The iPhone turns 10, Petya ransomware and an iOS 11 preview

Did you know it was the iPhone's 10th anniversary on Thursday? The Vergecast knows. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul talk about what the iPhone means to them, to the industry, and to the entire universe. With just a slight tangent to talk about Orbs for Kings. Better yet, Nilay interviewed Verge reporter Russell Brandom about the Petya ransomware. It's a segment Russell calls "CyberTalk," but Nilay wants to call it "Brandom Security with Russell Brandom." Please vote in the comments. 1:00 - The iPhone turns 10 21:56 - iPhone or smartphones: which had the bigger impact? 31:50 - Petya ransomware in “Brandom Security with Russell Brandom” / “CyberTalk” 47:15 - Amazon Echo Show Review 55:31 - iOS 11 preview 66:00 - ARKit 72:30 - Paul’s weekly segment “Spin Safety” 74:50 - Galaxy Note 7 (Fandom Edition) 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.

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. A website.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  About boats.

• 0:13Nilay Patel?

  About boats. I was gonna say, website, a YouTube channel, an Instagram experience.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I feel like Instagram is a hot, hot commodity right now.

• 0:22Nilay Patel?

  Our Instagram is blowing up, blowing up. Our editorial director, Helen Havlick, just gave an interview in which she said, "I think most media companies are massively underinvested in Instagram, not The Verge."

• 0:32Speaker 02

  What's she doing, giving away all our secrets?

• 0:34Nilay Patel?

  Look, you can't be invested in Instagram unless you have hot shit photography.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  We have that. We have James, we have Amelia. You know, all kinds of things are on.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Welcome to The Vergecast, where we talk about the inside baseball of the digital media business.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  The Verge is great, and I want you to know it. We only have the one podcast right now, but it is proud.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  It stands alone. A bunch of stuff to talk about this week. Oh, by the way, Dieter's in studio this week.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Hello. Hi, how's it going?

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Dieter is here. Paul Miller is here.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you're just here to hang out?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Just here to hang. Actually, I came to New York because Walt Mossberg received the lifetime achievement award from the Loeb, Loeb Foundation, Loeb Group.

• 1:14Nilay Patel?

  He is the most achieved business reporter of his lifetime.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  According to Gerald Loeb.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Achieved.

• 1:21Nilay Patel?

  Achieved. Now, we went, we had this fancy dinner, we went to a thing, let's hang out.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Immediately, I bought a very expensive suit, and within five minutes of starting dinner, sprayed steak sauce all over myself, which is great.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  It sounds right, right.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I ripped the tag out of the pocket of my incredibly expensive suit, because there was a giant white tag that was meant to be ripped out, but I didn't, like, snip it out, and I, like, tore the inside of my suit.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, a show about Dieter's Pratt Falls fancy events. Anyway, Dieter's in town, Paul's here. Let's just, let's just acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is the iPhone.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  That's a really mean thing to say about Paul.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  It's rough. No, the iPhone, turn 10 today, this very day.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Decade.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, where were you? I mean, there's all kinds of, we've had all kinds of stories on the sites.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  I looked it up today. 10-year is the 10 anniversary, like, T-I-N, like, the precious medal that you give your significant other.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  It's 10.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  It's 10.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, we made it this far.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  I lived in Inverness, Florida.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  Was this come up, did they make this up during the Depression?

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  Wait, you lived in Inverness, Florida?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  I was running the Smartphone Experts network of sites, our iPhone site, which you now know as iMoore. Back then, I had found it as Phone Different.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  We bought two iPhones. I thought that I would do my first ever teardown of a device, and I thought a really good device to start with was the original iPhone.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Huge mistake. Lucky I didn't kill myself and everyone around me trying to take that thing apart. And, yeah, we, later that year, we ran the first of, I think, three annual Smartphone Round Robins, where we compared all the different smartphones against each other, because at the time, the smartphone market was not a duopoly of two, you know, giant operating systems. There was like a vibrant set of real competition between BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, and then the iPhone. It was like a party.

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  It was a real thing.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, we've talked a lot about this anniversary, I think. We talked about it in January, when it was the anniversary of the announcement.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  Had the, we had Brian Merchant and his book on the show. It's just, I've been looking at Twitter all day, and it's a lot of, here I was on this day. Let me ask you this. I think I know the answer, and I think that the answer is unquestionably yes. But is it the iPhone that changed everything? Or is it the modern smartphone? Right? Over the past 10 years?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  The, hmm, brrrr.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  So I think the answer is unquestionably that it is the iPhone.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yes, I was gonna say. It's, it's the iPhone, because the iPhone, I've got this whole article that I was supposed to publish today. I didn't, but it's coming. Just get ready.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Dieter, literally before the show began, came up to me and said, what are we gonna talk about this show? I didn't say anything, and then he said, here's what's gonna happen.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna make me talk about this article I haven't written, then I'm gonna talk about it, and then I'm gonna have to write it.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  You're doing this to yourself right now.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  I know.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Every other smartphone maker out there was playing by the wrong rules. So BlackBerry was like, we're better than a feature phone, because we do email, but we still like, know that you're, we still believe your phone should last forever, and we're being really nice to the carriers by having data go through our special server that compresses the data.

• 4:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Palm was like, we're better than a feature phone, because like, we're a PDA that's like, tacked onto it. Windows Mobile was... Microsoft being

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  It's a Windows computer.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Windows computer, but they weren't thinking straight. The most important thing that they did in terms of positioning the iPhone was Steve Jobs said, we're going to take 1% of the phone market. He didn't say, he, you know, he showed the slide with the other smartphones and made fun of their physical keyboards. He made fun of their web browsers. They deserved all of that. But he was looking past the smartphone market, which at the time was very small and making a thing that was accessible to a regular user, not a nerd. He was making the case to normal people, not to people who thought they wanted a smartphone. And it took a minute for that to actually work. A lot of people who had flip phones looked at the iPhone and said, I don't need that.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Or it's too expensive.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Or it's too expensive. But Apple aggressively made the case that this is a phone for everybody, not just a phone for, you know, people on Wall Street, which is what BlackBerry was doing, or people who, you know, are hyper organized, which is what Palm is doing, or people who maintain, you know, Windows XP servers.

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Which is what Microsoft was doing. And so the iPhone plus then later the App Store, which everybody else had the idea to do, but nobody had the courage to do. And I actually do think it took real courage for Apple to launch a centralized App Store.

• 6:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Even though I fundamentally think that platforms should be open, blah, blah, blah. Those two things together, I think the iPhone had a bigger part in changing the world than just the idea of a smartphone. Cause the idea of a smartphone, as Brian Merchant wrote, you know, it's been around since the 90s.

• 6:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Everybody had the idea. Nobody thought to take the thing out of the category of, you know, hobbyist nerd stuff to, we're going to try and get 1% of the whole phone market. And setting that goal and setting that competition, it obviously meant that they've got much more than 1% now. But if they had said, we're going to take 10% of the smartphone market, it would have been, they would have done the wrong things. But they're trying to aim for 1% of the entire market meant that they did the right things and they changed the, you know, they changed the world.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I think, I think platforms should be inherently open, blah, blah, blah, is the best description of the Vergecast that's ever been written.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  I got two things to say.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I think one really good. Because I can't decide whether it's smartphones or it's iPhone. But I think something that supports what Dieter is saying is how many smartphones came out after the iPhone that had keyboards.

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Like the pre.

• 7:23Nilay Patel?

  The Droid.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  And the Droid.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  And they were, those are, they had many, many other competitive vectors against the iPhone.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  The main one was you can slide it up and see a keyboard.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Right, but the, like, the smartphone is, is exactly what the iPhone was, except also with a front-facing camera, because that's important.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  But other than that, it's basically the same thing. Other thing I wanted to say is that I cannot figure out which precious metal it is. Because there's, I'm on like four different websites. Two of them are saying diamond, one says tin, and then one says crystal slash rock, crystal slash aurora borealis.

• 8:01Nilay Patel?

  That, are you on like goop.com right now?

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Thing.

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the aurora borealis anniversary.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  Just, just, instead of giving a present, go out and look at this guy. And now we enter the six-month winter of our relationship.

• 8:15Nilay Patel?

  That's great, it's been a decade and it's gonna be dark now for about six months. Um, you know, I.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Were you an immediate iPhone convert? Because I wasn't.

