We unfolded the iPhone Duo

Apple did the one more thing: This week it announced its much-anticipated folding phone. It also announced some surprising and controversial new AI features for Apple Watch, including "Live Rewind," which gives the user a text transcript of the last 15 seconds of real life. On today's Vergecast, Allison Johnson and Vee Song report back from California after having more hands-on time with Apple's new devices. Plus, Nilay Patel and David Imel take another swing at discussing Mac Minis and local LLMs with AI researcher CJ Trowbridge. Finally, Allison and Jake tackle some non-Apple stories in the truly rapid-fire thunder round. Further reading: iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max: Our first hands-on impressions The variable aperture isn’t the cool part of the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera Hands-on with the foldable iPhone Duo Hands-on with the new Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 Apple Watch Series 12 has an always-on Siri that makes AI recaps of your day Read the Apple document explaining how new listening features still protect your privacy Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn’t use their work OpenAI’s sly mathematical breakthrough sends a chill through academia Drama swirls around OpenAI’s legendary mathematical milestone The Trump phone just got a $250 price hike Six years later, Sony revisits its legendary XM4 headphones Hori’s electronic Ocarina of Time requires no musical talent. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 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.

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• 1:30Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of devices with two or more displays. I'm Jake Kastanakis, executive editor of The Verge. And we have a very big and very fun show today. We're talking all about Apple's event. We're going to go into the iPhone Duo. We're going to talk about the Apple Watches. We've got a special segment with Neelai Patel and David Amell talking about running local LLMs on your Mac. And then, the Thunder Round returns. But first, we're starting things off with Allison Johnson, who is here, joining us from California, where she has just been at Apple's event. Allison, so glad you're here.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Hello.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  We have so much to talk about. We're going to get to the Duo. But to me, this is so much bigger than the Duo. Right? This is John Turnis's first event as Apple CEO. And I think a thing that most people don't see is that they stopped doing the live events. But before they air the video for everyone in person, Tim Cook has traditionally come out and said, "Good morning," and all that, and said a little thing. And John Turnis did that this year. And I'm curious how it felt seeing him and what that presentation was like. Because this was really his first, I think, public-ish appearance as Apple CEO.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was. There was a lot of anticipation for it, I think. And we do that thing where, you know, the inside baseball is we kind of file into the Steve Jobs theater. And we're way up in the nosebleeds. Not that it's a big theater. But the execs are kind of milling around down by the stage. And it was so. I think it really hit me when we saw Tim Cook down there, kind of with jaws and everybody wearing like a leisure jacket. I was like, looking super relaxed. It was like, oh, wow. This is, this really isn't his show anymore. So Turnis came out. I thought, he didn't say a whole lot.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  He was out there to kind of tee everything up and cue up the video that we were all going to sit and watch. But you know, there was, there was a lot of confidence and energy. And I think it's kind of a, he's setting a vibe, I think, for the, for the Turnis era.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  First off, I love that there's a whole new visual style for the retired-ish Tim Cook. I'm looking forward to seeing what he busts out now that he's, he's not CEO. But yeah, it was interesting. So Turnis, in the video, he also opened with some remarks kind of reflecting on the, the privilege of being Apple's CEO. It's very interesting. In the video, he did not, it doesn't say, "I'm John Turnis, the new Apple CEO." He doesn't say, "I'm the CEO now." They kind of just throw to him. And he's not labeled. And he just gives these remarks. And he says, "I want to take a moment to express what an extraordinary privilege it is to represent the teams here at Apple." I'm just going to read, you know, a very brief and I think like slightly rough transcript.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  But he mentions, you know, that he's been there for 25 years and that he could never have imagined being up there as CEO. And there's this thing he says where, you know, "I love the idea that the things we make, make people more productive and let them do things they never thought possible before." And, you know, he, he gets almost in that sort of like Johnny Ive headspace of, you know, "We imagine new things and make them real and put these new things into people's lives." And, you know, I think maybe they don't have that many opportunities to do that. And maybe it feels, this would feel tired if he said it every single year. But it does, it feels, you know, nice to hear from the new guy that he's taking that, I think, Apple creative spirit forward.

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there was a lot of emphasis on the phone and the technology as the, they called it "the personal intelligent hub" or something like that. And I think trying to like, set the stage ahead of all the, you know, the specs and all the things we were there for to kind of remind everybody, you know, the, the Apple ethos, at least the one they, they project on stage at a keynote, is like, "This is here for you." It's, you know, it's centered around you and your needs. And, you know, he got up and said it. So there's, that was, that was the tone he set. You know, Apple has a funny way

• 6:09Speaker 03

  of like tiptoeing around things when they want to. But yeah, for him to come out and was like, AI, you know, he wasn't talking about Apple Intelligence only, was interesting. And I think it was, they, they understand the, the difficult position that they're in. You know, they want to push these AI features. The new Siri is like, actually finally good. All this stuff on the watch that V is going to have some existential feelings about later.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  So many feelings.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think maybe that it was kind of to get ahead of that and be like, "We are going there. We're getting into the AI. We know it's messy right now." That's kind of how I read it. It was sort of like, you, you say the thing that everybody is kind of nervous about and then break the ice was what he was hoping.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I also thought they did this really interesting structure to the event this year within all of the products. And you noted this in the live blog. They started with the iPhone Pro, right? And they opened all software, right? And they did this with the watches, too. The first half of the presentation, all software. They don't, they barely tell you what's new about the hardware. And I, I can't remember them doing it to quite this extent before, can you?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  No. And to be, I don't know what the, the time was. It, we were definitely less than like 10 minutes in. And it was like, iPhone 18 Pro, here it is. And we're like, oh, my God. That's usually, we have to wait till the very end for this usually. So it did feel like, whoa, we're off to the races. And then it was like, okay, we're staring, we're seeing a bunch of stuff. We saw it, duh duh. You can change the series voice. Great, cool. People probably didn't tune in to that who are maybe paying attention now. It was a little bit of whiplash for us. It makes sense that, you know, they, there's, there's frankly not a ton to talk about, hardware-wise, particularly on the Pro, that they wanted to be like,

• 8:19Speaker 03

  "And by the way, remember all this, this stuff that you're going to see for the first time?"

