Touchscreen MacBook Pro details, deep red iPhone 18, US Mac mini production

Right as we hopped onto Zoom this morning, Mayo, Tim Cook hopped onto Twitter to tease a week of product announcements starting next week. So Tim's tweet just says, a big week ahead. It all starts on Monday morning. We already kind of knew the gist of this based on the reporting from Mark Garman that Apple was going to have press releases multiple days next week, culminating in the Apple experience at 9 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, which I will be at in New York City. then there'll be separate simultaneous experiences in london and singapore shanghai shanghai yes not singapore shanghai tim cook suite just confirms that the fun starts monday morning that it's not just going to be wednesday it's going to be a multi-day event multiple announcements yeah and people are going to read into the whole week thing but when apple says a week they quite often mean monday to wednesday and i'm pretty sure when they did the the similar thing for the ipad announcements and that week and stuff which was monday to wednesday they had greg joswiak tweets a very similar thing and it was like we'll see you next week hashtag apple launch and it run monday through wednesday so it'll probably be monday through wednesday and then either the stuff goes up for sale immediately as they announce it or it's for sale on that friday right and then wednesday for me and everyone else at the events will probably be hands-on with stuff maybe some briefings maybe just some photo opportunities and stuff i wonder if apple executives will be split between all three of the locations like they were for the m4 ipad pro event remember yeah where's the future a ceo gonna be i think black for that for that event john turnis was in love he was in london yeah but that was because they literally just launched the batter sea yes that's right facility so it's less new this time so maybe they'll be back in new york but um the teaser is kind of interesting right with the logo because you pointed out the color of the logo doesn't actually match like it it kind of looks like the back of a mac laptop because it's like the aluminium base and then there's the logo like carved out inside it but the actual color of the logo does not match the actual back of any current mac laptop because the apple logos are much darker colors whereas that's more light so do you think this is the base model the cheap macbook and they just couldn't paint it black because it costs an extra 25 cents per laptop maybe like or the aluminiums like just slightly thinner top case because they're saving on materials well mark german did say that it's like a new what's it called like a shell process for this cheap macbook that they yeah he did that That is true, actually. I mean, we know it's going to be a different design slightly because it's a different screen size, right? So it's physically different. They're not just putting a different chip in the current air. So I could see them differentiate a bit with different colors on the back, right? And it's going to have a multicolor lineup. So maybe they've also taken the opportunity to change the tone, the difference in tone between the metal and the logo. But I'm excited for this week. I'm most excited for the cheap MacBook, I think. We'll talk about it more at the end of the show, but I can't wait to find out the price. I think we have a bit of a disagreement on that. But otherwise, what, the M5 Pro, M5 Max, MacBook Pro updates, the iPhone 17e. And maybe displays. Maybe a studio display. And then they're also still waiting on like the updated base model iPad, the M4 iPad Air, and the M5 MacBook Air. But I don't think we'll see all of that next week. No. Samsung had its Galaxy S26 event yesterday. and i liked our nine to five google coverage where they were basically let me see ben shown wrote that smartphones have felt somewhat stagnant over the past several years with truly new features being fairly rare and samsung's galaxy s26 series might be one of the biggest offenders ever of leaning on refinement very grouchy take there from ben i think he's a bit she's no different to most years of iphones recently yeah but the one thing about the galaxy the S26 Ultra in particular that stands out is this privacy display thing. So the privacy display changes how the pixels on the S26 Ultra screen emit light. It's a lot like those privacy screen protectors that you can put on any phone. And what it's meant to do is reduce the off-axis viewing angles of the smartphone screen. So if you're looking at it straight on, you can see all of your information as normal. But if you turn the phone to the side or if somebody is sitting off to the side, they can't see anything. It's completely like just blacked out for them. There are multiple settings for this. And I think that's what makes this pretty interesting because Ben and his hands on said there's a noticeable difference in the brightness and the colors coming from the display when privacy display is turned on. But via software, Samsung has done a few interesting things. So there's a maximum mode that narrows the field of view even further. So you have like a granular adjustment between how narrow you want the field of view to be. So you can toggle it on and off as you wish. You can also have it automated. So it will automatically activate when you open specific apps. So like when you open messages or you open your banking app. But the coolest part about this, I think, is that it can also just apply to specific areas of the screen. So one of the examples in, I think, an MKBHD video that I watched is that when you get a notification, like say you get a notification from Google Messages, the privacy display feature will kick in only on that notification banner. that is just so so freaking cool i think yeah so they can like turn it on and off on a pixel by pixel basis yeah it's a really cool feature even if it was just you have a full screen dynamic um mode so you can turn on or off a privacy display for the full screen top to bottom that'd still be pretty handy um because i think those privacy display screen protectors are relatively popular like i know a few of my friends have got stuff and obviously when you in those cases you've got to have it on like you're not taking the screen for the physical screen protector on and off every day right so basically you're forced to have it on which reduces your off axis brightness levels obviously because that's the whole point of them even when you're looking at something completely public that you don't care about and then this one they also the the third party screen protectors obviously also just cause that the hit to brightness and clarity of the screen underneath regardless right because there's another layer on top whereas this is like properly integrated in and if you could turn it on and off it then means oh well when you