 Ross, David, I'm all yours, man. What do you need to know? So I want to go first. I want to know about the iMac. It seemed like everybody kind of lost their mind when it came out and everybody was talking about how thin it was and all this stuff. Is it really as incredible as they make it sound? So what happened was when the iMac came out, they showed, they did a very dramatic introduction. The iMac is a masterpiece of visual trickery. So it came out and it was super thin and it looked as thin as the screen on a MacBook Pro. And then Phil Schiller rotated it and you see the gigantic round back. And gigantic is the wrong, it's not gigantic, it's just compared to how thin you think it is, the actual depth of it is surprising. So it looks very thin and it's a really aggressive kind of bit of optical engineering that you've got this flat 5 millimeter edge. But as soon as you kind of get around it all the way, you see how deep it really is. And so they did make it thinner and they got rid of the optical drive and they're doing this crazy fusion drive thing inside, which sounds to me like a regular hybrid hard drive. But the thing that shocked people, the thinness, kind of dissipated as soon as you get physically in front of it and you see that there is depth behind it. I will say the display of the iMac is gorgeous. They're not calling it a Retina display. I don't think they can do the visual acuity math they need to do in terms of pixel density to call it a Retina display. But all the other kind of techniques are there. So it's optically bonded, they're using the same scaling software on the Retina MacBook Pro, they're pixel doubling it, all that stuff. And it looks beautiful. So I think the average distance that you sit away from a desktop doesn't let them say it's a Retina display. But if you get a little bit farther back, you definitely can't see the pixels. Right. Neil, I want to ask you a little bit about the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina. We heard this argument earlier. It's got integrated graphics, it's closer to the MacBook Air in terms of graphic quality, but it's also outputting four times the number of pixels. How was the performance when you were trying out the 13-inch Retina Pro? When they announced the 13-inch Retina, I freaked out. That's the computer that I want. Because I don't want to run it at Retina resolution, I want to run it at the same resolution as my 15-inch MacBook Pro. And you can do it. You can set it to run at 1680 by 1050, which is my computer's resolution. So I was very excited about it. And then they announced the integrated graphics, and I was very sad. But so I got to play with it a little bit. And there was a big crowd of people. We didn't get to do everything we wanted to do. But I did run the 1080p Iron Man trailer simultaneously with a multi-track GarageBand file, one of the demo files, while scrolling around a 21-megapixel RAW file in Aperture, all at the same time. And the CPU monitor only ever hit 50%. It spiked above it here and there a little bit, but it kind of was steady at 50%. So my sense is that Apple's figured out how to push all those pixels. I mean, it's not a great graphics card. Nobody's excited about it. But Apple's kind of figured out how to make it perform adequately with that stuff. I think we'll have to see... For me, I think that's enough. I come to events, I take photos, I put them on the internet. I think that's going to be great for me, and the screen resolution's great. For people, Jordan, our video producer, he still had a big quizzical look on his face when I was doing all this stuff with it. So I think we'll have to put it through the review and see what the performance is really like. But just at a quick glance, trying to max it out, I really couldn't push it much harder than that. Technical follow-up question, what did you think of the Iron Man trailer? So I'm really irritated because I never actually got to watch it. Because I put it on, and then I had to listen to this crappy GarageBand guitar lick while scrolling around a photo. So the corner of it seemed amazing. And I will say that the default GarageBand guitar lick song works really well with it. It's kind of like a Dark Side of the Moon thing. But other than that, I didn't get to see it. So Neal, I sit tight for one second. We've got hands-on with the new MacBooks, I believe. So we're just going to run that, and then we have lots more questions for you. Hey guys, this is Neal with The Verge. I'm here with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It looks very much like the previous MacBook Pro, only it is far, far thinner because it emits the optical drive. It's got some new ports here. It's got the new MagSafe port. It's got two Thunderbolt ports, USB 3.0 on the other side. It's got an HDMI port, obviously the SD card slot, and another USB 3.0. Obviously the big change here is the Retina display. This has an effective resolution of 1280 by 800, but because it's pixel doubled, you can't see the pixels. It looks amazing. You can also run it at 1680 by 1050, which is the resolution of the old 15-inch MacBook Pro, which is great. So this has a lot of potential for Pro users. If you have a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you