Widgets are back, and everything else from WWDC

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss all the updates to Apple's iOS, macOS, watchOS, and iPadOS announced at WWDC this week. Later, Verge senior correspondent Liz Lopatto joins the show to explain the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suing crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase, and what it means for the future of crypto. Further reading: Apple WWDC 10 biggest announcements: Vision Pro, MacBook Air, iOS 17, and more watchOS 10 is bringing back widgets in a big way Apple’s iPadOS 17 adds personalized lock screen and interactive widgets Apple’s Siri will soon handle multiple smart home commands Apple’s iPadOS 17 adds personalized lock screen and interactive widgets Apple announces iOS 17 with StandBy charging mode and better autocorrect Standby is a new iOS 17 feature for your iPhone that could be great for Apple Home users Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block Hands-on with the new 15-inch MacBook Air Apple announces macOS Sonoma with game mode and support for desktop widgets Mac Pro with M2 Ultra first look: boy, that’s a big chip All the features Apple didn’t mention in its WWDC 2023 keynote The SEC is suing crypto giant Binance, here’s all the details The SEC is trying to freeze Binance’s assets The SEC sues crypto exchange Coinbase for breaking US securities laws Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. AMEX Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments all in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of Confabulator. Remember Confabulator? Confabulator is 2004, in that time zone. And then Apple sherlocked it with a dashboard. The developer sold it to Yahoo. And it became the Yahoo widget library, which I think we all agree, saved Yahoo. Stunning. It never. That's why Yahoo's still with us today. That's why they're still here. Yeah. As part of Verizon. Who's the widgets? It would be amazing if there was like a director of widgets at Verizon. I hope there is. I know there is. Come on Decoder, director of Verizon Widgets. That person's job is to just make weird, like mid-range Android phone home screen widgets that charge you by accident. Anyway, I have a friend, Eli. Hi, David.

• 2:09David Pierce?

  Hi. I guess I'm iGoogle in this conversation. I'm like the new cool upstart, just showing up, screwing everything up for everybody.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  There was a time when Google was like, people will come to google.com directly and we'll show them a page called iGoogle full of widgets. That time passed very badly.

• 2:24David Pierce?

  That time was eight minutes long.

• 2:26Alex Cranz?

  Been gone.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I keep bringing up widgets because we're going to talk about widgets a lot today. Apple's back to widgets, but we've lived the whole cycle. Like, Apple killed Confabulator, they introduced Dashboard, they killed Dashboard, and now they're bringing it back. Alex Cranz is here. Hi, Alex.

• 2:41Alex Cranz?

  I'm missing Growl still.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Growl, the notification system.

• 2:44Alex Cranz?

  That was good. Like, if we're in 2008, I want Growl back.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  You know how, like, 90s fashion trends are back?

• 2:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Same with widgets. It's really, it's going to be the theme of this episode. So, we are back. I'm back in New York City. I need, like, a dopamine fast like the tech bros do.

• 3:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  I am overstimulated. It has been, it has been a rockin' five days for me, starting with a Taylor Swift concert.

• 3:09Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  My niece and nephew graduating from high school. That was very emotional.

• 3:12Alex Cranz?

  Congratulations.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Very emotional. And back-to-back days.

• 3:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Which one did you cry more for, the graduation or the Taylor Swift performance?

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so, I will say, I will say that we watched my sister, because, you know, she's the Eras Tour.

• 3:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  So, she was, like, reliving the memories of her children growing up, era by era.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Oh, Lord.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  It was a lot.

• 3:33Alex Cranz?

  No dry eyes. Incapable. Oh, my gosh.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  It was a lot. The children at high school graduation were like, "We're out of here." Like, it was impossible to be emotional. F this place. It was great. And then, straight from there.

• 3:46Alex Cranz?

  To WWDC.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  WWDC. And then, after WWDC, we did, we did the Vergecast with the Waveform crew, which was incredible.

• 3:53Alex Cranz?

  That was a lot of fun.

• 3:54David Pierce?

  We were real punchy by that point, but it was a lot of fun. But Alex, Alex, you'll appreciate this. Neelai landed in San Francisco, comes to Cupertino. Our hotel is essentially across the street from Apple Park, but because of the way Apple Park works and because its security is intense. Like, Neelai, I would suspect, out of all of the things that you went to, Apple Park had more security than TSA, Taylor Swift, any of it.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I just say this? After all, all the Ticketmaster stuff, all that stuff, I made a decoder about Ticketmaster. They did not check our tickets at Soldier Field.

• 4:25Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  We just walked in very confidently, went through a bunch of metal detectors. They looked at my bag and we went and sat down and I went and asked someone, hey, do you want to check my ticket?

• 4:35Alex Cranz?

  Nah.

• 4:35Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, no one ever narcs on themselves. We believe you. You're good. And we sat down.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  It's amazing. But anyway, so Neelai gets there and we have to go to Apple Park the next morning. And Neelai just looks at me very seriously and goes, David, I can't walk. I have walked too much. I had to walk to and through Soldier Field. I can't do it. So we took several lifts, literally just from one side of the Apple Park to the other side of Apple Park.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  David did make me walk twice. It's true.

• 5:02David Pierce?

  I did.

• 5:02Alex Cranz?

  Twice? That's too many times. He just saw Taylor.

• 5:05David Pierce?

  One of our favorite things to do was ask random Apple employees if they were filling their rings on WWDC days.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  It was very good. There's no Twitter anymore. I didn't have any place to put this, this picture. But on the way to Soldier Field, it's like there's neighborhood-y. And all these kids had lemonade stands and one of the kids was accepting Bitcoin. And I was like, hey.

• 5:27Alex Cranz?

  I think I saw this photo.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  I put it in Slack, but I didn't have any place to put it. There's no Twitter.

• 5:32Alex Cranz?

  The kid's on it.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, what's up with Bitcoin? And you know, they were like, yeah, we have Square, so we have Bitcoin. We don't prefer it though. There's too many transaction fees and it's slow. No, this is great. I was like, I'm gonna pay you in actual cash. And they looked heartbroken because they had to like flip it with all this cash.

• 5:48Alex Cranz?

  They're like, you can't use the Square app? Come on, man.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. It was very good. Anyhow, so earlier this week, we did the full episode on the Vision Pro. We had Marquez, the Wayfarer crew, come on for a lightning round. That's already in the feed if you're here for Apple Vision Pro news.

• 6:03Alex Cranz?

  Go get it.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  Go get it. I will say after that episode, I've been pondering it a little more and I figured out exactly what I want to say about the Vision Pro.

• 6:10Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 6:10Nilay Patel?

  It is a simulator of the thing Apple wants to build.

• 6:14Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  It is very obviously not the thing. It is just a very powerful hardware simulator of the thing.

• 6:21David Pierce?

  That's good. And in the same sense as like, one of the things that's going to be interesting over the next six months or so is a lot of people are going to have to use Mac simulators to build stuff for the Vision Pro. And in the same way that you can't get the actual sense of the thing until you actually wear the actual thing, it is still that one leap removed from it. That's good. I actually like that a lot. I think that's really true. And I should, I just want to say one thing in addition to a bunch of follow-up I've gotten. There are a lot of people who are very curious about the field of view on this thing because it's sort of hard to describe in a way that makes sense. And the metaphor that I-

• 6:55Alex Cranz?

  Because they don't give you actual numbers, right?

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  We've not yet cut a number.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  You, you end up standing there with like your hands on your face going like, it's not this wide, it's not this wide, it's kind of this wide, you know what I mean? And so, but the thing that I have heard, the metaphor I like best, and Neel, I'm curious if you agree with this, is that it kind of looks like looking through the viewfinder of a camera, where there are very clearly edges if you look for them, but you are also very much seeing the whole picture. But it still feels like you're looking through something and not as if there is an entire thing. Does that metaphor work for you? That really worked for me.

• 7:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I get it. I think I perceive the edges much more than other people. But, you know, again, given the circumstances that I was like using the thing, I was looking for them.

• 7:35David Pierce?

  Right. It's the sort of thing you would stop noticing pretty quickly, I suspect.

• 7:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, we're on video. Can you just wear?

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  Now I have to do the hands.

• 7:42Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna do it. I'm making you do it.

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  So 180 degrees is like a plane on your face.

• 7:47Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  It's this. It's not 180 degrees. Yeah, I don't know, 120?

• 7:52Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere in there. We did learn some important specs over the course of WWDC. 90 hertz refresh rate on the displays, unless you are watching 24 frames per second video content.

• 8:05Alex Cranz?

  So it drops down?

• 8:07Nilay Patel?

  No, it goes up to 96, which is an even multiple. So every frame is on there four times, which are very smart, very Apple. Apple is saying more things about the Vision Pro to its developers over the course of WWDC and some more technical information is coming out. That we didn't have when we did our episode and it's all on the site. All of it's very, it's minutia.

• 8:26Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like frame rates and the thing. There's a developer kit. We didn't know this. If you submit to Apple, they might send you a developer kit. That's interesting to know.

• 8:34Alex Cranz?

  I'm going to submit an app.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  You should submit an app.

• 8:36Alex Cranz?

  Of people mimicking the field of view of it.

• 8:39David Pierce?

  My app is where you can just pour a beer that's virtual in the Pro and just sort of make it slosh back and forth. And it costs $10. I'm going to make a million dollars.

• 8:48Alex Cranz?

  You can make so much money.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  There was that app in the very beginning of the iPhone app store. It was just like, I am rich. It just cost $100,000 and like people bought it.

• 8:57David Pierce?

  It's very good. Brilliant.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  And it just displayed the words, I am rich.

• 9:01David Pierce?

  Did you know that there are developers who literally refer to the fart app era of the iPhone? Like this is a term I heard unprompted from several people referring to like the early sort of halcyon days where people will buy anything just to see how it works. They call it is like canonically known as the fart app era of the iPhone. I like that very much.

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  It is very good. Again, whole episode on the Vision Pro.

• 9:20Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  More minutia on the website that we still operate called theverge.com. The last good website. This episode is all about the other stuff. The OSs, Apple has 400 of them. They are masters of releasing a feature for one OS and then releasing the same feature for another OS a year later and calling that new. So a lot of that to sort out. There are some new Macs we got to talk about. And then there's a crypto meltdown happening in the background of all this. And Liz Lopatto is going to join us at the end of the show to tell us what is going on there. So let's start with the software. David, you have organized this by feature because I think that makes more sense than by OS.

• 9:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think for exactly the reason you're talking about that Apple tends to do this thing where it has kind of overlapping features that launch at different times on different devices and they kind of do the same thing. If we were just to talk about this as OSs, we would just talk about iOS 17 for a long time. And then kind of little branches into other things, which is sort of how Apple does its software now. But I went through and found, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 kind of categories of things that Apple talked about. Some are big, some are small, but in terms of like big new features that are either on one platform or several, I found a bunch and I figured we can just go through a bunch of them. And widgets, as we've been talking about, is the first one.

