Reviews of the iPhone 14 Pro, Apple Watch Series 8, and more

Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss The Verge's reviews of the iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 14, and Apple Watch Series 8. Further reading: Apple iPhone 14 Pro review: early adopter island Apple iPhone 14 review: meet the iPhone 13S It’s time to bring contrast back to our smartphone photos Apple Watch Series 8 review: if it ain’t broke iOS 16.1 beta adds Apple’s ugly new battery percentage indicator to the iPhone Mini iOS 16 review: unlocking the lock screen We finally got our hands and eyes on the PlayStation VR2 Google canceled its next Pixelbook and shut down the team building it We didn’t need another Pixelbook Adobe to acquire Figma in a deal worth $20 billion Bose QuietComfort Earbuds II review: noise cancellation domination Disney’s CEO teases a ‘hard bundle’ of Disney Plus and Hulu Sonos announces long-awaited Sub Mini for $429 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast, the flagship podcast of the Dynamic Island. First of all, I want to call it my friend Joanna Stern for actually taking a canoe to an island for her review video.

• 1:54David Pierce?

  It was excellent.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, Joanna is like, what if I just do a little bit more than everyone else would possibly do? And the fact that she did her entire video on a small island with a canoe.

• 2:08Alex Cranz?

  Did she initially pitch like a bigger island?

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, no. Well, okay, first of all, I'm your friend Eli. That's Alex Cranz.

• 2:16Alex Cranz?

  Hi.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is here.

• 2:18David Pierce?

  Hi. I live on the Dynamic Island. It's a mindset more than a real island, but Joanna found the real island.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  Her video producer obviously brought a drone.

• 2:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  I think it's Kenny is her video producer. I'm pretty sure he's the one who made this video. And so her point was that the island gets bigger and smaller with the tide. And so they have the video, the tide making the island bigger and smaller, just like the dynamic island on the phone.

• 2:42Alex Cranz?

  I love this so much.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is, it is just very good. It's a very good joke.

• 2:46David Pierce?

  It also straight up would be an Apple thing to do to make the dynamic island slightly smaller with the tides. Like, like a localized dynamic island that like changes colors as the sun sets and rises and falls.

• 2:58Alex Cranz?

  You can always know the tides, looking at your phone.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  Whatever happened to that Steven Spielberg show that was only supposed to be available at night on Apple TV? Do you guys remember this?

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  No, that was on Quibi, dog.

• 3:08David Pierce?

  It was on Quibi. Okay, that makes more sense. Okay.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  And they never built the technology to do it.

• 3:12David Pierce?

  Womp, womp.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  But he was like, I made a horror show. And so you have to watch it at night. And it's like, yeah.

• 3:18David Pierce?

  On your phone.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  Constantly turning your phone. And they announced it was such fanfare.

• 3:26David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:26Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:27Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like, the show's only available in the middle. And it was very much like, that's how a lot of TV worked for quite a long time, actually. It was only available for 30 minutes once a week.

• 3:38David Pierce?

  Put that show in the dynamic island, is what I'm saying. That's, that's where Quibi goes.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  No, if Apple did the tide sensor thing, they would, they would be like, we have built a custom array of tide sensing robots. Monitors the coast of California. And that is constantly, in a very privacy respecting way, constantly beaming tide information to your phone. All right. So a lot to talk on this week. Indeed, we reviewed the iPhones 14. We also have a, we reviewed the Apple Watch Series 8. iOS 16 is out. David reviewed that. Sony brought out the PlayStation VR 2. Google canceled more stuff. We also, our new website launched, which we did a whole podcast about, uh, that came out yesterday, but it's like two days later, three days later.

• 4:26Alex Cranz?

  It's old news.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  It happened on Tuesday. I'm very tired.

• 4:29David Pierce?

  You've also been talking about the website nonstop for, I mean, as long as I've been at The Verge and potentially much longer than that.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:37David Pierce?

  Do you want to talk more about the website? How are you on website talk?

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'll say. So the podcast David made with me and Tara and Matt from our product team, we did that like before it went out. So like, what I will say is now the thing's out. I think we have a lot of people who make products in our audience. You have no idea how it's gonna go, right? You just have to like, I've been looking at this website for six months. I've been reading our site exclusively in these designs for like two months. And you know, the first wave of feedback to everything is like, fuck you, change it back. Like, that's just the way life goes. And so we were expecting it. And we certainly got that. And I think those people tend to amplify one another, especially on Twitter, the social network that I'm trying to escape with our new design. So if you're tweeting at me, change it back. I can just

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  get your headlines on Twitter. It's like, well, yeah, I mean, that is the dynamic I am fighting against. I'm fighting against the hostility of this platform. We are together as a family. On the flip side, you know, a couple of days later, we're starting to get way more notes. I'm getting notes in my emails. I'm getting notes on Twitter. We're getting notes across our team. It's starting to click for people. So like, you can open us first thing in the morning and see a bunch of cool stuff. And you can check us once at night and see a bunch of cool stuff. And that's like, yeah, we didn't, we didn't get it right. We don't think it's perfect. It's not done. We should change some things. And we will like, that's like how it's gonna go. And here's what I will say to you, to everyone. Apple made you use iOS seven for one year.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna ship Stage Manager to a lot of people. And it's gonna be like that for one year. Like, we're gonna change our site faster than that. So just like breathe. We wanted to try some things. Some of our site is like, the most cutting edge web development you can do. And maybe it's a little too cutting edge. Maybe we need to back it down a couple steps. But the main thing, which is, Did I just publish the Tube Filter top 50 that I look at once a week to our site in five seconds and point out that the number of channels in the top 50 that are primarily YouTube Shorts channels keeps growing every week? And then that was done in four minutes and I got to share our audience with Tube Filter,

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  which is a great resource and not have to overdo it and have that be on our... Yeah, I got to do that. And like, if we can just do that a little bit more and make it valuable for people to check one more time a day and not have the toxicity of social media, I think we're gonna be fine. And so, yeah, we're gonna tweak the colors and fix the breakers and if we're gonna do all the things, we're gonna keep blurpul. Blurpul is deeply important to a lot of people. Blurpul is extremely good. But here's what I think the main thing we have to change is, people keep saying, "There's too many fonts." There's only three fonts. What you are really reacting to is that the display of regular articles and the display of the quick posts are too different. So we actually just need to make them look more of the same. And that's like a pretty easy change. We have to do it.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  But like, I think once you make that change and it's just, there's more visual consistency, I think we're gonna be fine.

• 7:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I will say, the thing that's been the most fun for me the last few days is like, way more of our Slack is now on our website, which I think is very cool. Like, I went on vacation in August and I got yelled at for being in Slack. And I realized, one of the reasons I keep opening Slack is because we have this channel called Goods Tweet, because I think there used to be one called Good Tweets that's now dead. So now there's one called Goods Tweet. And there's just like a long-running list of like funny tweets in that channel. And I literally check it on purpose because I like it and it makes me happy. And it's like, we've just built venues to put that stuff on our website, which was the point. It's like, our job is to like, see cool stuff on the internet and we want to give you more of it in public. And people are just having a blast with it. It's just so much fun to do. It's great.

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just, it's fun for our staff to be a part of our community. And doing it on other people's platforms seems self-defeating. So we're gonna try to do it on our own. And yes, that's a big change. And yes, the whole site isn't just a list of headlines anymore. But we think this is a... There are so many ways to get lists of our headlines. Like, infinite. You can build custom RSS feeds for days. There's a page on our website that is one decade old. We'll put a link in the show notes about how to build custom RSS feeds out of The Verge. It all still works. We've been committed to RSS for one. If you are listening to this show, you know that we have been committed to RSS at a DNA level for like one decade, and we're going to keep doing it, and we'll make an RSS feed for all the stuff. If you

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  want those views, you can get them. You can just follow us on Twitter. We just tweet all the headlines every day. But we're going to try something else on our own platform. So like I said, we'll iterate. I'm more pleased. We made everybody talk about a website in 2022.

• 9:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  The spiritual victory of making everybody talk about a website in 2022 is very high. The reacting to the complaints about people wanting the website to be more like a direct injection RSS feed to the brain, fine. But like, I'm happy that people are reconsidering the value of the web in 2022. We've accomplished our first.

• 9:44David Pierce?

  And if you read The Verge on a 40-inch ultra-wide monitor, and you think that the column of The Verge is too small, please just know that we hear you, because we all have giant, weird, crazy monitors, too. And we hear you. Most people use cell phones.

• 9:56Alex Cranz?

  Like, half our staff has, like, the ultra wides. Sean Hollister has, like, his monitor is as big as his desk.

• 10:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. What does it look like on the, on the, that crazy Samsung thing that's 11 feet tall?

• 10:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 10:09Nilay Patel?

  No, it's the vertical curves. And the one, it looks great, man. That's just The Verge.

• 10:13Alex Cranz?

  It's like, that's what it's built for. They actually built it for us. That's a surprise.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  We started with the two views. We start, what did we start? We shipped a product, right? Like, we started with the phone viewport, because that's most people. And we did, like, the standard laptop viewport, because that's almost everybody else. We'll get there.

• 10:30Alex Cranz?

  Where's my e Ink view and my iPad view? That's all I want.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, Apple needs to use iOS 7 for one year. Just take a breath. We're going to be fine. All right. Speaking of Apple, phones. We have phones.

• 10:45Alex Cranz?

  A lot of phones.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  You reviewed the Pro, which I feel like is, like, clearly the most interesting of the phones. Like, we didn't review the Plus.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Allison's review of the iPhone 14 was very much, it's very funny. You should watch it. It's very good.

• 10:56Alex Cranz?

  Her video is extremely good.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's the same phone.

• 11:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  Only now you can tell you if you're in a car crash.

• 11:03David Pierce?

  It's even more the same phone than I realized. Like, the thing I at least hoped was that in the camera in particular, some of the like little upgrades would add up to something. And it kind of sounds like they barely do. It's like, very much in the vein of if your phone is dying and you need a new one, this is probably the one to buy. If your phone is not dying and you don't need one, don't buy this one. And

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the iPhone 14 is indicative of the fact that maybe there are no more people without cell phones.

• 11:35Alex Cranz?

  Tell me more.

• 11:36David Pierce?

  Certainly not who might buy iPhones.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  Right, like, Apple's entire game now, and if you just look at the pricing of these phones, right, it's

• 11:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Nilay Patel?