have every reason to look at this. And particularly important is this thing seems to perform really, really well. So we put together kind of an insane test here. I've got GarageBand open. I've got the 1080p Iron Man 3 trailer, and I've got Aputure with a 21-megapixel RAW file open. This is the CPU monitor. You can see all four cores are kind of barely doing anything. I'm going to start Iron Man. I'm going to start GarageBand. This is a cacophony of sound. And I'm going to start scrolling around in Aputure. Let's get Iron Man open here. And you can see everything is just kind of working pretty well, and the CPU is only about at half. So although it has integrated graphics, Intel HD 4000 graphics, and it's pushing this ultra-high resolution screen, performance seems to be actually really great, erasing kind of a big worry people had about those graphics powering this display. So that is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It's a great product. If you're like me and you have a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you have a whole new reason to want a smaller computer. Neelay, are you still with us? Yeah, I'm here. It's funny because I just literally heard myself say everything I just said. It was pretty awesome. It was pretty awesome. I'm here for you, Ross. You made the interesting point that this is a 15-inch... If you have a 15-inch Pro, this is a great alternative. What if you have an Air? Do you feel like this is a good upgrade? Do you think it's worth it? It's definitely thicker than the Air. It's just a more massive machine. There's more going on in there. I wouldn't be racing to upgrade if I had an Air, but if I was one of the many, many people who want to move down the line to the Air, I would probably stop at the 13-inch Pro. The screen is incredible. So looking at that screen versus looking at the Air screen, I think, is a no-brainer. So if you're wanting to go down to the... I think Apple has to figure out what its next move is with these machines because the Air is extremely thin and light. It's a beautiful computer, but it's clearly surpassed one level technologically by the Pro. And maybe that's for the best. For the longest time, I couldn't think of a good reason to get the 13-inch Pro over the Air, and now there's a couple of really good reasons to do it. So maybe Apple's stratifying its line a little bit more that way, but I would definitely get the Pro over the Air. And it's great. We've gotten a lot of impressions on your hands-ons about the iPad Mini, the iMac, the MacBook Pro. We got your impressions from the theater. The one thing I want to ask about you personally, Neelai, when we were kind of planning for this event, we were talking what is Tim Cook going to say, we were kind of convinced he'd bring up maps a little bit. I remember you particularly thought he would actually bring up maps in some way. They did the public apology. Not a single mention at all. Yeah, I don't know, man. They talked about iOS 6 a lot. They talked about how great their software is. They talked about all their successes. Apple events are structured very predictably, right? So they're always the same. We sit down, we get a bunch of stats about how well they're doing. There's always a shot of an Apple store, usually some far-flung place that I can't go to. And then there's a little bit of an update on something, right? And it seemed like the maps would be a great place to go and say we're basically turning what has been a bit of a failure into a success. We're updating it. We're making it work better. And they just didn't do it. And I kind of understand why. At the moment I didn't understand. But they did so much today. They packed so much into this event. When they were doing the Mac Mini, for example, it went by so fast that if you blinked, you missed it. You'd be basically like, here's a list of specs, I'm going to read them as fast as I can. Look at all these ports. Okay, that's Mac Mini. Got to go. Oh, there's a server version. $1,000. By the way, let's talk about the MX. It's really thin. Got to go. And it was about as fast as I've ever seen Apple go through an event. So spending time talking about a failure, this kind of machination between this didn't work out well and we fixed it, here's an improvement. When they could just talk about products that I think people are very excited about, I understand why they didn't do it. I think it would have been nice to see kind of a metric update on where the maps were and where they've come, but that'll just happen over time. And to be honest, the iPhone 5 is selling gangbusters. This iPad Mini is going to sell crazy. I don't think people are worried about the maps. They're expecting Apple to fix it and Apple is working on fixing it. Are you going to grab an iPad Mini when it comes out? Your Mini. What? Really? I don't know, man. I have this new game I play with Apple products where I swear up and down that I'm not going to buy it and then I go to a store and I play with one and then I leave and then a couple days later I come back and I say I'm not going to buy it and then I do. But I do that with everything. That's how I have a Nexus 7. That's probably how I'll end up with a Surface. It's $329. It's a surprisingly good price