• 10:36David Pierce?

  I feel like if I come out of WWDC 2023 with one thing, it's that widgets are back.

• 10:44David Pierce?

  Right? Is this, is this the takeaway?

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, after Apple killed them ruthlessly.

• 10:50David Pierce?

  And, and I think that the actual cycle there, I think is super fascinating, right? Because we've been on this 15 year run where Apple just said, everything is apps. And if you want to do things, the first thing you have to do is press on an icon and open an app. And every app became a universe unto itself. And everybody built gigantic businesses out of keeping you inside of an app as long as possible. And then over the last few years, there's been this pushback in the other way. That's like, actually, if all I want to do is check off a thing on my to do list, isn't it objectively insane that I have to like page over three pages to in on my home screen, open an app, wait for it to load and log in and then do it again? Like, yes, that is insane. And so we're finding these ways to like stitch things back together. And Apple's trying to figure out how to do stuff on the lock screen.

• 11:34David Pierce?

  And it's like, this was a good idea 15 years ago. Widgets are great and they should probably have existed this whole time and been much better. But they're coming back in a big way now.

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  Apple has really never liked the idea of having live data on the home screen of the iPhone. For years, and you know, the joke is that the weather app icon was 72 and sunny for however long. They've finally gotten past that. Now they've added widgets to the iPhone and they're, you know, their big announcements for the iPad was like, the widgets are interactive. And it's like, well, they should have been the whole time. So they, they went to just sort of like static display of data to now you can actually like mark a to do done on the iPad. And then they've got these like big ideas that connect to their other bits and bobs of technology. Like the widgets on your iPhone will somehow connect over continuity to your Mac and appear on your Mac in some way.

• 12:22Alex Cranz?

  I don't, why?

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  So that you don't have to set up your widgets twice.

• 12:26Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 12:27David Pierce?

  Oh, well, and there's a huge number of things you are likely to do on your iPhone. Like that won't work the same way on your Mac.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  Wait, name one of those things.

• 12:37Alex Cranz?

  Apple classic music, Apple music classic?

• 12:40Nilay Patel?

  But that's not a widget.

• 12:41Alex Cranz?

  But it should be. And then I want it on my Mac. That's the only one.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  What's one thing that you do on your iPhone that you shouldn't do on your Mac or you couldn't do on your Mac? That's a widget. That's like specifically a widget.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  I'm using my iPhone as my camera to do this show, so I can't look at it right now, which is hurting me emotionally. But I do think like there is this thing that Apple is trying to do, I think correctly, in which if I'm sitting at my computer and I have to pick up my phone, that is bad. Like, I would argue that is a bad user experience every time I have to look at my phone while I'm also using my computer. And to me widgets is one small step back in the direction of do computer things that are also phone things. And this is like what Windows and Android have been working towards together for a long time, right? And if you have a Chromebook and an Android phone, you've been able to do a lot of this stuff forever. But this is like, they're just slowly getting a little closer together.

• 13:34David Pierce?

  And especially with these more interactive widgets, being able to have the same information accessible in all the places goes a very long way for me. I have no idea how this is going to work. And I will say, my experience with things like continuity and handoff has not been good over time. So I don't have a ton of faith in this working super well, but it's at least an interesting idea.

• 13:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's super inconsistent, like continuity.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Alex Cranz?

  It's not reliable.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  Today, I definitely tried to do the thing where you copy something from a phone and paste it on the Mac, which usually works perfectly well.

• 14:06Alex Cranz?

  It was like a TikTok from three days ago.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was. It was a TikTok from three days ago about something else that Apple announced. But it just beachballed my Mac today. It was like, I don't want to do this. I'm tired of pasting things from three days ago. That said, the widget idea for Apple, just in terms of what an app is and how you should interact with it and what's happening on your phone. They were apps, apps, apps, apps, apps. So your whole phone turns into a single purpose appliance every time you open an app. And now they're getting to, we should have little bits of UI strewn about your entire experience so that you control things in the world, which is pretty cool. And I think especially in the iPad, you know, their view of the iPad home screen is like. A control panel, but then there's actually a control panel.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  And so like they're, they're just running into some mixed metaphors here. I think on the whole, it's really good. But it's just fascinating to see them sort of deconstruct the apps and lift the controls out of them into widgets. Because then they get to the next thing, which is the same widgets that run on the watch.

• 15:09Alex Cranz?

  See, I think they actually converted me to be anti widgets during their long anti widget campaign.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 15:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I like, I have some widgets on my phone, right? I have like a weather one and a calendar one, but I don't actually want to interact with that stuff. I like having my little compartments. And so all of these widgets and all this excitement for it and like David, you saying, oh yeah, now you'll be able to have the exact same info on both your phone and your laptop. I was like, oh, I hate that. I want my separate spots.

• 15:35David Pierce?

  I just thought of my widgets example, which is smart home stuff. A, interactive widgets is an extremely good way to do things like control my lights. If I just want to turn off the one light that I have connected, it's insane that I have to open an app every time that should be a button on my home screen. And now it can be. And that's also a thing I would like to be able to do in exactly the same way with exactly the system, the same system on my Mac that does not currently exist.

• 15:57Alex Cranz?

  I take it all back. Never mind. It just converted back to widgets.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  You're into widgets now.

• 16:02Alex Cranz?

  It's just done. I'm like, oh, smart home? Never mind, never mind. Let's do it.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  But I do think it, to your point, Alex, there is this interesting thing that Apple is trying to do, which is figure out how to give you more sort of tools and interactive stuff in widgets without it being overwhelming and annoying. Because what you don't want, and what there is a version of that could exist, is essentially full apps running in teeny tiny icons all over your home screen all the time, which is a UI nightmare. It's a battery nightmare. It just, that's bad. And if Apple let developers do that, they would do that. They would just surface the whole app onto your home screen. And so there's like, there's a middle ground somewhere that Apple is trying to find that I think is going to be really interesting.

• 16:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because that's what I think of like Android in 2008, 2009. That was what they, the Android experience. And so I'm like, oh, I don't, it's not 2008. I don't want that experience. I want something nice and like, right now, they're kind of clean. And I don't want to go back to like, you can do everything right here. It's basically the whole app in a tiny crummy square that you can barely see.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  I think this is actually, now that you said Android, it's so indicative of where we are with these phones, that Apple responded to the over widgetification of Android.

• 17:12Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 17:13Nilay Patel?

  By being like, ours is clean.

• 17:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:15Nilay Patel?

  We're not doing this. And now it's like, No one's gonna yell at Apple for copying Android blatantly. They just, no one cares. Yeah. And like, screw it widgets, you can have them back. I look, I'm excited. Package tracking, oof.

• 17:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's a good one. Oh my gosh.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  But you think about the, the combination of Apple's stuff, live activities, the dynamic island in widgets. There's a lot of ways to put stuff on your phone that's like little bits and bobs of information.

• 17:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  There's not, there's not, we'll just see how it all goes. But that was like, the theme of this whole thing was like, a platform? Have you thought about putting widgets on it? And then the entire watch is like a series of widgets now.

• 17:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  It looks very much the same. I don't think that the changes to the watch are as big as they made them seem. No.

• 17:59Alex Cranz?

  Cause it was just like, you wanna go to the app, now you can go to the app but still be able to see the time.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Alex Cranz?

  And that's useful.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  But those are watch apps, right?

• 18:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like it's just like watch apps, but a little smaller and a little less ugly. And I'm like, oh, okay.

• 18:13David Pierce?

  Well ironically, the two cases Apple made are, you can see apps smaller, like you, like exactly you just said, and you can see apps bigger. Because they spent all this time talking about, remember how they redesigned the apps so that they take up the larger screen on the new watches? So it's like apps bigger and also apps smaller, but apps fundamentally is still the same. It's like, that's the watch story.

• 18:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. Lots of changes to the phone app, actually that's what they led with.

• 18:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Nilay Patel?

  That connects to other changes in FaceTime and messaging, what's going on there?

• 18:40David Pierce?

  So, this is one that actually I think shows up across a bunch of different platforms in really interesting ways. And we should probably break it into two things. So there's the phone app and there's FaceTime. Which I would have thought Apple would have tried to all sort of shove together, but it didn't really, uh, which is weird. But on the phone call side, the two big things that I can think of, and again, it's been a long week, I may have forgotten. Are that A, now you have these things called contact posters, that you can sort of make a, a picture of yourself and have a font with your name. That will now show up on other people's iPhones when you call them. I have a lot of questions about how that works, but it's kind of a neat idea, I think. And then the other one is this, like, visual, real-time voicemail thing, where now when somebody calls you,

• 19:21David Pierce?

  if you don't answer, it will start live transcribing the voicemail that they leave you, and- You can press a button and pick up the phone. And Neelai, you and I spent some time digging into how all of this works and it is like truly bonkers.

• 19:35Nilay Patel?

  It's a hat, but it, and I think Mark has rightfully pointed out on our last episode. This is very much how Pixel call transcriber works.

• 19:42David Pierce?

  True, yeah.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  But it's more limited and it makes, it's funnier because of just how it is limited. So they made an answering machine. So right now, when you set up voicemail, you record a voicemail greeting and it goes to your carrier. And if you don't answer your phone, your carrier's like cloud-based voicemail system does a thing and visual voicemail happens. And I cannot tell you the last time I sent, listened to, or even acknowledged the existence of voicemail.

• 20:08Alex Cranz?

  I have 18 unlistened voicemails.

• 20:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, I delete a bunch every time somebody calls me and tells me my voicemail is full. And short of that, I never, ever check my voicemail.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  But some people use it, it's great, but whatever. The people who I care for, they get the voicemail and they hang up and they send me a text.

• 20:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  That much sparsier way of working through this. What Apple is doing now, when you set your voicemail greeting, it goes to two places. It goes to your carrier and it also lives on your phone. And when you get a call, your phone answers the call in the background, in a process, plays your greeting. So it's, the listener does not know. And then it records the incoming audio and live transcribes it on the screen. So it's a little answering machine app.

• 20:50Alex Cranz?

  That's cool.

• 20:51Nilay Patel?

  It's, I mean, it's hilarious that they've turned the phone into an answering machine. If your phone is not there, it falls back to the carrier cloud-based visual voicemail system.

• 20:58Alex Cranz?

  I love that they realized that we need better call screening.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, because of all the robocall stuff. I mean, this is like, the other piece of this is they did a bunch of work on robocalls, on letting you decide whether you even want to see them. So if carriers flag something as a robocall, your phone will not even let you know what happened. Which is fascinating because they built all those hooks for call screening into the US. Like I use RoboKiller, it's an app I pay for. I'm kind of wondering like, am I going to pay for this anymore? Because you built it, you're in Sherlock. They built all these hooks for these products to exist and like do screening for you. And now they're slowly building it into the US.