  The, I know the 14 Pro price of my, they start a thousand dollars, and the big one is $10.99, right? But then the carrier subsidies are out of control. It's just they're totally dependent on the carriers now, because the carriers are all into your upgrade cycles. They really want you to upgrade those phones because you'll sign another two years of 5G service, for whatever reason you might want to do such a thing. Like, Apple has created a world in which most people who are going to have iPhones have their iPhones, and they, yep, they need to be competitive and compete with Android and conquest those users. But that huge installed base, if they can just turn them regularly, they're gonna sell a lot of phones.

• 12:20David Pierce?

  Well, and it's almost like the incentive to make it dramatically better every year in, for those people, is almost going away. Because now it's like you're gonna keep your phone until you need to upgrade for one reason or another. And then you're just gonna upgrade to whatever the new one is. So the thing where Apple has to like, ship something spectacularly new every year, because that's the upgrade path for people, is just gone.

• 12:41Alex Cranz?

  How many people is that upgrade path for, though? Like, the ones who are doing it year annually? I know a lot of people on our staff do, and probably a lot of our listeners are doing the annual, but I feel like a lot of people are now just doing like three, four year upgrades. And even then, it's the same thing, like, I gotta wait until there's a reason to upgrade. 5G was not a reason for a lot of those people.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the carriers will happily lie to you until you're

• 13:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, carriers will tell me differently, but

• 13:06David Pierce?

  Your mom, Alex, is on, if I remember correctly, like an iPhone XR, right?

• 13:11Alex Cranz?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:11David Pierce?

  Your mom is gonna buy an iPhone 14 and it's gonna be like magic, right? Like it is going to

• 13:17Alex Cranz?

  She's not, though, because she watched Allison's video. So she's like, I guess I'm gonna get a 13.

• 13:21David Pierce?

  Is she gonna buy a Pro? Oh, she's gonna buy a 13. Even that will feel like a huge upgrade, right? Like, the summation of these over the course of three or four years is huge. But each individual upgrade now is

• 13:32Alex Cranz?

  They're so iterative.

• 13:33David Pierce?

  Pretty minor. Yeah.

• 13:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I held off, I'm on an 11 Pro. My 14 Pro is currently in Kentucky. I'm so excited for tomorrow and like

• 13:44Nilay Patel?

  My understanding of your situation is that you live in New York and your family is in Texas. Is it on its way to you in Kentucky or has it stopped?

• 13:52Alex Cranz?

  Yes, because I just, I just checked the UPS tracking. And it's like, you landed in Kentucky.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  I didn't know if you had like a burner house in Kentucky.

• 14:00David Pierce?

  Has a P O. Box in Kentucky.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Just like, I'm working an elaborate tax scam.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  It's technically my main residence.

• 14:07Alex Cranz?

  Well, not anymore. It's now everybody on the podcast knows.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Kentucky State Tax Authorities are on the case. If you work in, like, if you're a tax auditor in the state of Kentucky and you're listening to our chats, let me know. I would just, what's that like for you?

• 14:22David Pierce?

  We have a lot of Alex information to tell you.

• 14:26Alex Cranz?

  Don't call them. Don't call them. It's fine.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  We are excited about the upgrade is the point of all of it.

• 14:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm fairly excited about it because it's actually feels like, like, for me, the dynamic island was the moment where I was like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna upgrade for that.

• 14:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, cool.

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  Which is probably very stupid. My sister was like, who would upgrade for the dynamic island? And I was like, well, I did. I just bought a phone for it.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's, it's fun.

• 14:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and it feels like

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  But I think that the cycle is, has been two years and it is stretching its way to four.

• 14:53Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  And you can kind of see that Apple's slowing the pace of iterative updates. So year to year, it's almost nothing.

• 14:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Nilay Patel?

  Four years, it's massive.

• 15:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Nilay Patel?

  And probably your battery is shot. So you're like extremely excited that your phone's

• 15:06Alex Cranz?

  That's the biggest part for me is I'm excited for my phone to last more than four hours.

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Alex Cranz?

  Well.

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 15:12Alex Cranz?

  Four hours. Yeah.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  So we've now dispensed with talking about the iPhone 14.

• 15:16Alex Cranz?

  And that's the iPhone 14.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  Actually talked about it all.

• 15:19Alex Cranz?

  Get the 13.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  iPhone 14 exists to be upgraded to. It does not exist for any other like meaningful reason. It's just slow iterative updates and it's there. They cannot advertise the new 48 megapixel camera. They can't advertise a new chip in the 14 Pro.

• 15:35Alex Cranz?

  Commercial trying to explain it.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  They can't advertise a new design. They can't advertise the size of the camera bump. What do they got? They got the island. And it's like, oh, that's why they named it the island.

• 15:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's a great, actually, I've super come around to the name. Because if you are me and you are walking the earth and people are like, what do you think of the dynamic island? You're like, let me tell you about notifications and status alerts in smartphone operating systems. And you're like, this is, this is actually how I want to connect with people.

• 16:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is the bond that will bring us together is your newfound interest in smartphone alerts. And then I look up and they, they have been running for minutes. The, the distance between us has grown so immensely.

• 16:19Alex Cranz?

  With their little pixel phone.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  But that's why I have this community.

• 16:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Nilay Patel?

  So that's the 14, right? I think it is just a very iterative update. It is designed to capture that group of

• 16:28Alex Cranz?

  No island.

• 16:28Nilay Patel?

  iPhone 11 owners who are, it's time to upgrade. And I think all those people will be very happy.

• 16:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Nilay Patel?

  If you have an iPhone 13, just like stay away. Actually, I think the iPhone 13, in particular, the iPhone 13 Pro, you can get it on sale. Tremendous upgrade target. It might be actually a superior upgrade target than either the 14 or the 14 Pro.

• 16:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  If you have an iPhone 11 and you can like get one of those on sale, whoo, that's a good idea. Right? It's like a very complete phone. And this is really the point. This was my review of the, the 14 Pro. The iPhone 13 is complete. It is a finished thought.

• 17:02Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  In, in Dieter's review of it last year, he was like, there's not a lot here to say. Right. And like you kind of.

• 17:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, they did the thing.

• 17:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And you kind of end up reviewing iOS.

• 17:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  Right. At like a basic level. And that's like, you know, it's Apple, it's hardware and software and services. And that did a, you know, like Tim Cook will give that speech, but as a product, as a finished product with melds hardware and software, there was just not a lot of rough edges to the iPhone 13 Pro.

• 17:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  I can criticize the camera and some little like all this stuff, whatever. It didn't have an always on display. It's like all this, it didn't have a bunch of Android features, basically. With the 14 Pro, they've added an always on display. They've added the satellite thing. They've added the island. All of those things are like wildly unfinished. The 48 megapixel camera is new. So you're like, Apple's now in the beginning of this new path. And you're like, oh, I can see all the rough edges. I can see all the things they didn't add. I can see all the ideas they didn't complete or what they left off to ship this one. And that's like, pretty exciting. At the same time, it's also like, boy, there's a lot to criticize.

• 18:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, and I guess what I wonder with, with the 14 Pro and even still wonder, kind of after reading your review is like, is there a long road towards something really cool here? Are we going to get to the iPhone 15? They're going to like polish all those things. And then we're going to be back to thinking like, okay, they more or less finished this medium interesting thing they were trying to do.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  I think you have to take it in chunks.

• 18:24David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 18:24Nilay Patel?

  So the island, I think we won't know if it's awesome or if it's 3D touch part two until next year.

• 18:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  Like straight up, the live activities API has to ship, which is turning into a huge deal for Apple, right? This like background task, live activities API that they put, they're doing in iOS 16, which we saw, when we saw it at W W C, I think Dave and I both like, oh, that could be a whole thing. But it is the foundation of the dynamic island. So all the thing, all the concepts they showed from flighty and lift and all that, like, they all need to use it.

• 18:57David Pierce?

  It's the sand underneath.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What's, what are islands made of?

• 19:06Alex Cranz?

  It's the volcanic rock.

• 19:08David Pierce?

  Volcanic rock. There you go. It's the dormant volcano underneath.

• 19:13David Pierce?

  No, but I think, and the interesting thing is I've been talking to a bunch of developers about this, and there's still very much a sense of like uncertainty about the best way to use this stuff. So I think you're going to see a lot of folks try stuff and roll things out that are live or aren't live that make use of the island. And I, there's a lot of open questions about not like whether this can be cool, but what it looks like when it is cool, that I think is like, to your point, going to take a while to shake out. And especially with the live activities. And I think it's true on the island, too. Like it's, it's coming for you. It's not a thing you get a lot of control over. Like if you're going to have notifications on, you're also going to get live activities. So I think figuring out sort of where that pendulum should stop

• 19:56David Pierce?

  before it's like super annoying and in your face all the time is going to take a minute.

• 20:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So here's one that we couldn't review because the live activities API hasn't shipped. There are no apps that use it. Like right now in our video, in every video, every demo of the island, what do people do? They start the music player and that flies up to the island and then they open a timer and then the island splits in two.

• 20:18Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  The, the classic.

• 20:20David Pierce?

  The clock app is the most innovative app on the iPhone. Like prove me wrong. It's the one.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  All right. But that makes sense. And there's an internal priority system in iOS that says the music player is more important than the timer.

• 20:34David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  So the timer is going to go in this little circle and the music player is going to be the big one. If you then make a phone call, iOS is like, actually, the phone call is the most important thing and we'll kick the music player, we'll stop it. We're going to stop your music while you're playing a phone call and timer's it. So like, there's this internal priority system that Apple has developed. Who knows, right? Like when you add Uber to that mix, who wins? Will Uber respect said priority system? When you add sports scores to that mix, who knows? Like there are millions of kinds of these live activities.

• 21:08Alex Cranz?

  Is Apple handling that? Or is that going to be up to the developers? Is it going to be up to the, the users? Seems like a terrible idea for it to be up to the developers.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  It's not up to the users as far as I know. So Apple has this priority system. Yeah. You don't like assign yourself like a five.

• 21:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  I think they've ranked basically the APIs.

• 21:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  My app's not very important. I mean, that's what they did on Android, right? Notifications on Android have priority levels and the developers basically pick their priority levels and everyone picks like the top priority.

• 21:38Alex Cranz?

