Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

Today is another one of our hallway conversations, and no seriously, this actually started

off as a conversation in the hallway between Benedict Evans and A6 and Z board partner,

Steven Sinovsky, and in true hallway convo style, where we riff off a theme, in this podcast,

just the two of them talk about all the recent news in the industry around devices, ecosystems,

and architectures. Besides, for example, Google's new pixel phone, which is especially notable as

a first phone made by them on the hardware side as well, Apple had a number of announcements

recently around a new MacBook Pro and innovations in touch, and then Microsoft, which among other

things announced a new Surface Studio, an all-in-one touchscreen desktop

PC. Benedict and Stephen first talk about the announcements and then talk more broadly about what it all

means in terms of S-curves and innovation, covering everything from the X-86 to arm processor shift

to ecosystem fragmentation to the role of touch and interface, and finally how it all changes

work.

Well, we were talking about what an exciting week it was for people who like PCs, that for the

first time, in a long time, there's new PCs and also just the one after another Microsoft Apple.

And like, is this a changing of the guard over who's taking over PC leadership

and design, even talking about, did Microsoft do better ads for their devices than Apple did for

their devices, even though Apple sort of created the metaphor for doing the sleek ID walkthroughs?

What's on your mind?

Well, there's a bunch of things. I mean, Apple announced

a upgrade to their laptops that people have been waiting for, and it's an upgrade. It's

another speed bump with a new design with this interesting touch bar thing on it. Microsoft,

...