• 21:33David Pierce?

  Is that, who's in charge of those lists? Is that like a, is that a? Thing your carrier has is that a thing Apple does like who who is the one saying this is probably spam.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  So that's that was that industry like Robo Killer has a list and you can like add to the list.

• 21:48David Pierce?

  But even now, like I don't have Robo Killer or anything and I get calls that say, you know, likely spam or whatever. I assume that's the carriers who maintain that.

• 21:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it's your carrier.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  But the carriers have like lists of like bad numbers or spam numbers. They have a product. They have stir slash shaken.

• 22:03David Pierce?

  Right, right, right.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Great standard and they're doing authentication of the numbers in some way. So I think that's where they're because the the high volume call spammers are spoofing the numbers. So now if you're if you're making a call to spoof numbers, the carriers can detect that in some way.

• 22:19David Pierce?

  Which is why all the robo calls you get come from your local area code.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 22:23David Pierce?

  Which is so funny to me because now I just absolutely resolutely do not answer the phone if it comes from my area code, which is hundreds of miles away from where I currently live and has nothing to offer me anymore.

• 22:33Nilay Patel?

  No one in the city of Chicago can call me. Sorry, you're not allowed. I don't care what I don't care what is your problem. It's your spam. So that's really interesting that they built a little answering machine. The call posters thing, the contact posters thing, also fascinating because it is unclear how the poster gets from my phone to your phone. Just they and they haven't told us yet. So I call you on the regular old phone system.

• 22:58Alex Cranz?

  And I'll see your face.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  I have AT&T, you have Verizon, whatever it is. I call from that. That's a regular phone call. There's no data channel on that phone call.

• 23:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but suddenly I have data on you.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  But suddenly before the call is even connected.

• 23:11Alex Cranz?

  Hmm, hmm, hmm, that's suspicious.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's just, I think you just have to tell like.

• 23:17Alex Cranz?

  It's just curious, curious.

• 23:18Nilay Patel?

  That's what they do with iMessage, for example, right? You try to send somebody a text message. They detect whether both numbers are in the iMessage database. No, but iMessage will detect like you're trying to text this number.

• 23:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  And it will go look for that number in the iMessage database. And then it will like change you over to iMessage, getting out of that database. Oh, no.

• 23:38David Pierce?

  Well, that's also how you get the thing that'll pop up at the top sometimes where it's like, you know, so and so has updated their contact photo and you or you can say like, share your contact information and you just sort of hit the one button and share. And that makes sense to me over iMessage, but you can't do that SMS to SMS. And this is sort of the equivalent, which is really interesting.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:58David Pierce?

  Which is kind of where the FaceTime thing gets confusing for me because if they had just said, this works via FaceTime, which is functionally iMessage for voice and video calls. That would make perfect sense. But yeah, but the fact that this is still ostensibly a carrier calling thing is very interesting and confusing to me.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm guessing Apple is just extending that thing they do where they know what phone numbers or iPhone numbers.

• 24:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  And they're saying, okay, here's a contact poster. You've made the call. It doesn't update it until you make another phone call.

• 24:27Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  So if you have my contact poster, I call you, you're going to see the old one until we connect and then it will send you the new one. There's, there's just like a lot going on here that I think is like.

• 24:36Alex Cranz?

  Are the call posters, they're going to be your photo, right? Cause like right now, everybody's.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  I think you can set them whatever you want.

• 24:41Alex Cranz?

  Cause does that mean we're just going to get a bunch of big emojis? Because right now, everybody I know uses emojis as their face.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 24:48David Pierce?

  Same, actually.

• 24:49Alex Cranz?

  Vast majority of people. There's one or two who don't, but the majority do. Cause like Apple encouraged you to make a emoji and so everybody did and then it made the thing. So that means like, we're going to have like giant emoji faces being like.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then that's how they're going to bring us all slowly into Vision OS.

• 25:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:05David Pierce?

  But I also get the sense it's going to be, I mean, the way it looks is like a lock screen, right? It's got sort of your name at the top where the clock would be. It's got the big full screen picture. My guess would be there's going to be a flow in which Apple sets, like asks you to set this up. And prompts you to like, pick a photo of yourself. Mine is going to be me doing finger guns in like a super cool way. I'm going to be wearing a hat and doing finger guns. I'm pretty excited about it.

• 25:30Alex Cranz?

  I love this.

• 25:30Nilay Patel?

  No, we're in the nineties. We're in the nineties and early 2000s. We're not really at trucker hats and finger guns.

• 25:35David Pierce?

  So it's going to be me in low rise jeans with a Nelly Band-Aid on my cheek.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 25:41David Pierce?

  I'm going to have the Nelly Band-Aid.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  You're there, you're at, we're at, we're at Widgets in Mac OS 10. We're not yet at trucker hats. The trucker hats are coming. You'll know this when Apple kills Widgets the next time.

• 25:55David Pierce?

  Okay. Contact posters 3.0. David has a trucker hat.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  You cannot set different contact posters for different people or different lines. That's obviously the next turn. We're gonna have to pretend to be excited about that next year. Mark my words. Next year, W W C app will say, "Contact posters for different people and the crowd will go wild." Just as the crowd, I will say, talking about the early 2000s, went wild for updated PDF support on the iPad.

• 26:18Alex Cranz?

  They did. Like, you could hear it.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:21Alex Cranz?

  Over the, over the, the recording. Because you guys, you guys, for our listeners, one of the ways that we cover the event is sometimes there's like a little microphone and we can hear the keynote because you guys are there. And so we could hear like, "Ooh."

• 26:36Alex Cranz?

  When it happened, it was very, very good.

• 26:38Nilay Patel?

  It was good. It was pretty funny. FaceTime updates. FaceTime basically just in more places. You can leave FaceTime voicemail now. I don't know how else to describe that. That is separate from the regular voicemail.

• 26:49Alex Cranz?

  Somebody was being very hostile to millennial women about, about that. They were like, "They're the ones most likely to abuse that with their parents." And I was like, "That's not, it's absolutely true."

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  That you're gonna leave-

• 26:59Alex Cranz?

  Do so many FaceTime-

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  FaceTime voicemails?

• 27:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, with my parents. I was like, never felt more called out and like seen at the same time.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  I'm definitely gonna have my kid leave FaceTime voicemails from my parents. That's what they want. We already do it. It's just taking a video and sending it to someone.

• 27:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:13David Pierce?

  The thing that's weird about this, and this, I'm just realizing this right now, is the way that Apple is doing this with like, cool stuff on the phone side, cool stuff on the FaceTime side, cool stuff on the messages side, but none of these things interact with each other. This is a very like Googly way of handling this, where it's like separate teams that have nothing to do with each other that are all kind of arriving at the same idea. Like, what if we could sort of talk synchronously but also asynchronously? And we had a bunch of different ways to communicate? Like, the fact that FaceTime voicemails and audio messages in iMessage are different things and are also different from phone calls, which now have live transcribed voicemails, doesn't make any sense. There should be a thing like iMessage, where it kind of fails gracefully from thing to thing, depending on what device you have.

• 27:56David Pierce?

  And instead now, I'm like, okay, if I'm gonna call you, do I call you on the phone and leave you a voicemail? Or do I call you on FaceTime and leave you a voicemail? Or do I send you an audio message in the messages app? This doesn't make any sense.

• 28:10Nilay Patel?

  David, if this was 2004, right now, what you just said would have raised you $100 million. To build a universal messaging client.

• 28:18David Pierce?

  And then I would have sold to Google and there would have been.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  And it would have gone away. You'd be like, why are there so many instant messaging services?

• 28:25David Pierce?

  I mean, but right, like you can see, this is the thing that ordinarily, Apple's very good at is being like, okay, we've just, we've just made a system. It's called calls. I don't know. And it just works. And it's like, okay, if it's on iPhone to iPhone, we're going to default you to FaceTime audio because that sounds better. And you have all these cool new features. If they're not in the iMessage database, it just works.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  They have too many users to do this. I'm telling you that I agree with you. If you were clean cheating this, like, well, it was, uh, John Doerr was the VC who had the iFund.

• 28:55David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  2008, man, we would have raised so much money with exactly this pitch. We have sat through this pitch so many times. Apple has too many users to reboot this. They're like, this icon makes phone calls. This icon makes FaceTime calls. This other icon is your voicemail and this icon is some other stuff. And they're like, they have to educate 100 million people.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  And if you change the name of the phone app, you're going to freak everybody out. Yeah, you're probably right.

• 29:22Nilay Patel?

  Even the dumbest thing that I do all the time, which is I call, I call my parents on the phone. And then Max rolls up to me and she's like, where are they? Cause the idea of an audio only phone call, she's like, what stupid old people ideas is why can't I see who you're talking to? And then I just push the button to turn into a FaceTime. Routinely blows everyone away.

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Right. The idea that the, the audio voice call can turn into the FaceTime call is a paradigm shift that is like routinely confusing to most people. My parents, when it's the other way around, and this happens to everyone else's parents, my parents will hang up the phone call and call me back on FaceTime. Because they're like, we're, we're switching modes.

• 30:00Alex Cranz?

  My parents just get upset. Well, my dad's fine with it. My dad's fine with it. He like, he was watching the Vergecast like live blog. He's like a nerd. That's where I get it from. But my mom was like, she routinely accidentally FaceTimes me when she's on the phone. She's like, but FaceTimes me when she's just talking to me on the phone. And I'm like, there's just the side of your face.

• 30:20Nilay Patel?

  Not your butt.

• 30:20Alex Cranz?

  Not your butt. Thank God.

• 30:22Nilay Patel?

  Cheek time.

• 30:23Alex Cranz?

  Time.

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  That works in both ways. Moving on.

• 30:26Alex Cranz?

  Moving on.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  I get your point, dude. I'm just saying, I think they're stuck by how many users they have.

• 30:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  They do this a lot slower. FaceTime is coming to the Apple TV. I very confidently told an Apple person, I was like, can you just use the USB port on the Apple TV? And they looked at me.

• 30:41Alex Cranz?

  There's a USB port?

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There was one in the first one, on the bottom. It's gone, it's gone now.

• 30:47Alex Cranz?

  There's not a lot of ports on there.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  It was a service port. Do you remember though, finding the secret USB port is like always the great choice. Like, there was a Nintendo that had one.

• 30:54Alex Cranz?

  There was a Nintendo, like, the Apple, obviously, like, everybody always has like TVs.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  They were not excited that I knew about their secret port. Whatever.

• 31:03Alex Cranz?

  They get mad.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  So it's continuity. So you can use your phone or your iPad to make FaceTime calls on TV. Lord knows how that's gonna work, although I will say, there's a really interesting new spec in iOS 17 that controls motorized docks.