  They're like, I'm the most important.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  Surprise. It's true on iOS too. You need to know what's new on Netflix right now. Yeah, Apple has time sensitive notifications and like half of my notifications are marked time sensitive because developers like, of course this is time sensitive.

• 21:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it seems like a terrible idea to give the developers any control over that because they're.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is where I think Apple's control of the App Store, for better or worse, comes into play. Like they're gonna pay a lot of attention to how this thing is being used. So, you know, here's a question. What if developers just start putting ads in the dynamic island? It's a thing you could reasonably do, right?

• 22:09Alex Cranz?

  I will throw my phone out the window.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  You're near a McDonald's and McDonald's is like, boop, boop. Stop in for some french fry. You can see it coming.

• 22:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, I think Apple's ability to police its platform, and I think perhaps more importantly, its absolute willingness to police its platform is gonna come through here. So there's just this part of it I can't review yet.

• 22:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? Because that huge ecosystem of experiments has not actually begun. Then the part you can review is like, you're just like using your phone and it's like, oh, I'm not supposed to use this. Like, it's just background stuff. Like, what I'm supposed to do on my iPhone is use apps.

• 22:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's not really a world in which you're like using the Maps app to navigate.

• 22:55Alex Cranz?

  Via the island.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  And you open another app. Right? Like, how often does this happen to you? It's very rare. There's a world in which you have the Maps app up and a phone call comes in and like that little thing is fine. But just like sort of the opening round is like, oh yeah, it's the music, it's phone calls, it's the timer. That's what I really want there. And kind of everything else is just like a demo.

• 23:18Alex Cranz?

  You kind of compared it to 3D Touch earlier, but I feel like it's more adjacent to, I'm sorry, to everyone besides me who loved it, the touch bar.

• 23:27Nilay Patel?

  That's rude.

• 23:28Alex Cranz?

  Like, I feel like it's that same, and I, and I, I wonder if like, the touch bar part of its failure was that like, Apple and developers had very little interest in it. Like, developers didn't do a lot with it. Apple did like, three things, and it was like, yep, there it is. And there was no, nothing more happened with it. Is this different? Like, is this gonna be different?

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's different. I hope so. Um, the, the, the problem with the touch bar is like, Apple replaced a set of good and useful buttons.

• 23:57Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  That had been on computers for 1,000 years.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 24:01Nilay Patel?

  With like, this idea. And it was like, not useful, and it was like, hard to use, and whatever. This is like, alright, there was a notch, which you basically didn't see. I know some people claimed to be able to see it. And now there's this thing that you definitely see, because it is always moving. Like, stuff is happening up there all the time. And it's like, you gotta pay for that, right? You gotta make that so useful, it's worth it to be there in your face all the time.

• 24:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Nilay Patel?

  I always think of things in terms of cost, right? So like, the first Apple Watch to me was not worth it, because the cost of having to care for its little battery was like, too high.

• 24:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, you were just always charging it, and it didn't do a lot, and it was pretty slow, and it was like, oh, I'm putting more into this than getting out of it. The notch was like, a great value proposition. It took away a little bit of screen, but it added Face ID. And like, after a day, you're like, I'm not even looking at this thing anymore.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  Now I Face ID. This is like, they've made it more prominent, it's in your face, you're looking at it, you kinda wanna use it. And it doesn't do a lot yet. Like, it is legitimately cool that the airdrop indicator is in there. It's cool, like, that's just neat.

• 25:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:05David Pierce?

  I do think you might be underrating the widget access from other apps. Um, that like, I, to me, it's like, the closest thing we've ever had to like, persistent playback controls on an iPhone, which I would argue, if done really well, is like, hugely useful.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:23David Pierce?

  There was a tweet somebody did the other day, that was basically like, after looking at the dynamic island, they never noticed that your phone doesn't tell you what you're listening to as you're using it. It just has, there's just audio playing, there's no sort of latent information about it, unless you go looking for it in one way or another. And I've spent a bunch of time thinking, like, is it, is that actually a thing I want? If I'm like, listening to music, do I need it? Like, ticker scrolling the song I have on at all times? Like, probably not, but do I want access to playback without having to do three or four other things? Like, yes, that strikes me as really useful.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  But you did. You just swipe down. You get like the widgets on the notification center.

• 26:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, but the like.

• 26:02Nilay Patel?

  Or it's in a control center.

• 26:04David Pierce?

  The control center thing sucks. I will, I will. Center is useless and I will not stand for anyone telling me control center is good.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but so then here's, but here's my pushback to you. You have to tap and hold.

• 26:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, you want it to just be the one tap to get there.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  You just tap it and open it. Since we published that take, like I've heard arguments like some apps won't have it. You know, like they won't have a widget. You'll just like go back there anyway. Like, okay, fine. What like, what is the appropriate widget for like, I don't know, the stocks app? It's just like take this, if the stocks app makes a dynamic island widget, like we're all doomed. We financialized too much in our lives. Yeah, the, the widget part of it is really cool. That's actually the coolest part of it is because they, to your point, it's like always on playback controls. They have made it look like a screen that gets bigger with this subpixel anti-aliasing.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:54Nilay Patel?

  It's very crisp and it like opens very cool and all the animations are cool. Like, that's the way to think about it. Like, you've got a secondary display on your iPhone now that lives way, way over the top of the system.

• 27:05Alex Cranz?

  Like a touch bar.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  Like a touch bar. And it just.

• 27:08Alex Cranz?

  It is a bar that you touch.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I just, it doesn't, they didn't take away the escape key on the keyboard. Like, it's, the cost isn't that high.

• 27:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they added, like, it would have been like if the touch bar had been above the function key bar and instead.

• 27:23David Pierce?

  No, it would have been like if Apple had replaced the dock on your Mac with a touch bar. Like, that's functionally what's going on here. It's like, it's a space you kind of use that is still a software space that they're turning into something different.

• 27:35Alex Cranz?

  I'm just thinking about that, like trying to swipe across the bottom of my monitor. That's gross.

• 27:42Alex Cranz?

  No, thank you. Absolutely not.

• 27:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like, we'll, like, that's my big, this is what I mean. That's, so the first bucket is like, a year from now, we'll be able to confidently evaluate the dynamic island.

• 27:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  Right now, what I can, I'm just telling you, the trade-off is a little bit upside down. Like, it's more in your face. If you, I run my phone in light mode, it covers up the content. You can see, it's just a black pill on top of your display all the time. In a way, the notch, because there was no bright contrast at the top of the notch, it was easy to ignore. But now there's screen at the top too. So you can just like see it glowing and it moves. So you're like, look at it all the time. It's worth it. Is it cool? Do people want to talk to me about status indicators on the phone? They do. I love it.

• 28:23David Pierce?

  Alex, do you use dark mode or light mode?

• 28:25Alex Cranz?

  I am a dark mode, like avid religious believer.

• 28:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's like full crazy to me that you use your phone on light mode, Neelai. Like that is, it's, it's, do you just turn on your phone at night and it blinds you to death?

• 28:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, based on tweets about our redesign, I am not the only one.

• 28:41Alex Cranz?

  I mean, we have some, some light mode lovers also at the verge.

• 28:46David Pierce?

  I mean, I too love to be blinded by my phone every time I turn it on. It's great.

• 28:50Alex Cranz?

  Like it's upsetting to me. I have like a white screen on me right now and it's giving me great lighting on one side of my face and that's the only reason for light mode.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that was the first bucket. A year from now, the second bucket is like, who knows?

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, the other thing I put in the year from now bucket would be the camera.

• 29:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:10David Pierce?

  Really?

• 29:10Alex Cranz?

  Why, why would you put that in the year from now bucket? Cause it feels a little like apart from the sharpness issues you had, it felt pretty complete in your review.

• 29:19David Pierce?

  And this is like an old idea. Apple did not like invent a new theory about photography here. It's just pixel bins.

• 29:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then like, so what you get out of it is the sensor is much bigger. So you get a little bit better blur, like Boca and the, and the photos, which is nice. Not so much that like, you have to like, go look for it and then it's there and it's a very, it is very nice. But it's not so much more than 13. Yeah. And you get a little bit better, a little light performance. You do get better fine detail, but that fine detail comes with a bunch of sharpening. You're just not getting, this is only a year from now. I think Apple will be more confident in how to use this sensor.

• 29:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think right now they played it pretty safe and that they're not pushing it. And I'm just telling whoever from Apple is listening to this, like the photo processing is getting too aggressive. Like the combo platter of noise reduction and sharpening that is occurring on the iPhone right now is like just getting weird. Like too much, like back it off.

• 30:13David Pierce?

  It is the side by sides of particularly the 14 Pro and the Pixel 6 were pretty wild. Just that it's like, and you even say this in the review, it's like, these are two photos of ostensibly the same thing that just have wildly different opinions about what a good photo is supposed to be. And you can look at them both and they're both pretty good photos. It's like, this is in incredibly bad lighting and it's, it's a relatively like sharp, nice looking photo, but it is stylistically like miles apart from each other. And it's, it's wild. Like it's gotten so much more pronounced over time.

• 30:51David Pierce?

  Samsung has this like very warm tone idea about the world where everything is like colorful and smooth and beautiful.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  Samsung phones are on a different planet. I don't know what else to say about this. Like they're in a different dimension where everything is a different color.

• 31:07David Pierce?

  I kind of like the world it lives in. It's a very like optimistic universe that Samsung's phones live in where everything is like beautiful and the sun is always setting.

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  So the last time I did an iPhone Pro, I didn't do it last year, two years ago, I did a 12 Pros. And my takeaway that year was all these phones are the same. They all look the same, like no differences exist. And then this year they're as wildly different as they've ever been. I mean, like in bright light, when you like shoot a person on a city street, like they look exactly the same. But it's on the edges when they have to make decisions. It's like, it's hard to even describe, like they're making artistic decisions that are wildly different from each other.

• 31:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. And the Pixel is very sort of like neat and tidy. And then Apple is just like, let light rain, see what happens.

• 31:51Alex Cranz?

  Just like the dynamic range.

• 31:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's nuts.

• 31:53Alex Cranz?

  On the 14 Pro versus the six, the Pixel 6 Pro is, is incredible. You're looking, oh, I can like look into these buildings on the Pixel 6 Pro and. I simply know that there are buildings there with the iPhone.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Alex Cranz?