open your you know you could choose what apps you want to be turned on for so you like your banking app or maybe a tight to a focus mode if we were like translating it back to the iphone right um it could be in like you know off axis not sure or if you're at home it could be on all the time and then you go out the house and they turn the privacy display on that's pretty cool the per pixel thing where it does on different elements of the screen that feels a bit more gimmicky to me really it's called technology but like does it really matter like your whole like oh i'm only going to cut out my notification banner versus the rest of the screen i don't know about that i think that's like the coolest part because if you're sitting somewhere just scrolling on twitter and you get a text message from somebody that's private like having people not be able to snoop on that is pretty i think that's like the most interesting part about this but then you don't mind people looking at twitter feed i guess is the yeah the idea yeah i guess so maybe it's a cool feature no 100 it's cool and i 100 think that apple will eventually do it as well and the thing that i've seen is that apple will never do this now that samsung has done it and like the display is made by samsung for the Galaxy phones. And that's like, it's always good to remember that the display is made by Samsung Display. Samsung Display is a separate company from the Samsung that makes the smartphones. Samsung Display's business is making smartphone displays and selling them to whoever wants to buy them. Apple gets iPhone displays from Samsung Display. So there's absolutely no reason to think this won't come to a future iPhone. Oh, were people saying that as if they think Samsung won't sell it to them? Yes, exactly. No chance. They'll sell it to whoever will buy it. It's the same thing like with the iPhone Fold where Samsung Display is selling, has worked with Apple to make this creaseless folding display that's going to come to the iPhone first, not the Galaxy Fold first. But yes, it will also eventually come to the Galaxy Fold. It's like Samsung Display is a separate entity that supplies screens to most of the dominant smartphone players. Yeah, I think this is it. The fact you can have a privacy screen that you can turn on or off. so like maybe if you're just sharing family photos you can have it off and have the full brightness and vivid and vivid clarity of the screen but then you're like sending text messages and you don't want people next to you be able to read what you're writing i think that's a great great compelling feature that would easily sell phones like i always think about like the you walk into a retail store because obviously a lot of people are just set in their ways and they upgrade from iphone to iphone upgrade from galaxy to galaxy and that's that's how it goes but for the people that do actually like wander into a retail store and they don't know what they're doing or they're just seeing advertising online you can easily there's a story to it where it's like you're out and about you don't want someone to see your screen you press this one button and it blanks it out and it's like you don't need to buy a third party screen protector and you don't need the screen protector to be in your way for the you know eight hours of the day where you're at home and you don't care about it but when you're out and about you can just flick it on and there you go and then people next to you can't just peer over your shoulder at what you're looking at but easily sold looks cool you could definitely do a cool demo in a retail store as well if you wanted to right just have the sales assistant have it straight on then flick the button then turn the phone it's like oh it's magical now you can't see it great feature has some real utility apple 100% do this at some point ios 26.4 beta 2 is here and you remember mayo that time we spent last week explaining that ios 26.4 beta 1 added support for testing rcs encryption but only on this weird iphone to iphone system and that it would come to future platforms later all that time we spent explaining that last week throw it all out the window because ios 26.4 beta 2 adds support for testing rcs encryption between iphone and android still rolling out slowly to beta users and android users will need to be on the latest beta of the google messages app and availability will vary based on carrier but once everybody has the beta test enabled you can now text from iphone and android and back and forth with encryption enabled why didn't they just wait one week I don't know. They did the whole rollout process last week for beta one with the explanations about it, you know, being iPhone 2 only for no, for the very next week them to have, oh no, it's coming to, like, why didn't they just, I mean, last week they could have also just said, you know, you'll be able to test it with Android users next week in the next beta, right? Yeah. It would have been a bit easier, but they pretended like it was like some, I thought it was going to be like, oh, we're going to wait three months before it comes to an Android extended beta, but no, literally the week after. We're still not anticipating this feature to ship, right, with 26.4. They still say a future version of iOS 26. So before September, but not 26.4. Yeah, so it's still going to be in developer preview, but at least now you can developer preview it with Android Paypal 2. And there's this little lock icon that appears in message threads that indicates the conversation is end-to-end encrypted. So that'll show up for RCS messaging and, of course, iMessage, because as Apple loves to point out, iMessage has been end-to-end encrypted since 2011. So, of course, they're going to add the lock there too. iOS 26.4 beta 2 is smaller than the first beta, but the other thing that I think is worth noting is in the games app, the search button no longer floats off to the side. It's been integrated back into the navigation bar at the bottom, and the search bar is no longer at the bottom. It's been moved back to the top, just like the App Store change that we talked about last week. This would seemingly suggest that the App Store change was not a bug, like some people speculated. It's some sort of conscious design decision that Apple has made just for these two apps for the time being. Yeah, which reverts it to like iOS 18 layouts, right? Where the search tab was just a straight tab and you had the thing at the bottom. And the longstanding shortcut still exists where if you tap again on the search button, it will like focus the text field. So if you're in like the app store and you switch to the search tab, but you don't want to take your thumb all the way to the top of the screen to actually type in the field. If you just tap the tab again, it like selects the text for you. So that does exist. And that's existed for, I don't know, it must be 10 years at this point. if