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  I was absolutely an immediate iPhone convert.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I, I wanted a better email experience that I could get on the iPhone. And, um, I, I needed, like, I needed some of the apps that I was using on other smartphones that you could not do on the iPhone.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  So I had, I had two phones.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  It was like, I had just started in Gadget. Chris Siggler was like, you gotta buy this Nokia N70. So I bought a Nokia, it was a dumb idea. Um, it's not a great phone. It looked real pretty, it came in a great box.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  And I had, you know, whatever, I always had the newest Sony Ericsson candy bar.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  That was, that was my phone. I had every, every iteration of that phone. I think the last one I had was the W810i, which was a Walkman phone.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Oh, that was a good phone.

• 9:09Nilay Patel?

  I loved that phone. Um, and I remember thinking, this Nokia can do so much, but everything is such a chore. It is so difficult to do everything that it can do.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:21Nilay Patel?

  Um, and I would keep on trying to do it. And then there was a, what did the Sony Ericsson's run? They ran some terrible OS.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  They ran, they ran an option to symbian, it was S40 instead of S60. Did they?

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  I, I thought it was.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Maybe that came later.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  It was, it was something else, but, um, it wasn't S40. But anyway, it had a Google Maps app.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  And I remember thinking to my, in a WAP browser, a WAP web browser. And I remember thinking to myself, this Google Maps app is actually way better on my stupid feature phone than it is on this Nokia N70 because it's so much simpler. Right. And so when the iPhone came out, I was like, well, this is all the things that I, it's, it's all of the things I like about the Sony Ericsson. It's like simplicity, it's pared downedness.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  In the hardware front factor that matches this Nokia. And like, they all weren't on the shelf and I, like, it was an immediate convert. And I very distinctly remember showing it to other people. And their immediate reaction to it was, this is too delicate because I treat my feature phone like shit.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, I can't have this. Yeah, it's still, it's still there, but nobody, nobody doesn't buy a smartphone because they're afraid of cracking the screen or losing the expensive thing anymore. But I just remember that first day.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  Which was 10 years ago today, um, taking it to like a party. And me like, look at this thing and like showing pinch and zoom on photos and all the things that you showed people. And everyone was like, that's amazing. It's really expensive and it's too delicate.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  And it's funny how that perception at least has completely gone.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are two things that were requirements for phones before the iPhone. Actually, we recorded a video and then killed it because it felt too much like a weird review of like the things that are still a problem with the iPhone.

• 11:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  And before the iPhone, everyone assumed that a phone battery would last somewhere between three and seven days.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  And everyone assumed that you could make a phone that you would be able to drop and kick around and throw in a bag with keys and it would be fine.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  And no one thought, well, what if, if we didn't have those assumptions? What would we be able to do? And are those things more important? The answer has turned out to be yes. I'm still not happy about the durability of smartphones. And I'm definitely not happy about the battery life of smartphones. But the trade-off is get a smartphone.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Paul, were you an immediate convert? We were at Engage. I remember that day very clearly.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  I had to travel home for a wedding.

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  I got to travel home. It was a very special wedding. I was very happy I was there. And I, for some reason, had more money in my bank account than I normally do. And I walked into a singular store and I bought an iPhone. And then I activated and I went to like a bowling alley with like some like hometown friends and like showed them all YouTube. I feel like that was the only thing that I could like impress anybody by was because they like had that old timey TV logo.

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  And, and you could just load videos and show. Yeah, like I, I don't know. You just, I just remember that YouTube was like the killer feature at that, at that time. And it's funny because I had, you know, I had a PDA in high school. A friend of mine had like a, an iPAC in high school.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Like it's, you know, all these, all the, that's the thing is we'd had computers in our pockets before the iPhone.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  But there was definitely something new about the iPhone that just did it better. But it really wasn't that interesting until, until the App Store. I definitely agree with that.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think that's the, what's, I was supposed to go on CNBC today. Talk about the iPhone in 10 years and I got bumped.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Because Trump did something stupid on Twitter.

• 13:17Nilay Patel?

  No, it wasn't. Surprisingly, it was not Twitter. It was, they announced sanctions on Chinese banks.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 13:24Nilay Patel?

  But like literally, they were like, Neelai, tell, tell us about the iPhone at 10 and what's coming next. And I started saying my first sentence and the anchor interrupted me and they cut to the White House.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  For like a live press conference with the Treasury Secretary. And I was like, okay.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  All right. So what were you gonna say?

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I was gonna say on CNBC there.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  The overwhelming, and this is why I think it's unquestionably the iPhone and not smartphones. Because I think it comes down to the App Store. The overwhelming story of the last 10 years is that every other category has converged into the iPhone. So like, cameras are not a market, the way they used to be a market.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Because of the iPhone. Taxi dispatch is not a market, because it is now converged into the iPhone. That YouTube app, right?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  ESPN is failing because people watch video on their smartphones. Everything has converged into the iPhone, and I think the-

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Nintendo sells iPhone games now.

• 14:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they're still, they've still got other ideas over there. But yeah, just like down, you just keep going down the line. The iPod is not a business anymore, because it was converged into the iPhone. That was Apple's biggest selling product for a minute there. And it's hard to think of another-

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Microsoft is no longer the dominant company in computing.

• 14:40Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Because of the iPhone.

• 14:42Nilay Patel?

  And it's cloud services run the backend of so many apps, right?

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:45Nilay Patel?

  And it's all, it's all just converged into the iPhone. Literally, just shopping.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  Amazon just bought a grocery store, because you're gonna be able to push a button and get groceries. All of that is like, deeply fascinating. I think we talk about that at a very deep level, on the show and on the site and other tech sites. We all talk about like, the specific turns of the screw. But if you look back over the sweep of 10 years, that is the whole story of the world. Right? Like, in, like, our relationships to society are mediated by apps on a phone. Like, just overwhelmingly, that is true.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  But, so here's, here's, here's my question to you.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  You were gonna say all that on CNBC? Because typically, when you're on CNBC, you only get about like-

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, so the second part of that sentence, because the, the, the, the second question was, what's the next 10 years?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  In, what I, I think I've said this on the show, I had like, a failed column attempt at this. I think that might be like peaked.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  And now what's happening is we're putting sensors and screens and things in other objects and we're starting to diverge off of the phone. Right, because people want to have different experiences elsewhere that aren't always completely mediated by the phone.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  And I think that cycle back and forth is really interesting. I think it's a long, it has a longer period than you might expect. Like, we're always expecting, like, this year at T S, everything's like, "It's the Echo", and like, "The Echo's gonna kill the phone", and like, "That's gonna take a decade."

• 16:13Speaker 02

  But what's super interesting about that swing away, and we've been talking about the swing away for a while now, is the rules are still not set in the same way that they were not set for smartphones before the iPhone. They're playing by the wrong rules. Uh, and the competition is also, uh, broader and way fiercer than it is with phones now in the same way that smartphones were. So, we just reviewed the Echo Show, for example. A fascinating device. It does not act like a tablet at all.

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  It acts like a speaker that happens to have a screen on it.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Apple's coming with their thing, and their, their play is to have a better music experience. Google's play is to know everything about you through your Google account, except for your work, Google work calendar, because they are terrible at multi-account stuff.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  By the way, everybody at Google has a personal email and a work email. How do they not have this solved? Literally every Google employee has this, has this problem.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Crazy making.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  Sundar Pichai has this problem.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. But when you look at what's happening in the, like, just the smart speaker market, and don't even, don't even talk about the rest of the smart home stuff, which I still feel like is more nascent than most people want to admit.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  It's a much fiercer, broader, smaller compet, the smaller in terms of like, the scale of the market competition, and it hasn't had that crystallizing moment yet. And, nobody knew that there was gonna be a crystallizing moment from the iPhone, for sure, until, you know, a year in and the App Store. Right? It wasn't clear that it wasn't just gonna be a dog-eat-dog, five-person fight for the next decade.

• 17:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  So, it might be that we get that with whatever is next after the iPhone. Like, two years ago, I wrote at CES that we know what comes after the iPhone, it's Internet of Things. And that's a- Thankfully, we're using that term less, but this idea that computing, Walt calls it ambient computing, right? It's what that ecosystem looks like, I think, is going to be more interesting and more diverse than the duopoly between iOS and Android and smartphones. Yeah. I could be wrong, like, I could be totally dead wrong, but I don't get the vibe that that like that competition between all these big companies that are doing all this stuff

• 18:34Speaker 02

  is going to have a like really clear, obvious, "Oh, everybody's doing it wrong, we fixed it, here it is, bam" moment that we had with the iPhone. Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  I think there's something interesting, there's an interesting parallel in software, where you basically, you have monoliths and you have like, well, for a brief moment, there was a really hot term in software development where you'd build things with microservices. It's like, monoliths are messy, it's one big thing, and if you change one part, you could break another thing, so let's split it up into lots of little parts that each do one thing, they do really well, and that's like the pre-iPhone life. I had my Rio, I had my Mavica, and I had my cellphone.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Did you have the floppy drive, Mavica? Was it Mavica? I always said Mavica.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Was it Mavica?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  I always said Mavica.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  They had them for our high school yearbook, I never, I never used them. You know, you'd have one thing, but that's just like, that's, those are disparate things, they weren't networked, they weren't connected, and they weren't expected to work as a whole. And then like, Apple kind of tried to make the computer the digital hub, but they stopped doing that as much when the iPhone was just a monolith that had everything all in it, it was all one thing. So what happened with the software is tons of companies started like re-engineering their software to be microservices, where you'd have these tiny little pieces of software that would do one business role, and then it would communicate somehow with a system

• 20:12Speaker 01

  that would kind of manage all of those things. Turns out... That's really, really hard to create like a good distributed system. Like who's in charge of restarting something if it fails? You know, who's in charge, period?