• 8:24Speaker 02

  I know, it's so painful for us because I'm like, "Tell me about the dual aperture camera." Very blouter. This is the thing. If they had gotten in early, I would have gotten this straight. But instead, they're, and I think this probably makes sense from them from a marketing's perspective. They're focused on the experiences that their software can create, which is often Apple's advantage. Let's talk about the Pro a little bit because that's where the event started. Thoughts on the Pro? You excited?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Well, I have complicated feelings about, I mean, to a camera nerd, I'm excited for, you know, we have, for the first time, like Pro actual manual exposure controls in iPhone Camera app. Like, amazing. I'm here for it. And we have the variable aperture on the main camera lens. I have questions and thoughts about that. But you know, it's a, it's a cool camera feature. And then outside of that, it was, there was so little. You know, there's a little bit of, I mean, obviously, the A20 Pro in both the phones. And then some improvements to battery. It sounded like the, the Pro Max

• 9:34Speaker 03

  is getting a actually slightly bigger battery, maybe dependent on if you have an ESIM model. So that's a, that's a real tangible benefit. So it was kind of like, well, That's sort of it hardware wise.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it feels like a very, and I think like very polished version of the 17 Pro. It looks great. Like, I think the colors are delightful this year. But you're right, it's there are these very advanced and nuanced camera features that I think are like truly for professionals in like a serious way. And that's, that's sort of it in terms of very high level hardware features that are going to get people excited. So the variable aperture, you can move from what's it's around like F 1.4 up to F4, or down to F4, I should say. And that lets you let less light in and get more in focus, which is, is a genuine photography tool.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  But to me, that sounds a little dicey because if you're doing that on a sensor this small, my guess is you're going to run into some possible issues with, with noise.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's where I'm a little puzzled. So the like, the lead that they buried is that the aperture is actually brighter now. It's F 1.48, I think, is the, the brightest stop. So that's cool. That lets in more light. That'll be a benefit in your low light photos.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  But then they have the, the ability now you can stop it down manually down to F4. And yeah, I'm a little perplexed. I can see that maybe like going to that very bright F 1.48 was not going to be ideal in every situation. If you are, you know, the, the depth of field is this, just that much narrower. Could cause problems if you're trying to take a picture of something like closer in low light and only the very top of the thing is in focus. Or if you're taking pictures of multiple people, I don't know. So I think that's why they introduced this ability to stop down

• 11:52Speaker 03

  and to extend the depth of field. But for the most part, you're, most things are in focus when you're taking pictures with a phone. The sensor is tiny, the lens is tiny, so the aperture is tiny.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  If you're talking about it in terms of full frame equivalence, it's, you're already at something like F7. When you start at that, like F 1.48.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  It introduces all kinds of wild things of, you know, we have the, the fake bokeh mode, the portrait mode that we've all been using for years. I use it a ton with my kid. It sort of fudges those F stops in terms of a full frame camera. So it'll, you go to F 1.8, you get a beautiful like blurry background. All of a sudden, you're, you're having physical aperture on the camera lens. You go to F 1.8, you're like, this, this is nothing like the portrait mode photo.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  It's just, I could spiral about the, the aperture, but I won't do that right now.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  It, it is very fascinating because again, it's like, this is a thing that I carry around a camera all the time and man, like half this stuff is like over my head. I, I'm not sure that the average person is going to be able to take advantage of this. There is an auto mode, but to me, the variable aperture makes the most sense when you pair it with all the software stuff they're doing for the Pro camera, which legitimately looks quite detailed and quite impressive, right? Like they're letting you dial in white balance and, and shutter speed and things of that. So we're obviously the aperture. Again, that stuff is like really pro level.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  I think it takes a long time to use those controls on a phone screen. But Apple's pretty serious about this stuff, right? They film all of their events on their phones. And I think there is a subset of people who are really going to make use of that. And perhaps, perhaps the variable aperture is for that group of people. I'm not sure how it's going to be useful day to day. But when you look at it as a suite of Pro camera features, that sort of makes sense to me. So I think that's sort of the high level for the Pro. Let's talk about it, the iPhone Duo.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  It starts at $1,999 for the 256GB model, gets up to $3,199 for the 2TB model, which please, if, if you're somebody who's going to get a 2TB model, email me and tell me what you're going to do with that storage. That is bananas.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  So 5.4 inch outer display, 7.6 inch inner display. It's got two cameras on the back, one on the inside that's under the display and one on the outside on the, the front. I think that's, that's the high level. Allison, you actually got to see this in person. You've handled a bunch of foldables before. What are your impressions?

• 15:04Speaker 03

  It's really nice, you know? I, I think the, when the rumors, you started getting serious about Apple doing the, this wide format foldable, you know, we, we've started seeing them over the summer from, from different competitors and the, the Z Fold 8 is obviously the big wide fold thing. And you, you look at any of them, at least I did, just like the pictures and the renders. And you're like, that looks weird, like that looks like just like a weird phone. And then you go pick it up and you're like, no, actually this feels very nice. It feels kind of natural and I'm not bothered by this kind of unusual

• 15:49Speaker 03

  wider aspect cover screen. You know, opening it up, I, the, the iPhone Duo in particular has that, the matte display on the inside, which is super nice. It, I think is just a, a good idea on the inside of a folding phone like this. It really cuts down on the glare, gives it more of like a, I am now using a tablet feel, you know? That, that was very pleasant. The crease is hard to see though, you know, we were sort of seeing that devices that had been folded more times than the ones we were using

• 16:33Speaker 03

  in the hands on area were, were showing a little bit more of a crease. But again, like I, I'm not personally bothered by the crease on, on any foldable. They've definitely gotten a lot better. But this, this one seems very acceptable. Definitely to my eye. It just, it seems like a nice polished device, like so far.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  The, the hardware on foldables as a category has gotten just so dramatically nicer over the past five or so, or however many years it's been at this point. You know, starting with the like, this thing is fragile and if I look at it wrong, it's going to break. To, you know, I, I literally just, just today held a Z Fold 8 and it is a, a gorgeous piece of hardware. It feels, it feels really, really elegant. And I think you look at, I unfortunately haven't had a chance to hold the iPhone Duo yet. I've seen the photos, seen the videos. It looks fantastic. It looks like a really nice device. You've held the Z Fold 8. Are, are they similar? Because they're both, the Z Fold 8 seems quite polished, actually. For, I think we expect Apple to kind of come in and show everyone how it's done.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  And I actually think Samsung may have gotten there this, the same summer or perhaps earlier.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a very similar experience. Z Fold 8, I think is a bit thinner and lighter and the, the Duo. It's, it is that weird experience of you're having such an out of body. You know, you, you watch the keynote, you have to run over to the devices. It was crazier than ever this year, which is not a surprise, I guess. But you, you finally get the thing in your hands and you have to sort of like come back to it. You know, after the initial, yeah, I've got to get the photos. I gotta, you know, get some thoughts together on this. It wasn't until like, they're basically trying to kick us out. And I was like, let me, let me hold the Duo one more time.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  And just kind of like thinking about it and not in that like isolation. I was like, this, this is a little bit heavier. Like this will be a consideration for how people want to. It, it's just a different form factor. It's a different kind of distribution of the weight. I think one thing that I'm kind of stoked about is that it has MagSafe and I can put the frigging pop socket on the back of it when, when I want a little like support with the form factor. So I'm excited there are magnets in the back of this wide foldable.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  That's a, that's a big one. It, it is interesting. I think, you know, usually these, these differences in hardware are kind of marginal. And I think on the foldables, it's actually still a big deal. And you mentioned it, the iPhone Duo is a touch heavier than the Z Fold 8. It's a touch thicker than the Z Fold 8. And I think at that size, these things do still matter. But the, the question is, do they matter as much as the experience of using it? And I think a big part of the story on the Android side is that the software is not always there to make it a fantastic experience or to sell this. You got to see this, obviously in Apple's very, very polished curated environment.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  How was the software? Did it feel like this is going to be something that is meaningfully better or different than using a standard iPhone or just using an iPad mini to you?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  This, I think, will be a little bit more of foldable on training wheels, which is, which makes sense, I think, for, for the iPhone. You know, we've had eight years of Samsung foldables and inner screens and, and in Samsung's, you know, typical way, they're like, you can run four apps on this thing if you want. And I think the, um, the target audience for that phone is like, great, that's what I want. I want to be able to do all my things and I'm okay with a little wonkiness. You know, sometimes I, you have to futz with it a little bit. The Duo is going to let you run two apps as a maximum.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  You can have that floating like picture in picture, um, video, if you were watching a video also. But it seems like they've, they've just taken a lot of care, particularly with the continuity of how it is when it's folded versus how it is when you open it up. And it sounds like they really didn't want it to feel like two different experiences, which is a very Apple approach to it all, I think. I, I think the, the more common approach for the Android devices has been like, you know, getting the hardware to the point where it is now, um, you know, elevating it and it's more sophisticated than it was.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  And then sort of building on the software capabilities every year. But Apple coming out of the gate, you know, late into the foldable game, relatively speaking, they have to do that thing where it's like, super polished and it's going to be very friendly to someone who's maybe just familiar with an iPad and doesn't want to be running four apps at once. They just kind of want it to, to work and play videos when they want videos and do FaceTime and, and something else when they want it to do that. It seems like it will be that device, you know, pending actually using it a lot.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Software so often is where Apple has the advantage and, you know, watching the videos, watching people's hands ons. iOS looks, I, I think, so polished for this experience. It looks like they really did do a lot to make it look natural and fluid. I dare I say liquid glass looks good here.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Right?