not longer. But I still don't know. Like, I don't really get the point of it. I mean, I just don't, I mean, I don't think it's actively bad. I think it's weird. Now there's kind of a mismatch between other system apps and third-party apps that have adopted this bottom search bar interface just for Apple to now walk it back. But I don't have a strong dislike of it. I mean, it's fine. Well, again, in isolation, there's nothing wrong with it. But I feel like you need to break from the default system convention, which still seems to be have a split bar that where the tab bar transforms into the search field that seems to be the default right because apart from those two apps everything else does that and if you look at like the human interface guidelines for liquid glass that's what they tell you to do so you really need like a strong reason to break from the convention and here i don't really get the reason it's just like the app store team is staging a revolt against against the design against the design metaphor like you know i mean you you kind of joked last week that you think it's still like ad rates or something or like but yeah no i don't think i'm joking when i say that i think that's legitimately part of the reason but there's not an ad at the bottom of the search tab you know what i mean like yeah but when the search bar is at the bottom your focus is on the bottom of the screen not the top of the screen where the ad is right so i guess now you're forced to kind of like having your provisional peripheral vision yes top suggested item yeah but i don't think there are ads in apple games yet yeah yeah yeah it's a good way of putting that because i'm sure it's basically an app store search right just for games so they could slap some ads in games up very easily if eddie q is listening to the show he's sending an email right now saying why are there not ads in apple games yeah i mean next week they're putting more than one ad slot in the app store search results right that starts next week yeah i don know i just don see it as a compelling enough reason to break from the convention so you should do it everywhere like if they decided that it too confusing for users to have a transforming tab bar just change all the apps back and have a more traditional tab bar it be fine but don have two apps alone break from it for no good reason so yeah but clearly the fact that they're doing it in games now as well as app store is obviously an intentional decision for at least this department there's also a toggle in accessibility and beta 2 called reduced highlighting effects oh yeah yeah i forgot about that and this is what i think it's meant to do is reduce kind of the brightness around the edges of buttons and sliders the little glinting effect yeah like in control center i think that shows up on the volume slider maybe and the brightness slider but all the players all the players in control center have that edge effect do they even the ones you oh yeah they do yeah and obviously you've got the app icons on the home screen that do it right and i'll tell you what people that have like dark mode home screens on threads they really hate the outline the ios 26 outline thing they're really against it um because they just think it kind of breaks up the flow of a dark ui which i do get but the the classic and the accessibility feature is it isn't you know highlight effect on or off it's reduce highlight effect and in this beta it doesn't seem to do anything right like yeah that's what i was going to say is i've toggled this on and off and looked everywhere and i can't tell a difference i guess probably it's bugged right now and they're gonna fix it yeah so we'll wait for beta 3 and see what it actually does but yeah like reduce is always a it gives them leeway right because it's like well is it actually gonna make the highlight the border on the app icons go away entirely or will it just be more subtle when they turn off the motion effect right where it like moves as you rotate the phone around and yeah so i guess we'll keep our eyes peeled for beta 3 on that one. 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I don't know if this is him speculating or if this is him saying something based on a source inside Apple or whatever, but I'm laying my stake in the ground that I do not think that's going to happen. I think one of the reasons that orange is so popular and one of the reasons people tend to buy new iPhones when there are cool colors like we've seen with the 17 lineup is that those colors are perceived as being limited time or limited edition. It's like the Pacific Blue was a one-time color the desert titanium was a one-time color if apple makes an orange iphone 17 pro then keeps it around for the 18 pro or the 19 pro it loses that that luster i think it's a hard one because i do think the orange has been like more popular than those other colors you mentioned you know yeah and and they've embraced it all the marketing for the iphone pro line this year just shows it in orange all of it as it should it's a fantastic color but if you're someone who updates every year maybe you love the orange so much that you'd be put off if you can't get the orange again that's a good point the year over year people i mean i was a bit put off because they didn't do a one in black you know not the main reason i went for the air but definitely a factor i was like well the pro doesn't come in the color i actually want so maybe i'll skip it like the oranges obviously people love it it and it does feel that maybe they could keep it around for longer i kind of agree with you that if you ask me to like bet right now whether it's going to stay or go i'd probably say go but as it becomes more embedded in like the culture of the year and you see how well these phones are selling like look at apple's earnings right the 85 billion iphone revenue number how much of the 85 billion is because they made it in an orange color that people like gotta be a fair it's got it's a few billion worth you know so if you're if you're sitting there doing the next generation of phone you know like obviously the next generation of phones designed but clearly they can pick some colors right and they have some flexibility on color choices probably finalizing around now right for final assembly and production maybe you're like well the orange is just selling so well that we can encourage more people to get the orange next year that maybe aren't already this year but want orange it looks cool and the people that did buy orange are like well we'll keep it going because before they kind of had like you know they had the silver and black staples then they had the gold like the gold the gold could have been a statement color right when they first did gold and then they kind of kept it around and i know it's changed and evolved a bit and they went from rose gold to more yellowy gold and then it got a bit light and a bit darker