point. I think the next year we'll see one come at $249 and that'll dramatically change the stakes of this game. I think Apple targeted the form factor and they built whatever product they needed to build that form factor and that hit $329. I think next year if they do it the way they did with the original iPad where they brought it down $100, that could really make an impact on these lower priced tablets. I think Google still has a lot of potential at $199 with the Nexus 7. I think we'll probably see some updates to the Nexus 7 coming shortly. We'll definitely talk about that more. Obviously I think we're going to do another Vergecast on Thursday after the Microsoft event. We'll probably do another one on Monday to talk about Google. Yeah, there's only like 30 more events going on. There's only like 30 more events. This is the first event which is really weird to think about. This week is a long week we've got out of us. I'll say kind of a final thought here is that it's very rare to... When we did the iPhone 5 event, it was Apple's focus on the iPhone 5 and they put out these iPods. The iPod Touch is great and the iPod Nano is like, why did you make this? Their Apple story didn't seem like it had gelled. They were just updating this phone. The software seemed very kind of like timid. Now kind of in some, the sheer amount of updates they've done to all of these products. Tim Cook said on stage, we've updated almost everything here. The only one that's missing is the Mac Pro. So sorry guys, no one's ever getting a new Mac Pro. They've updated all of their major products in really dramatic ways. I think the iPhone has proven to be a bit more of a substantive upgrade. It's still an iterative product but I think now that people have them, they're seeing the true level of update that it is over the 4S. Very few other companies are doing this level of complete product line reinvention every year. I think what's really interesting is that Google and Microsoft, they've both got events this week. They're both going to, particularly in Microsoft's case, they've got to reinvent Windows and say here's the beginning of our Stablet strategy. Whereas Apple is now saying, our tablet strategy is mature, the foundation's built and we're ready to start splitting it off into other products that hit different targets and different price points. Microsoft and Google have a lot of catching up. Google's got to hit the top end of the market. The Nexus 7 is a great product. For one and nine, I think it's frankly an amazing product. But Google has nothing to compete in 10 inches, nothing to say you should replace a laptop with this. Microsoft is going straight for you should replace a laptop with this and nothing to compete with. You can read with this or here's a smaller product. It's only Apple that's now hitting all of the marks while still revamping all of its computers and doing all this other stuff that it's doing. I will say that I was pretty down after the iPhone 5. I thought the company needed to find a new path, a new aggression. But this event, and I think Josh was saying it too, this event to me is very aggressive. They're moving all their platforms forward. Even if something as mundane and simple as calling the new iPad with a lightning connector the iPad fourth generation, they're just showing off. They're just flaunting that they can change a generation of the product that quickly. It really is just a third gen iPad with a new processor and the lightning connector. But they're trying to move everything forward as fast as possible. I think this whole week the industry will shake down after Google's done, after Microsoft is done, after Windows Phone 8 is coming out soon as well. There's a lot more to come this week, but I think Apple's played a very strong hand here. Awesome. I think that's a great way of slimming pretty much everything up. It's almost like you've been wanting to do this all day. All this pent up need to talk and we just had to make sure you get it out immediately. Yeah, that was like written, like you had a teleprompter or something. That was nice. It was beautiful. Jordan actually has been standing in front of me writing it live. Nice. So, all right. Hello, Jordan. You guys go do something other than cover an Apple event. Go get some rest. And we'll see you when you get back to New York. All right, guys. I'll see you soon. Bye.
 Ross, David, I'm all yours, man.
 What do you need to know?
 So I want to go first.
 I want to know about the iMac.
 It seemed like everybody kind of lost their mind when it came out and everybody was talking
 about how thin it was and all this stuff.
 Is it really as incredible as they make it sound?
 So what happened was when the iMac came out, they showed, they did a very dramatic introduction.
 The iMac is a masterpiece of visual trickery.
 So it came out and it was super thin and it looked as thin as the screen on a MacBook
 Pro.
 And then Phil Schiller rotated it and you see the gigantic round back.
 And gigantic is the wrong, it's not gigantic, it's just compared to how thin you think it
 is, the actual depth of it is surprising.
 So it looks very thin and it's a really aggressive kind of bit of optical engineering that you've
 got this flat 5 millimeter edge.