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  So you can see how you can like dock the thing, it'll like rotate, it'll tilt at you, whatever. The phone can follow you around.

• 31:23Alex Cranz?

  So wait, could you, if I have the phone on my bedside table, because I'm sleeping in, could my boss then FaceTime me and then slowly make it like motor around and be like, wake up! I see you sleeping. Get your ass out of bed.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Your boss.

• 31:38Alex Cranz?

  Your boss.

• 31:39David Pierce?

  I, hypothetically, whoever that is.

• 31:41Nilay Patel?

  Wake up, Alex!

• 31:43Alex Cranz?

  I'm here, I'm awake.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, but for FaceTime, that's really fascinating, right? That you would, you can, you need some sort, you gotta prop up the phone somehow. And now there's all these other little, there's other ways to control docks, which I think is fascinating. I don't know if they're gonna interplay, but you can see how they're coming together.

• 31:57David Pierce?

  We are kinda getting ahead of ourselves on that one, but I think the docks thing is super fascinating to me, because like, it's been, I don't know, a decade since like the iPod dock phenomenon died. And we're gonna get like a whole new dock phenomenon, now that we have standby mode, and we have this, this whole dock kit thing, which is what you're describing, where you can actually control the way a dock moves. Like, things you stick your phone on are gonna be interesting again, and that makes me so happy.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, it's back. It's, we're gonna have to start a gadget blog again, just to cover it.

• 32:26Alex Cranz?

  Are the hotels like budgeting for all of the docks they're gonna have to add?

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  Hotels are budgeting for nothing. I checked into my hotel in New York City last night, and they looked at me confidently and said, "We're so excited, room service is back."

• 32:39Alex Cranz?

  It was just like chicken nuggets.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was like, whatever.

• 32:43Alex Cranz?

  Some tendies.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  They're like, they're not even budgeting. It's horrible. Last piece, they're adding USB-C support for webcams on the iPad and microphones.

• 32:53David Pierce?

  Very excited about this. And this is like, this goes in with the FaceTime coming to Apple TV thing. It's just like, more things get webcams. You can video conference on more things. That seems like a universally good thing to me.

• 33:06Alex Cranz?

  Why do you need one for your iPad?

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  So if you have a display, so if you set up an iPad, you plugged in a display or a USB-C, and the display has a built-in webcam.

• 33:14Alex Cranz?

  How many people are plugging their iPad into a display and then being like, boy, I really need a webcam on top of that?

• 33:21David Pierce?

  No, Alex, do you know the real reason? It's because the iPad's camera is in a stupid place and it's not where it should be. And now you can put one in the middle like a normal person. This is the best news of all time. Now you can have a webcam where a webcam should have been for 12 years, Apple.

• 33:37Alex Cranz?

  You have some feelings there, David?

• 33:39David Pierce?

  No.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  I cannot wait for the first picture.

• 33:41David Pierce?

  Center stage is a great feature that doesn't cause any problems for anyone ever. It's great.

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait for the first picture of somebody with the iPad in a keyboard dock with like a Logitech camera mounted where it should be.

• 33:51Alex Cranz?

  Like in a coffee shop.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great.

• 33:53Alex Cranz?

  Little mic.

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  And then the last piece, which we should talk about maybe a little bit more, they're bringing communication safety to FaceTime, to Photos, to Airdrop.

• 34:01Alex Cranz?

  That felt like huge news.

• 34:02Nilay Patel?

  It's like huge news. They just slid in. I mean, this was like such a big deal, they had to pull it the first time.

• 34:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because it's scanning your images to detect for nudity and then be like, hey, did you know there's some nudes coming your way? And like, that shocks me.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  So the scandal with this was before, when they were doing it in the cloud, and they were doing the on-device hashing and passing it back and forth to the cloud. There was a secondary scandal, there was another feature that had a secondary scandal where it was alerting parents.

• 34:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  About children potentially getting nudes. That was a big deal. This is just on-device.

• 34:39Nilay Patel?

  Scanning. So a picture is coming in, your iPhone looks at it locally, says, we think there might be some nudity here. Are you sure you want to see this picture?

• 34:48Alex Cranz?

  How many people are like, well, actually, a lot of women are like, no.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Alex Cranz?

  Never mind. I forgot about dick pics.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like a real, it's a real thing for a lot of people.

• 34:57Alex Cranz?

  That is a real thing that a lot of women deal with. I'm so sorry.

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  But they announced it, I think they, there was a lot of confusion about that first set of announcements and what it all entailed. They announced this.

• 35:06Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:07Nilay Patel?

  They did not do a great job of explaining what this is.

• 35:10Alex Cranz?

  They just like, shot right by it.

• 35:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that was very deliberate, right?

• 35:14Alex Cranz?

  Right, yeah.

• 35:15David Pierce?

  The louder Apple talks about this, the more people are going to ask questions about it. And I think, like what you're saying, Neelai, about this being on device, they have answered a series of the most complicated questions about it. But it is still true that your device is scanning your photos, and we can debate what that means. Like, your phone, the photo is already on your device. Like, it's not like your device is not aware of what this photo is.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, your phone can happily search for things in your photos.

• 35:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:40David Pierce?

  But then, and yeah, it'll, it'll prompt you if you get one, if like, if a child receives a photo that, that it perceives to be problematic, one of the things it will give you is a pop-up where you can either, I think, block the contact who's sending it. There's a, there's a thing that just says, message a grownup, which I think is very funny. It's just like a very funny way to name that particular feature. But it's the kind of thing that is like, it, it seems sort of like an obviously good idea at first, and then kind of the longer you think about it, the thornier the questions get about what this knows and who it should notify, and the difference between sort of protecting someone and letting them use their own device the way that they want to. It's, it's super messy, but Apple clearly thinks it's gotten this right, because it's now starting to roll it out kind of everywhere you might see multimedia.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And this is way too much for this episode of Vergecast, but just today, before we started recording, Louisiana passed a child safety bill. It says you can't sign up for services without parental consent. The parents can cancel your terms of service agreements from all the stuff. There are other bills in other states. A thing that is happening across the tech industry and across tech policy is using children as a stand-in for very, very aggressive surveillance and regulation.

• 36:50Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 36:51Nilay Patel?

  And we have pieces on it on site. We can link it in the show notes. But this is, this is right on the edge of that, where I, I think on balance, it's fine, especially given Apple's history and privacy standards and parental control, like all that stuff. You know, like, this is right on the line of fine. Right, like you're a parent, you want to see if your kid's getting weird photos. You want your kid to be able to alert, like, all fine. There are some cases in that. You're a kid, you have an abusive parent, where it gets real dicey. Right, so like, there's just some, there's some big questions in there, but on balance, I think it's on the line of fine.

• 37:24Alex Cranz?

  You also can't troll your friends with Gozy anymore. Sorry. I mean, maybe you can, we'll find out.

• 37:31David Pierce?

  It truly is the early 2000s again.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're back to the early 2000s. Speaking on the 2000s tip, Alex's favorite feature.

• 37:38Alex Cranz?

  My favorite feature?

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  Airplay in hotels.

• 37:40David Pierce?

  No, Alex is banned from talking about this on the Vergecast.

• 37:43Alex Cranz?

  Hold on, I didn't get to talk about it. You guys, this is, this is bullying. No, um, so they're say that they're gonna allow you to airplay in hotels.

• 37:53Nilay Patel?

  They could allow this today.

• 37:55Alex Cranz?

  Yes, this is my thing, is like, I think this is theoretically really cool feature that should already exist, but will never truly exist, because, again, I stayed at a Marriott recently, and there was still that iHome 2000s iPod dock in there. Like, I'm not really confident that I'm gonna be getting airplay in my hotel anytime soon.

• 38:16David Pierce?

  No, it's not gonna happen. Uh, there's gonna be like, do you remember all those years ago, and it's still true now, you like, you drive around and you see a hotel, and they have the sign that says like, vacancy, $149 a night, and then it just says like, has HBO? Like, I wonder, I wonder if airplay is gonna be the new HBO, that they'll just like, put on the sign, airplay.

• 38:33Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's what they're doing now, like, has Netflix?

• 38:36David Pierce?

  That's true, yeah.

• 38:37Alex Cranz?

  And I'm like, I'm not signing into my Netflix on, on this account.

• 38:40David Pierce?

  Which is exactly why I want airplay. That's the thing, right? It's like, this, this, in theory, solves a lot of problems, because I don't have to log in, I don't have to remember to log out when I check out.

• 38:48Alex Cranz?

  But they have to replace that Linksys B router from 2003.

• 38:54David Pierce?

  Everybody loves a captive portal. That's, that's, that's my, that's my feeling.

• 38:58Alex Cranz?

  I love a captive portal.

• 38:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, this to me is like, the best idea and most unlikely thing to actually take hold, that I saw. At.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  I swear, I'm just sitting here Googling, I swear, they've made the airplane hotels announcement before.

• 39:12David Pierce?

  It would not surprise me.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, they announced AirPlay in 2010.

• 39:16Alex Cranz?

  They probably said it then.

• 39:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm guessing in 2011, they're like, and it will be coming to hotels soon, like, one year.

• 39:21Alex Cranz?

  With our partners at Hilton. And Hilton was like, no.

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  Some Hilton person, like, wanders on stage, like, we love computers.

• 39:28Alex Cranz?

  Love Wi-Fi.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  Chromecast had a big hotel partnership for a while there. Do you remember this?

• 39:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and then it went away.

• 39:36Nilay Patel?

  Every time you see a screen, there's someone who's like, if I control the screen, I will make the money. And then there's you being like, what if I just send my phone to that screen? That's the CarPlay story that Apple has won, much to society's detriment, and it is not the hotel story. The last time I was in a hotel, I literally went and unplugged the HDMI cable from whatever garbage hotel box and plugged it into my laptop.

• 40:00David Pierce?

  I just watch whatever is on Nick at Night. Like, that's become my main thing. It's usually Friends. Sometimes it's The Office. I just, I scroll through the guide until one of those two shows appears, and that is my hotel TV experience. And it's fine. I have no notes. I don't need anything else.

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, so that's AirPlay, another, again, vintage 2000s announcement. Another vintage 2000s announcement was the name drop. Where you can just walk up to someone and, like, wave your phone at them.

• 40:26Alex Cranz?

  Did they let you test that one? Like, did they have a very controlled demo for it?

• 40:31Nilay Patel?

  Again, the TikTok that I was sharing, that Alex was laughing at me about, was in 2013. Craig Federighi was like, we've expanded contact sharing. Now you can just do it with a tap. You don't need to bump your phones together.

• 40:45Alex Cranz?

  Now you gotta bump them.

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  Bump your phones together. This was a whole startup. The startup was called Bump.

• 40:50David Pierce?