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  The internet works because everybody's kind of like all, we're all our own independent nodes and we know what we want, we know what we want to achieve and the internet's sort of a a communication medium. But if it's something, if you ask the internet, "Hey, internet, can you go do something for me?"

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And so, so...

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I did ask Twitter to tell me some jokes today and was successful.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Just to be clear. Those are people.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  So there are real success stories of like microservice type architectures.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  And, but that's still like an open question in software. So I'm just wondering, like if, if, if we start moving to lots of little devices doing single purposes or that are focusing on one task, if that will remain really frustrating to use, like because of just like the inherent problems in creating distributed systems. Like this whole, you know, this whole idea that Google Assistant is different on like every different system or that sometimes my Chromecast doesn't work, you know? YouTube hardly ever breaks when it's all inside my phone.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  But once it starts talking to some other devices, it gets, you know, it gets more complicated.

• 21:46Nilay Patel?

  There's no like, there's no single logical home for it or canonical home for it. It becomes a different thing.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, who's in charge of that?

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, what, it's funny because I know a lot of people are going to answer that question differently, like was it the iPhone or was it smartphones? And in particular, Android, right? Like we can't discount the Android explosion. It's obvious that Android has sold more phones, has more market share. But the reason I keep coming back to, it's the 10-year anniversary of iPhone and it's useful to say the iPhone actually let all this change. To me, it comes down to the App Store. Like fundamentally, the notion that you're going to buy a beautifully designed device and developers can target it in like a pretty fixed set of hardware constraints and that consumers will learn that downloading a new app will give this thing more capabilities has not yet played out in the same way on the...

• 22:40Nilay Patel?

  What is it called now? Is it the Play Store?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  It's still the Play Store? They haven't changed it this week?

• 22:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  I always say Play Store and people correct me. Because the Store Store, where you buy the phones, is no longer the Play Store.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  It's the Google Store.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  That's because I always buy phones on this show. That's why I always stop. Is there a new phone for me to buy on this show?

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  But I don't think that's yet happened on the Play Store, right? Like, people buy Android apps, but the vibrancy of that market is not yet matched the vibrancy of the App Store. And I think it's fundamentally the App Store that drove the iPhone to be the thing that it is now.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I would say the vibrancy is there. I think the quality of your median iPhone app is higher than the quality of your median Android app. For various reasons. And the money that you can make on iPhone for a developer is higher than the money you can generally make on an Android phone for, again, various reasons. The reason that I give more credit to the iPhone than to Android is Android, like, fundamentally started its life as a reaction to the iPhone. As it was originally conceived by Andy Rubin and Google, it was basically a BlackBerry competitor.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  It wasn't even necessarily going to have a touchscreen. And they redid the whole thing when they saw the iPhone.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. And there's that great photo of the HTC phone.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  What, the one before the G1 was, it was actually like a Windows mobile phone that had been...

• 24:10Speaker 02

  You're just trolling me right now, because you know the answer. It was an HTC phone. It looked very strange.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  It's a show. We're supposed to talk to each other. It's not just me saying things I know you know.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  When Google said, you know, we don't want that phone anymore, HTC said, okay, we'll put it back on the shelf. And then when Palm was flailing and needing to make yet one more Windows Mobile Trio while they tried to create WebOS in the background, which was itself a backup plan, because they were trying to do this other Linux thing, which was itself a backup plan, because they had screwed up on another thing. They walked up to HTC and said, you got anything? And they're like, well, Google didn't want this. And that turned into the Trio Pro, which, by the way, was an amazing phone.

• 24:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  It had a button for Wi-Fi.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  You could toggle the wifi by hitting the button on the side.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  So, let's talk about that and then we can take a break and move on to other things. Because you actually did review the Echo Show this week.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I did.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of conversation about iPads and laptops that we should talk about. But, um, let's talk about that kind of state. I think one of the other really important things of the iPhone and of Apple, and I think it's actually now a huge challenge for Apple. Apple did the iPod. It was like a beautiful piece of design. They did the iPhone. It was the first kind of like beautiful phone. Nokia made a bunch of beautiful phones, but this was a special one that skyrocketed in sales like this.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  It feels like the, the mass appeal of the iPhone as a status object, as a design object, has actually taught every other company that they need to think this way. So like famously for years, like Mac hardware was better than Windows hardware.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  That's not the case anymore. Like Windows hardware is really nice. Famously for years, like there was the iPhone and there was the Droid and the Droid basically looked like a muscle car. Right? It was like, it was a cool piece of hardware, but it was not, the fit and finish of that thing was not the same as the iPhone at that moment in time. That is just not the case anymore. The S8 is a beautiful phone.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  I thought you were like leading up to saying that the Echo Show is beautiful because dude, it is not.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying, I think that, that expectation from consumers that everything should be designed well.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  And thoughtfully created and, I mean, Panos Panay was on the show, uh, two weeks ago now. And he just said the word craftsmanship like every other word.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  Because he knows that's what consumers want. That's like, Apple started selling that. Do you think that Apple still occupies that space exclusively or is like, is it encroached? Like that, that, that to me is the other main legacy of the iPhone. Is it created this expectation that you would have this thing in your pocket all the time that was like really well designed? And that was designed around you as a person rather than a computer in your pocket.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think they occupy that space exclusively. I think they created that expectation and many other companies have risen to meet it. I think that Apple has. Slightly more freedom to design the thing that it wants to design because it also like designs the software. And so when it wants to make, I don't know, a pair of Bluetooth headphones, it could just make whatever it feels like because it like doesn't really care if it works with anything else. When, you know, some other company needs to design a pair of Bluetooth headphones, they have to test that shit up against a bunch of Android phones. And all of a sudden, they're like, ah, and they have to make sure that it will

• 27:39Speaker 02

  work across that stuff. And it limits what they can physically design. Whereas Apple, you know, when they make a new, when Apple makes a new laptop, they just make the exact thing that they want because it matches the software. When HP goes to make a laptop, they have to make sure that it'll work on Windows and they also have to please a bunch of other stakeholders. Apple doesn't care about the carrier stakeholders. They don't really care about like enterprise stakeholders as much as other companies have to. So they have fewer outside constraints on what they make. And so they generally are able to make slightly nicer things.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it feels like Apple's the only company that's like really writing its own script. So like, while there are tons of companies that beat Apple in almost each type of thing that Apple does, Apple kind of has that freedom. I also wanted to point out that there's this really good Ars Technica piece that's about the first iPhone SDK. And it's really cool to think of like, Steve Jobs left Apple, and then he started Next, which is an operating system based on Unix. And then Next became OS 10, and then OS 10 became the iPhone. And like, there's these like, deep software roots. And

• 28:56Speaker 01

  I think it's part of what made the app so good. Like, Apple basically, you know, made a new skin on top of it and locked it down in a lot of ways. But there was, there's like real quality software underpinned.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Can I, can I blow your mind?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Go back a step earlier in that story, and Unix was developed at Bell Labs from AT&T. And then go a step later in that story, AT&T was explicitly told they're not allowed to make any customizations to the Unix software.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Really?

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because Singular was, if Singular turned into AT&T, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, Unix came out of Bell Labs.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Hmm. In the end.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  It's all AT&T.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  It's always just eighteen, ten.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  It's my bell.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  If we're complimenting our competitors, which I'm always happy to do, there's also a great story on Motherboard about the first iPhone dev team and like how the jailbreak scene took off. And it's wild because it's still there. There's like twenty year olds in Italy jailbreaking iPhones and they can jailbreak a seven running iOS eleven, like to plug it in your computer, but the market for it is gone. People don't want to do it anymore.

• 30:02Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, go read The Verge mostly.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  And then go check out our second.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Every now and then we will allow you to read other stuff.

