch with M5? Right,

[00:47:54] Stephen Fenech: I’m not sure now. I’m just thinking that they must have it.

[00:47:56] Trevor Long: I feel like just because on the web 16s are only the, are only the Pro Pro. So I mean, it’s so annoying to try and describe, but they’re only the ones that are, that are Super Chip enabled, let’s call them. So you know, the MacBook Pro.

[00:48:14] Stephen Fenech: Now they have an M14 with M6 and the 16, the 16 M5

[00:48:20] Trevor Long: Pro and

[00:48:21] Stephen Fenech: M5. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:22] Trevor Long: Yes. And now touchscreen is an option,

[00:48:27] Stephen Fenech: right?

[00:48:28] Trevor Long: I feel like they need to narrow back their page because it’s still a MacBook Pro. It’s actually just an option, but they want to have the, the Pro with XDR, Pro LED. Yeah, I’m looking at it right now. Product.

[00:48:40] Stephen Fenech: I’m looking at it right now. They’ve got side by side MacBook Pro, Pro LED XDR, and then MacBook Pro next to it.

[00:48:46] Trevor Long: Whereas if you click on the shop now for the MacBook Pro, you’ve got, you’ve got choose your size, 14-inch, 16-inch. You should be able to choose 16-inch and then choose the, you know, bigger display.

[00:48:57] Stephen Fenech: You know, you can, you can choose on—

[00:49:00] Trevor Long: no, but you can only choose standard display or nano texture. So you can’t then choose to get the touchscreen. You’ve got to go back to the touchscreen MacBook Pro page.

[00:49:08] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, I know, that’s separate. It’s separate menu.

[00:49:10] Trevor Long: It’s a separate product.

[00:49:12] Stephen Fenech: Yep.

[00:49:12] Trevor Long: I don’t know. I think it’d be smarter to bring them all together. And give me all the options in one.

[00:49:16] Stephen Fenech: No, they’ve done it different. So I’m looking at it now.

[00:49:19] Trevor Long: Pre-order. Speak. I can speak for the two blokes here, right? Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re buying any of these products, get the nano texture. Just get it. Now, there is an anti-glare coating. I can’t not have it on the touchscreen. There’s an anti-glare coating on the touchscreen, Mac. I didn’t mention with the gloss.

[00:49:36] Stephen Fenech: Yeah,

[00:49:36] Trevor Long: it’s good. It’s, you know what it’s like? It’s like LG’s anti-glare. Compared to Samsung’s anti-glare. That’s your touchscreen anti-glare versus your nano texture. But on all the MacBook Pros you can get nano texture. On iPad Mini you can get nano texture. On iPad Pro you can get it. Just get it, folks. It’s so good.

[00:49:59] Stephen Fenech: Yeah.

[00:49:59] Trevor Long: Now you reckon?

[00:49:59] Stephen Fenech: Now that’s a choice now in the nano texture. It costs you an extra $225 on the, on the, the new.

[00:50:07] Trevor Long: But in In nearly every case, it’s only on certain models. Like, you’ve got to have the right spec or the right size. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:50:15] Stephen Fenech: So, uh, well, yeah, you know, there’s, uh, there’s a lot of customizing you do on all of their— like, it’s scary when you want to add more memory. And I noticed too, on their menus now, they give you, like, say you want to upgrade the— I’m going through it now— say you want to upgrade the, um, Unified Memory.

[00:50:35] Trevor Long: Yes,

[00:50:36] Stephen Fenech: there’s a, there’s now there’s a little drop-down menu that offers 24, 48, or 64, and then further down it gives you or choose from more options, 32 gig and 128. So that’s separate to the, the general, uh, the like 24, 48, 64, and they’ve separated 36 gig and 128 gig. For some reason. See pricing and charges. It doesn’t—

[00:51:03] Trevor Long: I’m not sure which one you’re looking at there. It might, it might be since the Pro LED also between the chips. Oh, this is the, uh, Pro.

[00:51:10] Stephen Fenech: But even the same thing for the storage. The storage is selected either 1, 2, or 4, and then it goes, or choose from more options, 8 and 16. I think, you know how, you know why? I think because you see next to it, you know, 2TB plus $750. 4TB plus $2,200. They don’t want to scare you with plus $16,000 for the other one.

[00:51:35] Trevor Long: See, mine’s not showing that. It’s just showing included and plus $2,000 for the 128 and stuff like that.

[00:51:40] Stephen Fenech: Now mine shows 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and then another section, or choose from more options. And then it’s got 8, and it says see pricing and charges. 16, see pricing in charges.

[00:51:54] Trevor Long: And then you click on that

[00:51:55] Stephen Fenech: and

[00:51:55] Trevor Long: then it’s,

[00:51:57] Stephen Fenech: um,

[00:51:58] Trevor Long: well, then it didn’t give you—

[00:52:01] Stephen Fenech: no, no, I’m in the Aussie shop, I believe. Hang

[00:52:03] Trevor Long: on. Yeah, I think I’m in the—

[00:52:04] Stephen Fenech: I’m in the Australian shop. I’m, uh, you go to .com.au. Yeah, yeah, um,

[00:52:10] Trevor Long: we’re seeing, we’re seeing two different things. It’s quite remarkable.