  There have been many startups trying to do this. Like, there were so many years where everybody was like, NFC is going to change the way we interact with each other, and forever. And now, no, it didn't happen. Now it's like QR codes, which is just NFC, but like, it works. And now apparently we're getting the thing where you can bump your phones.

• 41:07Nilay Patel?

  Bump was number eight on Apple's list of all-time most popular free iPhone apps. By February 2013, it had been downloaded 125 million times. It was acquired by Google and subsequently shut down.

• 41:21David Pierce?

  Well, at least they had a nice, you know, at least they got some money before Apple shut it off.

• 41:25Alex Cranz?

  And then it took Apple 10 years to replace it.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  Just like the acquisition by Google, this, it's just three sentences long. On September 16th, 2013, Bump announced they'd been acquired by Google. On December 31, 2013, both Bump and Flock would be discontinued. The company subsequently deleted all user data and shut down their servers, rendering all apps inoperable. This is the most Google acquisition story ever.

• 41:49Alex Cranz?

  Beautiful.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, when you get acquired by Google, you should be forced to pre-announce that your service will be discontinued.

• 41:55Alex Cranz?

  Don't worry, we're deleting all your data.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  Lena Khan, you want to accomplish something, write a law that's like, if you are acquired by Google, you have to pre-announce that your product is a failure and no one will ever get to use it again. That's how you stop mergers in America. You just skip to the end. You got acquired by AT&T, guess what? Five years from now, AT&T is going to sell you for parts.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  Just pre-announce it. We did this for money. Alright, that's enough. And then the last one was they expanded Airdrop so it works over the internet, which is cool.

• 42:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  But only if you're, so you're both signed in iCloud, you leave, it'll continue to transfer over iCloud.

• 42:30Alex Cranz?

  That's all I want. Get excited for gritty.

• 42:33David Pierce?

  And you can now set up things like SharePlay and Airdrop by touching your phones together, which, sure. This is the sort of thing, so my, the only time I have ever been like, wow, Airdrop is an amazing, magical piece of technology. And I think I've talked about this on the show. I was at the Formula One race in October and we were standing there waiting for all the drivers to come in. And we happened to be at the very front of a crowd of like 100 people. And so my friend Stephen had the best view and was filming everything as everybody came in. And then he would just open up Airdrop and just tap on every name he could find. And he would just send this video to all of the phones on all the people around us. And it was like, it was like the most incredible file sharing experience I have ever had. And ever since, I'm now like an Airdrop true believer.

• 43:16David Pierce?

  I just use it to like send stuff from my phone to my computer.

• 43:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:20David Pierce?

  To have it actually work socially, I was like, oh, this is, this is something. There's really something here. And that idea that I could just like, I have a thing that you want and you just sort of like boot my phone and you have it. I mean, it could work.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's why Google bought Bump in September of 2013.

• 43:36Alex Cranz?

  10 years.

• 43:36David Pierce?

  And now your share exists. Just now.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  If you work at Google and you can tell me whether one letter of code from bump made it into nearby share, one, like, that's it, that's the bar, one letter, one bracket of code from bumped is a nearby share, let me know, I would love to know the answer to that question. Let's lightning round the rest of the stuff. Standby mode, probably everybody has seen if you're listening to the show, that was Apple's big announcement in iOS 17, you put your phone, when it's charging on its side, the OLED phones will just like always on to show you a clock, they made a alarm clock. Yeah.

• 44:11David Pierce?

  Another cool use of widgets, by the way, you can run both a clock and you can have widgets appear. So that's another, it's like a full screen widget experience.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  Too much information.

• 44:20David Pierce?

  I'm not mad at it.

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, what was the name of the thing that ran the widgets, the little guy?

• 44:24David Pierce?

  Chumby?

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  Chumby, they made Chumby. You know, the little guy.

• 44:28David Pierce?

  They Sherlocked Chumby.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  They Sherlocked. Here's my social clip, ready? I'm gonna look right at the camera and say, "They Sherlocked Chumby." That means something. That means something to a lot of people, and if you're not one of them, stop scrolling and go do your research. They Sherlock Chumby. A million views on TikTok.

• 44:52David Pierce?

  I just went to Chumby's website, you can still buy a Chumby, apparently.

• 44:56Nilay Patel?

  Does it run Confabulator widgets, doesn't it?

• 45:00David Pierce?

  I just want to read you several things that are on the Chumby website.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 45:02David Pierce?

  Unbrick your Sony dash, details here. Activate a Chumby, deactivate a Chumby. These are, these are some of the largest and most important things on the Chumby website.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  That's very, very good. God, it's beautiful. Siri can now handle multiple smart home commands in a row, that's great, they cut it to just Siri, which, whatever, I don't, hey Siri, wasn't that hard to say?

• 45:27David Pierce?

  So the thing that's actually interesting to me about this, and the reason I put it on here, because I agree that the features themselves are kind of whatever, you can have longer conversations, it's slightly easier, I expect Siri to be 1,000 times worse with the false positives than it has been before, that's gonna be awful. But are you guys slightly surprised that Apple is continuing with Siri as kind of an ongoing concern? I kind of thought Siri was being phased out and there was eventually gonna be some other...

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  Too many users.

• 45:51David Pierce?

  You think?

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  But Siri sucks, it has this like decade long...

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  People are setting timers and asking for music all the time. Yeah, that's all you need it for.

• 45:59David Pierce?

  Even Craig said that onstage. He was like, when he was giving the examples for what Siri can do, now it can do multiple timers, foray. But he literally was like, people, you love to use Siri for, you know, playing music and setting timers. And it was like, oh, so Craig knows the only two things that anyone ever does with their voice assistants.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  Apple is trapped in its prison of its own success, and it can only leave that by leaping headfirst into the metaverse.

• 46:22Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 46:23David Pierce?

  I mean, that is, that is perfectly fair. But I, I kind of thought Apple might take the like AI revolution as a chance to do basically what Microsoft did and be like, forget all these things we've done before. Like Siri is clippy with another name, right? It's like a thing that seemed nifty and is bad tech and everybody hates it. And you would think they would have taken this moment as a possible opportunity to rebrand. And I'm just surprised they didn't.

• 46:47Nilay Patel?

  They need to do the big change, right? You can get rid of Siri. You need to replace it with like, here's the generative AI chatbot assistant of your dreams that is taking actions on your behalf. And they don't have it. The only mentions they had of generative AI in this whole keynote were in the keyboard.

• 47:03David Pierce?

  Can I give you a theory that I think I'm absolutely right about? That generative AI chatbot exists and it's called Spotlight. That is going to be the thing. Like, over the next three years, Spotlight is going to be a more and more important part of all of these platforms. And that's where all of the actual AI focus is going to be.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Because it's the search box.

• 47:20David Pierce?

  It's the search box. They're increasingly putting like actions into Spotlight. So you can do stuff right from the search results. It's how you open apps. It's how you find things. It's like, that is where, if I'm Apple, that's where all the AI stuff is going to go. Not Siri, Spotlight.

• 47:35Alex Cranz?

  So they're gonna Sherlock Alfred.

• 47:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, like.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  They Sherlock Chumby.

• 47:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Alex Cranz?

  God, no.

• 47:44Nilay Patel?

  Do you think at Chumby headquarters, they were like, it finally happened?

• 47:48David Pierce?

  Do you think if we called this episode, They Sherlocked Chumby, anyone would listen to it?

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  I think that we have only one choice at this point in time. Look, Alex Heath just put up a story about Mark Zuckerberg's reaction to the Vision Pro. I think it is incumbent upon us, if you're out there, you're a young reporter and you're trying to break onto the verge, send us a note about how you're going to get the chumbi reaction to standby mode. I'll run it. I'll, we'll pay market rate, we'll run that story. What's going on inside of Chumby HQ? Bring me pictures of Spider-Man.

• 48:19David Pierce?

  Is there a Chumby HQ?

• 48:20Alex Cranz?

  Is there a Chumby HQ?

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  All right, last few things, last few things, mostly on the watch side. The side button now opens a control center for watch, which is cool. They're updating the polling rate for motion to enable new kinds of apps for golf, for hiking, for cycling, tennis.

• 48:36Alex Cranz?

  Plug in your, your, your computers and stuff for, for cycling now. So you can have like cadence monitors and stuff.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Sherlock Peloton.

• 48:43Alex Cranz?

  They Sherlock Peloton, good.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Alex Cranz?

  But like, no, I think that one's super useful because it's been like a holdback. If you want to go ride your bike out in the world and check your cadence, can't do anything with Apple on it and it sucks.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  David has written here, add a watch to group FaceTime.

• 48:56David Pierce?

  I am so excited about this, just purely as a trolling mechanism. Like you get to be the person, everybody is on FaceTime and you just show up on your watch. That's both like a power move and the cruelest thing you can possibly do to somebody.

• 49:09Alex Cranz?

  That is all my mom is gonna do.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  That's great. The watch now have, Maps in general has offline maps, which is a huge, way late addition. You can do that partially on the watch now. And then we mentioned this very briefly on the last episode, in the waveform segment, but when you go on a hike, the watch will set a waypoint for the last place that you had cell signal, in the last place that you had any cell signal from any carrier so you could place an emergency call, which is really smart. Just smart stuff all around. Okay, that's it. I mean, that's not it. There is so much. Yeah, Apple announced so much stuff, all kind of quality of life features all the way around, very cool. But we gotta take a break and talk about these Macs. We'll be right back.

• 49:54Speaker 01

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

• 50:38Speaker 05

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

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Now I want to tell you some very important news that happened while we were in break. I went to chumby.com as well. And I just want to read you this list of the most popular chumby widgets. It's, it's weather, obviously.

• 51:27Alex Cranz?

  Of course.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  I can has cheeseburger.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, very important.

• 51:30Nilay Patel?

  The fail blog. Lifehacker news.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  And our friends at Dig.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  Early 2000s.

• 51:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, man. I wonder if that lifehacker widget still works.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  You gotta get a chumby and you can buy a used chumby still on the site. This is your new project, Alex.

• 51:46Alex Cranz?

  This is my new project.

• 51:47Nilay Patel?

  Can you run Flex on a chumby?

• 51:48Alex Cranz?

  No, probably.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  That's probably true. All right, let's talk about the Macs real quick and then talk about some good stuff that didn't hit the keynote. Then we're going to bring Liz on Talk Crypto. The Macs, I feel like is, they're not a complicated story. 15 inch MacBook Air.

• 52:02Alex Cranz?

  Big cheap Mac.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  Big, yeah, but well, it's cheap ish.

• 52:06Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  15 screen. It feels like they pulled the ripcord on the last category of laptops.

• 52:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 52:12Nilay Patel?

  You know, like everybody bought their upgrades in the pandemic. Mac sales have slowed way down. They're like. Big cheap screen.