• 22:41Speaker 02

  It's, I'm like, oh, maybe, maybe there's something, like I have it turned all the way down in the beta.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  And I look at it on, on the Duo and I'm like, oh, there's something here. But you're right, like it is very interesting. You met, you mentioned it's like a foldable on training wheels and I'm so curious what the trajectory of this is going to be because if you look at the iPad, they're like, one app, one app, one app. And then they're like, one app, you can slide one over, two apps and you can slide one. And then now it's like, we have three different multitasking models. You can choose whichever you'd like. And like, I, you know, this is V1 of an Apple foldable. I suspect it will get more complicated over time, but I don't necessarily know that it's a bad thing that Apple is being opinionated and being specific about how you should use

• 23:28Speaker 02

  the iPhone Duo in V1, particularly as they're trying to get app developers on board. Apple made a big point about how they went back through all of their apps to optimize them for the Duo's display. And they made a bunch of changes to iOS, right? The dock is perpetually on the right. The settings and whatnot are in the top right corner, which I actually think looks really natural and great. Did you have a chance to play around with any of that?

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Just kind of picking it up and, and looking at the home screen, you're like, this is different. This is a little bit of a different experience. Yeah, having the little like toolbar or, um, on the side of the screen and, um, and you open it up and you're like, that's where you're like, oh, okay, this was designed to make this feel like just one experience and not like one phone over here and one phone over here. I think it, it, it sort of faded into the background pretty quickly for me, just, just kind of like doodling around on the device. I guess we'll see how, how people react to it.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  It's, you know, it's kind of the obvious thing, but it is a huge deal when Apple messes with the iPhone in any way, you know? This is their, their first new form factor for this device and it's, you know, the, the pillar of their business. And, um, so I think they, they recognize that and, um, really like carried that thought all the way through, like, how should this be when it's closed? How should it be when it's open? What, what are the software changes that are going to make it feel better?

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And I think by virtue of this being Apple, they will probably sell quite a few of these. But it's also not necessarily a bad thing for them if this is not a, a total blockbuster because it does take time to get the app developers on board. It does take time to polish, you know, every corner that they might have, you know, overlooked in the operating system. And those are things that happen with time. And I think Apple is better at that than other companies at getting the developer ecosystem to come on board and to make sure that everything is eventually in place. All right, we've got a ton more to talk about. We're going to take a break. When we're back, V Song is going to join us and we're talking all about the Apple Watches.

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• 28:08Speaker 02

  All right, we're back and V Song is here to join us to talk about the new Apple Watches. V, glad you're here.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  I'm glad to be here.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  So there are two new watches, the Apple Watch Series 12, the Apple Watch Ultra 4. They were so similar over last year's models that Apple just sort of bundled them when they announced the two of them. They were like, we've got these watches, here's the whole family and now we're just going to tell you about software features because that's most of what's new here. So I, I kind of want to break it down because as far as I see it, there's sort of two big chunks of new features here. And one is a big hardware feature, but one that you're not necessarily going to see. And that's the improved sensor array. And the second is AI and ambient listening, which is wild.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  There's a lot to unpack there. So let's start with the hardware because I think that's more straightforward. So V, what's new here? There's the sensor array that touches your skin has been upgraded on both watches, correct?

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yes. So it's been a while since the sensor array has been upgraded at all. I would say, I think since the series six, maybe is the last time the sensor array changed. And there's been a lot of like engineering done to be different. So basically the crystal is a bit larger, although the case footprint is the same, like we're not going up in size and that's to ensure better skin contact. The electrode for the EKG, um, it used to have like two spokes coming out of it. They're calling them petals, um, but like these two lines that would come out. And now it has 32, so more data in that way. And the arrangements of the LEDs which emit light and the photo diodes which receive

• 29:53Speaker 03

  light, because that's how the optical sensors work, have been kind of condensed. The TLDR is that it's supposed to be a lot more accurate. We got a lot of questions about tattoos online and in our comments. And what I'm going to say is that it's going to depend on your tattoo and the placement of your tattoo because the fundamental underlying technology that it relies on light, how it reflects into your skin and reflects off of your skin, that has not changed. So like the sensor, the new sensor placement, depending on your tattoo and the darkness of your tattoo, that may help, it might not. So like the, the, the problem with this technology isn't like making light better.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  It's just like, that's just kind of the fundamental flaw of that technology. And the rearranging of all of this stuff says that they can now flash the lights more frequently. So it will take more, um, continuous heart rate measurements. So previously it used to be that when you were working out, yes, it would sample pretty frequently, but when you're just doing your day to day, it would be like once every five minutes or so, not very often. It's changed throughout the years because it wasn't, uh, they were trying to preserve battery life because if it was flashing more often, you would have more.

• 31:12Speaker 06

  Battery drain. Now they're going to be sampling once every five seconds, which is a 60 times increase in frequency. And they're also now going to be sampling recovery, HRV, heart rate variation, which is the difference between heartbeats and is a proxy for how recovered you feel. That's something that a lot of other wearables like the Oura Ring or Whoop or Garmin, all these other devices have been measuring for a very long time. Apple has also been measuring heart rate variability for a while, but it's differentiating it as recovery. So this is enabling a new readiness feature, which, you know, again, the wearable nerds out there will be like, everyone else has had a readiness feature

• 31:56Speaker 06

  for like five, six, seven, forever ago.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  There's no new sensor, right? It's not like this unlocks some new thing that they can track. But because they have more data, they actually are able to interpret it in new ways and get stuff like heart rate variability and this readiness scores. They went hard on heart rate variability. Is that, is that a big deal?