[00:52:14] Stephen Fenech: Wow,

[00:52:14] Trevor Long: wow, there you go. But yeah, as I said earlier, you can really, uh you can really spend some money on these things, can’t you?

[00:52:21] Stephen Fenech: Yeah, what did you get it up to? $22K? $22K.

[00:52:23] Trevor Long: I got it to $22,400 or something like that for the touchscreen one, yeah.

[00:52:27] Stephen Fenech: That’s like a sport. You should have a sport to compete against. Oh, I got it up to this much. Yeah.

[00:52:33] Trevor Long: As you said earlier, it’s the price of a car, isn’t it?

[00:52:36] Stephen Fenech: You know? It is, isn’t it? $22K deposit on a unit.

[00:52:39] Trevor Long: I think it’s a sport to try and justify this. And I’ll be honest with you, the experience today is quite interesting because none of them convinced me that you needed touch. They just demonstrated how they would use touch. So there was a musician upstairs from France, very musician, you know, big hair and tight pants and all that kind of stuff, sitting in a little studio type environment. And he was using Logic Studio and he was showing how to add drum beats and stuff. And he was touching the screen to add them as opposed to, I don’t know, the keyboard, the spacebar or something. And yeah, I get it. It works that way. It didn’t overwhelm me with this is a compelling reason to have it. And so I do think, and I think it’s going to be a huge adjustment. I think once we get hands-on with these things, it’s going to be more of a look, for the first week and a half I didn’t use it, but then I found scrolling a website was easier, or I found that, you know, zooming and moving between spaces was easier and stuff like that.

[00:53:31] Stephen Fenech: So, and they’re available when? Next week. Next week, Friday, November 6th. On the 6th of November. So that’s That’s— yeah, that’s—

[00:53:37] Trevor Long: I think all of these products we’ve talked about, the iMac, the iPad Mini, the M6 14-inch and the touchscreen Pro LED XDR MacBook Pro, all go on sale next Friday. Yeah, preorders are out now. Show them your money, folks. Show them your money. You’ll get one fast and you’ll get a Duo, that’s for sure.

[00:53:59] Stephen Fenech: But, you know, you mentioned that you know, the $22,000 one. No, I don’t think— I think that’d be— it’d be obviously a pro user would buy that, but it’d be someone who sort of works for a big studio, big, you know, big company that would— that would be an investment in a project that they’ve started or something like. So if you’re

[00:54:20] Trevor Long: producing a movie, terabytes of storage, you know. Yeah, I mean, I get it. That’s a lot. But you’d also want some serious backups because if your whole movie is on the Mac and something goes wrong. Yeah, but there’s— look, here’s the thing. The last thing I’ll say is there’s a lot of people who do things with Apple products that we wouldn’t even imagine. And that’s one of the experiences I had today. Just to rub it into Steve, and I sent him a video of an actual model of Industrial Light and Magic Star Wars ship from one of the TV series reversed against an LCD panel screen, which is like they’re using those, the volumes. So they shoot them. And what he was showing was weird. It was nothing to do with the touchscreen Mac, by the way. It was— he was showing that they were shooting on an iPhone because it could be blocked. You know, there’s a, there’s a function in the iPhone in the camera. You can lock it to a range of other controls. And he was showing how it was being locked to the lighting. And so he was also not just had white lights, he was controlling a much more spaced out LED panel of lights to show that the kind of motion across the ship matched the screen in front of it and things like this. It was remarkable. There was— mate, there was a guy, and I’m going to try and get a copy of the photos. I stood and got a photo taken, right? Took a photo like 1 second, but it took— in that moment, it took, I don’t know, 200 photos and allowed him to manipulate the photo in such a way that you could change the lighting. It was stunning. And then there was— then there was this area where they had a woman standing in front of, let’s call it, a 100-inch TV. And it looked like she was just standing in a— it looked like what was behind her was a photo of a kitchen, let’s call it, right? But it was actually a high-resolution 3D model. And wherever the camera moved, the background moved in relation to her. So she stood still and the camera moved around. It was a 3D model so that it was like they were using a virtual set. And it was all using bloody iPhones. And there was, there was guys that had a— remember The Matrix? Yeah, the shot in The Matrix with the bullet, right? Bullet time. There’s guys— bullet time. There’s a guy upstairs with 9 iPhones in a bullet time, like a ray.

[00:56:27] Stephen Fenech: Oh, wow.