 But as soon as you kind of get around it all the way, you see how deep it really is.
 And so they did make it thinner and they got rid of the optical drive and they're doing
 this crazy fusion drive thing inside, which sounds to me like a regular hybrid hard drive.
 But the thing that shocked people, the thinness, kind of dissipated as soon as you get physically
 in front of it and you see that there is depth behind it.
 I will say the display of the iMac is gorgeous.
 They're not calling it a Retina display.
 I don't think they can do the visual acuity math they need to do in terms of pixel density
 to call it a Retina display.
 But all the other kind of techniques are there.
 So it's optically bonded, they're using the same scaling software on the Retina MacBook
 Pro, they're pixel doubling it, all that stuff.
 And it looks beautiful.
 So I think the average distance that you sit away from a desktop doesn't let them say it's
 a Retina display.
 But if you get a little bit farther back, you definitely can't see the pixels.
 Right.
 Neil, I want to ask you a little bit about the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina.
 We heard this argument earlier.
 It's got integrated graphics, it's closer to the MacBook Air in terms of graphic quality,
 but it's also outputting four times the number of pixels.
 How was the performance when you were trying out the 13-inch Retina Pro?
 When they announced the 13-inch Retina, I freaked out.
 That's the computer that I want.
 Because I don't want to run it at Retina resolution, I want to run it at the same resolution as
 my 15-inch MacBook Pro.
 And you can do it.
 You can set it to run at 1680 by 1050, which is my computer's resolution.
 So I was very excited about it.
 And then they announced the integrated graphics, and I was very sad.
 But so I got to play with it a little bit.
 And there was a big crowd of people.
 We didn't get to do everything we wanted to do.
 But I did run the 1080p Iron Man trailer simultaneously with a multi-track GarageBand file, one of
 the demo files, while scrolling around a 21-megapixel RAW file in Aperture, all at the same time.
 And the CPU monitor only ever hit 50%.
 It spiked above it here and there a little bit, but it kind of was steady at 50%.
 So my sense is that Apple's figured out how to push all those pixels.
 I mean, it's not a great graphics card.
 Nobody's excited about it.
 But Apple's kind of figured out how to make it perform adequately with that stuff.
 I think we'll have to see...
 For me, I think that's enough.
 I come to events, I take photos, I put them on the internet.
 I think that's going to be great for me, and the screen resolution's great.
 For people, Jordan, our video producer, he still had a big quizzical look on his face
 when I was doing all this stuff with it.
 So I think we'll have to put it through the review and see what the performance is really
 like.
 But just at a quick glance, trying to max it out, I really couldn't push it much harder
 than that.
 Technical follow-up question, what did you think of the Iron Man trailer?
 So I'm really irritated because I never actually got to watch it.
 Because I put it on, and then I had to listen to this crappy GarageBand guitar lick while
 scrolling around a photo.
 So the corner of it seemed amazing.
 And I will say that the default GarageBand guitar lick song works really well with it.
 It's kind of like a Dark Side of the Moon thing.
 But other than that, I didn't get to see it.
 So Neal, I sit tight for one second.
 We've got hands-on with the new MacBooks, I believe.
 So we're just going to run that, and then we have lots more questions for you.
 Hey guys, this is Neal with The Verge.
 I'm here with the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.
 It looks very much like the previous MacBook Pro, only it is far, far thinner because it
 emits the optical drive.
 It's got some new ports here.
 It's got the new MagSafe port.
 It's got two Thunderbolt ports, USB 3.0 on the other side.
 It's got an HDMI port, obviously the SD card slot, and another USB 3.0.
 Obviously the big change here is the Retina display.
 This has an effective resolution of 1280 by 800, but because it's pixel doubled, you can't
 see the pixels.
 It looks amazing.
 You can also run it at 1680 by 1050, which is the resolution of the old 15-inch MacBook
 Pro, which is great.
 So this has a lot of potential for Pro users.
 If you have a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you have every reason to look at this.
 And particularly important is this thing seems to perform really, really well.
 So we put together kind of an insane test here.
 I've got GarageBand open.
 I've got the 1080p Iron Man 3 trailer, and I've got Aputure with a 21-megapixel RAW file
 open.