• 32:20Speaker 06

  The thing about wearables that like I want our readers to understand is that a lot of the times it's not measuring anything super directly. Like even your heart rate with the optical sensors, it's not measuring it directly. It's shining light into your skin, finding out the rhythm of your pulse based on how the light reflects back. And from that, an algorithm is estimating your heart rate. And we've gotten to a very high degree of accuracy with optical heart rate sensors compared to when wearable technology first came out. But heart rate variability as a metric, it's a proxy for your autonomic nervous system, which is kind of like a stress indicator, how recovered you are from certain things. And as wearables shifted towards sleep and recovery over the last several years,

• 33:05Speaker 06

  it's become a more prominent metric, especially among athletes.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Okay, while we're talking about mysterious health metrics and uncertain science, some of this stuff sounded scary. They were like, we'll tell you your longevity. We'll tell you the age of your, your body. And I'm like, oh God, like, can it actually tell that stuff? Does that mean anything?

• 33:34Speaker 06

  Basically, these, these companies are all measuring different metrics and they're weighting them in different ways in their proprietary algorithm to basically kind of give you an estimate as to whether your physiological age matches your chronological age. And the idea is you want to be younger or on par or younger. And if you are older, then maybe you want to change certain levers in your health so that you can be physiologically younger than your chronolo- I think it's a load of crock. I, like, if you're using it in the way that I think it was originally intended to like see areas of your life that statistically with the literature,

• 34:16Speaker 06

  we can say gives you a better chance of living longer? Okay, sure. Like you can be like, oh, maybe I'm not doing enough in terms of sleep. I should really change my sleeping habits so that it's more regular. Or, oh, I'm really like kind of eating pizza and fried chicken all day. And maybe I should eat a vegetable every now and then. In that sense, it's fine. But you know, you kind of get into it, like I've talked to several readers, several people out in the wild who are just like, my Whoop age, I got obsessed with lowering my Whoop age. And then, you know, I had one commenter who was just like, and then I got a blood test and found out I was really not doing so hot on that blood test. So it's like, your health is holistic, but it's just very much like, guys,

• 34:57Speaker 06

  let's use common sense, eat nutritionally most of the time, exercise regularly and try and sleep consistently. And your health age should be fine. Like you could get hit by a truck tomorrow and it won't matter that your health age was like 10 years younger than your physiological.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  This is the thing. Every single year I watch these Apple Watch presentations and I'm like, oh man, this is a major improvement over last year. And I've got to wear one of these things or else I'm going to know nothing and I won't be healthy. And then like three days later, I'm like, this is probably fine. Like I probably don't need all. Does this seem like a big level up to you? Does this seem like it's going to change what the Apple Watch can do? Is it going to displace, you know, the Whoop for Whoop diehards? Or is this actually just like another iterative? Okay, they're, they're adding more expected health features kind of year.

• 35:53Speaker 06

  It's, I think it's more towards the latter with an Apple twist. Like Apple doesn't really care about being the first to these health features. They care about executing it in a way that they think is scientifically valid and actionable. So like they, in last year, they introduced a sleep score, right? Every other wearable has had a sleep score for like ages now. Like it's, it's not new. And so like this health app redesign that's coming later in the year is very much kind of bringing it more in line with what we're seeing from other health tech companies. So in a sense it's catch up, but with an Apple twist. So one thing I do give them credit for is that they do try and take a much more conservative approach so that, you know, you can just engage with it to your degree of comfort.

• 36:38Speaker 06

  You know, I'm looking at their longevity tab that was in, in the keynote. And it's less objectionable than some of the other ones that I've seen in this space, which are really just kind of pushing you to the frontier edge. It's a lot more like, hey, we're going to take the generalized approach. It's going to be a lot more holistic and top level, which I think for the average person is the right choice, but you know.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Yes, it, you can see there's so much stuff in there now. So those are the health updates. To me, the, the more unexpected and more differentiated and wild update was what they did with AI. So Apple announced this thing called Audio Intelligence, which is just another, you know, AI acronym. And there are a bunch of subfeatures in this, but the two that I think are most striking are called Live Rewind and Siri Recap. V, can you, can you TLDR what these two are for me?

• 37:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Live Rewind is if you're in a situation, you're like, ah, what did someone just say? You press the crown twice and it like goes back 15 seconds in time and produces a transcript of what was said. So you can just check it on your wrist. And if you choose to save it, it will go into the Siri AI app.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  They, there's a new hardware chip that it's, it's recording nonstop to enable these features.

• 38:11Speaker 06

  Kind of, there's like, the way that it's described in like the privacy documents that it's come down, that's come out because I feel like Apple was very like, oh, people are going to have questions. So here is a white paper that was ready to go by the time the keynote had ended. There is something that they call a secure exclave on this chip that the audio is processed through supposedly. Apple can't access it, you can't access it. There are no audio recordings saved. So the raw audio file gets sent to this exclave. Beep boop bop, AI processing happens. That's a scientific term, beep boop bop, AI processing. And then that audio file is immediately deleted.

• 38:53Speaker 06

  There is a visual cue that is recording, that you are recording something on the wrist when it pops up, as well as an audio chime that also happens at the same time so that people around you are supposedly aware that this feature has been enabled. And you have to manually enable it at all times. So at no point are you going to be able to be like, what did someone say 30 seconds ago? Like that's, you're not going to be able to pull up a transcript of that. It's just boop.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  You have 15 seconds, that's it.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  You got 15 seconds. So it's like the second someone says something and you're like, ah, didn't catch that. You have to activate it for, for this thing to, to come up. And who knows if it's going to be any good, right? Because it's a mic on an Apple Watch. It has to be kind of, this mic doesn't have like long range frequency. It's not like you're going to be able to point this thing at something someone said very far away. It's kind of more what's in your immediate vicinity.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  The social use case for this is very mysterious to me. Like I both intuitively understand it where I'm like, oh yeah. There are definitely times when I'm like, I could not get that word. But, but what is the use case for? And so I will press a button on my wrist, which will then announce that I'm, I missed what you said and then read what you said instead of just asking you to say it again. I'm sure there are some accessibility use cases there. That feels very clear and Apple did highlight that. But for, for the, you know, day to day, for the millions and millions of people who have these, that feels very strange. And that's only one of them.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  So then there's Siri Recap, which I think takes us to a much grander level.

• 40:38Speaker 06

  Basically like when, when it's on, you'll get a recap of the conversations that you have. So like it'll detect that that conversation, it's, it's not fully accurate to say it's always on recording because you can customize when this feature works. So you can customize it to be like only during work hours or never on during later hours. So like you have some customization there. It is opt in, so it's not turned on by default. So it wouldn't be accurate to say that every Apple Watch that's out there is suddenly listening to everyone. That, that is not necessarily the case.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  But it has the ability, correct? It could, you could set it to always listen.

