Code Conference, Pixel 3 rumors, and WWDC preview

The Vergecast is here once again to fulfill the weekly prophecy of illuminating tech news. This week, Dieter is at Recode’s Code Conference, but he still calls in to talk to Nilay, Natt, and Paul about what he saw and heard. Also, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is next week, so the crew runs through what to expect. There’s a whole lot in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment “Embarrassingly parallel,” rumors about the next Pixel phone, and some deep philosophy about whether a phone is a tool or an instrument — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 00:41 - Code Conference 2018 5:32 - Evan Spiegel on Facebook: ‘We would really appreciate it if they copied our data protection practices’ 11:56 - AT&T and Verizon both want to run massive ad-tracking networks to rival Facebook 21:03 - Apple’s WWDC 2018: iOS 12, macOS, and what else to expect 27:31 - Apple’s AirPlay 2 with multiroom audio streaming and stereo 37:41 - Paul’s weekly segment “Embarrassingly parallel” 40:24 - Cryptocurrency mining rigs are just PCs — so why won’t Stripe let you sell them? 44:04 - Google reportedly planning Pixel 3 for October, and the XL model will have a notch 48:26 - 2018 O’Reilly AI Keynote, Thomas Reardon, CEO, CTRL-labs 53:02 - Your phone is an instrument, not a tool Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to The Verge Has, the flagship podcast of The Verge. That's what we do.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Verge.net?

• 0:11Nilay Patel?

  Verge.net.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know if we got The Verge.net.

• 0:15Nilay Patel?

  The Verge cryptocurrency, I'm just taking that.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:19Nilay Patel?

  Bet they don't have a podcast. They didn't ask us if they could use our name. I'm not gonna ask them if we can use theirs. That's how that works. And Vox Media, which is a media corporation that we're a part of. It's great.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 0:31Nilay Patel?

  They don't know that we're the flagship, but we have been for some time. Anyway, I'm Neelai, Paul's here.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  Dieter's at the Code Conference in California.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  I am.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  And Matt Aaron is here. Hi, I'm back. So Dieter, let's start with you, man. You're a code. I'm not a code. This is the first year I haven't gone in a long time, which makes me sad, because you're there, like, hanging out with all the billionaires. Walt Mossberg is there. He's retired. He used to run code. Now I was just there as an attendee. From what I can tell, you guys are just having a grand old time. Just partying, but I'm here.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  It was a grand old time. Yeah, no, everybody there was really, really pleased with how the event went. They said there was no rabble rousing, Neelai, since you weren't there. Everyone felt better. There was some protesting. There was a union thing going on at the hotel, but that there were no problems there. But yeah, it's been a fun, interesting event. So Evan Spiegel was on stage, Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Shrepfer, whatever, CEO of Uber, whose name I was able to pronounce yesterday, but I super can't do it right now. President of AT&T, just a whole slew of people, a whole cast of characters. Talked a lot about stuff. Just talking about all the stuff. Women in tech, all kinds of stuff.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Can I ask you maybe a too-broad question? Feel free to narrow this down.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  What's the vibe? Because I feel like in the past, I've looked at these conferences and like, yeah, there's like drama and different things happening, but it's like, oh, we're talking to the important CEO-type people who are slowly taking over the world. But now it's like, this is their world, and we're humbly asking them not to fuck us up.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Is that an accurate vibe?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  It's actually surprisingly accurate vibe. I mean, last year, Donald Trump was the new president and everyone was sort of shell shocked and we all sort of looked at each other and went, uh, what's going on now, everybody? And then everything that's happened with Facebook disclosure, my wife works for Oculus, which is part of Facebook, they gave away Oculus goes at this event, that is now done. They were just like, well, okay, that happened. We should try to reckon with that, but we sort of know. And so everyone's just sort of, all right, we're cool. We're not like happy and exuberant about everything, but we're no longer panicked. So what can we do to make things better and not just panic about everything? I would say that's the vibe.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, hey, like, we actually could survive. Like tech could actually be good. Like you kind of whisper it, you know? I mean, the CEO of Uber was on stage and so like, he wasn't responsible for all of the terrible stuff that happened before he became CEO, but he's responsible for fixing it. And so he has to like, do this, do this weird dance of like apologizing for the thing that he didn't do and promising to do better. And there was just a lot of that going on.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm just looking at this list of news, we should get into it, but it does seem like this wasn't so much a, I'm going to announce some groundbreaking thing or I'm going to hint at a new product. This was very much about Kara, who is an incredible interviewer and Peter Kafka, who's also an incredible interviewer, who is now the, the other chair of the Code Conference, replacing Walt. But it was about them asking, hey, are you adults? We're all in need of some adults. You seem like you could be the adults we're looking for, but I have a questionnaire here that would verify whether or not that is true. And that, that was like a real, just watching some of the videos that Recode has posted, it seems like a real theme of the thing.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  Whereas before, in years past, I mean, this is the same conference where, you know, Walton Kara had Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on stage together. And it was a much more, here are the masters of the universe. I think that vibe was they were established as the masters of the universe. And now we've got a new class of people who are vying for that sort of role.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  That's a really good way to put it. So like Evan Spiegel, of course, is not an adult yet. I think he's still 12, maybe, maybe he's 13 now. But, okay, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi was definitely there to like, show that he's an adult. But nobody was on stage as like, to be celebrated as the master of the universe. They were, everybody was sort of contending with the idea that Silicon Valley, you know, people think of these conferences as like Silicon Valley conferences that are about what's going on in tech in this particular place. And there's a whole bunch of venture capitalists and networking and ba-da-ba-da-ba. But there was a real sense that what's, what's actually going on is we're not here to celebrate you as like titans of tech. We're not here to show the world what is going on in this weird, insular corner of,