• 30:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm going to read an ad and then we're going to do a quick segment. I talked to Russell Brandom about the crazy cyber attacks that happened all over the world this week. It's actually like in another time and place, it would be the biggest story in the world, actually, that there are viruses bringing down like some of the biggest corporations in the world. So I'm going to read the ad, we'll talk to Russell, we'll come back, we got to talk about the Echo Show. Dan reviewed the ERO, which I think is an interesting thing to just talk about sort of generally what's happening there. And then.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  I previewed iOS eleven, we just put up a Sierra thing.

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's all fun. Let me read this ad.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Let me tell you about Norton Wi-Fi routers. Do you have the internet at home?

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  If you do, then chances are you have a Wi-Fi router. And if you have a Wi-Fi router, that means cyber criminals can hack into your home network, including Wi-Fi to access your credit card information that may be stored on your laptop or the family photos on your phone. You're going to tap into your baby monitor, which is all very creepy. Well, Norton, by semantic, the leader in digital security for over thirty years, has built a secure Wi-Fi router called Norton Core.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  It looks very cool, but don't be fooled. Underneath Norton Core's stylish exterior is a powerful security technology that helps turn your home Wi-Fi network into a digital fortress. It discovers your personal connected devices, it identifies vulnerabilities and helps secure them. If something's breached, the Core will quarantine the threat. Norton Core also features parental controls that let you decide when and where your kids go on the internet. It has a 1.7 gigahertz dual-core processor to deliver blazing fast internet speeds. So you can just get the security need and the speed you want with the Norton Core. Go to Norton.com/vergecast to save thirty dollars if you preorder before July one. That's Norton.com/vergecast.

• 31:49Nilay Patel?

  All right. So I have here

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  Today, live in the studio, Mr. Russell Brandim. How's it going, Russell?

• 31:56Speaker 03

  It's great. Thanks for having me.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I know about you, Russell.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 31:59Nilay Patel?

  You are the only person that has ever made me interested in cybersecurity.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Not even the Mr. Robot program, Hackers the Film.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  No, but you were there with me when we did the after show. Hackers the Film was not about cybersecurity in any sense of the word. That was about haircuts. Okay. There were massive cyber attacks this week. Can you just start at the start?

• 32:24Speaker 03

  Um, okay. So yeah, so essentially, if you got hit by this, your computer basically immediately shut down. It encrypted all of the, everything on your hard drive, all of your data. And then you got a screen saying, send $300 to this Bitcoin address and like, send us this email if you ever want to, if you ever want your data back, right? So, and it hit a lot of places. Merck, the giant pharmaceutical company, someone who worked there DM'd me actually and said that they were, more than 50 of their, 50% of their computers, like worldwide,

• 32:59Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  were hit by this in some form or another, which is, if you think about the size of that company, you know, Maersk, the shipping company, which a lot of people don't know, but it's the largest shipping company in the world, is still not running ships into this New Jersey harbor like today, two days afterwards, which is like, each, it's just an insane amount of financial damage.

• 33:19Nilay Patel?

  Does this attack have a name?

• 33:22Speaker 03

  It has too many names is almost the problem. So Petya is one because it was, this code was similar to a family of ransomware that was known as Petya. But then there were important differences. So another firm called it Not Petya. And those two names were equally popular for a while, which is really confusing. And then someone else decided to call it GoldenEye. We've just been saying Petya because I don't think people really...

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  So Petya hit Maersk, it hit Merck. Any companies not starting with an M?

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Rosneft, the Russian oil company, FedEx.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  We've got some Danish, it was like weirdly regional, but yeah, a lot of people.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like world under attack, right?

• 34:03Speaker 03

  I mean... Oh, yeah.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 34:06Nilay Patel?

  What, like, were they after money? Like, what was the goal here?

• 34:10Speaker 03

  So, this is what's weird. Normally, if you see this kind of thing, it's, it happens often enough that there's a name for it. It's ransomware. And it's a pretty, like, if, if you're a cybercriminal, this is like a pretty reliable scam, is you usually look for some medium-sized company that doesn't have great cybersecurity. $300 is not a lot of money for someone in that situation who wants to recover from like a disastrous cyber incident. So, usually, they will just pay off, and then you decrypt their computer, and everyone walks away at least moderately happy.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  And this works? Like, this is a thing that happens in it?

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I, I think, you know, if you're, if you're like a cybersecurity officer for like a company, this is, this is one of the main things you're looking at. It's like, okay, we might get hit by ransomware. But this was different. So, it was really, really big, which usually you don't want ransomware to be because you want to stay under the radar, you want people to be paying you to avoid publicity. You pay them $300 so you don't have to tell your boss, basically. It was really, really big, and it also wasn't very good at being ransomware. It was around 50 people worldwide paid up, which is just not very many. And in part, it's because it doesn't seem like they were able to actually decrypt any computers.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  So, they, they asked for payment. After you paid them, you were supposed to email them at this random email address. And they didn't even pick like Proton Mail or some sort of robust email provider. It was just this random German company that was like, oh, they're using this for crime, we'll immediately shut down the email.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  So, you couldn't contact them. And then, as people looked at the code, it turned out that they were deleting these boot files, which you would need in order to run the decryption. So, they couldn't decrypt them remotely. Like, it's possible someone could recover it, but like, it's just, you would not be able to perform the service of ransomware on this. So, he's basically wiping these computers. So then, okay, if they maybe, are they bad at ransomware or were they after something else?

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  The other thing about it is that it hit Ukraine really, really hard. And not just like companies in Ukraine, but a lot of really central infrastructure. So the central bank was involved and the Kiev metro, the Kiev airport, just a lot of kind of really central services. And it seems like that was deliberate. Like the virus itself was really good at traveling kind of within networks, which is, so once one person at the company got it, everyone got it, which is one of the reasons these really big companies were so vulnerable to it. But it seems like the initial infection points were mostly Ukrainian in nature. There was like a sort of poisoned software update for this Ukrainian tax software.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  And then there was what they call a watering hole attack where they got this Ukrainian news site and sort of anyone who visited it got this malware. But it was really specific to Ukraine, which is weird. It's not like a choice you would make usually if you were a ransomware guy. So who is like really good at cyber things and hates Ukraine? A lot of people are looking at Russia and thinking, is this part of a larger cyber campaign? Is this maybe like more in the lines of an ongoing guerrilla warfare campaign rather than just like straightforward criminal acts?

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. And obviously Russia is constantly in the news because of whatever may or may not have happened with our election. Well, what did happen with our election, to be perfectly honest. Is this starting to be like the dawn of a new way of thinking about Russia and its cyber capabilities? Or is this well-known and now they're just doing it and they don't have any repercussions?

• 38:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, so the other thing is they, there was... A more sophisticated attack arguably against this, a sort of electric utility in Ukraine in December of 2015 that a lot of people saw as, you know, electric utility, it's critical infrastructure, it's like extremely cold in Ukraine in December, and so having this go down for like six hours, I mean, the ability to deprive people of electricity is like a fairly fundamental thing. It wasn't down for that long, but it really got a lot of people's attention, and it was widely attributed to Russia. So, yeah, I mean, this

• 38:41Speaker 03

  is definitely a weird and new thing, and I think the weirdest and newest thing about it is, we don't 100% know what happened, and it's very difficult to respond in like a, in a sort of national diplomacy political way. If you, if you're not really, really sure that this was something that the Russian government chose to do, it's kind of like you just get away with it. Like, you can't really respond in any diplomatic way.

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  What was the vulnerability here? Is this something that you can, that they just didn't update from Windows 95? Like, what hap, like, give me the specifics.

• 39:16Speaker 03

  This is one of the other weird things about it. So WannaCry, which was kind of like this, you know, last month, there was this specific vulnerability, and it's something that, you know, was leaked publicly by this weird group. The general assumption is that it was an exploit developed by the CIA, and then, or sorry, the NSA, and one of their kind of remote staging posts was compromised, and this thing got out in the wild, and these criminals leaked it, and then, you know, two weeks later it was being used in ransomware, and it was really damaging because not everyone was patched, right? This is not really like that. I mean, it used that same exploit, but after the other global ransomware attack,

• 39:58Speaker 03

  like, most people were patched, and certainly, a company like Merck, like, one of those large companies, they're going to be prepared against this, like, they have, the problem was not that they weren't patched. It was one of, I mean, the vulnerability was something kind of more fundamental and kind of stickier. I think for years, cybersecurity people have been talking about over provisioning in networks, which is one of these like, it's not a very sexy, like, it's not like the spy exploit thing, but it's just like too many people have admin access in every network. And this is like, absolutely, like, a classic thing. Well, if you have admin access and you're on a Windows network, there are lots of Windows tools that let you remotely

• 40:41Speaker 03

  install software on other computers on the network. And so that's what this did. I mean, that was, I was talking about lateral movement. It exploited a lot of those systems. And it wasn't that there was a vulnerability in that particular version of Windows. It was just that you had admin access, so you had the power to install the software. And you probably didn't need it, you probably shouldn't have had it. And so, the guy who was clicking on the, the sort of, you know, the Ukrainian news site.