• 41:18Speaker 06

  You could set it to always listen. And when it detects that a conversation is happening, it'll produce high level meeting summaries that then appear in your Siri app and then auto deletes after seven days. So. It's kind of like, you know, how you're on a Zoom or Gemini or a Google Meet call and Gemini just like produces a summary of that meeting.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Which I gotta say, I love that. I like, those are really helpful.

• 41:51Speaker 06

  Though, like in certain contexts, I think there's gonna be a lot of people who find value in that particular thing. It's just, and this is a kind of a existential question that's been on my beat is there's, I know that I'm using it for a non creepy method. People around me don't know the parameters that I've defined that this feature will work. They don't know how I've configured it. They don't even know whether I have a model that's compatible with this feature because it does require the secure exclave on the chip. So it's not coming to previous models. And so in the whole world of Apple Watch users, the vast majority of people who will not

• 42:34Speaker 06

  upgrade this particular year because they have perfectly fine and functional Apple Watches, they don't have this capability on their device, right? So it's only people who get the new ones that have the potential to do that. And even then it has to be opt in. So there's that, there's just like a lot of like calculation that's going on in my brain right now as to how this feature will work for most people. But as I understand it, it's not a transcript. They strip attribution out. They don't differentiate speakers. So like us as journalists, you can't record a meeting and be like, oh yeah, I'm gonna go find quotes in there now. Like you can't do that.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Then it gets to this weirder place where it's like, okay, so you get this generic summary of all the conversations you had throughout your day. And so I'm gonna get a summary being like, you told somebody at length about GTA 6. They didn't care. Like, what am I gonna do with that? Like, I just, on one hand, I find this so wildly impressive from a technological standpoint. The fact that we're at a point where we can just leave a microphone running nonstop. We can use AI to make sense of it and summarize, like, that's very cool. Whether that actually produces useful insights, like we're, I don't know that we're there yet. This feels like a, we're doing it because it's cool.

• 43:56Speaker 06

  It's very much a thing that I think is useful in a work context or in a planning context, like if you're a parent and you have a lot of kids, you have to attend a lot of meetings for kids that have a lot of action items that come out of it. In these contexts, I think it can be useful and we already have the kind of technology in like this particular context where you're video conferencing and you're like, ah, what was the action item from this meeting that I need to do? Like in those contexts, I think that's what it's meant for. Like you attend a lecture and you want to know what the notes from that lecture are and the points that were salient. But from our like day to day conversations where you're just talking with friends, do you really need like a bullet point of what, who said what and where and why?

• 44:41Speaker 06

  Like, uh, not really. And also, again, like, no attribution is gonna be given in these, in these notes. So the way I understand it is like, I say something, the, the, the meeting notes from the Siri recap is never gonna say, V said this. There's no said in there. If there is a name that pops up, it'll be like, Amanda did her homework.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  It's just so interesting that they're like, we're not gonna make it too useful because then it would be really creepy. And so we're, it's like, we don't, we don't wanna go too far. But that is, that is the risk here, right? Like this is the summer that the Meta Ray-Bans switched from being this, you know, kinda hot up and coming product to being called perv glasses, like quite widely. And now Apple is like, oh, by the way, you know the smartwatch we make that millions of people buy every year? All of them now have the potential to record audio 24/7. I don't know how people are gonna feel about that.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  Based online, not particularly happy about it, which is sort of like interesting because in my comments, everyone has been like, Meta glasses, not Walmart, makes them, oh, wait for Apple's version, which, you know, like, is sort of like a soft launch here with a device that is like already used by a lot of people, trusted by a lot of people with a lot of sensitive information, right? Like smartwatches, they learn a lot about you in terms of your health and like, a lot of data is collected from them. So in one sense, Apple is sort of testing that philosophy, I think, about AI wearables. And like, if we come out and have a very strong privacy first thing here, we have

• 46:34Speaker 06

  a secure exclave, we're not recording audio, everything auto deletes, we're trying to keep in mind, it's not only your privacy, but the privacy of bystanders around you. Like it is one of the most thoughtful implementations of a privacy policy that I've seen in this class of device. And at the same time, I'm like, how, I mean, obviously they, they kind of want the press to communicate how it works and educate people. But I'm like, it's very difficult to have that stick in the public's mind. It's very hard to communicate this feature.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Yes. And I think there's this important distinction between can Apple keep your audio secure? I fully believe they can, right? I'm sure that this is quite well thought through. That's one side. The other side is, do people wanna be recorded? And I think for Apple, this is like, this is an area that they're stepping into in a big way. We're expecting them to release a pair of AirPods that have cameras on them next year that are going to probably do a very similar thing. And I think that's gonna make people uncomfortable in a, in a very new and unusual way. They're allegedly, you know, tinkering with an AI pin in their labs too, which is a thing

• 47:46Speaker 02

  that it's different when Humane does it and they sell a couple hundred of them versus when Apple does it and this thing becomes a true mainstream product. I think this is actually going to make the Apple Watches one of the most interesting products of the year. So V, I'm very excited for you to test these and see whether this stuff even works at a basic level. I think there's gonna be so much more to talk about here.

• 48:12Speaker 06

  I think it's also very telling that these features don't launch until later this year. So like.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Hmm, that is interesting. Yep. Still more to work on.

• 48:21Speaker 06

  Like some, some of the audio intelligence features are launching, but it's kind of like the lower stakes ones, like Shazam is gonna work better. Yay. Or like, audio, like it'll be able to tell on a doorbell, right? Yay. Like.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Okay, the Pixel has had like a 24/7 Shazam feature for, for like a decade now. And it is like one of the single best features in the Pixel. If they had just said, the Apple Watch now has 24/7 Shazam, baby, I think they would have sold so many new Apple Watches off that. They should, they should have kept it simpler.

• 48:54Speaker 06

  It's still the underlying concept, right? It's the same underlying concept that it's always listening so it can always Shazam.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  It's just telling me who's song, I'm not, that one I'm not stressing about. This, it's, but you're right. They've, they've all been listening the whole time. All of our, I'm not gonna say it, but you know that wake word? Like your phone is listening to you right now. It's very weird. And there's a gradient and like, Apple just took a large step forward.