[00:56:28] Trevor Long: And in, in almost real time, it processed this space, this area of this scene, this, you know, 8-second scene using 4 Mac Studios. Like linked together. So the performance for Mac Studios and then any individual could just use the, the Mac to touchscreen Mac to manipulate the scene and show from any point, change the light and do all this stuff. Like, I don’t think we mere mortals can understand what some people want to do with these products. And no, you’re right, mate, we don’t expect the performance.

[00:57:01] Stephen Fenech: No, no, I review—

[00:57:02] Trevor Long: I don’t know anyone that does.

[00:57:04] Stephen Fenech: I review review the MacBook Pro. They sent me the MacBook Pro to review, and in my review I’m thinking, there’s no— my workflow is not going to get anywhere near what this thing can do.

[00:57:13] Trevor Long: Yeah.

[00:57:13] Stephen Fenech: And, uh, but there are people who can push it to the limit. I’m not one of them.

[00:57:19] Trevor Long: Very, very— my current capacity, people, mate. Um, I don’t think I’ll— I’ll stop it right there. I’ll never be that person. But I— but here’s what I think. I think we’re going to get to a point where in this AI generation— and your brother Mikey would talk to this as well, where we will want to localize things. And so I think about some of the stuff that some of my AI agents are doing, and I might prefer it to be local on a computer. So I’d prefer you just reading from this software rather than reading, having my account, if you know what I mean. And I think that Apple’s pushing the boundaries of the ability of their processors so much to do those kinds of things that the potential is genuinely there for Absolutely. Where the stuff that we’re doing, like, and it’s funny, I had a lady ask a question in a briefing of Apple, and I’ll paraphrase, she, she was speaking, she was, English was not her first language. And so she said something about doing the local, you know, AI. Does that save energy? I know what she meant. She didn’t mean does it use less power on the device. What she meant was because they were not using a data data center, is that good for the environment? Like, we’re not having to build as many data centers because we’re able to have it on our computers. And there’s a potential for that, right? There’s a potential that we actually have too much compute in the cloud and want and need more compute in our laps. That’s, that’s the next 5 years, I reckon. That’s where it’ll be interesting.

[00:58:42] Stephen Fenech: Absolutely. Yeah. Right now, I don’t know what she was trying to ask.

[00:58:46] Trevor Long: It’s been a, it’s been a massive, massive week, Stephen. Many, many, many, many product announcements from Apple. They’ve dominated the week. I don’t know if there’s been any other news. All the details of those product announcements are at techguide.com.au and eftm.com. Have I missed anything? Is there other news?

[00:59:01] Stephen Fenech: Well, not really. Apple’s pretty much dominated. You know, the— you mentioned AI before. The Norton have a part of their— they’ve expanded Norton 360 to include Safe AI. So, you know, you’ve got your agents sort of acting on your behalf. They’ve got now a safe AI tool that makes sure that it’s not sort of putting any of your information out there and, and putting you at risk.

[00:59:27] Trevor Long: Kaleda, that does the same thing. It’s fascinating that these companies have realized that they’ve needed to go from a decade, two decades ago, antivirus, stopping viruses from hitting this machine, to internet security, stopping us from doing stupid things with the internet, to now stopping

[00:59:41] Stephen Fenech: scammers. Yeah,

[00:59:42] Trevor Long: through Norton and and others like Trend Micro, they’re doing this thing where they go, okay, so rather than using— because I, you can talk about Norton, but I know with Trend Micro you can still choose to use ChatGPT or Claude. You can choose which model you want to use, but the— it’s like an interface that says, oh, my credit card number’s this, uh, you know, send it to that. And what it’ll do is go, listen, I’m not going to send that on, but I’m going to make the query and come back to you with the answer, and I’ll then incorporate your credit credit card details into the answer because that’s what you want to see. Like, make me— let’s say you said, make me a, a document that gave a hotel permission to charge my credit card. I want you to write me a document. Here’s my credit card, here’s my passport number, whatever, right? It goes away, and normally it’ll just come back and it’s sent it up and it’s sent it back. So what these smart AIs do is they go, tell you what, we’ll hold off on that, we’ll send it off, we’ll get the cool letter written, and then we’ll plug the credit card number and passport number in when we show it to you. I think that’s genius. So yeah, very, very smart. Yeah. Way to keep us safe in the AI world.

[01:00:45] Stephen Fenech: Protection from the outside and from the inside. So our AI agents are doing the right thing by us.

[01:00:52] Trevor Long: Always. All right, mate. Well, lovely to see you. And I’ll be back in the studio next week and we’ll, we’ll talk anything but Apple. Should we, should we try next week? It’d be hard because— Good luck. Reviews. But Yeah, well, just for Bruce, we’ll try and release an episode in the next 2 weeks called Anything But Apple.

[01:01:08] Stephen Fenech: Sure. All right, try.

[01:01:13] Trevor Long: Let’s do it again next week. Thank you to Arlo. Thank you to JBL. Two Blokes Talking Tech, episode 756, and we’ll be back next week for 757.

[01:01:19] Stephen Fenech: See you later.