so it does shift but the gold became like a staple right in the aluminium era the orange might be the new gold maybe but i just think it loses its so one thing people want is that they want other people to look at them and see that they have the new iphone and the orange does that if orange sticks around for multiple years that kind of cancels that benefit is no longer there well i think it's orange but in a different shade maybe i mean they do like a deeper orange or something i just think if you go like there is an argument if let's say for the 18 pro they went from what is it a blue an orange and a silver and they did like yellow green and magenta you're just kind of alienating some upgrade paths yeah and if you're just purely thinking about the sales the sales uh onboarding it's like well if we had to keep at least one color around that gives a transition for people that just bought our phone in massive droves and maybe it'll be inclined to keep going and maybe you pick the most popular color. What it does do though, for sure, is put a lot of pressure on the colors team inside Apple to come up with an equally good or better color for next year and future years. What Mark Gurman says Apple is at least testing for next year's iPhone 18 Pro is a deep red. Again, he speculates that red and orange might both stick around as options, but deep red is the quote unquote flagship color in testing for the 18 Pro. I am 100% on board with this. Red is one of my favorite colors, if not my favorite color i a deep red sounds very like indiana university crimson coated which i love i love iu i went to iu i would buy a deep red iphone 18 pro in a heartbeat the problem is is if it's it depends on how deep it is is deep red darker than like product red or is it about that red i would think it would be darker than product red but product red too has had multiple levels of darkness over the years like and what we'll say is product red's kind of disappeared from the apple lineup of recent of like don't sell a single product red product anymore as far as i can think right now maybe some maybe they still sell a watch band or something but i don't there's no like iphone that's product red the last product red iphone was the iphone 14 so that was 2022 i thought that looked cool the red that was a very that was a very bright red for sure that was not cool here i'm gonna send you a picture that i found on twitter somewhere of all of the product red iPhones over the years. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can see the definition of red has changed quite a few times. So the deep red, it could be like the 2022 iPhone SE kind of color. Yes, or like the iPhone 8, I think, like, yeah. Mm-hmm. Those are good. The product red iPhones are good. It's just kind of a shame they stopped doing them. The big thing about the orange, I know we're circling back around again. Right now, Apple only does three colors for the Pro phones. Yes. So they got space to add more colors in. And I would obviously like them to add a black color. but maybe they do like they keep the orange they keep the silver because that's like the neutral one and then they do two new colors one of which is the deep red and that brings it back up to four the base iphone the iphone 17 has five color options you have lavender you've sage you have mist blue you have white and black so i think the pro phone there is room in the lineup for more colors and so that's maybe why german's hedging on the orange because it's like they only got three right now so you can see when they're deciding what they're gonna do for next year we've got three new colors and i guess we'll keep orange around and that brings our total options up to four it doesn't feel like too much i understand what you get about it being like premium unique and maybe it devalues the deep red next year because people will be like well they're going to keep that around as well if it's a big hit but i don't know the orange just feels a bit too too beloved and too popular for them maybe just to immediately abandon it yeah you might be right but i think i'm sticking with my with my bet that it is gone for the 18 pro lineup they'll get rid it for the 18 then the sounds go down and bring it back to the 90 exactly yeah exactly in a separate report mark german has details on the touchscreen macbook pro coming later this year so this is the m6 macbook pro that we talked about before i think last time we mentioned it we talked about the touchscreen we talked about oled we talked about how it might be thinner than the current macbook pro design but it would be the biggest the first real revamp to the macbook pro since 2021 in this report, there are a couple things worth calling out. So first, he says that this MacBook Pro will have a dynamic island for the first time. And I am all here for that because it's felt like the notch on the MacBook Pro has always felt just arbitrary, like it's there, but it's not hiding anything really. Like the front camera is there. It let them make the bezel slightly smaller, but they don't do anything via software to like accommodate the notch or take advantage of the notch like they didn't even go the bare minimum i think which would be to add some sort of menu bar accommodation so if you have a lot of icons in your menu bar those icons just don't like obstruct get cut off yeah it's like they did nothing yeah the fact they didn't do a system bartender replacement when they did the notch was crazy and i said this the moment the notch is way too big like yes i don't understand why it is that big on the mac when it doesn't have face any components inside it like i understand okay you gotta have a notch right but you've got what You've got a front camera, you've got an LED that's green, and then you have the little ambient light sensor. That's what's in that space. But look at your iPhone. Even the original iPhone, the iPhone X, had the first notch. The notch was smaller than the width of the one on the MacBook Pro. I don't understand why it's that big. The Dynamic Island, Mark says, will be built around a hole-punch cutout for that FaceTime camera. And he says it's smaller than the pill-shaped notch in the current iPhones. And presumably, this means all of the software niceties of having the dynamic island on the iPhone will also come to the Mac. So I mean, on Tahoe, live activities sit in your menu bar as a rendered dynamic island on the right hand side. They're just sitting there waiting to be shifted over to the left a little bit. They're just waiting for the new Mabba Pro to put them in the center. The interesting part about this though is on the Mac, there is like your native instinct is to glance to the upper right to view that type of information just because that's where the menu bar has always been. So it will take like some mental adjustment to start looking towards the center and like looking up a little bit you know it's a different