• 49:21Speaker 06

  It just did a push. And it's, I, I, I have to say that I really feel like they are so aware of the conversation that's happening right now because of the documents. Those documents were ready to go before the keynote ended.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  Before the keynote ended, they were like, and here's how it works and here's how it's private and here's how it's secure. And it's sort of just like, oh, they're aware. And I think they're trying to do the thing that I've been asking Meta to do for two years, which is to lead and show how privacy can be done. Whether or not it's gonna be effective in the court of public opinion is something that I'm gonna be watching just because it's hot privacy summer, hot surveillance summer with the flock cameras and, and all of this stuff. It's all related. And so this, this space is how I feel for the last 24 hours like.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  I think it's going to be so interesting to test these things and see what actually happens, but particularly to see what, how people respond once they're in the wild. V, thank you so much for joining us to break this stuff down. I'm sure we're gonna have a lot more to discuss later this year. All right. We've got more Apple to talk about, but not about this week's event. The other week, Apple announced some new Macs and they went all out marketing them as AI powerhouses, which we thought was probably just some marketing bluster. And some listeners told us, maybe it's not. So Neelai Patel and David Amell called up an AI researcher to break down what's real and what's hype.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  So like a week ago, we did the Vergecast and we were talking about new Mac Studios. And in the way that we are off, want to do, we dismissed Apple's marketing as out of hand. They were like, these are the best computers for AI. And I was like, that's silly. Nvidia, because I'm Team Jensen, as everyone knows. And all these people told me I was wrong.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  Look at that. So I was like, okay, we gotta get this right. I'm clearly missing something. The Vergecast's audience doesn't often just tell us we're wrong for no reason.

• 51:23David Pierce?

  Well.

• 51:24Nilay Patel?

  Usually there's something there. So we called up CJ Trowbridge, who's an AI researcher. I've been following his TikTok for ages. He's really smart and he is going to explain to us what's going on in local AI. It is more surprising than you think and whether or not Apple's claims about these Macs actually hold up. CJ Trowbridge, you're an AI researcher. You have one of my favorite TikTok accounts about AI, specifically local AI. Welcome to the Vergecast.

• 51:47Speaker 09

  It's nice to be here. Nice to meet you.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  I am a huge fan and I'm very happy to have you here. So here's the makeup. Last week, we were talking about the new Mac Mini and Mac Studio in Apple's very hypey press release about how they're the best computers for AI. And I said something along the lines of, I bet Nvidia has something to say about that because probably Nvidia chips in a desktop PC are better. And then we got 10 million comments saying I was wrong, which I appreciate. A lot of them about unified memory, some of them about daisy chaining all these Macs together on Thunderbolt. There's some reports that OpenAI and Anthropic are actually buying these devices in the tens of thousands. So I figured I should bring on someone who knows a lot about local AI and the state of the art there to explain exactly how I got this wrong. And if Apple's claims are true, tell me,

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  is Apple correct here? Are they the best devices for local AI? What is the state of the art there?

• 52:40Speaker 09

  I think they're one of the only options for a specific use case that most people don't have alternatives for, especially for people who are trying to run large models at home. And you can see it in the price pressure around those particular SKUs versus the high-end consumer Nvidia SKUs. It's interesting because people are, there are all these class action lawsuits against Apple for misrepresenting their AI capabilities. And I think that has fed into a lot of the speculation that like their hardware is all bad at AI. And it's true for the phones. Their phones are not very good at running AI. But for these computers that specifically have hundreds of gigs of RAM, they can.

• 53:25David Pierce?

  Apple is now finally starting to market these Macs as the best Macs for AI that they have made. So I think my question here is like, they've had the Mac Mini for a while now, right? The M4s are the ones that went crazy for OpenClaw. Now they have M6. Why, why is the M6 tangibly better? Or is it? Because it seems like, okay, because Apple is starting to actually market it as the best AI inference computer that they have.

• 53:51Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 53:51David Pierce?

  So is it, it's not better?

• 53:53Speaker 09

  So like the inference happens using typically it's integer eight math or smaller, which there are a lot of

• 54:01Speaker 09

  structural issues that pop up around that. And so like for one of them with, with Apple, they actually don't have the capability of doing integer eight maths. So like they copy an integer eight number into the register and have to like convert it to 16, which is true for, for many GPUs as well. And they've, they did that because it cuts the, the memory bandwidth in half. So you can advertise twice as much. Right? Nvidia does the same thing. So a lot of these, I think like, like theoretically you can say, this is a single digit percentage improvement over the previous generation. And it's like, well, yeah, that's true. It is the best. It's better than the last one, but like 3% or whatever.

• 54:39Nilay Patel?

  So head to head with a Nvidia GPU, what would you take? A new Mac Studio or a PC with Nvidia GPU?

• 54:45Speaker 09

  It depends what you want.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 09

  If you're trying to run a single model that's like less than 24 gigs, then something like an RTX 6000 Pro is going to be a lot faster, like a lot faster. But if you want to run something that's bigger than 24 gigs, it's not going to work at all. Right? Like it's gonna, it'll run in the system RAM at the speed of system RAM.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I think that's the big advantage that they have is like, if they want to put a lot of RAM, you can put bigger models in the RAM, but it's not going to be as fast.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  Let me ask you just like a really dumb question. And this is like the root of this whole thing. Maybe I've just been poisoned by the hype, but you know, a big part of the modern AI moment is Nvidia saying these GPUs are not just for graphics, they're for accelerated computing. This is like Jensen's speech. And it turns out AI really needs accelerated computing for a training and inference. And we need to build, we need all the electrons in the world to achieve AGI because only Nvidia GPUs can do it. And we're gonna buy Hugging Face and all this other stuff like, right? Nvidia is on this terror because of the power of their GPUs, right? That is the message they are sending. And you know, again, maybe, maybe I just bought the hype, but I don't associate Apple with super powerful graphics.

• 56:00Nilay Patel?

  Is it just the memory architecture app? And Apple famously went to unified memory ages ago. They did it with the M1s. Is it just that they got lucky in picking that memory architecture?

• 56:09Speaker 09

  I don't think it's even that. I think like, for example, when you look at the secondary market for used enterprise inference cards, even the ones from 10 years ago are, are hard to get. Because chips really haven't changed that much in the last decade in terms of the capability at the tasks that they were already doing 10 years ago. The performance is like a single digit improvement since then. There's new extensions, there's new shortcuts, there's new duct tape for really specific applications where you have like new kinds of tensor cores, stuff like that. But the actual like raw compute capacity is not super different with the, the 10 years ago cards versus today. And actually the inference cards like a, like a P40, for example,

• 56:55Speaker 09

  has more compute power than any of the M-series Macs chips, right? And these are 150 bucks, but there are cycles and sometimes it's like you can't get them. I think the big difference there is that it gets you from not being able to do it at home to being able to do it at home. So it's true that there are better ways. There are more expensive ways. You could get like an RTX 6000 Pro versus a Mac Studio and it's going to be a lot faster. But it's much more limited in the, the RAM, right? So you can potentially get much, much larger models that will run on a Mac Studio

• 57:33Speaker 09

  with 500 gigs of RAM versus something like even the, the highest end RTX 6000 Pro that only has 96 gigs of RAM. So I don't think it matters as much the memory architecture, although they do have higher memory bandwidth than many of the other chips that are available. But the reality is that any CPU can do anything that any CPU can do. Right? Or any GPU can do. GPUs can do more things at once. They're faster with certain kinds of tasks like matrix multiplication. But if you look at like a, like a Pixel 2, right? A Pixel 2 gets like five tokens per second on many of the new Quinn models, right? That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's a quarter of a million tokens a day.