  And they're very bright.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  Brighten it up. You know, it's like other stuff like Apple does not appear. Apple spent a lot of time on portrait mode, you know, and like Samsung is just even a baby S22, not the S22 Ultra. Does better portrait mode segmentation of like hair. It's a bummer. Than iPhone does now. There it is. And we actually did that demo with the S22 just because it's interesting to see that the not pro Samsung phone is outperforming the iPhone 14 Pro. I think that, you know, the pixel is contrasty and moody and always has been. Apple is, what'd you say, Alex? It's like Festival of Lights. Like it's very Thomas Kunkka.

• 32:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  Like it's, everything is very bright. Uh, there's almost no shadow. Like, can you switch it? Can you switch it to rich contrast mode or like mess with the, yes, you can do all these things, but it's just, I think Apple has gotten, they've like backed themselves into a corner with the processing a little bit and they, this is, I think now with the new sensor, they can collect more light. They can get out of it and go to a different look that does not require them to do the amount of noise. Cause when you shoot 48 megapixel raw. I was just about to ask. It's not like the world's noisiest photo. Like it's a fine photo. They're huge. It takes the shutter, like when you push the shutter, the capture time is really long.

• 33:23Alex Cranz?

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  Like I would not run around shooting a 48 Pro, 48 megapixel Pro, like you'll just get annoyed and the files are like 80 megs. I can't destroy this phone in one afternoon. But you can see there's a lot for Apple to work with there. But I just, I think they're a year away from that thing. And then God only knows, like they've, you know, they've rebranded this whole thing as the photonic engine and they've really, the main move there is they've moved deep fusion, the mid light and low light pixel by pixel. Now they're running it early in the process on uncompressed data and it's still just like, what does sweater mode do? Like, did this do anything? Like, who knows? But like, you know, they're, they're getting more comfortable sort of talking about their processing pipeline as something other than magic, you know? And like, I think that's good.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  And I just, I think they can start making different decisions. So that's what I mean by it's a year away from being like, oh, there's a 48 megapixel sensor in this camera. You can do stuff that the 13 Pro definitely cannot do. And right now they're just like right on top of each other.

• 34:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:22David Pierce?

  So is that, is the next turn there then to basically open up like a new set of camera modes to people? Cause it feels like what you're describing is like, Apple has this like incredible amount of raw power now. And the solution is to give that back to users. Like to just let you do more stuff with your camera feels like the next turn from like, we just collect an incredible amount of light and have an incredible amount of processing power. Like find clever ways to put that back into the camera app seems like where this goes. And I feel like, I just think about like the, what's the thing called in macOS now? Where you can use your phone as the webcam and it'll also look at your desk?

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  Continuity camera.

• 34:59David Pierce?

  Continuity camera, thank you. Continuity camera feels like a version of that thing, right? Where they're just like, okay, now we have lots of pixels to use and lots of processing power with which to use them. Like what wacky new stuff can we open up? And it feels like that's what I would hope Apple would spend the next year working on.

• 35:15Alex Cranz?

  Are they gonna focus on the camera though? Cause I feel like the camera for the longest time has been the differentiator year to year for, for most phones, right? Like most phones, the big upgrades camera related. But it also feels like the majority of people have gotten bored with that, don't care as much about the camera upgrades, like present company excluded.

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the 12 Pro camera was fine.

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  The 13 Pro camera was great. Like, what are you gonna do?

• 35:40David Pierce?

  But like action mode, I think is an example of something that is like a, and I've said this on their show before, like is a meaningful change. It doesn't sound like it's great yet, but like that kind of thing is the kind of stuff where it's like. Everybody's just running around making TikToks all day right now. If you can make them more stable, like you have accomplished something real for people.

• 35:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So action mode is like really interesting, you know, because you know what they're doing is across all the sensors, they're just like cropping down. You know, there's like the TikTok filter, which is like holds on your face. That is what it is doing. Like it just, it's just

• 36:12Alex Cranz?

  But that's a little line.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  It's cropping the sensor down. And then as you move around, it's just moving around the sensor.

• 36:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  Which is, you know, that's neat. But as far as I know, when you do it on the 48 megapixel sensor on the main wide, it doesn't use the additional space. So you don't get like more stabilization off the 48 megapixel sensor than you do off the other 12 megapixel sensors. Like, that's just like one of those like things you could just figure out how to do, you know, like the A16 bionic processor is like a, is what I, from what I'm told by Apple, the performance is off the unlabeled charts.

• 36:47Alex Cranz?

  So we all just need to be

• 36:49David Pierce?

  50 times better.

• 36:50Alex Cranz?

  Really excited about iOS 17.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't think, the camera is the thing they don't update. You're right.

• 36:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  It's like, and that's weird. I just think that's weird. I think they should start doing camera updates and versions of iOS. Like you have the hardware, particularly like the iPhone 13 Pro to the iPhone 14, same processor, same camera, as far as we can tell, right? 12 megapixel sensor, same lens. Why does the 14 have the photonic engine with deep fusion and the 13 Pro doesn't get it? That's just weird. It's a software camera.

• 37:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:20Alex Cranz?

  Cause you need to pay for it.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't, that's like, at some point, when Apple does the segmentation, they're, they're just playing games, I think are dumb for software to play.

• 37:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Nilay Patel?

  But I don't know, we'll see. Like that, but I'd put the camera, like, action mode is great if you have a ton of light and it's still not that great, but like, it's a baby step forward to a really important thing. And so a year from now, will it be like a meaningful change? Like maybe? And that's like, that's, I put the camera in the island in that like, one year from now, I would put always on display in one year from now, because I think a lot of people are going to discover that they want their always on display to be slightly more off than this display.

• 37:58David Pierce?

  Take us through that, because that was the thing I am like, the single feature about the 14 Pro I'm most excited about is the always on display. And I left your review

• 38:06Alex Cranz?

  Not

• 38:07David Pierce?

  kind of thinking like, maybe I'm going to buy this phone and then turn the always on display off.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm definitely turning that always on display off.

• 38:12David Pierce?

  Why is it not good?

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  Bluntly, Apple's behind. Android phones have had this for a long time.

• 38:18David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  And they've had to compete on making that thing good, right? So like across the Android landscape, always on displays, like you can customize them. You can put widgets on them. You can, you can make them look like just a clock. You can make them look like all kinds of things that look wildly different than the home screen. Apple's like, what if we just dim the lock screen?

• 38:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  This is what is occurring and they don't, you know, and it's still very colorful. So like Becca and I were sitting next to each other, we both thought our phones were on all the time.

• 38:43David Pierce?

  So is it functionally not that different from just having your phone on? But the brightness turned like almost all the way down. Is that like basically what it feels like?

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  Well, and the screen is only refreshing at one hertz. Like imagine you had a way shittier version of your phone.

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So it's like, you know, the screen isn't updating, but notifications are flying. Yeah. Like it looks too on.

• 39:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Nilay Patel?

  And like, I would prefer like that pixel style faded or Samsung style faded all the way to black and white. You know, and like

• 39:11David Pierce?

  Show a clock.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  Show a clock and like my next calendar appointment.

• 39:14David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Call it a day, right? And the other, I noticed this and I think Mark has noticed this too. It feels like it's running the battery down faster.

• 39:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:23David Pierce?

  Which is like the main thing Apple says it doesn't do.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, it's the wrong set of trades.

• 39:28Alex Cranz?

  The main thing we don't want to, to happen. It has to, because you're still, you're, you're still firing those pixels. Like everybody else did it black and white because you could turn all the black. It's just the pixels are

• 39:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And they're like, what if we left the entire screen on?

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:46Alex Cranz?

  But at 20% brightness.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. A better way of thinking about the always on display on most Android phones is that it is the mostly off display.

• 39:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:55Nilay Patel?

  And Apple's like, yo, this thing's on.

• 39:58Alex Cranz?

  It's just on.

• 39:59Nilay Patel?

  So, and I think, you know, like as we've seen from iOS 16, tons and tons of customization is in iOS 16. So it's like, it's just like another year of refinement away from being great.

• 40:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  These are all the reasons it got an eight. Like we reset our scores because we had score inflation. But I'm just like, well, always on display, like not a thing, like cameras, like pretty much the same. Like I wouldn't say it's necessarily better than the, the Pixel or the S22 Ultra. In fact, in some ways it's definitely worse. In some ways it's much better. But yeah, it's like, it's a tie to just behind. Like that's how I put the camera. On video, I think it's way ahead of everybody is always. And then the island is like, who knows?

• 40:35Alex Cranz?

  It's crisp.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  Question mark city. It's very crisp. And then the rest of the stuff is like satellite connectivity. It's like, it's not even out yet and I can't review it. I can just tell you it's there. Car crash detection, like, I don't know.

• 40:45Alex Cranz?

  Did you, you didn't crash a car?

• 40:48Nilay Patel?

  We did not crash a car. I have heard tell that there are some plans to crash some cars.

• 40:53Alex Cranz?

  I have also probably heard that.

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're gonna, Alex, after the show, we have to figure out our insurance for the car crashing.

• 41:00Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great, guys. Stay tuned.

• 41:02David Pierce?

  This feels like the sort of thing I'm gonna be made to do against my will. And I just want everyone to know that I don't want to do it. I'm saying it on this podcast.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  David, we have a meeting tomorrow.

• 41:10Alex Cranz?

  Bring your fluffiest sweater, maybe a really fluffy hat, like just.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  A fluffy hat?

• 41:16David Pierce?

  A fluffy hat.

• 41:16Alex Cranz?

  Bulky stuff.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  That is the most Texas car crash instruction I've ever heard. You don't need a helmet. You just get yourself a bulky hat. You're gonna be, you're gonna be great.

• 41:24Alex Cranz?

  Just go like this. Just hunch and fly. It'll be great.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break.

• 41:29David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 41:29Nilay Patel?

  We've been talking about the iPhone so much. Come on now. We're gonna take a break and we'll come back and talk about this. Watch.

• 41:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  I tell you what, wear fluffy hats. We'll be right back.

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• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  We're back. I think we can dispense with the Apple Watch Series 8 very quickly.

• 42:55David Pierce?

  I think that's right. Unfortunately, that seems to be right.

• 42:57Alex Cranz?

  It also does car crashes.

• 43:01Alex Cranz?

  Put on your fluffy gloves.

• 43:02Nilay Patel?