presentation of information yeah i know what you mean but i do think there's a there's enough of a distinction between the kind of status items that go on the right hand side and like your dynamic island live activity yeah do you know what i mean so like your current flight information i mean the waistline tire just looks stupid right where it's got like black rectangle on the right hand side that feels like a different elevation of kind of relevance that you could see oh that goes in the middle You know like there a bit more of a almost and it kind of like an extension of what they do on the phone anyway where the dynamic island's in the middle but what do you have on the left and right you have status items yeah that's true and so this is like let's just make it wider it's kind of like what you'd expect them to do if they haven't ever put a island on the ipad right it's like yeah you've got status items on the left and right but you've got a really prominent status item that goes in the middle and that's the Dynamic Island one. But I love this. I love the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. I think it's such a cool way of presenting both like a small amount of information that you can see in just the island itself, then also the live activity and the ability to press on it or click on it to expand it out to show you more. I think it's probably, I don't know, probably the best piece of like software interaction Apple has done in a very, very long time. And the rate at which developers have adopted it and added their own clever implementation, I think it's really well done. and for it to come to the Mac is fantastic. And it hasn't gotten old. I still love the little thing where you're playing like a song in Apple Music and then you close the app and it just flings it up in the top. Yeah. Has the little wave, the waveform in there too. Like it's really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did some great stuff for the island. Obviously in a perfect world, you wouldn't need a cutout at all on the front face of the phone. And that's where they're going. But while there's a physical cutout there, you might as well make use of it as they've done so. And even in the future future where there's no cutouts at all, physical cutouts they might still put it in the dead center circle just add make the island show when there's a you know active state is going on because yeah it's just nice one thing about the implementation on the mac though mac apps don't have dynamic island integration at all right or live activity or sorry live activity integration at all yeah those are coming from iphone mirroring so presumably apple would have to change mac os to let apps build live activities and encourage developers to do so which is a bigger task on the mac than it is on the iphone so we'll see about that software side of things yeah i mean you still have iphone mirroring right yeah but and and i'm sure they'll put some of the other states items in there like volume control right i know right now that hovers over the the music the the audio option on the right hand side but you could have that come out the island if you wanted to like they can do all their system stuff with it and once there is a physical island on the mac you'll at least get apps that are decent mac citizens supporting it with native notifications and things and even if they don't at least you can do iphone mirroring and it'll still show up there so it's definitely worthwhile i mean i'll take anything that makes that notch a smaller win i just think it's too big on the mac so if you're going to make it island great even if the island's dormant most of the time i don't care you know then he also elaborate mark also elaborates on the touchscreen implementation on this new macbook pro so he says that apple has a sort of revamped dynamic user interface that will come to the Mac to accommodate this touchscreen. So for example, if you touch a button or control with your finger, you reach out and touch it. The interface will bring up a new type of menu surrounding your finger that provides more relevant options for touch commands. Then macOS will also display the most appropriate set of controls based on your prior interaction. And if you tap on an item in the menu bar at the top of the screen, the set of controls will enlarge to be more easily selectable with the finger. There will also be a touch-optimized interface for choosing emoji, but what there won't be, and I think this makes sense and doesn't really come as a surprise, but what there won't be will be any sort of like on-screen touch keyboard. Well, yeah, duh. I mean, you never know. The keyboard's attached. Yeah. It's like on the iPad, right? Yes. When you have the iPad in a keyboard case, it doesn't put a software keyboard on the screen. Yep. And when it doesn't, it's a bug. And the laptop is not going to be detachable. So there you go. Yeah, no software keyboard. The other software parts of this, I think, are, I think all of this is good news. Like they're doing more than just slapping a touchscreen on the Mac and saying you can use it for scrolling or maybe pinching and zooming in an app like Photos or Photoshop or whatever. They are bringing what sounds like some of the touch interactions of the multitasking mode in iPadOS 26, where controls enlarge if you reach out and touch while you're using a trackpad, bringing that to the Mac and kind of sharing that, those interface interaction methods across platforms. Yeah, and the menu that surrounds your finger kind of reminded me of the like radial menu that the Apple Pencil Pro has in the Notes app, right? Oh, yeah. If you like tap on the Apple Pencil, it like spins out a spiral of your tool palette. So it's like next to your, it's next to the stylus rather than being docked to the bottom of the screen. It like comes out in a little like circular fashion. You could see that happen on, there's almost like a new right click context menu for touchscreen on Mac. At the very basic level, Tahoe already kind of got them a lot of the way here. like a lot of the system controls just got a bit bigger a bit more space a bit more room for easy touchability with a pad of your finger versus the precision of the mouse cursor so like if you if you rewind five years mac controls are a lot tighter together not close together and it would be more annoying to touch toolbar items for instance um which were obviously designed for a mouse UI but over time partly probably in preparation for this but also just partly because of design aesthetics controls have got bigger right the mac app kit toolbars and pallets and sidebars they're just bigger elements that are more accustomed to touching anyway so that's the basic level where i still think that touch will be secondary like it's a secondary input method on a laptop all the windows laptops have it and people use them but they're not primarily touching their fingers on