• 41:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  Shouldn't probably have had full admin access, but over provisioning, it's everywhere.

• 41:18Nilay Patel?

  So like, literally, Merck, too many people had admin access on the network, and Windows software updates were just traveling across the network?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  I don't 100% know. I mean, I don't want to say specific to Merck, but like, I assume, yeah, it was very, like, large companies, there's a lot of over provisioning, there's a lot of, there's sort of these, uh, these rarely-used features of Windows networks that let you, it was W I M, or W I M S, depending on which one, which I forget, it's like instrumentation, something. But no one ever uses it unless you're, I mean, the thing they say is, this is the favorite of penetration testers, which is the people who get hired to break into Merck, so that you can, they can say, well, this is what the hackers would do in the net.

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  The cast of the movie Sneakers.

• 42:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, exactly. So, so, those people love this and do it all the time. Generally, we don't see it outside of that a ton. And this is kind of the first high-profile instance of it really being used to do damage.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  And just to do damage and chaos, right? That's, that's the goal, it seems like?

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, they stole-

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  To Ukraine in specific- All these other, were they, was it like Russia targeted Ukraine and then it just went wild and now it's everywhere? Or is it?

• 42:33Speaker 03

  So, I mean, we don't know. The thing is, if the question is, what were these people trying to do? Once you put it out there, it just spreads and you can't control how far it spreads. You know, so that, we don't know, we haven't found any vectors of them specifically targeting like Merck or Rosneft or any of that. We have found these vectors that seem like the stuff you would do specifically to target Ukrainian targets and specifically like Ukrainian banks, which seems weird.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 03

  But, I mean, to play like the other side of the coin, maybe you just wanted to rob a major central bank and you thought Ukraine would be like an easy target? That's very possible. I don't know. That seems kinda dumb, but criminals do lots of dumb things. So, it's, it's, it's just really hard to know. But, I mean, the vectors we've found so far are really the ones you choose to go after Ukraine and it is, it's just kinda suspicious, given how heated things are between Russia and Ukraine right now. It just looks really bad.

• 43:38Nilay Patel?

  So, what do people need to know? Do you need to like, take any action? Is it, is it one of those like, oh, Ross Luster wrote the post about, change your passwords again?

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Well, last time it was, it was up, you know, patch windows.

• 43:50Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Which is always a good, it's always good advice. This one, it's really tricky. I don't think, I mean, I definitely think if you are running a network, you know, check who really needs to be an admin.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Speaker 03

  That's a good one. But, there isn't a silver bullet. And, I mean, I'll say, you know, there are people who were doing tests and they said, you know, I had all of the patches installed, I had all of the right settings, and I tried this out and I still got infected. So, be careful. I mean, there, there has not been a single sort of golden rule piece of advice that protects you from this so far. Which is a little unsettling, but I'd also say, what we're looking at... Is a few single points of infection that mostly happened on Tuesday and then a lot of lateral movement within networks after that. And just it's spread so far because everything's so interconnected at this point.

• 44:47Speaker 03

  So I think if you haven't been hit already, you're probably safe. Probably. Don't get too comfortable.

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  Very unsettling way to end this. What's Mike, is Microsoft said anything?

• 44:58Speaker 03

  Um, they have said that they, their current, uh, existing antivirus is aware of the thing and they say we'll stop it. I don't want to like print that until it's confirmed. Yeah, like I'm sort of, but that's what they say and they have a statement and they're very, uh, you know, unhappy about this happening. Uh, but I will say it doesn't seem like this is, when WannaCry happened, it was really like the spotlight was on Microsoft and when they had patched everything and how much they had patched, they released this emergency XP patch and it was really like the focus was on Windows patch management. And it seems like this time around, that's not really as true.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Like it just, that's not as big a part of why this happened. So in a sense, I mean, that's good news if you're, if you're running PR for Microsoft, but I think it is a little unsettling because there's no one at the wheel.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  So I don't know.

• 45:56Nilay Patel?

  Very unsettling at the end here. It's like, if you're not dead, you're still alive and no one's in control.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  On uncertain note, that's it taking after Twin Peaks. I don't want you to know too much about what's going on. There are still mysteries to unravel.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  Well, I am excited that you are covering it and I am excited that, like I said, you're the, one of the few people I know who can make it as interesting as you. So thanks so much for coming on.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Oh, well, thank you.

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  Talk to you soon.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that was Russell. Russell's great. I, I said this to him, but I'll say it to everyone. Literally the only person I talked to that makes cybersecurity seem extremely exciting and interesting.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  Also, uh, literally the only person who doesn't make me completely panic about cybersecurity while also actually telling me the stakes in such a way that I understand how, why I should be panicking. He's just a very calming presence.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but also very exciting. Anyway.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  We're all doomed, but it's fun.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, Brandom Security with Russell Brandom is going to be a new, new segment. Okay, so a lot, just a lot of reviews and previews and things happening.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  We can't hit it all.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Internet wide fight about iPads versus laptops. Josh Tepulski went on a Twitter rampage about why the iPad running iOS 11 is real bad, which mostly I agree with. Actually, I think everyone kind of agrees with him.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Tom Warren agrees with him.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  And it's like a, now it's a semantics argument over what you're, okay, let's just start at the start. Dieter, you reviewed the Echo Show.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  I did.

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  I got mine yesterday, I set it up yesterday.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, what do you think?

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  Uh.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, right? Don't think of it, you, you expect, you are expecting too much because you see the screen.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  No, that's not it.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Really?

• 47:29Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I, here's the one thing that I don't like about it.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Okay, it's ugly as hell.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  That's not it. When you talk to the regular Echo.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  You say Alexa.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  The top lights up and it spins around and looks at you.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  Right, so it is active in 360 directions.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  360 degrees, 360 directions. But if you're in that 364th direction, fuck you.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  So it's active in 360 degrees. That's really useful because it's in a very central location in my apartment.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  And so like sometimes we talk to it from the living room, sometimes in the kitchen, like wherever. The show has directionality. Right, the speakers face forward, the screen faces forward, the lights on the front.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  And that means it doesn't feel as useful in the other parts of my house.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  So you'd want it to like swivel around and say.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  I just, I, I think just having that light on the top, that, I think that circular element is really important.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Really, good point.

• 48:21Nilay Patel?

  But the speakers are way better.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Mine sits on the counter and it's, oh, the Echo was in the counter before, so.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  It's always been on a wall away from, not in the middle of the room.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is probably just like a very unique.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  You just have yours set up on like.

• 48:35Nilay Patel?

  It's just in the middle.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  So wait, you move your Echo, where'd you put your Echo?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  It is in a bathroom now.

• 48:44Nilay Patel?

  I have a tap in the.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  We also have to do a bunch of work to debate about what Amazon accounts, the different Echoes are going to be on. Because Amazon does a thing where you, when you say Alexa, only, only the one that is closest to you is supposed to respond. But that only really works if all the Echoes are on the same Amazon account. So I had to change the Echo Show to computer because the other Echo got switched to my wife's Amazon account. It's a whole thing. We're gonna have a big fight when I get home.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  That aside, this seems like a nice, like if I get a new iPhone, I'm like, I wish I could plug my old iPhone into like Bitcoin miner or something, but no, it's just a worthless piece of trash.

• 49:21Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  But if you get another Echo or get an Echo Show.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  So this is a thing that I think is really important about the show, uh, uses the same plug as the big Echo.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 49:31Nilay Patel?

  So like, I literally took it out of the box and just like unplugged. I think, I think Amazon of all companies like thinks about things like that.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Like you just.

• 49:39Speaker 02

  Put it in place and you can like take the other one and you've got a new plug and you just like do it. Yeah, they should have used USB C for all of them. I'm just saying, everything should be.

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't charge. Who cares?

• 49:49Speaker 02

  It's a center plug.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  I didn't get into this as much as I probably should have in the written review, but this is a very, very V1 platform.