• 58:14Speaker 09

  So like, how many old phones do you have in a drawer somewhere that you could be getting a quarter million tokens a day out of? You can run the newest AI models on like, like those never obsolete machines. Like it's still, it's a CPU, it's got storage, it's going to be really slow, but like really any computer would work. So there was this article recently that came out that said, a 10-year-old Xeon is all you need. Right? Like a play on the original Transformers paper because it's like the, those old trashcan Mac Pros are like a couple hundred bucks on eBay and they have 128 gigs of RAM on some of them. And they have a Xeon and they have two GPUs and they're like small GPUs, but it's big enough that you can,

• 58:56Speaker 09

  you can put the parts of the model that need to go fast on there. So something like Ollama or llama.cpp, they'll do that automatically. They'll take the encoder, the decoder layers, the KV cache and stick that on the GPUs, run everything else out of the system RAM. And suddenly you can run these huge models or even from the hard drive, right? You don't even need the RAM to hold the model.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  Would you say that this frenzy to buy all these Mac Minis and Mac Studios is overblown? Cause I see so many AI influencers, if that's what we're going to call them, daisy chaining all of these Mac Studios together. They're buying $10,000 Mac Studios, five of them, putting them together. You're saying the speed, if the speed is not the most important thing in the world to you, you can ostensibly run these just, you know, while you're sleeping and they'll eventually on your Pixel 2. Do you think that we don't really need these Mac Studios and these Mac Minis? It's, it's all about how long you're willing to wait?

• 59:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's a hundred percent. So I, especially the idea of like daisy chaining, like doing like multi-system clusters to do inference is insane because it's going to run at the speed of your network, which is like slower than just running it off of an SSD. Like it doesn't.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  Apple wants you to use Thunderbolt, which is reasonably fast, right? That's a PCI level connection.

• 1:00:11Speaker 09

  Well, still, I mean, PCI is so much slower than RAM.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  Fair.

• 1:00:16Speaker 09

  Right? Like if, if you've got it, if you can put it in RAM, that's all you need, right? But at the same time, like you can get superior results with these much smaller and more efficient models that are distilled and focused on the particular task that you're trying to tackle. So I always say like, don't try to cluster for inference. So if better means can I solve the problem? Can I do the task? You don't need the big models. You don't need to daisy chain multiple systems. You just need to figure out how many tokens a second do I need to reach my deadline or whatever? Like how, how fast do I actually need this to go?

• 1:00:53Speaker 09

  And I think what I've found is that for most people, it's really a question of their interaction with the, the model. Is, is the speed that they're concerned with?

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  Is there benefit to buying cutting edge hardware to run these models? Cause that would be why you would buy a new Mac Studio. And we are seeing, I mean, there's a headline in the information. It's like how Apple accidentally won AI. Because to your point from the very beginning, the demand is actually very, very high for these cutting edge systems. Is that being driven by anything or is it just vibes?

• 1:01:20Speaker 09

  Well, so like the MBA answer is like VCs don't want to pay for, for CapEx, right? So like all these companies that are, all these startups that are doing AI stuff are supposed to be renting services instead of buying equipment. And so if you want to rent, you have to rent from, you know, any of these inference providers in the cloud.

• 1:01:45Speaker 09

  Versus I think it's a different, a different perspective is people, especially at home, people who are, who are technical, maybe they were laid off typically, like all kinds of different use cases where there is this, this feeling that they want to be able to run it themselves for whatever reason, right? Because you don't see, I think, a lot of like software startups doing that. It's, I think it's more consumers doing that. And to some degree, people are, are, are buying it. But the difference with CapEx versus OpEx there is that if you're doing, if you're doing, if you're renting in the cloud, you're renting something that's subsidized. So if you're, if you have like transaction economics where it's like, I want to

• 1:02:26Speaker 09

  buy a million tokens as cheaply as possible and get them used like in the cloud, you're going to get a lower unit price from, from renting. But if you're. Someone who wants to be able to do it at home, and you can afford a couple hundred watts of electricity every hour. The difference is huge. If you can pay 150 bucks and get a P40 card and have competitive performance with the cloud models, just with the cost of electricity, that doesn't make sense for a company, but it makes sense for an individual because the unit economics are totally backwards for capex versus OpEx considerations and the same kind of consideration for a person at home.

• 1:03:11Speaker 09

  Where it's like, I don't really care about a little bit of electricity. I want 50 tokens a second at home without having to pay 20 bucks a month for it. And I think there's this, particularly in the American cultural context, there's this sovereignty thing. People want to have a garden. People want to do inference at home. Like, it's the same kind of mindset. Like, why am I renting that from some sketchy person? And it goes down when I need it. I could just do it at home.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Americans want to do inference at home is like the political slogan that will completely scramble the data center debate in this election cycle. Like, we gotta get, we gotta get T-shirts printed.

• 1:03:51Speaker 09

  100%.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  I've heard you talk about your thesis before. I know your other big prediction is that these frontier labs are just not sustainable, right? That it, all of this will come back and be run locally in different ways. Put a timeline on that for people because I know you've talked about that a lot.

• 1:04:04Speaker 09

  Well, maybe. Like, if they were serving the best models we have, the Chinese models, they could have favorable unit economics. And I think the question, when you look at, like, for example, there was this recent report from Dirac about OpenRouter. And you see this like 60-40 swap of like, people were using 60% of their tokens going to the US labs, 40% to open source models. And it swapped in the last like six months. And so now the vast majority of the market is for these open source models being served, being served on OpenRouter by various inference providers at favorable unit economics, which is something the US labs are not capable of doing. So I think it's that same divergence between like, we want to serve, you know, trillion parameter models

• 1:04:49Speaker 09

  and lose 40 times what we make versus like people who are actually getting serious about inference as a commodity business. The question becomes like, well, okay, is it easier for me to run Qwen models on OpenRouter and pay whatever it costs to do that? Or should I buy a trashcan Mac and do it in my garage? I think that's sort of the tension that will continue to emerge because these frontier models are the open tiny models at this point, right? And it's only going to keep being true and getting more true.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna have to have you back after I've built a trashcan AI rig in the garage. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for being on the show with us.

• 1:05:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, thank you. Nice to meet you guys.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Thanks, Neelai and David. We're gonna take a break. When we're back, Allison is joining us again. It's time for the return of the Thunder Round.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

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• 1:06:39Speaker 12

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• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  All right, we're back, and Allison is back with us. But you know who's not here? Neelai and David. And that means that I have unlimited power once again, which means, Allison, it is finally time for the return of the Thunder Round.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  That is right.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  It's back.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  One night only, the Thunder Round returns. No one can stop us. This is also good because we have a time crunch. Allison needs to get to the airport.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:07:42Speaker 02

  The Thunder Round differs from the Lightning Round in this way. We go through stories quickly. There is a timer. And our producer, Eric Gomez, will strike us down with the power of thunder if we go too long. Let's do this. Okay, Allison, I have to tell you about the OpenAI math drama that happened this week. Have you heard about this?