the screen it's like it comes in handy in cases and they use it and they they do stuff it's not literally every single thing you do on the laptop is suddenly you we don't even need a trackpad anymore right we start touching the screen just because of the ergonomics of it doesn't happen so you kind of use it more opportunistically than you do obviously on an ipad where it's like permanent and i know there's the common refrain of like well who wants to like reach out their hand into the air and like tap on the screen because it's vertical rather than horizontal like a phone people do it all the time with windows laptops and with ipads in magic keyboard cases so i see so many people with ipads with keyboard cases and they still touch the screen rather than using the trackpad yep you just get used to it like i'm not saying i would i'm not like advocating for it but i completely understand why apple is doing it you go into any computer shop or like any retail electronic store i guess in america that's best buy you have all the macs that don't touch that you can't touch the screens on despite apple being known as the touch company from the iphone and the ipad and then every single windows laptop that's anywhere close to the same price of a macbook you can touch the screen and stuff happens and the bare minimum of just being at a pinch and zoom or swipe up and down on web pages would be enough if you want to go further and do this fancy stuff with these radial menus and make stuff expand a little bit all the all the better for it like i don't think it detracts from using a mac like you could buy the new maverick pro and never touch the screen and you would not be affected negatively in your experience in any way shape or form so it's only an additive feature i like i don't really see an argument against it and you and obviously apple hasn't seen it as a priority because it's taken them what a decade you know to do it um but that's because it's not a priority it's not essential but it is nice to have and we're at the point now where they're checking off the nice to haves and so here we are they're going to put touchscreen on the macbook pro eventually it will come to macbook air as well and then when you have a random customer in a store deciding on the next computer to buy you won't have the store rep going well you can touch the screen on this one you can't touch the screen on that one or you won't have all these kids that are growing up in an iphone world who just expect all screens to be touch sensitive to touch the screen of their mac or their their family's computer and nothing happened so it was inevitable this was going to happen it's not going to be the primary input method of the mac but it will be a input method yeah i was skeptical of it when the first reporting on this came out last year but i think what mark has described in this report and the interactivity of it all it's kind of it's won me over for the most part just knowing that there's going to be more to it than the bare minimum because i think part of what you're describing which is people reach out and touch a screen and they expect it to respond. They expect everything to be a touch screen. That is very true. But if Apple were to just say, okay, people want a touch screen, just make it touch. So when they touch it, something happens and they can go back to using their keyboard and their trackpad or the mouse. That is kind of what my fear was at first, which was going to be an adoption of the lowest common denominator version of the feature. But again, what Marco has described here is much more robust and well refined. Yeah, he's doing the checkbox item of the tick list of the spec sheet, but it's also doing it in a nice way that's actually useful to somebody in but not useful universally right but useful when it comes to wanting to do it my only remaining concern is whether there will be any indirect trade-offs of this like will they have to make the macbook lid thicker will it mess up the design or like the counterweight between the bottom and the top will it impact like your battery life will it impact i don't know any parts of mac os i do have concerns about that as someone who would probably almost never use the actual touchscreen part of a macbook yeah because you use like your laptop closed right when it's most of the time yeah the lid is a good question i don't know whether i have to make it a bit thicker or something because remember the reason they stopped making the apple logo light up was because there wasn't enough room in the lid i think there have been some rumors that like these laptops will be thinner though right overall so presumably the bottom half would be thinner yeah maybe they make the bottom case thinner and the lid's a bit thicker. Software-wise, I don't think there's any reason to make any affordances for touch when you're not touching the screen. So I don't think you'll be impinged in that scenario. Well, I mean, they already made changes to Tahoe that people hate. Other than the changes they've already made. I'm not one of them, but people hate some of the changes in Tahoe. The default button size went from like 18 points to 20 points, right? Stuff got bigger so if you can be okay with the current state of tahoe in terms of the size of controls then you'll be fine yeah battery life wise i don't know for sure but i'm pretty i i don't think a touchscreen uses battery when you're not touching the screen any more than a screen does really so i don't think there's battery life impact but yeah the lid might have to be read like the lid and the the hinge mechanism probably will need some treatment yeah overall i've come around on this idea more than i'm more optimistic than i was six eight months ago yeah i mean i'm upgrading to the m6 macbook pro for the oled not for the touchscreen yeah i'll use the touchscreen occasionally yeah that's the thing i can over even if i never use the touchscreen and it comes with one or two drawbacks i can overlook i can overlook all of that for oled and now a dynamic island like yep those two are worth it worth the update alone this episode of happy hour is also brought to you by Nordsteller. 