• 52:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  Do you want it? It looks great. We saw it, we got to play with it. It's a 500nit display. It's not going to blow anybody away.

• 52:28Alex Cranz?

  But it's still pretty.

• 52:29Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty, it's very thin. It's fast. They did a thing where they calibrated the battery life to be exactly the same as a 13 inch. So it's 18 hours of video playback, whatever that means.

• 52:39Alex Cranz?

  Instead of like.

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  Vastly more battery life.

• 52:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's, maybe it'll run faster because of that.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. But they, they, they just picked that number and they went towards it.

• 52:49Alex Cranz?

  Have fun, Monica, whenever.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't think there's a lot to say about the MacBook Air.

• 52:53David Pierce?

  I mean, to be fair, that's a lot of battery life. I don't know that, like, I would rather have more, you know, performance on a bigger display as opposed to going to like 20 hours of battery life. It's already like, you can use it all day and it will be fine. And that for a laptop is.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  Two days.

• 53:10David Pierce?

  Good enough for me.

• 53:11Nilay Patel?

  I want two days. Let's just push it, see what happens.

• 53:14David Pierce?

  I just feel like at this point, I'm so conditioned to bring my laptop charger and charge it obsessively that like laptop battery life is almost meaningless to me at this point.

• 53:23Alex Cranz?

  I have 10% battery life.

• 53:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I completely disagree. I never charged this laptop.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  Really?

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I used it all day at the Apple event. Can I tell my story about the photos? I got the first photos of the Vision Pro.

• 53:33Alex Cranz?

  You did?

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  In the world, on the web.

• 53:35David Pierce?

  Neil, I ran around saying, old man still got it.

• 53:37Nilay Patel?

  Old man still got it.

• 53:39David Pierce?

  The rest of the day.

• 53:40Alex Cranz?

  Just shouting it as you're shooting photos.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  Years of being a blog, like a baby blogger with no access. I'm like, whatever, get out of my way. I pushed Alex Heath out of the way to take this photo with my 11 year old Nikon D7500 with a 40 millimeter micro lens. The single greatest hands-on photo setup of all time cannot be replaced. Don't even try me. And you know what, you want to, I still beat you. I got that photo up. I broke the only rule that we have, which is don't open Lightroom at the event. I opened Lightroom and made it good. So everyone's eating cookies, I'm, I was done.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, they did all of that. Processed the photos, whatever, didn't plug in my laptop until I got home that night. I spent, I live logged the thing, I did the photo hands-on of the Vision Pro and the Mac Pro, whatever other coverage, I wrote as fast as I could, the Vision Pro hands-on. That night I got home, I still had 15% battery. What if I'd had a whole other day? How much more 11-year-old camera usage could I have gotten out of this computer?

• 54:43David Pierce?

  No, to be clear, I'm, I'm pro as much battery life as possible. But I think in this case, especially with the M2 Air, we've seen it hit the like throttling threshold earlier than we might like. And I think in this case, I'm maybe happy to make a little bit of a battery life trade, given how good the battery life already is, in order to eke out a little more performance. We don't know that that's the case.

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're gonna have to find out.

• 55:04David Pierce?

  We'll have to see when we review the thing, but that, if, if that's the trade they made, I'm okay with that trade.

• 55:08Nilay Patel?

  Apple very much also sticking with eight gigs of RAM in the base models of these things, which they have more or less been proven, like it's fine, you can definitely hit the swap on these computers.

• 55:18Alex Cranz?

  Pretty fast, yeah.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  I'd like them to go up on that, but we'll see, we'll, we'll see what happens. They announced macOS Cinema, we've already talked about most of the features in there. Game mode is really interesting.

• 55:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think the big surprise here was that they just kind of skated right by it, that you can now just play Windows games on this. Like, like they're using, they're using the emulation software, they're kind of the emulation backend that crossover uses, to run kind of wine-based emulation.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 55:48Alex Cranz?

  Of Windows games. And ostensibly, it's so that developers can test it and see if it works. It just works.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're already seeing people, there was somebody who was tweeting, I think they, they got Cyberpunk 2077 running on a Mac with basically no work.

• 56:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, for like 15 FPS on an, but on an M1 like MacBook Air. So I'm really, really curious to see kind of what's gonna happen there. I'm definitely not gonna be putting...

• 56:14Alex Cranz?

  Beta on my SSD to test it out this weekend.

• 56:18David Pierce?

  No, definitely not. No, who would do that?

• 56:20Alex Cranz?

  Totally not. Who would do that?

• 56:22Nilay Patel?

  Sonoma also has new support for WebKit-based apps. You can just put them in the dock that can send notifications. I'm very excited about this. No one else cares. I'm telling you, this is...

• 56:29Alex Cranz?

  We were all excited, just not as excited.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  The politics of web-based apps and desktop operating systems are the future. And then there's obviously the Mac Pro and the Mac Studio, which we should spend a lot of time on. I think we will in the next coming weeks. The Mac Studio basically gets the M2 Ultra, which is two M2 Max chips put together, up to 192 gigs of RAM. The interesting thing, we were told repeatedly with 100% confidence, the M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio has the same performance as the M2 Ultra in the Mac Pro.

• 57:02Alex Cranz?

  So if you don't need PCI slots...

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  So the only reason you're buying the Mac Pro is PCI slots. There's no more thermal headroom in that chassis. We were told that if you attempted, if you wrote like a power virus,

• 57:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  the Mac Pro's additional cooling capability might, but like only in that most extreme circumstance are you gonna see it?

• 57:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  But like in almost every situation, the performance is exactly the same.

• 57:28David Pierce?

  And it's very clear to us, like Alex, what you just said is exactly right, that if you have pre-existing expansion slot PCI needs, the Mac Pro is for you. It's in the same chassis as before. Dan was very annoyed that it's in the same chassis as before.

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  I know. It's a beautiful chassis.

• 57:45Alex Cranz?

  It's cute.

• 57:45David Pierce?

  I think it's great looking. I don't know why Dan was so annoyed, but Dan was very annoyed.

• 57:48Alex Cranz?

  I think the cheese just...

• 57:50David Pierce?

  The cheese grates, it's beautiful. But it is functionally exactly the same computer, just in a bigger thing with some USB ports and expansion slots. And the Mac Studio, I think Apple seems to think that if you are sort of starting from scratch, you are vastly more likely to start with the Mac Studio. But if you're like dropping into a bunch of existing equipment, which lots of people are, A, there's a good chance you're upgrading an old Mac Pro and you're just gonna drop this in, and B... This is a thing you need. So it's kind of like if you know for sure that you need it, the Mac Pro is for you and it's also $7,000. If the Mac Pro isn't the thing you know for sure you obviously need, the Mac Studio is probably for you. Like, that seems to be very clearly how Apple thinks about this.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that's always been true of the Mac Pro. The fascinating thing is a lot of slots. If you look at the pictures when it's open, there's two cards in there already. The first card's kind of a fake. It's not actually in a slot. It's just sort of like at a 90 degree to give you basic I/O. The second slot, or the second card, is a slot. So you can pull that out and take out like the HDMI connectors and put in whatever else you want. And then there's the six slots below it. The sixth slot is a compatibility slot for older PCI cards that don't play well with the new standards. It's all like backward compatible focused, only that Apple is not often backwards compatible focused.

• 59:06Alex Cranz?

  But they have to be for Pros.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  But for Pros. The thing is, like, you cannot put a GPU in there.

• 59:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  It's not allowed.

• 59:14Alex Cranz?

  That's the thing I keep thinking about, like, what are the PCI slot usages in this case?

• 59:20Nilay Patel?

  It's so much Pro stuff. It is ultra-fast networking. It is ultra-fast SSDs. It is SDI connectors for displays and cameras.

• 59:27Alex Cranz?

  99% of us don't need or care about.

• 59:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you are working in a gigantic video editing house, a post house, and you have effectively turned 60 Mac Pros into a single Mac Pro using SDI and like networking standards.

• 59:42Alex Cranz?

  And now you can do it again.

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  And I can do it again, right? Like, there's stuff here that you want.

• 59:45David Pierce?

  It's not an accident that the demo Apple uses is Avatar, the Way of Water. It's like, it is deliberately for people way at the end of any spectrum you can think of. And if you're making, if you're James Cameron, you're probably gonna buy one of these. And one of my favorite things that happened at WWDC was Neelai asking Apple people, "Have you considered the societal implications of giving James Cameron this much computing power?" Which I think is a very important thing that we are still not spending enough time talking about. But like, it's for James, it's for the James Camerons of the world and kind of nobody else at this point.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  But the two interesting parts are, one, you have to do a big paradigm shift. How much GPU do you need? There's two GPU options. Which one, you're not, it's not the same as your AMD and your Nvidia GPUs. What if you want to use some of the cool Nvidia stuff they're doing around machine learning and generative AI and? Nope, that's not gonna happen on this platform. And then how much RAM do you need? Because guess what? You have to decide at purchase.

• 1:00:41Alex Cranz?

  That's brutal.

• 1:00:42Nilay Patel?

  And it's not a terabyte and a half, which is what you can get all night. Does that equal 192 gigs of RAM? It's unified on the chip between. And you know, their argument is the SSDs are fast. Having unified memory means the CPU gets memories that's as fast as GPU memory. And the GPU memory gets as much memory as CPUs normally get. That trade off is worth. And it's like, we're just a little. I mean, the M1 has been out for a while now, but we're still pretty early in the overall experiment of unified memory.

• 1:01:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  Especially for these kinds of applications. And I just don't know the answers. So like I said, I think we are going to need to spend a lot more time talking about these computers and what they mean. Because a split that is occurring is between Apple's ideas about GPUs and Nvidia's ideas about GPUs. And they're just. Nvidia is much more in charge of the PC ecosystem right now than Intel, in my opinion.

• 1:01:31Alex Cranz?

  100%. They're in charge of like half of the gaming industry, too. Just for PC gaming, of course. But yeah, they have really outsized role and hate Apple.

• 1:01:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, these companies hate each other. It's so bad.

• 1:01:43Alex Cranz?

  So much.

• 1:01:43Nilay Patel?

  All right. There's still a lot of stuff. David has promised me that he can, lightning fast.

• 1:01:48Alex Cranz?

  Go.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  Get through all the cool stuff that Apple didn't announce in the keynote that happened at WWDC. David, go.

• 1:01:54David Pierce?

  This was an unusually non-keynoty WWDC in the sense that they had so much to get through and they spent so much time on the Vision Pro that there wasn't even time to get through all this stuff. What they didn't announce in the keynote is one of my favorite genres of internet article right after WWDC, and this year is a good one. So here are a bunch of the ones that I think are very cool. You can now clean up verification codes in mail and messages. They'll auto fill even if you get them in an email, which is awesome. You get EV charging with real time availability. So if you're driving an EV, you'll get more information in Apple Maps than before. There's pet recognition in photos in iOS 17. So you can search for like the name of your pet or my dog as opposed to having to dig through, just like it works with people now. You can put people's pronouns in your contact info, which is great.