• 50:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Uh, the screen, when you ask for recipe, doesn't stay on as long as it ought to.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  It, there are not enough apps that are enabled to show stuff on the screen. And so the knock on the thing is the screen is generally kind of pointless.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  But I stand firmly by my opinion that that's the right move and to not have put a, uh, a tablet OS on this thing, to not have made it like a Fire tablet, because you would, then you would be angry at it because you have to go over and touch it all the time. Farhad actually interviewed Charlie Kindle, the head of hardware over at Amazon, and he says that their first cut at the Echo Show was just putting, you know, a tablet on it, making it, you know, a tablet OS like the Fire tablet, and they realized that was wrong. And I'm very glad that they did that. I think my, my, my TLDR for the review is thank God it's not an Android tablet, because it would have been a disaster.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  It's not, like, buy this thing if, because if you believe that the screen will be useful later, and if you want to have a nice little kitchen TV, but don't buy this thing because it's like an amazing like tablet computer in your kitchen. It's not going to be that for a while.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  I, it just, having it show the timers is useful.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, the timer thing is great.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  That's it. Like, it, it's funny. It's, I got the thing and I set up last night and played with it. And this morning Becky walked out and. I was like, that's the new one. It shows you the timer. She's like, oh, that's really useful. And then she looked at me and she goes, we have too many voice assistants on our camera. Cause it was like the old Echo, the Google Home. She's like, this has to stop.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  I'm pretty sure I'm gonna put black tape over the camera.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the camera seems super useless to me.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  You guys aren't gonna give each other drop in privileges?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  I shut that thing off. So it asks you.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  What, really?

• 51:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, when you, when you plug it in and you set up in the Amazon app, it's like, turn this on. Like, it's like excited. If they just name that, like, auto answer, and you could go and turn it on, I think it would seem less creepy.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Auto answer, what do you mean?

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  Cause that's basically all it is. It auto answers the call for you. So like, you have an Echo show, I have an Echo show, I call you, it just like picks up. Right? And that is a genuinely useful feature for, I think Dan has talked about having one, so his kids don't have to like monkey with a thing. You can call them. A lot of people have talked about having sort of like elderly parents. You can just call them and talk like.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:19Nilay Patel?

  So it's, it's like a narrow.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Podcast co-hosts.

• 52:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just hello. Uh, but calling it drop in and like making it a feature, I think is like a little, I think they're gonna get less uptake on it than, it's just weird. It's just a weird idea. Like, the whole thing about, don't give, give this to people that you would give keys to your house.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  Like, sure, I'm with you, but being able to, like, that's different. You have to show up, you have to like, come in, you have to be there. You don't just get to start looking at me without any sort of like larger thing happening. I don't know.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  I don't know. Like, I think, I don't know. I'm wondering if that's a generational thing. Like, I feel like I'm like pretty uncomfortable with video chat. But like, other people, like, do it differently.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  It's different. You'd video chat differently on the Echo show than you do other devices. You don't sit there and look at it. You, it's just, the video is there, you sort of walk by, talk to the person, and then you go about doing other stuff. It, it's at a stupid angle, and so I was like, oh no, this is bad, and I don't understand, and blah, blah, blah. But when you start playing with it, you can like go and look at it, or you could just walk across the room and keep talking. It's a very, very good speaker. The microphones pick up everything really well. It handles echo really well. And so the video calling ends up feeling a little bit more like a hangout and you don't have to give direct attention. Like video calling on a phone is really a pain in the ass because you're like, you gotta stare at the thing. Do you look at yourself? Do you look at the little thumbnail? Do you look at the camera?

• 53:51Speaker 01

  And you can't let it drift too low because then you're showing all your chin.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  It's a really intensive attention thing, but with the echo shows, you just, you start a video call and if you're not standing directly in front of it, that's okay. You're just sort of like talking to somebody like they're in the room and you can like wander over and look at their face if you feel like it.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I have to use the speakerphone part. You know, it's, I was, again, set up last night. And I didn't realize there was plastic over the front of the speakers. And so your review, everyone's review is like, these speakers are great. And I turned up and it was like rattling and shitty. Did everyone just lie to me? It took me until this morning to realize there's plastic over the front. And like, I was literally playing music and I peeled the plastic and like, the room filled with music. I was like, oh my God, it was true. It was great. Um, so bottom line, she buy a regular echo or a show?

• 54:40Speaker 02

  If you've got an extra hundred bucks, buy the show.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Not, only for putting it in your kitchen.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  I really wish they just put that circle light on top. There's something really powerful about that circle light. The Google Home has it on the top. I think it's, that's why we use, that's why I can, I think Alexa is nicer to say, but just having it in the middle of the room and like being able to say, like, it's still.

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Why do, why don't you just not look at it at all and just trust that it hears you?

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  There's something about having it like, it's user feedback. It's like, good. It's pleasing to have that happen.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  It's like eye contact. So you know someone's listening to you.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  Robot. Oh, other thing that's weird when you set it up, uh, Amazon explicitly refers to it as she.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:26Nilay Patel?

  Which I, it's the, something, something not great about that. Okay. Uh, you also looked at iOS 11.

• 55:32Speaker 02

  I did.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  On an iPad.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, also on an iPhone, don't install the beta on your phone.

• 55:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Just don't do it. It's, it, it literally is a fire. Your phone gets hot every day. I have to reboot this iPhone seven like twice a day. I'm sure it'll get better very soon. It'll be fine.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  You could install it on your iPad, uh, unless you use it for work every day, which that's a whole other debate.

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I've I wrote 3,000 words and did a 10 minute video, so I'm sort of out of things to say other than

• 56:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, let me just, okay, go ahead.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. It it radically changes the iPad.

• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  It it makes the best case ever that you could make it your main computer. Uh, that doesn't necessarily mean it does make the case, if that makes sense.

• 56:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I watched Dieter's at my house over the weekend that you was like doing the work, right? Right when you first got it.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:28Nilay Patel?

  And I watched him use the iPad, the 10.5 iPad, the new one with iOS 11 on it and swiping like a maniac keyboard cover. Right now, Dieter's got his MacBook.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  That's because the iPad's in my hotel room because I didn't want to carry two devices around.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  But you but you picked one.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  Uh, for the office, yeah. Um, my plan is I'm using the iPad at home.

• 56:48Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Instead of a Chromebook or taking my laptop home. And now I'm going to go buy a beefier laptop and leave it at the office.

• 56:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh, nice.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  And I will have the iPad at home or a Chromebook, depending on if they ever make

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  So here's the big debate.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  And it was just everywhere this week. iPad versus laptop. Can one replace the other? Should we even think about it this way?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  Tell me.

• 57:15Nilay Patel?

  It's the question, right?

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  And like, literally, we've gotten to the point with the question where we are litigating the validity of the question itself, which indicates to me that the question is important. Right?

• 57:27Speaker 02

  I feel that it is a 90% device.

• 57:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  And that if you don't have a computer, you either are just okay, accepting that you can't do that other 10%, or you will go to your computer for the other 10%. And that 10% of like stuff you've got to do on a quote unquote real laptop tends to like metastasize and grow. Into like, oh, I need this all the time. So for me, I work a lot in a browser. And not being able to multitask multiple browser windows side by side with another app over there is a pain point for me. I also don't love the way that they've set up spaces where apps get locked to each other when you set up a split screen.

• 58:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  There's like, there's a lot of little things that you have to play with and get used to. But the thing, there's a lot of stuff that was in that, it used to be like, I don't know, 30% of the stuff you couldn't do. They've, they've cut that down to 10. And so we can have arguments about the UI of multitasking. We can have arguments about the form factor and why don't they just make a good clamshell? We can have arguments about a bunch of stuff. But I believe with the new files app and with like a push to get more developers to make stuff like Affinity Photo, that a lot of the stuff that you assumed you would never be able to do on an iPad and you need a laptop for,

• 59:01Speaker 02

  will go away and you'll be able to do it just fine if you can get over the mental shift to tapping and swiping, instead of pointing a mouse at it.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  The lack of fine grading control for text stuff is still a problem for me. And the other thing, like, I don't know, it's super hard to really nail down what it is other than comfort. But not having just a free form windowing system is limiting in a way that I don't feel like really it needs to be. And they're just gonna, I think they're just gonna keep playing around the, the interface on it.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Over and over again.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  I think what, what is clear to me is that it's now far more powerful and you can like do a bunch of stuff on it. And that bunch of stuff might eat into the time that you would otherwise use your laptop. But