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Go to shopify.com slash happyhour. that's shopify.com slash happy hour thanks to shopify for sponsoring the show apple announced this week that it will start manufacturing the mac mini in the united states later this year so they say beginning later this year mac mini will be produced at a new factory on apple's houston manufacturing site which will double the campus's footprint which is where they were currently making uh apple intelligence private cloud compute servers yes and which to their credit allegedly that they were ahead of schedule on starting production of those Mac minis or of those Apple intelligence servers So it seems again if you take them at their public word, this Houston facility is going pretty well so far, but the devil's in the details, right? Like how many Apple intelligence servers are they making in Houston? Are they making one every week or are they actually making a, keeping a steady supply of them yeah i mean they're making more than they were 18 months ago yes when they were like private car compute exists now they're gonna actually run like gemini models on it so i presume it's i bet they're glad they're ahead of schedule in terms of pumping them out um but is there really that much difference between making a private car compute server rack than there is a mac mini like i know these things are always my more complicated than saying it but what's the difference right you put a chip in an aluminium box and there you go so it's a nice gesture right it's good that they're making more macs in the us than than not but it's not like they're doing some crazy investment here out of left field and the mac mini is such a low volume product it's not a hard commitment to make even if they didn't have the houston facility at all already i feel like they could have done it as a token gesture for the administration if that was really what they needed but obviously you know it's not all just like made up they are going to sell these things but of all the apple products in the in the lineup the mac mini is one of the easiest you know it's like it's a metal box with a apple silicon chip inside it and they don't make they don't sell many of them so they'd have to make many of them it's low volume it's nice it's obviously just like what they do for the matte pro right that m2 matte pro that everybody buys yep is made in the us because so was the 2013 matte pro and then they did it for the 2019 matte pro and then when they refitged up with silicon they kept going i kind of see this as the final death now the matte pro like yeah the made in the usa matte pro is going to get phased out sometime this year and what they're going to say is but we're not stopping production of macs in america because we're doing the mac mini in the u.s now like it's just one out the window one comes in and i guess the mac mini is slightly more higher volume than oh significantly was especially in recent years when the mac pro has been abandoned right but still they're also not in in the mac pro case it was all mac pros made in the u.s that was sold in the u.s right it's not a commitment for all mac minis sold in the us to be made in the us it's some percentage of so if you actually i mean they'll probably never tell you this publicly but the quantities of production might be similar right in terms of yeah us mac minis and us mac pros but this is a big signpost to me that at some point this year we're going to get a newsroom announcement that the mac pro is not being sold anymore do you think we'll actually get a newsroom announcement or will it just be removed from the website with and die a very lonely death what did they do when they cut off the iPod it's like Apple loves music and the top title was iPod touch no longer sold or whatever yeah the music lives on yeah the pro lives on that's what it'll be and then it'll be a newsroom post advertising the new map of pros in the max studio oh it'll almost certainly be a just a paragraph in whatever the next max studio is yeah yeah that's absolutely right this is the type of announcement where it's like like great like more Apple stuff should be made in the United States. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's so light on details that it's hard to know just how big of a step this really is. Like in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sabi Khan said it'll be thousands every week. And like, okay, is that 1,000, 2,000, 100,000, 500,000? It's just hard to know the scale of this. But I do think, like I said, it's good to hear that this facility in Houston is going. It's versatile enough that they're able to do this, And it's going well enough and they have the staff and the expertise to continue to expand it. Because the Mac Pro, I forgot, is not made in Houston. It's made in Austin. Yeah. I would wager that at some point that Austin manufacturing facility closes down probably and any U.S. manufacturing moves to Houston. That would be my guess because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have two facilities in the same state that are, what, like three or four hours apart? Like kind of just want things to be centralized. and it certainly sounds like all of the latest investment has gone into Houston, not Austin. But yeah, all of this is ultimately good news. Finally this week, that low-cost MacBook that we talked about at the top of the show, a report on Weibo yesterday outlined the alleged, what do you want to call it, limitations or compromises that Apple is making to get the price down. The rumor itself is kind of weird and a little bit hard to make heads or tails of, but it seems to be based on code from an unreleased internal build of macOS Tahoe. And my interpretation of what this person is doing is looking at the code and the kernels specifically for this low-cost MacBook and working backwards, if that makes sense, saying, okay, what is included in the MacBook Air code that's not included in this? That's my interpretation of how they've done this. So I'll just run through the list real quick, and then we can talk about each point. but it says that it will not have a true tone display. And then there's a separate source that says it won't have a P3 wide color gamut display either. Lower max brightness in the MacBook Air's 500 nit display. No support for fast charging of any sort. It'll use a MediaTek Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip, the same chip used in the base model iPad, not Apple's newest N1 chip. Will not have a backlit keyboard. Slower SSD speeds compared to the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. No support for high impedance headphones. and storage options will include 256 and 512. But there also might be a special 128 gigabyte tier reserved just for education buyers. Oh, and it's not written in that list, but we're anticipating that display output will be constrained because it's an A80 Pro chip, right? Yeah. So you might only get one external display of 4K over USB-C or something rather than what you get on the MacBook Air, which is two displays now and the internal. like the comparison i was using as i was writing the story and reading about it do any of these macbook compromises stick out as bad as the lack of magsafe on the iphone 16 and my my instinct is no all of this no i think seems reasonable i mean the base ipad doesn't have true tone or a wide color gamut screen right nope so i'm not expecting the screen of the new macbook to be any better than the screen on the eye on the base ipad so that's about the same the no backlit keyboard one that surprises me a little just because backlit keys aren't like a big expense right it's like you know