 This is the CPU monitor.
 You can see all four cores are kind of barely doing anything.
 I'm going to start Iron Man.
 I'm going to start GarageBand.
 This is a cacophony of sound.
 And I'm going to start scrolling around in Aputure.
 Let's get Iron Man open here.
 And you can see everything is just kind of working pretty well, and the CPU is only about
 at half.
 So although it has integrated graphics, Intel HD 4000 graphics, and it's pushing this ultra-high
 resolution screen, performance seems to be actually really great, erasing kind of a big
 worry people had about those graphics powering this display.
 So that is the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.
 It's a great product.
 If you're like me and you have a 15-inch MacBook Pro, you have a whole new reason to want a
 smaller computer.
 Neelay, are you still with us?
 Yeah, I'm here.
 It's funny because I just literally heard myself say everything I just said.
 It was pretty awesome.
 It was pretty awesome.
 I'm here for you, Ross.
 You made the interesting point that this is a 15-inch...
 If you have a 15-inch Pro, this is a great alternative.
 What if you have an Air?
 Do you feel like this is a good upgrade?
 Do you think it's worth it?
 It's definitely thicker than the Air.
 It's just a more massive machine.
 There's more going on in there.
 I wouldn't be racing to upgrade if I had an Air, but if I was one of the many, many people
 who want to move down the line to the Air, I would probably stop at the 13-inch Pro.
 The screen is incredible.
 So looking at that screen versus looking at the Air screen, I think, is a no-brainer.
 So if you're wanting to go down to the...
 I think Apple has to figure out what its next move is with these machines because the Air
 is extremely thin and light.
 It's a beautiful computer, but it's clearly surpassed one level technologically by the
 Pro.
 And maybe that's for the best.
 For the longest time, I couldn't think of a good reason to get the 13-inch Pro over the
 Air, and now there's a couple of really good reasons to do it.
 So maybe Apple's stratifying its line a little bit more that way, but I would definitely
 get the Pro over the Air.
 And it's great.
 We've gotten a lot of impressions on your hands-ons about the iPad Mini, the iMac, the
 MacBook Pro.
 We got your impressions from the theater.
 The one thing I want to ask about you personally, Neelai, when we were kind of planning for
 this event, we were talking what is Tim Cook going to say, we were kind of convinced he'd
 bring up maps a little bit.
 I remember you particularly thought he would actually bring up maps in some way.
 They did the public apology.
 Not a single mention at all.
 Yeah, I don't know, man.
 They talked about iOS 6 a lot.
 They talked about how great their software is.
 They talked about all their successes.
 Apple events are structured very predictably, right?
 So they're always the same.
 We sit down, we get a bunch of stats about how well they're doing.
 There's always a shot of an Apple store, usually some far-flung place that I can't go to.
 And then there's a little bit of an update on something, right?
 And it seemed like the maps would be a great place to go and say we're basically turning
 what has been a bit of a failure into a success.
 We're updating it.
 We're making it work better.
 And they just didn't do it.
 And I kind of understand why.
 At the moment I didn't understand.
 But they did so much today.
 They packed so much into this event.
 When they were doing the Mac Mini, for example, it went by so fast that if you blinked, you
 missed it.
 You'd be basically like, here's a list of specs, I'm going to read them as fast as I
 can.
 Look at all these ports.
 Okay, that's Mac Mini.
 Got to go.
 Oh, there's a server version.
 $1,000.
 By the way, let's talk about the MX.
 It's really thin.
 Got to go.
 And it was about as fast as I've ever seen Apple go through an event.
 So spending time talking about a failure, this kind of machination between this didn't
 work out well and we fixed it, here's an improvement.
 When they could just talk about products that I think people are very excited about, I understand
 why they didn't do it.
 I think it would have been nice to see kind of a metric update on where the maps were
 and where they've come, but that'll just happen over time.
 And to be honest, the iPhone 5 is selling gangbusters.
 This iPad Mini is going to sell crazy.
 I don't think people are worried about the maps.
 They're expecting Apple to fix it and Apple is working on fixing it.
 Are you going to grab an iPad Mini when it comes out?
 Your Mini.
 What?
 Really?