• 1:02:38David Pierce?

  You can ping your watch from the control center, which is awesome because I constantly leave my watch places. You can link to notes in other notes, which all my productivity nerds will. Understand is very exciting. You can automatically categorize your grocery lists and reminders, which Dan talked about for six and a half hours in the last episode. Thank you, Dan. Multiple people can share air tags, which is cool. So if you have like a thing you want to track, multiple people can track it at the same time. You can toggle settings and shortcuts within a spotlight search. So if you search for Wi-Fi, you can actually turn Wi-Fi on and off right from the spotlight search results. You get a thing called visual lookup in paused video frames. So you can pause a recipe and you can pull the thing you're making out of it and actually use it to look it up from YouTube, which is very cool. You can share passwords and pass keys across devices and with other people.

• 1:03:23David Pierce?

  You can use any email address or phone number in your iCloud account to log into your iCloud account. So you don't have to remember which is like your official iCloud password. Stage manager is much better. There's some like free form windowing that's much closer to what we've been looking for for a long time. And finally, there is a thing, if you have Apple TV 4K and a HomePod, that just enhances dialogue. So you can actually hear what the hell is going on in all of your TV shows. There's more, but that's all my favorite stuff.

• 1:03:47Nilay Patel?

  I have to say, saying stage manager is much better. Bold, David. We'll see.

• 1:03:53David Pierce?

  We will see if stage manager is much better. I would say I am on the record more than most as someone who thinks stage manager sucks and should be killed and buried. But they said free windowing several times to us.

• 1:04:04Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  So I am hopeful that Apple has finally done the thing it obviously should have done the whole time.

• 1:04:09Alex Cranz?

  I hope it's, I hope it's the jankiest free windowing ever. Just because I want to see David's face.

• 1:04:15Nilay Patel?

  Just to torture me.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  Being like, ah.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I want to say. I've been thinking about this a lot as I was going through that list. One, as they add free windowing to the iPad, just turn the iPad into a Mac. It's fine. Second, they are almost completely out of excuses to add a touchscreen to the Mac because they always complain that people have their hands tired holding them up in the air. And then they announced the Vision Pro where you control it by waving your hands around in the air. Just saying, everybody.

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  Let me touch my screen.

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to take a break. That's enough Apple talk. We're going to bring on Liz. We're going to talk a little crypto and we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back. It's the first cast.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/AF. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now?

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  Expense reports, receipt chasing, month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/AF.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Liz Lopato is here. Hey, Liz.

• 1:06:10Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm operating as a fucking unlicensed security exchange in the USA, bro.

• 1:06:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God. Well, it's the first cast, everybody, with Liz on it.

• 1:06:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's what else do we need to know?

• 1:06:20Nilay Patel?

  So before we get started with Liz talking about what's going on at Binance, literally as we've been recording, Alex Heath is live blogging and internal meta all hands. Very good. I just want to read you two quotes. Here's Zuckerberg on the Apple Vision Pro. "I really think their announcement showcases differences in the values and vision that our companies bring to this in a way I think is important. The quest is about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer and doing things together. By contrast, every demo Apple showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves. That could be the future of computing, but like, that's not the one I want. The like is important."

• 1:06:52Speaker 06

  I think that's very important.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 06

  That's so good. Like, it's really good.

• 1:06:56Nilay Patel?

  It's a good Zuck response. And then they showed the Twitter competitor, Project 92. We think it's going to be called Threads. Surprise, it looks like an Instagram comment section. Because it's being built by the Instagram team.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  Shocked.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited about this. It's going to be interoperable with Activity Pub.

• 1:07:11Alex Cranz?

  The joy on your face just now.

• 1:07:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm very excited about this, but that is really like I cannot overstate the extent to which it just looks like the Instagram comments, which is fine.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  It's super.

• 1:07:21David Pierce?

  It just is Instagram comments.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The question is whether they're going to activity pub the rest of Instagram, which I think would be very fascinating, but that's on the site. Now you can go look at that picture. You can go read the Zuck quotes. Alex is going to have more in command line. He is, we just spent a bunch of time with him at the Apple event. Alex Ethan reporter mode, very good.

• 1:07:37David Pierce?

  It's good times.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  Very good. A burst of pure energy. Anyway, that's that. Go look at it on the site. Liz.

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  Hi.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of reporter mode, there's been a lot of crypto news this week happening in the background of the Apple event, and it appears that people are going to go to jail. What's going on?

• 1:07:53Speaker 06

  Well, we only have civil suits so far, though I have to say the Binance civil suit kind of looks like they've stapled a criminal complaint to a civil suit. So I'm very excited for whatever the DOJ is gonna do. But there are a couple of things. The first thing is that Binance and Coinbase have both been accused of operating as unlicensed securities exchanges in the US. Now, obviously Coinbase is going to fight this because it's an existential threat to their business model.

• 1:08:19Nilay Patel?

  And they're like the good boys or like the wannabe good boys?

• 1:08:22Speaker 06

  They're the wannabe good boys. And like, to be clear, the facts, like the fact patterns in the cases are really different. So like, if you look at the Coinbase complaint, it's pretty buttoned up and it's a little bloodless. And that's fine. That's kind of what I expected out of Coinbase. I didn't expect any like group chats called Wired fraud or like, you know, exciting things from the chief compliance officer where he talks about using VPNs to get around geo fencing, you know, like the fun stuff that we've seen already from the CFTC complaint against Binance.

• 1:08:57David Pierce?

  But at the same time, doesn't, doesn't the SEC basically also just kind of say Coinbase is illegal?

• 1:09:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:09:03Speaker 06

  100%.

• 1:09:04David Pierce?

  So it's like, it's a very like kind way of being like, your business is a bad one. Stop doing it.

• 1:09:09Speaker 06

  Well, so here's, here's the thing is like how I'm looking at it or how I'm thinking about it. Anyway, like to the degree that Coinbase has done anything illegal, it's like a procedural crime. Like they're not screwing their customers. There's no wash trading. They're not being accused of like any of a variety of things that would make you lose confidence in Coinbase as a company custoding your tokens, right?

• 1:09:35David Pierce?

  We just call those things FTXing now. They're not FTXing.

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  You know who is FTXing though is fucking Binance.

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  Right, so the Coinbase one is like, the SEC is basically saying, most crypto tokens are securities. To run a security, to run an exchange, you need to be registered and follow those rules. None of you have done that illegal.

• 1:09:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, right.

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  And Coinbase is like, oh, we don't think that's illegal. And like, that's like a good natured, sort of like, university debate club argument. And they have known for a long time the argument is coming. Binance, I mean, I saw one note from like their chief compliance officer that's like, bro, we're running a fucking unlicensed security exchange, which is how Liz started the episode, like, that's crazy.

• 1:10:19Speaker 06

  His name is Philip Lim, he's like not named in this complaint, but he is named in the CFT, or sorry, not Philip Lim, Samuel Lim. He's named in the CFTC complaint, and there's like a bunch of stuff here where like it's trivially obvious who likes talking, even though it's like, oh, it's CEO A, it's CEO B, who by the way, singing like birds. Like, I don't know if you were catching that, but they are already testifying. So I thought the Binance complaint was like really interesting because I think there must be a criminal case coming because so much of what's happening here does seem like DOJ stuff. And we've already heard a little bit about like Binance sanction evasion stuff. And like, there was a Reuters report last year about like Binance coming in to meet with the DOJ to talk about maybe doing a plea deal.

• 1:11:03Speaker 06

  And like, we haven't seen a plea deal, so maybe the DOJ is amassing more information, and I don't know. But like, to me, these are, these are, there are several remarkable things going on. Thing one is that we had a bill introduced last Friday, so right before both of these complaints dropped, by House Republicans to deal with this sort of token issue and decide whether they're securities or commodities. And if they are securities, giving them a route to become commodities. And frankly, I don't think this bill's going to go anywhere because the Democrats control the Senate. But it is really curious timing to drop both of these suits immediately afterwards. And the Coinbase suit was dropped the same day that Paul Gruel, who I

• 1:11:48Speaker 06

  I think is their chief legal officer was testifying. So, you know, that's like a cute little present from the SEC.

• 1:11:55Alex Cranz?

  Very polite.

• 1:11:55Speaker 06

  So that's interesting to me, but both of these are massive cases and both of them have the possibility of setting policy about what is and is not a security when it comes to digital assets. And I don't necessarily know that the SEC has the resources to try them both at the exact same time, which makes me very suspicious about like a forthcoming criminal complaint with Binance.

• 1:12:21Nilay Patel?

  Because the DOJ is so well staffed and under no pressure at all. Faces no political headwinds whatsoever.

• 1:12:27Alex Cranz?

  Definitely not busy with some other stuff.

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  But the case against Binance is essentially like it's amazing how similar it seemed to me to be the case against FTX, which is essentially, we have a lot of money and we're using it in thoroughly bonkers, totally inappropriate, extremely illegal ways. And Binance-

• 1:12:45Alex Cranz?

  But Binance didn't run out of money.

• 1:12:46David Pierce?

  But Binance was also a big part of the reason FTX ran out of money.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:12:50David Pierce?

  Like Binance started the run against FTX that led to all of this in a very real way. And now is kind of being chased down the same road, it seems like.

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  Not to say I told you so, but I did point out at the time that CZ had basically painted a gigantic target on his back by kicking all of this off. And like, this is like the first of what I think is going to be several arrows getting fired at him. Because like, yeah, you're right, like they absolutely like that absolute like Twitter beef, the run that then revealed the fraud, like intimately involved. But what's interesting here is that there seems to be a bunch of allegations that feel pretty FTX like. So all of these, there are all of these corporate entities that are controlled directly by CZ. You have CPZ Holdings, you have Binance Holdings Limited, which is what runs Binance.

• 1:13:45Speaker 06

  You have Sigma Chain, you have Merit Peak, and you have Coin Market Cap. And the ones that matter for our purposes are Sigma Chain and Merit Peak. Because some of the allegations in here involve stuff that feels very familiar. So like, for instance, we have Binance transferring $17 million from BAM Trading, and that's the parent company for Binance US, to Merit Peak. And then the BAM CEO being like, uh, where did you get that money? And where's it going?

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  You don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

• 1:14:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, just keep going. The literal quote is, I'm on a wild goose chase to make sure that we have knowledge of where $17 million is moving around.

• 1:14:30Nilay Patel?