one led that shines through the keys but maybe they're just space saving on that one right and it must be i guess slightly cheaper to produce key caps that are fully opaque rather than slightly translucent and but that was the only one that when you read the list out um that really stood out to me as like oh i didn't expect them to do that you know yeah the other stuff is like for the people buying the the base level mag like who has bought a macbook air and gone well i'm so thrilled i can now plug in my high impedance headphone yeah um and the back the power batch stuff is just like whatever like people charge their laptops it's fine i'm trying to figure remember but the backlit keyboard thing i know that the magic keyboard for the base model ipad does not have a backlit backlight at all and i think i know the ipad pro does i can't remember what they do with the ipad air though but either way it seems like the best parallel for this machine is that base model ipad right like similar or identical screen technology same wi-fi chip just same overall set of compromises compared to their air and their pro counterparts yeah it doesn't i'm just looking at the website now the magic keyboard for ipad air does not have backlit keys okay so it's just the ipad pro magic keyboard that has backlit keys then i want to say yes but i think the one of the interesting parts about this rumor is that there might just be 128 gigabyte tier just for education buyers. That would theoretically mean that the starting price for education buyers could be $200 lower than the starting price for everyone else. Because historically, education buyers get $100 off the list price. Then if there's also 128 gigabyte tier for education buyers, that's $100 less than the 256 gigabyte tier, basic math tells you that that's $200. So if they advertise the starting price for everyone at, say, $699, they can also say for education buyers, $499. A $499 MacBook is incredible. I kind of feel like the presence of an even lower tier storage option suggests the base price might be higher. Yeah, which, well, $699 is higher than I think I'm expecting. Well, your pick at the beginning of the year was under $700. Yeah. So you were thinking, what, $599 before? Or $649 maybe, somewhere in that $599 to $699 range. I don't know. I think people with those price expectations are going to be disappointed. I'm more leaning on like $750, $799. $799 is $200 less than MacBook Air. Yeah, that's $200. That's a lot. That's 20%, yeah. I mean, you're not wrong. And there was a separate report from Digitimes this week that said early rumors pointed to a $5.99 price tag, but now most estimates place it between $6.99 and $7.49. I mean, are Digitimes reporting anything now? They're just summarizing rumors. Exactly. I don't know. People want it to be $5.99. It'd be fantastic if it is, but I would be gobsmacked if it's that cheap. Apple is a premium brand, and yes, they'll make education models that are cheaper, and I think the presence of a lower storage option just for education suggests that it's going to be like, oh, to get it into the $500 price bracket it for education that's what we need to do you know what i mean but like the default price at apple.com it doesn't need to be like they're just devaluing themselves if they put it lower than that like i'm not saying oh oh you know i'm not advocating for them to make stuff more expensive but if you're just thinking from their shoes right yeah there's a brand value you walk in an apple store and they're going to have laptops there that are close to the basement of a care but they're like basically half the price you know half the price plus a hundred dollars it just doesn't really vibe with me i just don't think they're going to sell it like that like greg joss we just knows in his heart that they can charge more money for them and people still buy them like it's going to be 699 really is like the lowest i think they'll that they'd go and even that's pushing it let alone all the recent stuff about memory prices and still ram and everything being through the roof the other question about this is is the ram configuration because if it's the a18 pro chip apple's only ever released the a18 pro in a device with eight gigabytes of ram does that mean you won't even be able to update to 12 or 16 is it going to be a macbook where the ram is set and your upgrade option is just 256 or 512 and color i guess but possibly the only downside to that from a pricing perspective that i can think of is historically again current events notwithstanding apple's margins are in their ram and their storage prices it's like the mac mini starts at what 599 which is an incredible value but once you make even a single upgrade to the ram or the storage you're entering a new price bracket yeah but you can make the argument of the base ipad right and they just don't offer ram other options on those yeah so i don't expect them to have ram configuration on the cheap macbook but i don't know if eight gigs is too stingy they did that whole hoo-ha when they upgraded the ram on all of their laptops to 16 base in off cycle right like they did was it the m2 air or the m3 air that they just put to put to six yeah like m3 yeah m3 like six like six months before they did the m4 or whatever are they really going to do an 8 gig laptop i don't know like it's like i don't know whether the a18 chip is it really that hard for them not to do a 16 gigabyte variant of it like is there anything innate in the a18 chip that prevents them from doing a higher ram option i don't know off the top of my head i feel like it must be possible My imagination right now is that with current RAM prices, the plan was to do 16 gigabytes. But now Tim Cook is personally walking up and down the supply chain, ripping out 8 gigabytes of RAM from every computer. I mean, if you're talking about a list of constraints, the 8 gigabyte of RAM might be its biggest holdback in the modern Mac era. That is true. Yeah. 8 gigabyte of RAM is passable, but it's not comfortable, I don't think, anymore. Especially if you're trying to load any LLM models or anything. Yes. because Apple intelligence right now requires 8 gigabytes of RAM. Apple intelligence at some point, presumably, is going to require more RAM than that. And I don't think we're that far off from that happening. Yeah, I'd agree. So you're going to just limit certain features to certain amounts of RAM? Like, that is not a wise strategy, I don't think. I wouldn't put it out of the equation as an option, but it's definitely not preferable. Yeah, because everything else on this list of compromises makes sense. Like, and nothing else gets me as riled up as the MagSafe on the iPhone 16e. It all feels totally reasonable whether this computer is priced at $699 or I guess $799. All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. and Mayo, what about you? At Beez-A-Day Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.