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  I think the phone and laptop combo is still such a powerful thing that the iPad has to figure out what it does better than both of those.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Like the, I don't know, the argument, I, I do think it's like hard to, hard to say the question is narrowly whether the iPad will replace laptops. Like, there is something about that that doesn't quite get it right.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  Because a lot of people buy iPads just to watch Netflix. And then if it does email pretty good, then you might just do some email. You know, like, it's that kind of like slowly biting away at the things you'd use your laptop for. But the core promise of the laptop is that it can just do everything, right? Without, without limitation. Or at least the core promise of a desktop OS, not a laptop necessarily. The form factor is not the thing. But I don't think the iPad is at that point where it can credibly make that promise. And so if you're gonna spend a thousand dollars, twelve hundred dollars, you're gonna pick utility.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  And I, I don't, I don't know that we're talking about it in those terms, but every time I see this conversation come up, a lot of the assumption is that the iPad will eventually get there. Right? The, the core assumption is that the iPad will start biting off more and more and more and more. Eventually, it'll just bite off everything that most people need. But that, I don't think that accounts for how much people want to do the maximum amount of things for the money they spend.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Right. The, the, the case that I tried to make in the preview, and I don't know how coherently I made this case, but by trying to make the interface on the iPad radically simple, it made doing more complicated things more complicated. You had to have a certain kind of like iOS or Apple expertise. You needed to know the tricks to do it. And they've solved some of those things with iOS 11, but fundamentally, getting good at being super productive on an iPad is a different skill than being productive on a computer, on a traditional desktop OS. And

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  My hunch, I don't know if it's a harder skill than it is on a computer, but I do know it's a less prevalent skill. Everybody knows how to use a computer. And to Apple's credit, they put stuff in iOS 11 that basically recognized that fact and got rid of a bunch of the stuff that we assumed was dogmatic refusal. Like, the file system, to me, they do deserve credit for doing that because until then, we just assumed that Apple didn't believe, from like a religious perspective, that computers should have that thing available to the user. And now they're like, "Yeah, sure."

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  They definitely swung the pendulum. Like, you can have two split-screen windows, a slide-over window, a pop-up from the dock showing a thing, a notification dropdown that you're expanding to reply to somebody, and a picture-in-picture video window open on that screen if you want to. So that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 1/2 app kind of things. And it looks crazy. I like did it, and then I tried to take the screenshot, and it was gone. Ah!

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Understanding what's happening on a screen with that much crap happening on it is fundamentally more complicated than, "Oh, there's some stuff on my screen. My window's over here, I just put it there. And now I know what's going on, and I can go back and find it again."

• 1:03:22Nilay Patel?

  It's almost like the real question here is, is this actually simpler?

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. But it's funny because it's being framed as people will, the simple thing will eventually consume more and more of your time.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  But there's a real case to be made that the desktop OS for that kind of workflow is much simpler.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:03:43Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's kind of what everyone is missing.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  For simple tasks, the desktop OS is more complicated. So for simple tasks, the iPad is simple. For complicated tasks, it's more complicated. But on a computer, the simple tasks are more complicated, and then the complicated tasks are simple.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  Wait, no.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  On a computer, everything is like, kind of the same level of complexity.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Okay, fair.

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. Right, like, it's a fixed level of...

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:06Nilay Patel?

  You can just sort of like do these things.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  But that complexity is higher than doing basic stuff on an iPad.

• 1:04:10Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  I... I remember this thing, like, years ago, where, like, turns out, uh, Japanese kids were so into their phones that they were like, just weren't learning how to use desktop computers.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  And I know that there's a generation of people who have way higher literacy of how to use their phone than they have for their desktop computer. But what's interesting is all these productivity, I guess the Files app is on iOS, but, or on the phone version?

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  But all these kind of new multitasking tricks and like, the multi-app drag and drop and stuff, as far as we know, is not coming to the phone.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  The only drag and drop coming to the phone is the thing where you can drag multiple apps around on the home screen to reorganize your home screen.

• 1:04:59Nilay Patel?

  It really seems like it, and people complain Apple will...

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Like...

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  Think about it.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Like, if, if, if the iPad could be, here's a computer you already know how to use.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  That's its promise right now.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  But it's not, because the actual productivity stuff is a whole new, like, interface, interface paradigm.

• 1:05:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but the basic, if you don't use that stuff, it's not there. It's actually, like, the most complex thing about the iPad is that so many of its interface patterns are hidden from you.

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Where, whereas, uh, desktop OS, so many of its interface patterns are in your face, that that's why it's more complex.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  My, my thing was, like, I'd gotten to this point where I was doing most of my programming on my PC. So I was like, okay, cool, my, I could use my PC for like, Visual Studio and Unreal and Unity type, like, programming stuff. And then I could live this iPad life, because I'm just a writer in the Mac world. But then, I'm super stoked on ARKit. And Xcode only runs on, on macOS.

• 1:06:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, let's talk about ARKit for a minute. I feel like you and I have been sharing a bunch of ARKit stuff back and forth a little bit. What, it seems amazing. Like the demos that are out there, the little toys people are making. I saw one, it was made in Unity of like a robot lady dancing in a living room.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Nilay Patel?

  I think that's probably the best one I've seen so far. Someone made a measuring tape, which was comically inaccurate, but still kind of amazing that it exists.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  It was better than like guess, like eyeball on things.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's better than nothing, but it's still an inch and accurate. I'm with you and it's, it's like.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  I, I just find it so, it's just so impressive. It's just like really, really good software. You could just feel it like.

• 1:06:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  I, I have like been kind of experimenting with it on, on my evenings and I just like, it just kind of makes sense and they give you so much.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  They give you this like the ambient light of the scene. So you can like, if you have like physically based like materials on your 3D objects, they can kind of take on the, the tent of, of like they, you know, you can adjust your exposure as the physical cameras exposure adjusts. And it's just so like, there's just lots of little things that make it more compelling, but it's just also, it's just so easy to use. Uh, that there's going to be a lot of this stuff. And I feel like this will be a great like proving ground for like, if there is any useful AR, it's going to be discovered in the next year of this, you know, of people, of developers experimenting with, with AR now that's so

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  accessible to them. And maybe AR won't prove to be that useful, but I do think it will be very important and fundamental shift in computing. And so I'm pretty, pretty excited.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  What's the best thing you've seen?

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  There's just a blank look.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  He really wishes.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  The best thing is in my mind, the thing that I haven't built yet. You wanna hear my idea?

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, pitch me.

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  Okay, so what I wanna do is I wanna like, create this like virtual gallery and you like, you know, drop these objects in the scene. But every object is playing like a loop of sound and based on how close you are to them, like the sound will like get louder. So you can kinda do this like live audio mixing by like moving around through these.

• 1:08:24Speaker 02

  Oh, that's really good.

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if Vergecast listeners are aware that Paul is the part owner of a digital art gallery, but that is one of those things that makes it abundantly obvious.

• 1:08:35Nilay Patel?

  That's awesome. I think that like, do you see the flyover demo in Maps? Have you played with this on your iOS 11 phone? Apple changed it so Maps, when you hit flyover, it just lays it down in AR. So you can like walk through a city, like not, not in real, but like you're huge, but you can just like wander around a city in AR. Like that's the sort of thing where every other AR platform is trying to do like very targeted things. And Apple's just gonna layer it throughout the system in different ways.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  That seems really fascinating.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  Well, I, I think I've said this before on the Vergecast, but what's so impressive to me about ARKit is, uh, Apple has solved, Apple has figured out that you don't need 50 Project Tango sensors on a phone. They're not trying to eat the elephant. They're like, if you just enable through software, 80% of what people tend to expect from AR, it feels like 100%.

• 1:09:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Like, I believe that Project Tango's spatial awareness is way better than Apple's spatial awareness on a current iPhone. I also believe that just knowing that there's a flat surface here and this is the color temperature on it, is enough for a vast array of things that are gonna be really fun and potentially really useful. And so Google by like trying to solve the whole problem before they get real devices out to humans, is doing itself a disservice because Apple is solving the, a big enough chunk of the problem that it's gonna get a huge leg up.

• 1:10:09Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have to just start doing like lots and lots of AR kit demo roundups.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be-

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're putting one on Facebook. I put a bunch together.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  A bunch of little, little things.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the argument to buy the next iPhone, right? Like, they're gonna monkey with the camera to make it better for this. They're gonna have the next great A-series processor that has even more horsepower to figure it like-

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  Well, right now, it's like using 10% of the phone's processing power.

• 1:10:36Nilay Patel?

  Only 10%?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  That's wild. But, you know, like, they can't just count on design. And the leaks that are coming out, like, if that's really the design of the next iPhone, it's not substantial- it's better, it's not substantially different, like-

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  But this will be, if they, if they close the circle, this will be the arguments by that phone.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Do you think this is Apple building up to AR glasses, or this is just them, just like, making phones more interesting?

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  I think the glasses are so hard.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  I think so too, but man, do I want-

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  It's so bad.

• 1:11:08Nilay Patel?

  I, it, it's just, it's so hard. Like, I, yes, the answer is like, yes, I do, but it, I don't think you build up to the glasses by doing it on the phone first. I think you make the glasses the glasses.