  So, car crash plans in the future aside, the video team tried to trigger crash detection with the Series 8 by buying an RC truck, mounting a GoPro to it, and then having the watch on the truck just like crash into stuff. And that's, I mean, why do we, why do we, why did we start the Verge?

• 43:21Alex Cranz?

  I learned about that because I just heard the whine of the motor through the office. And I was like, what is that noise? And then I saw it whip around the corner and just crash sadly into a desk.

• 43:33Nilay Patel?

  Yesterday was one of the busiest days in our office in the past two years. There was like apparently some sales conference and obviously we had the relaunch and there's a bunch of product people. And it's like, how does the Verge team show up? Well, we've attached a watch to an RC truck and we're just crashing it into walls. This is what we do here. Welcome.

• 43:50Alex Cranz?

  We're professional adults.

• 43:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's great. It did not work. We did not generate sufficient G-forces to trigger. Or the watch was like, silly children.

• 44:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  This won't do it.

• 44:01David Pierce?

  The only answer is to get slightly bigger vehicles until it actually triggers.

• 44:07Nilay Patel?

  I think it might also know that it wasn't on a person. So I think we have to get like a lukewarm sausage and like, you know, just be like trying to trick it into pass it into detection.

• 44:17David Pierce?

  No, we have to put, we have to put David in a Power Wheels and then see what happens. I'll do it.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  I think you're just getting the car with the fluffy helmet on. That's what you're doing.

• 44:26Alex Cranz?

  It's in the mail. Get ready.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  So the, the Series 8, largely the same as the Series 7. I think V's point was if you have like a Series 3, you should upgrade and you'll have the time of your life and everyone else will be fine. Because the new watch OS will bring you almost all of these features.

• 44:42Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 44:43David Pierce?

  It's kind of the same story as the iPhone 14, right? It's like if yours is, if like you're, you use the one you have and it is obviously nearing the end of its life, upgrade to this one, you'll be psyched. If you already have one that you like quite a bit, don't worry about it. Nothing is going to change. The Ultra seems to be a very different story, but we haven't reviewed that yet. So we'll see. But the, yeah, the Series 8 is like, for me, it's like, I haven't had a watch in a few years. I was like all in on the watch for a little while and then kind of like tapped out on having too many notifications on my wrist. So I just like stopped being an Apple Watch guy for a few years and I think I'm going to get back in. And now the question is like, if I had bought a Series 7, I would not feel the need to upgrade. Now I can't buy a Series 7, so I'm going to buy a Series 8 because it's just the one to buy.

• 45:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:24David Pierce?

  But there doesn't seem to be anything, if you've bought a watch in the last, say, three years, it's very unlikely that anything here is going to blow your mind. It's weird, it's wild to me that Apple got to this point of these like teeny tiny annual upgrades this quickly with the watch, but this just seems to be kind of where we are.

• 45:41Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they could fix the battery life. Like there's stuff they could actually be doing that they're not, or that they haven't.

• 45:47David Pierce?

  I'm not sure that's even true though. Like it's a small thing.

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, they did fix the battery life with the Ultra. They made it gigantic and.

• 45:55Alex Cranz?

  Shove a couple more batteries in there.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  They solved your problem. Yeah, I think it, you know, it's interesting because the reason we're saying the iPhone 14 is that the sitter of stage is like they're out of iPhone customers. And so now they just have to be there and then squeeze you for Apple TV money as hard as they can. The watch is not there, right? The, the total market for Apple Watches is the installed base of the iPhone. And as far as I know, they have not yet arrived at one to one Apple Watch to iPhone sales.

• 46:25David Pierce?

  If they are, Apple is lying on its earnings.

• 46:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, I mean, that's, that's part of why they did the, the thermometers, right? Temperature readers? What are those called?

• 46:32David Pierce?

  Temperature sensors.

• 46:33Alex Cranz?

  There we go.

• 46:34Nilay Patel?

  Your belief is that the, the thermometers. That there are people around the world with iPhones being like, if only I knew what temperature.

• 46:43Alex Cranz?

  No, because I think this is part of, there's been this weird gender divide.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see what you mean.

• 46:48Alex Cranz?

  In, yeah, there's been this gender divide in wearables. Oftentimes, people who identify as women have been put pointed towards like, get the Oura ring, get a Fitbit. Like, you don't need a whole lot. Oh, you're you identify as a man, you need the biggest, smartest watch you can buy. And and this, like, Apple kind of perpetuated that by being like, look at this manly, manly, enormous Ultra, and then look at this smaller one that can track your period, or help you anticipate your ovulation through temperature readings.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  No, it cannot help you do that.

• 47:18Alex Cranz?

  It can't. It can help you.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  It can tell you after the fact.

• 47:21Alex Cranz?

  It'll tell you afterwards, and then you can use that to be like, hmm, maybe I'll have a better idea for next time.

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then Apple is not on the hook for their off-book, unlicensed FDA. Right? That's just you guessing.

• 47:35Alex Cranz?

  That's you guessing.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 47:37Alex Cranz?

  You just wanna you wanna get that sensor and go for that. But it's very, like, fundamentally appealing to these women and saying, hey, if you don't want to go get one of these other devices out there, if you want to be part of the Apple ecosystem, we've got you now. And I don't know if that's going to be successful, especially because, like, they really half-assed it by being like, we will not get any sort of approval whatsoever. We're just going to put this out here so you can anticipate and use it on your own time. And that's like, not great. But yeah.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I, you know, I think these review had it right. There's a couple of apps that on different platforms are that do have the certification to do it.

• 48:14Alex Cranz?

  And you can use those.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  You can see how Apple would you can see how they would show up on the watch and maybe get the certification. You can see how Apple would go after this certification.

• 48:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  So yeah, I buy that. Like, okay, they're expanding the capabilities of this thing, such that they might be able to get more people.

• 48:29Alex Cranz?

  Right. Yeah. And I think that's exactly what it is. It's just like, we know there's this huge market of people who historically haven't been buying these as often. They've been on these other platforms, and now we can convince them to get this really big watch that continues to be grow larger every year. Not every year. Every other year.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Alex Cranz?

  I'm upset about it.

• 48:48David Pierce?

  I have a theory about this that I'm just developing right this second, and I'm curious what you guys think. It seems like one of the things that Apple pulled off with the iPhone was to basically open up the App Store and make everybody else make the case for the iPhone for them. Right? Like the, the, the, Apple designed very few of the best things about the iPhone. Ultimately, that is not true on the Apple Watch in like any meaningful way. Apple designs all of the things about the Apple Watch at this point. And the, the like, there are apps on it, obviously, but I, I've seen very few Apple Watch apps that appear to be like Apple Watch first apps. They're, they're like companions to other things or sort of barely thought of things. And I.

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but there's one now. There's exactly one.

• 49:30Alex Cranz?

  Flow.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  No, it's Oceanic Plus by, by Huish on the Apple Watch Ultra. This is the one. They built the entire watch. They partnered with another company, which is a big move for Apple.

• 49:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  And that app is supposed to sell the Apple Watch Ultra to scuba divers. And I don't think that it is meant to be used as an extension of an iPhone app. Because if you're using your iPhone in the open ocean, you have problems. So like, they've got one.

• 49:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  And maybe that's the beginning of something else, but I think that's just mostly related to how often do you have your Apple Watch without your phone? And they still sell lots of, I'm, I would bet most of Apple Watches that get sold don't even have the cellular capability. And even the ones, I'd send the last year and a half with an cellular capable Apple Watch that I never hooked up.

• 50:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  Cause it's been a pandemic. I was like, what am I going to do? Make a call from this downstairs? So I'll just go upstairs.

• 50:24Alex Cranz?

  Is there ever a case where like, cause I never feel comfortable going with just my watch and not my phone. Right? Like if I get a phone call, then I'm going to have to figure out the AirPods situation. I can't play music on it as well. Like, I don't trust the Apple Pay and stuff on it. I should, but I don't like.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you should definitely trust that. That's fine.

• 50:42Alex Cranz?

  But there, there, I think there, I'm not the only one. I think there is a lot of people who, who do have this like psych phobia of just going with the watch and leaving the phone at home. Like.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  You should do it. When I, when we lived in the city and I would go on walks with Max, I would only take the watch.

• 50:54Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 50:55Nilay Patel?

  And it was great because I didn't have my phone. And so like, I could get texts, I could make the one phone, like I could make the emergency phone call if I needed it. I could pay for stuff. Still have my wallet, but it was great because I couldn't like check Twitter and see what people were mad about.

• 51:08Alex Cranz?

  But besides those walks, how often are you without your phone?

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, now I live in a house that's full of computers.

• 51:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  It's a real problem. I gotta buy another house. It's no computers. Shack in the woods. I'm just saying, like, give it a shot.

• 51:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Nilay Patel?

  But that, like, we said we're going to dispense with the Series A quickly. Like, now we are just generically talking about the Apple Watch.

• 51:31David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? The Series 8 is an instantiation of the Apple Watch is very iterative, very nice. And they've added capabilities that might appeal to a few more people, maybe many more people.

• 51:40Alex Cranz?

  And focus modes, too. But I know that one's cool because I'm going to be able to have, like, when I'm not at work, have one that doesn't have my calendar on it.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 51:49Alex Cranz?

  Not having to look at my calendar while I'm off work. That sounds great.

• 51:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We'll talk about the Ultra more next week. I think that's the interesting one. Series A, very nice. If you have a three, upgrade. If you have anything else, you know, upgrade watchOS, you're going to be very happy. David, do you want to talk about iOS 16 real quick?

• 52:05David Pierce?

  Sure. I mean, you've used it, actually, in a funny way, in a more advanced way than I have. Like, one of the funny things, I mean, it comes back to what we're talking about before, right? Like, one of the most interesting things about iOS 16 is going to be live activities in the dynamic island. Because the whole, like, thesis of iOS 16, if I was to, like, have a big, heady thought about iOS 16 is that it is trying to make your phone do more things without you having to do them. And we've talked about this already on the show, but it's like, the always on screen is about this, like, how do you get information without having to open up your phone, which I think is like, an absolutely correct path for Apple to be on. Based on your review, it doesn't sound like it's handling it perfectly, but like, lock screen widgets are amazing. Like, huge win. I wish I could have more of them.

• 52:47David Pierce?

  I wish they were more interactive, but like, I can tap on my phone and I can see what is next on my calendar and I can press one button to take a note on my phone.