  Wow. So let's zoom out. We all lived through crypto summer. Expressing any skepticism of crypto at that time was met with a just open hostility that we were stopping the future of all finance. And the questions we were asking, I would say, were not overly skeptical. It was more like, hey, doesn't it seem like you're trading securities? Right? Like, doesn't it seem like these are all just Ponzi schemes? The line's going up for no reason. What's the utility of these? Like, pretty basic questions. And it feels like maybe that industry has come to its logical endpoint. Right? Where like they are almost like banks or almost like stock exchanges. And now they're just going to have to be those things if they want to survive at all.

• 1:15:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, look, here's, here's the thing. It's funny you mention things going up for no reason because we have allegations of wash trading in this complaint. And for those of you who are maybe not familiar with wash trading, it's when I buy an asset from myself for an increased price to make the asset price go up. And it is like illegal. Like, that's like, that's not a question we have. We have laws about that. It's illegal. And so one of these entities, Sigma Chain, is alleged to have been involved with wash trading on binance.us. And there were a couple of periods where that seems to have been a big deal. And there's, again, a quote here where they're talking about volume.

• 1:15:57Speaker 06

  And one employee messages the CEO and is like, FYI, these are all Sigma Chain. And then lists 20 account numbers. Oh, no. So that's not great. So when we say things went up for no reason, I'm not convinced there was no reason. I think there may have been some market manipulation involved. And you may in fact remember, like, when we were talking about NFTs during this time, one of the use cases I suggested was money laundering. And money laundering and wash trading often go hand in hand. So I am like very interested in all of this because reading between the lines, it seems like there's some like real wild shit going on at Binance.

• 1:16:36Alex Cranz?

  And right now, Binance CZ is obviously under fire. And he's saying that this might affect Binance US, but not Binance overall, correct? Like, what happens?

• 1:16:47David Pierce?

  This is my favorite thing you did all week, Liz. I just want to, I just want to give you credit for this. Because what that tweet is, is the tweet that everyone sends right before it all falls apart. Where they say, this only affects our stuff in the US. Most of our stuff is elsewhere. It's no problems. Everything's going to be fine. Or they say the reverse, like this will affect everything, but our customers in the United States will be fine. Because whatever, it's regulated. And what almost always happens right after that is absolutely everything collapses spectacular. And you just, you did this quick post on the site that was basically like that tweet, and then a bunch of links to all of the bad things that happen to people right after they tweet this. And I just very much enjoyed that.

• 1:17:22Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's, you know, you wind up with these weird grooves in your brain after like covering this beat for too long, where you see one of those tweets and you go, uh-oh.

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  Although I will say that, like, again, if there is a ton of wash trading going on, and a lot of this stuff is CZ himself, then maybe it doesn't collapse because CZ doesn't want his own business to collapse. I don't know. There are just like a lot of question marks to me now around Binance, period, that, you know, didn't necessarily exist before. Like, you know, I gossip a lot. It's like one of my favorite things to do. I grew up in a small town. Like, it's just one of my hobbies. And even the people I talk to who like CZ think he's pretty cutthroat. So I'm interested to see how this all plays out because I think that he is kind of getting painted into a corner here. And what happens after that is like, question mark, question mark, question mark.

• 1:18:18Alex Cranz?

  And he's not going to do the altruism, let me go on the New York Times stage to talk about all of the crimes.

• 1:18:23David Pierce?

  The co-conference coming up, CZ.

• 1:18:25Speaker 06

  Hey CZ, you want to come on the Vergecast?

• 1:18:27David Pierce?

  Bring it on. CZ and the Vergecast would be amazing.

• 1:18:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, sold.

• 1:18:30David Pierce?

  Screw crypto, let's talk USBC.

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, I just want to come back to that big zoom out question again. We went through the crypto hype cycle. We are now in very much crypto winter. Even like Andreessen Horowitz, I mean, Mark Andreessen is like publishing long screeds about why AI is fine, actually. Just let it have your job. It's, is it over? Is it coming back? What's gonna, what's going on here?

• 1:18:50Speaker 06

  It's a good question. I don't know if it's over. I will say that one thing that I think about a lot is that crypto launched into an extended period of low interest rates when there was a lot of like free money like flopping around. And we're now back in a normal interest rate environment. And so that's affected a lot of stuff in tech. Um, it's affected a lot of startups. It's affected a lot of VCs. Obviously it's like affected some of the banks. And I'm interested to see what happens to crypto in a normal interest rate environment because it has never existed in one before. Do I think all crypto is over? Probably not. I have a hard time imagining that like as entrenched as Bitcoin and maybe even Ethereum are, that they, they go to zero anytime soon.

• 1:19:34Speaker 06

  But I do think there's a lot less, there are going to be a lot fewer token projects. And I think a lot of these token projects are going to have trouble continuing. So we'll see. You know, crypto people like to talk about going through cycles and like crypto winter and like we rebuild during crypto winter. And it's true, there have been like periods of like serious dips in the market where like people stopped being as interested and then there's another bull run. But all of those things happened in a previous interest rate environment that we are no longer in.

• 1:20:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. The thing I've been trying to figure out is, I think on the one hand, if you're a crypto true believer, there have been so many versions of this already that you're just sort of immune to it. Like if, if you've gone through all of this over the last 18 months and you still believe in crypto, I don't know that this is gonna blow up that belief in any kind of meaningful way. But at the same time, if ever there were going to be two dominos that topple the rest of them, I would think it would be Binance and Coinbase. That they're kind of, they, as it has been set up, Binance in particular is like, has been so ruthless in order to be kind of the biggest last thing standing. And you would think if it collapses. Or even just sort of takes a real, meaningful hit that that might scare people again.

• 1:20:49David Pierce?

  I don't know. I've been, I'm like, I'm torn between those two ideas.

• 1:20:53Speaker 06

  Well, there's, there's that, but it's worth keeping in mind that DeFi is also a thing. So there are decentralized exchanges that are difficult to meaningfully shut down, even if you decide that they're illegal. There are like technical ways to get around some of this stuff, but I agree with you. I think, you know, there's one possibility is that crypto like quits and that's the end of it. One possibility is that like, you know, there's no more crypto in the U.S., but it continues elsewhere in the world. And, you know, some of the best arguments I've heard for the existence of crypto have to do with countries outside the U.S., basically. I'm not sure that crypto is a perfect solution for some of those problems, but I understand where people are coming from when they find it interesting. Okay. You know, it's, it's, it's something we could argue about. That seems like a reasonable topic for debate.

• 1:21:36Speaker 06

  So there, those are two possibilities that, that could happen. There are a couple of other possibilities. So one of them is you may know that there, again, I mentioned legislation early here. There is a possibility that because this litigation takes so long, we get some kind of legislation that renders these lawsuits moot, which is the best case scenario for Coinbase. Because Coinbase, I don't think is going to settle. I think this is an existential threat to them. They're going to fight it all the way. That's going to be years, like the big Ripple case, which was one of the previous things about whether crypto is or is not a security, is still ongoing and it's like from the previous, um, you know, iteration of the SEC pre-Gensler.

• 1:22:15David Pierce?

  And even Coinbase's response to the lawsuit was very funny because they essentially said like, please just tell us what the rules are. And I don't know how genuine that is or not. And I think they'd obviously happily exist in a world without rules for as long as possible. But their, their response is basically like, just stop yelling at us and just tell us what to do. And I kind of, I kind of get that.

• 1:22:35Speaker 06

  I'm a little sympathetic to that, actually, because they were allowed to go public. And one of the things that the SEC does is review all of the disclosures of, you know, what the risks are. And like, if you're a marijuana company, uh, because the SEC lets a marijuana company go public, even though it's illegal, there is a disclosure that marijuana is federally illegal. The filing, right? There are disclosures in that filing, if you go back and look, that suggest that there is regulatory uncertainty, but the disclosure is not, we're running an unlicensed exchange and the SEC may crack down. And you know, the SEC got a chance to take a look at that. So I kind of am a little sympathetic to them feeling jerked around.

• 1:23:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like I said, Brian Armshiong, Coinbase, they're the ones who've been like, they've been the good boys.

• 1:23:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:19Speaker 06

  They're trying to be, yeah.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like he like made a documentary about how hard it is to be good. You know, like about himself, no one should watch it. It was just like, but like, that's like, when you're trying the most hard, right? And whereas like, I think CZ and Binance were like, we're the renegades and no one can stop us, which I, you know me, that's, that's my son.

• 1:23:39Speaker 06

  You love a pirate ship.

• 1:23:41Nilay Patel?

  But like, that's the one that like, the king of England comes and shoots your pirate ship at the end. You know, like, like Coinbase was like, what if, I've got colonial metaphors for days, I'm just going to stop it. But it's like, what if we were the ambassadors of the crown? Like, that's the game that they were trying to play.

• 1:23:58Speaker 06

  I do think that the FTX collapse significantly changed the political environment around cryptocurrency in such a way that may have influenced this particular lawsuit. I don't know whether that's just that it sort of lit a fire under the ass of the SEC or something else occurred. But I do know there's been a longstanding turf war between a lot of these federal agencies about who actually is in charge of regulating crypto. And it's part of the reason that we haven't seen a ton of action until relatively recently. So I'm, I'm really curious to see how this plays out politically, separately from how it plays out legally, because the political factor is, I think, undeniable here.

• 1:24:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Nilay Patel?

  All right. We'll see what happens next. I Liz quick posting away during the Apple event.

• 1:24:46Speaker 06

  It was incredible.

• 1:24:47Nilay Patel?

  It was so good. One of the funniest duels, like The Verge contains multitudes.

• 1:24:51Speaker 06

  It was beautiful.

• 1:24:52Nilay Patel?

  Deeply entertaining. Liz, always great to have you on.

• 1:24:54Speaker 06

  Oh, thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:24:56Nilay Patel?

  We got to wrap this thing up. We've done a lot of Verge casting this week, I want to say.

• 1:24:59David Pierce?

  We've also made Neelai a full half hour late for a meeting, which I'm very proud of.

• 1:25:03Speaker 06

  It's so good.

• 1:25:04Nilay Patel?

  I feel good. I feel good about that. I would rather be hanging out with you guys than any of my suit stuff that I gotta do. But great to see you, Liz. Thank you both. That's it. That's a Verge cast. Dopamine fast. I'm gonna do it. I'm going in the darkness like Aaron Rodgers and when I come out, I'm gonna play for the Jets. It's gonna be great. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:25:27Speaker 01

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:25:59Speaker 07

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever

• 1:26:42Speaker 07

  you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 1:26:51Speaker 08

  As a pioneer in the organic and natural food industry, The Whole Foods Market philosophy is rooted in a shared connection to people and to the planet. From farmland to stores, its products have always been a symphony of colors, textures, and flavors. In addition to its national brands, Whole Foods Market's team of local foragers continually scours the country to bring over 60,000 emerging and local products to its shelves each year. And they work with credentialed experts and top-of-the-line makers to offer customers the best possible variety. Shop Whole Foods Market in-store or online.