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  This is bananas. Robert Hart has been covering it on verge.com. I encourage everyone to go read that. He's much more thorough than I'm going to be here. But there's this mathematics competition known as the Millennium Prize. In the year 2000, they picked a bunch of very difficult and complicated math problems that they would award $1 million to the person who solved them. And they're supposed to, you know, advance mathematics and encourage new discovery. So OpenAI not thinking about Millennium Prize at all. And then on September 1st, so about a week ago, they hear some rumors that one of them might be solved or close to solved.

• 1:08:48Speaker 02

  And so they go, huh, let's see what we can do. And so they decide to throw like 10,000 AI agents at solving all of the Millennium Prize problems that are still open. And they get kind of close on one of them. And then they're like, let's throw the entire swarm at that problem. And then they solve this problem. But in doing so, they scoop the mathematician who had made a major advancement here. So the mathematician had not solved the entire thing. He had solved a sub-problem of it. But now they're in a beef because the mathematician had used Codex for part of his work. And so he's like, yo,

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  did you guys maybe train on my work in your system? And they're like, ah, we can't rule that out.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  It's really nasty. It's really weird.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  It is. I don't like this at all. First of all, the thought of a math problem you can't solve makes me feel crazy. And I don't even want to look at it.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  That's all of them for me.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Directly, yeah. They're very simple math problems that I need AI to help me with. Okay, that's wild. I'm so mad for that mathematician.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really weird. There are lots of like very messy ethical questions here. And I think like the math world is, I think, like rightly kind of outraged right now. It's this weird thing where on one hand, very cool and good that we can advance mathematics in roughly a week from a group of people who don't care that much. And we're just like, let's see if we can do this. Like, that's, that's cool and powerful. And on the other hand, the mathematics community is like, hey, normally we work together, right? Normally, we share research and support each other. And yeah, that, that did not happen here.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  It's really, oh, we're going too long. All right, Allison, what have you got next?

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Well, we're gonna talk about the Trump phone. I'm so sorry to our colleague Dominic Preston, who probably thought he was done writing about the Trump phone. The Trump phone is $250 more expensive. It is a victim of Ramageddon. It was $499, which was the launch pricing. It, it felt kind of unexpectedly generous, I think is how Dom describes it. Because it comes with 512 gigs of storage and 12 gigs of RAM. Stuff doesn't grow on trees. And sure enough, Trump, Trump Mobile had to, well, they, they raised the price. So it's $750 now.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  $750 for what is effectively a, is it a, is it a two-year-old phone? Because it came out this summer, but it was supposed to come out a year before. So it's actually like at least a year old or more? Like, and now it's $750 and it was already a bad phone?

• 1:11:59Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. That's the gist of it. It's, he does know. So it's still running Android 15, which is, it's a lot of money to pay for a phone running software that's two years old. But Dom was pleasantly surprised that the phone got a security patch. Yeah, or it was moved forward from the, the February 2026 security patch is now on the May 2026 security patch.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:12:33Speaker 03

  Which is one more than we thought it would get.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  The horrifying thing about this is that raising the price implies that people might still be buying this phone. That's not good.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  We must emphasize, even as a joke, it should not be done. It's not.

• 1:12:55Speaker 03

  Please don't, please don't. There are so many phones you can, even in this economy, for $750, you can get a good phone.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Does that mean, like, we, our apologies, we bought a few of these. We had to find out. Does that mean we can flip these? Can we flip these for more money? Or at least just pull out the RAMs? I don't know. Okay, Allison.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Are you an overear noise cancelling headphone fan?

• 1:13:26Speaker 03

  I feel neutral towards overear headphones.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Okay. Well, I think the legends in that space are the Sony WH1000 XM. It is that lineup. I think they really came in and I think, you know, kicked bows aside and have defined that space. They're now up to the WH1000 XM6s, but people loved the WH1000 XM4s. And so Sony announced this week, they're gonna bring them back. They're just like, people don't like the 6 that much, ah, we'll bring out the 4s. So they're bringing back the 4s at a lower price point, which honestly just kind of rules. Like, I'm like super into this, like, fan favorite gadget re-release.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I have a laundry list of digital cameras I'd like companies to do that with. Let's bring back the Panasonic TM5. Shout out to that one. I know, I love it. It's such a, like, like, sorry, guys, we did screw up. Here's the one you liked. Please do that more, tech companies.

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this is like, just a total win. It's like, people like this, people John Higgins, who reviews headphones and TVs for The Verge, he's still like, you know, I would tell people to get the XM4s over the XM6s. He's such an XM4 fan. Now, personally, I think the, I think the design of the XM4, I don't like them as much as the XM6. But I think I'm the outlier here, clearly, by virtue of Sony bringing them back. So I'm gonna take, I'm gonna say this is a win, and I'm also gonna take it as a win that Eric has not struck me down yet. I'm gonna pass it back to you. Allison, close us out. What's our last story?

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  Okay. Oh, right on cue. All right, we save the best for last. We are going to talk about the Ocarina of Time. So, Ocarina of Time remake is coming for a Switch 2. Every

• 1:15:35Speaker 03

  elder millennial who was, like, socially awkward and spent a lot of time playing the Ocarina of Time instead of, like, going outside, you know, not speaking from experience or anything, we're delighted. Thank you, Nintendo. So, we're going to have this, this feature of being able to, like, rather than just tap the buttons, you know, hum, and play the songs that are integral to the Ocarina of Time that I'm sure are ingrained somewhere in my brain matter. But, so, playing instruments is hard, it turns out. So if you are challenged

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  by, by a manual Ocarina, this company called Hori is going to have an electronic one that maybe defeats the purpose, but it's a little, is a physical object shaped like an Ocarina. It takes AA batteries, I believe, and will cost $50, but you'll be able to-

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Which is almost as much as the game.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, when you put it like that.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  They're gonna sell so many of these. This is, I think this is utterly genius.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  It's so, there's something sweet about this. It's like, you remember playing the Ocarina on the, you know, playing it on the controller and you kind of knew it by memory? And then, now we're making it like an analog experience and then, but it's like, no, let's go back to the digital experience, but in a different weird way. I love it. I, I get that anxiety that's also like talking on the phone in the presence of other people. Like, I don't really wanna, like, interact vocally with a video game, so.

• 1:17:24Speaker 02

  I fully wanted an Ocarina back in the day. I think, like, probably for the best that I did not get one.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, same.

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  My impression is those things are not easy to play for, for the person who just wants it as a video game accessory. So I'm like, so in on digital Ocarina as an accessory.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, convenience. I wonder where it ranks against a recorder. Did you do the recorder in school?

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  No, naturally, yeah.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, cuz that was-

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  But you can't sell as many recorders as, uh, specific accessories to a game. They're too widely available. Awesome. All right, Allison, thank you so much for joining us talking all about the iPhone, going through the thunder round revival, long awaited, thanks to the fans who have demanded its return. That's it for this week's Vergecast. Remember to subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of all of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters, and so much more. We'd love to hear from you. You can email us, [email protected], or call the hotline, 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show was produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We'll see you next week.

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