• 52:55Alex Cranz?

  You went widgets instead of the cutout?

• 52:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, none of my pictures are cool enough to need a cutout. Although I do now, my calendar widget is over top of my wife's face and she is not thrilled with that.

• 53:08David Pierce?

  There was some consternation, but I think it's great. And like, using, having a bunch of different lock screens that, like Alex was talking about, are hooked to focus modes is great. There's like, these little ideas, especially about the lock screen, that I think Apple got, like, really right. And then, everything else about iOS 16 is just like, common sense stuff that it would have been great to have had several years ago, but it's here now and pretty happy about it. And that's like, that's basically been the story of iOS for a while, is they're just like, oh, here's a feature you want. We made it for you.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's interesting because all the stuff you're describing that you want on the lock screen is stuff that I have in my Apple Watch.

• 53:40David Pierce?

  That's interesting.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, I never do any of this customization because like what I put, I just, I use the modular face in the watch.

• 53:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 53:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  So like, all right, there's the calendar. I just look at it like, there's not much else, I guess. It's, that's a weird dynamic.

• 53:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  Like you can overload your lock screen with ambient information, or you can just like overload your watch.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think that's right.

• 54:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I did the cutout because I don't need the widgets. Like, those are all on my watch.

• 54:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:04Alex Cranz?

  But I do, I do have one quibble with iOS 16. I was talking with Will Joel, our creative director, and we were mainly talking about the Verge website. And I was grilling him on the colors and everything because I wanted to understand it because I just think it's neat to talk about color choices.

• 54:18David Pierce?

  Is it the clock fonts?

• 54:19Alex Cranz?

  It was the clock fonts. Like, we immediately started talking about the clock fonts. Like, I was, I was like, look at these fonts. I'm talking about the Verge site. And I'm like, these fonts are great. Unlike these fonts. And he had a really, really interesting point that I thought was great, which is that like, the, the watch fonts, they've given us so much choice. It's almost anti-Apple. Because they've given us these really ugly watch fonts, right? Like, they are all kind of unattractive. And they didn't think what, they, it didn't have that like, Apple touch. Because Apple usually is so good at design. And if it's going to give you choices, it's always going to give you choices that it thinks are aesthetically pleasing.

• 54:56Alex Cranz?

  And I refuse to believe that it thinks these fonts are aesthetically pleasing, especially because they don't, like, the serif fonts you can choose don't work with the widget sans serif fonts.

• 55:06David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 55:06Alex Cranz?

  They, they clash. And you're like, this is ugly.

• 55:09David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 55:09Alex Cranz?

  And so on Apple. And it was just really, I hate it.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  That's what they want. It's MySpace time for Gen Z. And it's going to happen on their lock screens.

• 55:19David Pierce?

  That's real. I mean, the fact that that WidgetSmith app is so massively popular is like, there are definitely people at Apple Park who took notice of that, that like, people want to make their phones uglier in the service of making it look more like them. And that's actually the correct thing for Apple to do. I also, Alex, to your point, I think it's not Apple. I think what you just described is Johnny Ive. Like, like, the, the thing where it's just like, this is the right answer. And if you don't like it, you're wrong and can just go screw it. Screw yourself.

• 55:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:50David Pierce?

  Uh, that's Johnny. That was all Johnny Ive. And I think like, when he's gone, you can draw a pretty straight line to this.

• 55:55Alex Cranz?

  He was like, he was that Apple design. I think if, if, if this was, if that was Johnny, and this is like, obviously an operating system made without his influence, for the most part, as far as we know.

• 56:05David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 56:05Alex Cranz?

  Less than, less than previous years, at the very least.

• 56:08David Pierce?

  Less influence, certainly.

• 56:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Then what does that mean for Apple in its, its own philosophy about design? Because that's a pretty radical shift to say like, to go from being like, we, we know it looks good and will guide you to, oh, here's some fonts, here's some colors, you do you.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it's some, that's what, it's some fonts and some colors. If Apple was like, any font and

• 56:32Alex Cranz?

  It's what I want.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  iOS users were like, Comic Sans, let's do this. Like, they're not doing that. They, they pre-selected some aesthetics for you.

• 56:40Alex Cranz?

  But they're bad aesthetics.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  And you may engage in them.

• 56:43Alex Cranz?

  But they're like.

• 56:44David Pierce?

  But like, some of them are very ugly. I agree. But I think like, the, even when you go to pick a lock screen, it actually does this in a very interesting way, because it gives you, it, it basically like stack ranks what it thinks are good ideas. And it'll even pick a bunch of your photos that it's like, what if you use this photo as your lock screen? That might look nice. But then if you like.

• 57:01Alex Cranz?

  Picked a photo of my friend Sam at his wedding.

• 57:04David Pierce?

  Crushed it.

• 57:04Alex Cranz?

  And it was like, don't you want a picture of your friend Sam at his wedding to look at every day for the rest of your life when you turn on your phone? And I was like, no, Apple, what?

• 57:13David Pierce?

  What's wrong with your friend Sam? What do you have against Sam?

• 57:15Alex Cranz?

  Like, I mean, he's fine, but we're not friends enough for him to be on my phone like that?

• 57:20David Pierce?

  All my lock screens are, are of you guys. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  There's already a TikTok meme of like, people changing the lock screen for their side, their side pieces. It's pretty good.

• 57:33Alex Cranz?

  Focus modes?

• 57:35David Pierce?

  That's a good use of focus modes.

• 57:36Alex Cranz?

  I'm in my cheating focus mode. It's all you.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should take another break. I can't wait for these live activities. It's the point of iOS 16 is like live activities.

• 57:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be cool.

• 57:46Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be very good.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's a big deal. And it's just like, not here yet. All right, we gotta take another break. We'll go through a little lightning round when we come back. We'll be right back.

• 57:58Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to indeed.com slash podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 59:16David Pierce?

  Okay, we're back. Do we want to talk about the Pixelbook? I do, but before we do, can I give one more iOS 16 thing? Yes. I got the greatest comment that I've ever gotten from a story that I wrote on the verge.com and it has emboldened me to share the thing that I discovered on this podcast. So I wrote in the iOS 16 review that it was stupid that you couldn't sort in messages just to see your unread messages. Because that's stupid and you've never been able to do that. And it's stupid that that can't happen. You can unsend messages. That's great. You can edit messages. That's great. You couldn't just sort to see the unread ones. And we all have that one message from like two and a half years ago. That's the reason you still have the badge in your messages app. Anyway, I got a bunch of people on Twitter, thank you to all of you, who said, actually, you can do this. There's a, there's a thing at the top left that says filters.

• 1:00:01David Pierce?

  And if you go to filters, you can now filter down to unread messages. But you can only do this if you've turned on a feature in settings. You go to settings, messages, scroll all the way down and turn on filter unknown senders. It's not on by default. But if you turn it on, then you go to the messages app and you will have a filters button at the top and you can filter just to see your unread messages. This is the greatest thing ever. I wrote about it on The Verge and it was like this hidden feature lets you filter. And I just, for everyone listening, I just blew both of their minds right now. This is the greatest thing.

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  And then there's a red button.

• 1:00:33Alex Cranz?

  This is incredible.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  You can select all and mark red.

• 1:00:36David Pierce?

  It's magic.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, I can't do that because I need to get back to some people.

• 1:00:40David Pierce?

  But I wrote about this and somebody commented saying, usually when I read the 10 hidden tricks, it's all stuff I know, but I didn't know this one. So thank you.

• 1:00:47Alex Cranz?

  Aww.

• 1:00:47David Pierce?

  And I was like, yes. So turn on filter unknown senders, filter unread. Life changing. You're welcome.

• 1:00:53Nilay Patel?

  The other thing, the reason that I had filter unknown senders on already is because I have an app called Robocover, which is amazing. It not only blocks spam calls, sometimes it just takes them and plays a script at them.

• 1:01:05David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  And that script can be bonkers. And then it records that. And then sometimes you can just listen to that interaction.

• 1:01:12David Pierce?

  That's a podcast I would listen to.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Funniest thing that you can do on your phone. It's like just an old man going, hello? Hello? For five minutes and a desperate spammer trying to get through that wall.

• 1:01:24Alex Cranz?

  That's, I want that.

• 1:01:25David Pierce?

  That's awesome.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  It's a very good, highly recommended. It's like four bucks a month. And every now I just listen to them. But that's why I had filter unknown senders on. They need to do it with text when people reply to spam texts.

• 1:01:37Alex Cranz?

  So now if you delete, I found this out because I got a spam text yesterday. I'm on 16 and I deleted it and it said, do you want to report this as junk?

• 1:01:45David Pierce?

  Ooh.

• 1:01:46Alex Cranz?

  And I was like, what?

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  Love that.

• 1:01:47Alex Cranz?

  Game changer.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Alex Cranz?

  And then I deleted another text and I didn't want to report that one as junk. I was like, no, that's just my mom stuff.

• 1:01:53David Pierce?

  That's just my friend Sam who's not on my log.

• 1:01:55Nilay Patel?

  This is why you should buy your mom an iPhone.

• 1:01:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  The worst. Okay, let's start, let's start with the pixel book. So this is a rewind. Rich Meyer comes back to Google to start a tablet division.

• 1:02:09David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  To make hardware.

• 1:02:10Alex Cranz?

  All right.

• 1:02:11Nilay Patel?

  And then they're like, yep, it happened. Yep, we're excited about Android tablets again. Then there's a recession.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  In quotes.

• 1:02:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  Depending on who you talk to on what day, right?

• 1:02:22David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:02:23Nilay Patel?

  And Google's like clamping down. Sundar is telling people like,

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  Tighten up.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Be 20% more productive. Remember how Google, you could like spend 20% of your time inventing Gmail. We're done with that. Do stuff that we want you to do instead. So Google's clamping down. They just shut down Area 120, which is their like inventions factory. It's covered a bunch of inventions. They're spinning off Project Loon tech into some other, that's the internet balloons. Remember when every tech company was like, what if internet from the sky? Google's like balloons and Facebook was like planes and they, I don't know. So Google's clamping down and it seems like one of the things that got clamped was the next Pixel book.

• 1:03:00David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:03:01Nilay Patel?

  And they're just winding it down.