 I don't know, man.
 I have this new game I play with Apple products where I swear up and down that I'm not going
 to buy it and then I go to a store and I play with one and then I leave and then a couple
 days later I come back and I say I'm not going to buy it and then I do.
 But I do that with everything.
 That's how I have a Nexus 7.
 That's probably how I'll end up with a Surface.
 It's $329.
 It's a surprisingly good price point.
 I think the next year we'll see one come at $249 and that'll dramatically change the stakes
 of this game.
 I think Apple targeted the form factor and they built whatever product they needed to
 build that form factor and that hit $329.
 I think next year if they do it the way they did with the original iPad where they brought
 it down $100, that could really make an impact on these lower priced tablets.
 I think Google still has a lot of potential at $199 with the Nexus 7.
 I think we'll probably see some updates to the Nexus 7 coming shortly.
 We'll definitely talk about that more.
 Obviously I think we're going to do another Vergecast on Thursday after the Microsoft
 event.
 We'll probably do another one on Monday to talk about Google.
 Yeah, there's only like 30 more events going on.
 There's only like 30 more events.
 This is the first event which is really weird to think about.
 This week is a long week we've got out of us.
 I'll say kind of a final thought here is that it's very rare to...
 When we did the iPhone 5 event, it was Apple's focus on the iPhone 5 and they put out these
 iPods.
 The iPod Touch is great and the iPod Nano is like, why did you make this?
 Their Apple story didn't seem like it had gelled.
 They were just updating this phone.
 The software seemed very kind of like timid.
 Now kind of in some, the sheer amount of updates they've done to all of these products.
 Tim Cook said on stage, we've updated almost everything here.
 The only one that's missing is the Mac Pro.
 So sorry guys, no one's ever getting a new Mac Pro.
 They've updated all of their major products in really dramatic ways.
 I think the iPhone has proven to be a bit more of a substantive upgrade.
 It's still an iterative product but I think now that people have them, they're seeing
 the true level of update that it is over the 4S.
 Very few other companies are doing this level of complete product line reinvention every
 year.
 I think what's really interesting is that Google and Microsoft, they've both got events
 this week.
 They're both going to, particularly in Microsoft's case, they've got to reinvent Windows and
 say here's the beginning of our Stablet strategy.
 Whereas Apple is now saying, our tablet strategy is mature, the foundation's built and we're
 ready to start splitting it off into other products that hit different targets and different
 price points.
 Microsoft and Google have a lot of catching up.
 Google's got to hit the top end of the market.
 The Nexus 7 is a great product.
 For one and nine, I think it's frankly an amazing product.
 But Google has nothing to compete in 10 inches, nothing to say you should replace a laptop
 with this.
 Microsoft is going straight for you should replace a laptop with this and nothing to
 compete with.
 You can read with this or here's a smaller product.
 It's only Apple that's now hitting all of the marks while still revamping all of its
 computers and doing all this other stuff that it's doing.
 I will say that I was pretty down after the iPhone 5.
 I thought the company needed to find a new path, a new aggression.
 But this event, and I think Josh was saying it too, this event to me is very aggressive.
 They're moving all their platforms forward.
 Even if something as mundane and simple as calling the new iPad with a lightning connector
 the iPad fourth generation, they're just showing off.
 They're just flaunting that they can change a generation of the product that quickly.
 It really is just a third gen iPad with a new processor and the lightning connector.
 But they're trying to move everything forward as fast as possible.
 I think this whole week the industry will shake down after Google's done, after Microsoft
 is done, after Windows Phone 8 is coming out soon as well.
 There's a lot more to come this week, but I think Apple's played a very strong hand
 here.
 Awesome.
 I think that's a great way of slimming pretty much everything up.
 It's almost like you've been wanting to do this all day.
 All this pent up need to talk and we just had to make sure you get it out immediately.
 Yeah, that was like written, like you had a teleprompter or something.
 That was nice.
 It was beautiful.
 Jordan actually has been standing in front of me writing it live.
 Nice.
 So, all right.
 Hello, Jordan.
 You guys go do something other than cover an Apple event.
 Go get some rest.
 And we'll see you when you get back to New York.
 All right, guys.
 I'll see you soon.
 Bye.