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, you can't, if you do all the stuff on the phone, and you build this huge investment in the phone, like, sure, you've trained consumers to see it-

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  That's an applications versus like, understanding difference. So you build, like, the applications to the phone are not gonna be the applications on the glasses.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  But the things that Apple and developers learn by doing it on the phone, they will be able to apply those learnings to the application on the glasses.

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  They are currently teaching a million teenage developers how to put a dancing wookiee on a table.

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  You know, half, some, some, half a percent of those teenagers are going to make something that they learn, for the glasses, that they learn how to do by making the dancing wookiee.

• 1:12:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  That's what I'm thinking exactly.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  The dancing wookiee?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm thinking about a dancing wookiee.

• 1:12:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Alright. Paul?

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Uh-huh.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  Every week, you do a segment.

• 1:12:15Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  Has the same name. I didn't forget this week.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  It's like really important.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  Did you forget the second ad, though?

• 1:12:22Nilay Patel?

  No, I did not.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Okay, good.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  It's kind of a two-parter.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  It's called Spin Safety.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:12:35Nilay Patel?

  Saw this story.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  So it was two days ago. I wrote about this company called Bluespin that put a on Indiegogo. A Bluetooth fidget spinner. This is the first I'd ever heard of a Bluetooth fidget spinner.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  And it's a fidget spinner that like tracks your.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  Spins.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Tracks your spins with a magnet and also tracks movement with accelerometer and it's got a touch sensor. It's very exciting. I'm really stoked on it. It has like a tiny battery in it that's not rechargeable then just like lasts for a really long time because I guess they're using Bluetooth. Low energy.

• 1:13:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Today. I see this story. On our website or actually no, it needed to be edited by somebody. So I saw in our chat, it was like. Bluetooth fidget spinners exploding. I was like, oh no.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  I just wrote about it on Indiegogo.

• 1:13:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  And so it turns out that there's these fidget, these Bluetooth fidget spinners. That are like Bluetooth speakers.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  And so like it's happened twice where these Bluetooth fidget spinners have exploded while charging. And like it's so like the. Like one of them didn't even come with a charger. And, and like, like this lady's like saying like, I, I wanted to contact the company, but there's no company name. It just says made in China.

• 1:14:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  It's, it's so wild world and it like, I feel like that like Wild West mentality is kind of working for fidget spinners. It's like. Because you can buy a $5 fidget spinner. Like. If you walk 10 meters in any direction, you can, in New York, you could purchase a fidget spinner.

• 1:14:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  But that's probably not a great thing to do with Bluetooth devices that are, have a built in rechargeable battery.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  I really enjoy the fact that every product eventually has a Bluetooth speaker integrated into it.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  It's just, it's just a thing. It just happens. Like we had hoverboards here the other day.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Happened to have Bluetooth.

• 1:14:44Nilay Patel?

  On that same note, I actually had an entry for your segment this week.

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:14:48Nilay Patel?

  The Galaxy Note 7 fandom edition.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  Which is amazing. It's just amazing that Samsung is releasing a Note 7 called the Note 7 FE, which stands for fandom edition. So people who are sad that they don't have Note 7s because the next one can buy a Note 7. I think that's great. If you're gonna, if you're gonna just own something that completely.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, you know, this phone kind of exploded a bunch, but it was actually a great phone. Like, if you still want it.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna say, and this is a Vergecast, and so sometimes our humor maybe is not appropriate. I'm just gonna say, having it end, any, like, it ends in Dom, and it's a thing that could potentially burn you.

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  There it is. If you don't understand that joke, ask your parents.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  This is like, this is like if, if, if somebody at this party spilled the steak sauce on Dieter's jacket.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  And then they took his jacket away from him. They're like, you can't have this anymore. There's steak sauce on it. They framed it in a picture frame, and they tried to sell it to him.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  I think it's great. I love it.

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:59Nilay Patel?

  I mean, someone at Samsung had that idea.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, first they're like, you're gonna refurbish them and sell them. It is another phone in a different country, because we have them, they're, and then I'm like, you know what? I bet Samsung fans still wanna buy. I'm gonna buy one.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  What, calling it, you're right, calling it a fan fandom edition is a really great way for them to try and like, maybe give the brand a little bit of shine before they announce the next one. Because now there's gonna be a bunch of people saying, I'm a fan, I wish I could have had this. And so I got the fandom edition. And so they're, they're like, giving the Note brand a chance to have a nice, happy moment.

• 1:16:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  To maybe, possibly, let the next Note, which is rumored to be coming.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  The Galaxy Note 7, still banned on planes.

• 1:16:48Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  Are they gonna have to write a letter to the FAA being like, no, no, this is the fandom edition?

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Nilay Patel?

  Now you have to change the announcement? Because they already were not doing a great job with the announcements. They're like Samsung washing machines are not allowed on this or they're gonna have to be like Galaxy Note 7s are not allowed, but we can check to see if you have the fandom edition before you fly. A lot of questions here. Yeah. All right. That is the show. I want to mention something very important at the very end here.

• 1:17:19Nilay Patel?

  Game of Game of Thrones is back on the verge. Game of Thrones is starting in two weeks. Emily Oshida has handed the throne master. I don't know what you call somebody who runs a fantasy league.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  You'd say you hand the baton. It's like a scepter.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  It's the commissioner.

• 1:17:36Nilay Patel?

  It's a scepter. She's handed the

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  What's the, what's the egg thing that kings have to carry?

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  Egg thing. The egg of, the egg of, the egg of abandonment.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  No, it's a thing. It's like Roman emperors had an egg and that signified the Roman emperor-ness.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Not like the signet.

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  The, the egg of authority. The ovoid of responsibility.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  Faberge egg.

• 1:17:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The sphere of the kingdom.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Maybe it wasn't Roman. Maybe it's like Holy Roman.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  No, we can't just move past this. You're saying that kings had an egg that allowed them, that gave them their powers?

• 1:18:14Nilay Patel?

  Very confidently, too.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  What was that egg that kings had?

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  Everybody, you remember that egg, right? It's on the tip of my tongue.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  I don't know what to search for. I'm searching like rich person egg.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  Rich person egg. All right. If you know the answer to that question.

• 1:18:29Speaker 01

  Egg for kings.

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  The point, tweet, Dieter's at Backlon. I'm sure he would like to know the answer.

• 1:18:39Nilay Patel?

  Egg question. Anyway, Emily Oshida has handed the scepter of commissionment. To Caitlin Tiffany on our team. I think Verge House listeners should know Caitlin. Caitlin's wonderful. She's gonna be running Game of Game of Thrones. You can go to fantasizer, sign up for Game of Game of Thrones or Fantasy League for Game of Thrones. It's coming back. There's a post on the site with all the instructions. Check it out. I love it. It's like one of my favorite series that we do. So that is my little housekeeping note. You can also tweet at us, Dieter, who's still furiously Googling.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Just FYI, I just Googled the accoutrement of power just to see if that would do it.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, that just sounds like garnishes. That just sounds like carefully sliced radishes of authority. Dieter is at Backlon. Yes. Paul is at FuturePaul. I'm at Reckless. You can tweet at us. We love your feedback. You can go to iTunes, leave us feedback there. You also check us out on Anchor, which is a new podcasting platform. Andrew Marino, our producer, has been putting cool experiments with Caitlin, with Casey Newton, with other people on Anchor. I think Casey's been running it this week. So check us out there. That is where we're piloting new podcast ideas. We love your feedback. You can also listen to most of that stuff in the Verge Extras podcast feed. Just let us know. We need to have more shows. We're going to start making more shows. But we're just doing a lot of little pilots and experiments to figure out what that next

• 1:19:57Nilay Patel?

  thing is. So we're dying for your feedback on that. In the meantime, you can also listen to other great podcasts about tech from Recode. Recode has Too Embarrassed to Ask with our wonderfully talented senior editor Lauren Good. It has Recode Decode with Kara Swisher and Recode Media with Peter Kafka. And if you're a media nerd, highly recommended. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll. The Globus Cruciger. Yeah. The Globus Cruciger. I got it too. Well, that is not a good name for a podcast. Thank you, Yahoo Answers. The Globus Cruciger?

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  It's used on coins and iconography along with a scepter as part of the royal regalia.

• 1:20:31Nilay Patel?

  It's Latin for cross-bearing orb.

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's an orb with a cross on the top of it.

• 1:20:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, now Caitlin has it and she runs Game of Game and Brown, Sign Our Own Fantasy. That is the Vergecast. It's over this ever real rock and roll, Paul. Paul.

• 1:21:26Nilay Patel?

  The.