• 1:03:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. So according to our reporting, they had, they, they knew what this thing was going to be. It had been prototyped. It was scheduled to launch next year. And not only is that not going to happen, the team that was building it is no longer.

• 1:03:16Alex Cranz?

  They were all told to find jobs elsewhere in Google, right?

• 1:03:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Alex Cranz?

  Which is also just a funny thing that you can be like, hey, you still work here, but find a job.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Find something to do.

• 1:03:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Be more productive. Yeah. And I think, look, it's one of those things that like, if, if a hundred million people had bought a Pixel book, they would still be making Pixel books. So it's, this is the kind of thing that there's like a small set of tech nerds who really loved a Pixel book. The Pixel book was perfect laptop hardware. I will, I will go to my grave believing this.

• 1:03:46Alex Cranz?

  100%.

• 1:03:47David Pierce?

  It was perfect. It needed, like, the second version of it would have had slightly smaller bezels and it would have been fine, but it was, it was unbelievably great. It's still my favorite laptop hardware I've ever used.

• 1:03:56Nilay Patel?

  No, the Chromebook Pixel is my favorite laptop hardware.

• 1:03:58David Pierce?

  The Chromebook Pixel was awesome.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Actually, that's not true. My 16 inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro is the best laptop hardware I've ever used.

• 1:04:05David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 1:04:05Alex Cranz?

  All about that Pixel book.

• 1:04:06David Pierce?

  But the Chromebook Pixel came out nine years ago and like it.

• 1:04:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My mom still uses the one that I got her and it is lovely because I bought her one with Core i7 to run Chrome.

• 1:04:17David Pierce?

  It kicks Chrome's ass.

• 1:04:19Nilay Patel?

  It was overkill at the time, but it's great. It's still, it's still rocking because it just runs Chrome.

• 1:04:24David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I think the, the story really here, as, as Alex and I were working on this story in the editing, Alex Heath, yeah, sorry. Alex Cranz had nothing to do with it and deserves no credit.

• 1:04:35Alex Cranz?

  I was like, ooh, a surprise.

• 1:04:37David Pierce?

  But Dan Seifert sent this link to a study saying basically that like the PC market had this huge run up in the course of the pandemic and has like crashed back down to earth and Chrome OS has crashed even harder back down to earth. And basically what we've learned is that Chrome OS massively successful in schools and education really has not made any inroads in any interesting way anywhere else. And you know, who doesn't want to buy lots of thousand dollar Chromebooks is schools.

• 1:05:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06David Pierce?

  And so there was just, there was no way for the Pixelbook to continue to exist, which makes me very sad, but I also sort of understand.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  I really think that for a lot of people, a Chromebook is the best choice for a laptop.

• 1:05:19David Pierce?

  I agree, but the market does not agree with that. I believe it to my bones that that is true.

• 1:05:24Alex Cranz?

  I disagree. We already have people who, Monica did that great story last year about people who were raised up on phones and Pixelbooks, so they don't understand file hierarchies. And like, that's why I'm like, no, Chromebooks are bad for your full time.

• 1:05:37David Pierce?

  For your health.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  Like what you, Alice is like, what I need you to do is understand the concept of a file.

• 1:05:43Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:05:43Nilay Patel?

  Yes, your home, that's the first guest we're here for you.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  But I honestly, you know, the holidays are coming. Buy your parents a Chromebook. It will make your life better. I will never get over, I mean, obviously some of you have parents who are very good at computers. They're fine. If you're like me and every time your parents call, it's like a knives out in the street to figure out how they broke the computer. Get them a Chromebook.

• 1:06:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  Cause like all they're doing is going to websites. Like, that's all they really want to do. And the thing is really good at it. And then they have a phone for all the other stuff and they like use the phone to like do FaceTime calls. Like you don't, you don't need an app model on that device for that, for like, look at websites good.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, the Chromebook probably might make sense for a lot of older customers who, who maybe don't need a whole lot. They're retired, they're not doing like their taxes on the thing or anything like that. They have an accountant, but that, that, those, that younger, the generation Z or whatever we want to call it, those kids don't necessarily need or want just a little window to the internet. They've already got that. They've got their phone. They want something that can do a little bit, a lot more.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Alex Cranz?

  Not even a little bit, but a lot more stuff. So I think it makes sense that Chrome is not reaching out to those kids, especially because they also care more about their privacy. And you're just buying a window to Google when you buy a Chromebook. You're just saying, here's my data, Google.

• 1:07:05Nilay Patel?

  These are people who are buying Windows laptops and then running Chrome.

• 1:07:08Alex Cranz?

  No, they aren't though. They like, I cannot tell you how often I see the teens being like, don't use Chrome. It's terrible. You have to go get Firefox. Save Firefox.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  No, nope.

• 1:07:18Alex Cranz?

  There's like on TikTok and stuff like.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  I can tell you confidently, that is not a real thing that is happening. I don't know what teens you're hanging out with.

• 1:07:24Alex Cranz?

  The teens, the teens love it.

• 1:07:27Nilay Patel?

  Go use Firefox.

• 1:07:29Alex Cranz?

  It cracks me up every time.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  Here's a digression for you. I can't believe this hasn't come up on this show yet. Ford announced a new Mustang yesterday.

• 1:07:36Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:07:37Nilay Patel?

  It looks exactly the same as the old Mustang. They've added a crease to the back, whatever. On the inside, it looks totally different. They've added huge screens.

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  Everywhere.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  Everywhere. Just runs Unreal Engine. I think it doesn't run Android yet.

• 1:07:50Alex Cranz?

  But it runs Unreal Engine.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, they've got all these animations to, you know, cars now are video games. And actually, the PR is full of references to video games. They're like, we made the dashboard look more like a video game.

• 1:08:00Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, it's weird. But there's this line in it. They've taken out the buttons and the knobs for the climate control and the radio. There's maybe a volume button. So, or a volume knob still. And the line is like, we asked Gen Z, millennials and traditional Mustang owners. And they all prefer having screens. And it's like, those are your three generations. There's Gen Z, there's millennials. And then the generation that will forever be known as traditional Mustang owners.

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  It's like, all right, that's, you know, I've always been kind of on the border of Gen X.

• 1:08:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to have a traditional Mustang owner from this point on. I actually feel like that describes you personally better than any of the other labels. It's like, you want to do Oregon Trail or, no, no, no, traditional Mustang.

• 1:08:54Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's always been me. I'm an old soul.

• 1:08:57David Pierce?

  Also, Ford, you interviewed the wrong people.

• 1:08:59Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:09:00David Pierce?

  Like, no, they, no, this hard disagree.

• 1:09:04Nilay Patel?

  It's very funny. It's, it's just such a confidently stated line in this press release, too.

• 1:09:08David Pierce?

  But wait, back to Alex's browser point, that's actually a really good segue into another thing we should talk about, which is Adobe buying Figma for $20 billion.

• 1:09:15Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:09:15Alex Cranz?

  Terrible.

• 1:09:16David Pierce?

  Because there are lots of reasons it's terrible, but one big thing this is, is like a fundamental bet on web browsers. Like, Figma's thing for a long time has been that, like, the web is a place for massively powerful apps, and it has, like, built one of those things inside of web technology. And Adobe has been saying for a long time that it wants to build more of its tools into the web, and has struggled pretty hard to do so. But like Scott Belsky at Adobe has been talking about this forever. And this is like, this is going to be a push for them to do more stuff on the web. And I think my, like, theory slash-

• 1:09:49Nilay Patel?

  If it doesn't get blocked.

• 1:09:50David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, again, there are lots of reasons this might not happen, but might not, and might not be a bad idea. But like, a window to websites is a much more powerful thing going forward than I think it has been recently.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I, so I, there are lots of big companies, Microsoft, Spotify, whatever, where they're actually provisioning their designers Chromebooks to run Figma.

• 1:10:08David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:10:08Nilay Patel?

  It's like a real thing that occurs. Well, I don't think Microsoft is provisioning Chromebooks.

• 1:10:13David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 1:10:13Alex Cranz?

  Maybe.

• 1:10:14Nilay Patel?

  But Microsoft is getting, uh, there's a great CNBC story that I think Tom went to today in his piece. Just around a week ago, that Figma is like taking root inside of Microsoft. And Microsoft and Adobe have been very cozy, and like, it's actually straining the relationship. Who knows? I do think that if you're in a world where Lena Khan wants to block Meta from buying Supernatural, an app that only runs on the Quest, because she's like, there's not enough competition, and everyone seems to want to stop Microsoft from buying Activision based on Call of Duty alone.

• 1:10:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  That Adobe, which has Adobe XD, buying its only real competitor in Figma, probably needs to get stopped. Maybe, maybe it's too wacky, you know? Maybe, maybe the FTC doesn't know what Figma is. But in this world, it's like a big, big deal. And so, I don't know, we'll see. I, I would just imagine they're gonna charge headfirst into antitrust time.

• 1:11:08Alex Cranz?

  I just can't, like, I feel like Adobe has been- This company, we always kind of dance around when it comes to antitrust because they they have effective monopolies in a number of places, including like that that image, you know, Photoshop, like it's Photoshop. You go somewhere and they say, can you do Photoshop? That's like, that's it. And I wonder why it's taken this long for the antitrust eye to even glance.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, it hasn't glanced. They're like, we're gonna buy Figma.

• 1:11:37Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I feel like it's probably glancing right now. I feel like Lena Khan's on the verge right now. She's seen it. She knows. She's glanced.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, but when Microsoft set out to buy Activision, there was like, uh, there was a run up of like, Microsoft executives saying how open they were gonna be, like, you know, they set the stage, you know, like, we love openness. We're gonna do our app store thing.

• 1:12:00Alex Cranz?

  We got GitHub. We're great.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. And then when they announced it, they announced all these principles. They've been trying to say at Call of Duty, I think Tom has reported this, like, they sent a letter to Sony by just doing some math based on what they're saying.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  It's seven years of a commitment. They haven't said seven years exactly, but they said a few more years in the existing deal. It's like, you just like, it's like, no, like, you can add it up and it's like seven years. Like, Microsoft did a lot of, like, pre-work around regulators to, like, butter them up into approving this deal.

• 1:12:31Alex Cranz?

  And Adobe's done.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  It's still not gonna succeed, maybe, right? Like, it's still getting all this scrutiny. Adobe is like, I don't know, we're just buying Figma.

• 1:12:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's like, why is nobody, it's wild, because I feel like I see more complaints about the monopoly at Adobe than I do even Google and Microsoft and Facebook and everybody else that we talk about, or excuse me, Meta, being these big antitrust nightmares.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  I think one of the reasons, well, one, Photoshop is Photoshop.

• 1:12:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  There are a lot of competitors to Photoshop in the world.

• 1:13:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  Right? And the switching cost is actually like zero. Right. Apart from Photoshop files in the cloud or whatever.

• 1:13:07Alex Cranz?

  But they're not like, it's still, most people expect Photoshop to be the thing you use.

• 1:13:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's just like the market has picked a thing that you use. Like Adobe is not out there locking you into Photoshop. Like the world of ad agencies is like, we use Photoshop. Like, here's the skill you need to have to work at this company. Fine. And then with XD, the design program, like Figma was winning.

• 1:13:29Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  So like, you know, like the people complain a lot about how much Creative Cloud costs. And to become a young creative in the world, you gotta pay all this money a month just to show up at work. Yeah, I, it's an expensive proposition and maybe they should be cheaper, but like one to one for those apps. Like Final Cut exists. It is meaningful competition to Premiere, I guess.

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  There are lots of image editors that are not Photoshop. The fact that the industry has set a standard for its professional software, I think is like, fine. It's here where there's like a, people are not using the Adobe app. They're using this app from a startup and Adobe is like, whatever, we're just buying it to foreclose competition that you, you get this scrutiny.

• 1:14:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I don't know.

• 1:14:13David Pierce?

  That's what it seems to smell like to a lot of people, right? Which is like, everybody has Facebook buying Instagram because Instagram was cool on their mind right now. And that is like, that looks an awful lot like what Adobe is doing here. They're saying, oh, they've figured out something we can't, they're cool. We have to, we have to eat them before they eat us. And like, that is just, that is a dynamic people are primed to see in a way that I think they have not been in a long time.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:39David Pierce?

  I don't know whether it's actually the case here. It certainly looks like it on its face, but it's going to be interesting. But I would be willing to bet that the FTC has never once had a meeting about Adobe with the possible exception of like today or tomorrow.

• 1:14:52Alex Cranz?

  Do it, do it.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Adobe runs a gigantic ad business. I think Adobe is fundamentally one of the most undercover companies in tech. I think it is absolutely fascinating and like.

• 1:15:02David Pierce?

  Totally agree.

• 1:15:03Nilay Patel?

  We have a new reporter in the UK, I mean, Jess Weatherbed, she is creative. She's part of the creative community. Like she's, she's going to write a story about the Figma community and the reaction to Adobe. And I'm excited to point her more directly at Adobe overall. Okay. Alex, I just want you to explain one more thing before we go.

• 1:15:18Alex Cranz?

  Okay, what's that?

• 1:15:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm just going to read this headline that you wrote.

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  Oh, I know what it is already. Hell, yeah.

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  It's a great headline.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  I've read it so many times and I didn't read the story just because I was like, I'm gonna try to make Alex explain this to me. Disney CEO teases a quote "hard bundle" of Disney Plus and Hulu. And the sub-headline is, "The current 'soft bundle' is so confusing, they have an ad campaign to explain it." And it turns out that I have no idea what any of this means.

• 1:15:46David Pierce?

  Alex, could you tell us first all of your rejected headline ideas?

• 1:15:49Alex Cranz?

  They are not safe for the podcast community to hear. But yeah, I didn't know what a hard or a soft bundle was until this week, when Disney's CEO teased this stuff. Bob Chapek. Where did he tease this?

• 1:16:09Nilay Patel?

  Bob 2.

• 1:16:09Alex Cranz?

  Bob 2. I actually don't remember where he teased this. I wrote this whole blog and I forgot everything. Right. So yeah, Bob Chapek spoke to the Los Angeles Times this past weekend. They, he was at D23, which is Disney's big fan event. They announced a whole bunch of movies, Marvel news, Star Wars stuff, tons of trailers, new trailer for Willow, which only me and four other people are excited about. But boy, are we excited. And he kept talking about hard and soft bundles. Like, this was just part of the conversation they were having. And a soft bundle is, is when you take a whole bunch-

• 1:16:43David Pierce?

  I'm just imagining somebody going up to Bob in the middle and being like, "Bob, you know people can hear you. Don't talk about this here."

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay, what is a soft bundle?

• 1:16:51Alex Cranz?

  So a soft bundle is what we have now, which is Hulu plus, plus, plus, or whatever they're calling it at the moment. So it's Hulu, it's the live TV, it's ESPN Plus, it's Disney Plus. That's a soft bundle. Most companies are doing this. HBO Max is doing a soft bundle now with it and Discovery Go. A hard bundle is just an app where all of the stuff is in one place. But instead of calling it an app, they called it a hard bundle.

• 1:17:20Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so a hard bundle is when they just make Hulu and Disney plus the same app.

• 1:17:25Alex Cranz?

  So, but Hulu, Disney plus and ESPN. And it was really weird how he phrased it because he was talking about, it would be all of the experiences in one place, but somehow saying that was different than an app that was just Hulu and Disney plus merged together.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, because you don't want to make, you don't want to mix the Hulu shows with the Disney. So it's like an app with three tabs and that's

• 1:17:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it'll be like you click into it and you'd be like ESPN, like an app with sub apps.

• 1:17:54Nilay Patel?

  What would that app be called? Would it be called the Disney Hard Bundle?

• 1:17:57Alex Cranz?

  I hope so.

• 1:17:59David Pierce?

  Be called Bob's Hard Bundle.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's the merch test, everybody. We got to the inevitable conclusion of this conversation. We tried to avoid it for as long as we could. It took one minute and 18 seconds.

• 1:18:13Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  We're very sorry. Liam will be marking this episode as explicit. So kids, just tell your mom what happened here. And you can have a conversation about that with your parents. I'm very sorry. And I make, okay, it makes sense to me that they would like make everything one app.

• 1:18:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30Nilay Patel?

  Right. But doesn't ESPN have its own, ESPN should be over there.

• 1:18:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I think that's what they're trying to figure out. And also, are they even going to be able to buy Hulu? Because Comcast CEO this week also was like, hey, I know that we're, everybody's expecting us to sell our 33% share to Disney, but maybe we want Hulu and it would make sense.

• 1:18:51David Pierce?

  Well, that and also the other thing Comcast said that I loved very much was basically intimating that what if Hulu is actually worth one trillion dollars? They're like, we'll, we'll sell it to you, but it is the most expensive thing in the history of the universe. Disney, do you still want it? But I will say to me, the, the like, there's a, there's a lesser version of this, I think, which is basically just that they stay three separate things, but you have to get all of them. And I think that would not totally shock me if Disney is just like,

• 1:19:21Alex Cranz?

  Cable.

• 1:19:21David Pierce?

  This is the price. You get everything. It's cable again. And it's like, oh, you don't watch sports, but you want to watch Disney movies? Like, what's up, everybody? It's 1992 again. You're going to pay for it. Uh, and if Disney wants to fund all the stuff it wants to do, especially with ESPN, it's basically going to have to force a lot of people who don't want to watch sports to pay for sports. So I would not be at all shocked if that's where this lands.

• 1:19:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm required to say that Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, a parent company.

• 1:19:48David Pierce?

  We also made a Netflix show, which people should know. It's a good show. You should watch it if you haven't.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  Hologon made a quibi show. That's a real thing.

• 1:19:57David Pierce?

  I also really liked the bear on Hulu. I don't know if that's a disclosure, I should think. It's very good.

• 1:20:02Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Yeah, I watch NFL primetime on ESPN plus every week. That's another disclosure. It's a great show. Really great music. Yeah. All right. We should wrap this up. We have gone way over. But speaking of Comcast, they're rolling out 2 gig speeds to millions of people. You know, I usually have nothing but unreserved scorn for this company.

• 1:20:25Alex Cranz?

  But I don't believe them.

• 1:20:26Nilay Patel?

  Faster internet access is pretty good. That's true, but they're saying to millions. So if you've gotten 2 gig internet access from Comcast, let me know. I'm very curious.

• 1:20:35David Pierce?

  And we'll all come over to your house and hang out.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  Shannen Chris Welch, he totally scooped the Sonos Sub Mini, which was announced. It's 429.

• 1:20:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:20:43Nilay Patel?

  Very good. That's all right. All right. Next Wednesday, David, you're doing the hotline, right?

• 1:20:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, we are going to take all of people's burning Apple questions. So if you, anything you want to know that we didn't cover or stuff that you have feelings about, about Apple, 866 verge 11, or I should say, if you don't want to call or can't for some reason, you can record a voice memo and email it to [email protected]. That works great, too. All your Apple questions, send them along.

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  And then on Monday, we have a little mini series starting.

• 1:21:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  About the future of music on the show, which I think will be very good. Alex, do you have the first episode of that?

• 1:21:18Alex Cranz?

  Yes, I will be on the first episode of that and I am talking with Charlie Harding, who is a music journalist. And I believe also on the Vox Media Network with his podcast, Switched on Pop.

• 1:21:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:30Alex Cranz?

  Switched on Pop, right?

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  It's great. Charlie's been on the other show. That I'm not allowed to say it in this show. It was a good episode. We talked about-

• 1:21:37Alex Cranz?

  You're not allowed to talk about it here. We only talk about The Vergecast and Switched on Pop. And it's a really, really good conversation. We revealed far too much about our musical tastes.

• 1:21:47Nilay Patel?

  It was great. Speaking of the other show, on Decoder next week is Ryan Peterson, the CEO of Flexport. He's spicy. So Flexport is like a logistics company. We had a little splanching conversation. Very good. It's good.

• 1:21:59Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited.

• 1:22:00Nilay Patel?

  Might have gotten himself into some trouble at the end. We'll see how it goes for him. It was good. It was fun to talk to him. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. David's at Pierce. Alex is Alex H. Krantz. Redesign is up. It's running. We are not going to revert it to the other way. It's like such a weird question. But we're, we're just going to keep improving what we got, but I promise you we're going to improve it. Thank you for visiting us. In particular, I want to hear from Vergecast listeners about it because the whole point of the site is a community. And this podcast is the heart of our community. So by all means, reach out to us with feedback. We are eager to hear it. That's it. Let's shut up.

• 1:22:37Speaker 06

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:23:13Speaker 07

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