• 5:13Speaker 02

  of the planet where tech happens. We recognize that the entire world, all of democracy, everything, knows what's going on here now. And so now we have to talk to you in that larger context, not just in the, hey, look, technology, we're going to explain it to everybody. You know what I mean?

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. I mean, well, let's just start with the news. So Evan Spiegel was kind of the big kickoff yesterday. Time is a fluid concept. I have no idea. Tuesday, when code started, Evan Spiegel was the big kickoff. That was the evening session. He didn't really say a lot, except he, he took some shots at Facebook for copying him and said, I wish they would copy our privacy policy.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  And he kind of didn't really explain like, why he ran this disastrous redesign of Snap. But-

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I mean, he gave the same explanation that he's given before, which is they were trying to solve this problem of giving you your friends, but also increasing, you know, inventory for brands and for advertisers without it like, feeling like you can't just get to your friends is what you actually want. The funny thing is, he gave, buried in that explanation, one of the more cogent, clear product ideas, that's actually Snapchat, seeing that it needed to get something from other social media apps. He basically said, "Look, the way we redesigned it, there's now an infinite scroll, there's a feed. We wanted to put your friends at the top, but we also fundamentally created more quote-unquote

• 6:43Speaker 02

  'inventory' because you can keep scrolling to see more stuff, which is what you do on Twitter and what you do on Facebook." And so I think they were trying to get that vibe into Snapchat.

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, look, I'm just gonna do the conspiracy theory. Evan Spiegel and AT&T and Facebook, they were all there, Spotify to some extent. Really what they're talking about is how to do advertising better. That was the theme of the whole, all these interviews. You can go watch them, they're great, they're all over the place, talking about a bunch of things. But the problem all of them need to solve is, we need to put more advertising in your face. We need to do a better job of it. So Evan Spiegel has a messaging product. Messaging products inherently don't lend themselves to advertising.

• 7:32Nilay Patel?

  Snapchat Discover was his way of putting advertising into Snapchat. People, whatever, didn't like it. They tried to mix it all up again, make it easier to use, so that you might go over there and be like, "I'm in the advertising pain." Nobody liked that. So now they're mixing it up again. They're doing an endless feed that creates more inventory. That's like, that is the animating force behind what Snapchat is doing. How do we get advertising into our user base? Facebook, obviously, is Facebook. I think we all understand what they're up to.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Facebook is open to considering a paid product.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  I mean, to me, it's a little ironic that Evan is all like, "Facebook should copy our privacy policy." Because I feel like a couple, I think it was maybe a year ago when Snap Maps launched, like, everybody freaked out about their privacy concerns of just Snap knowing exactly where they are and just putting their stories on a map all the time. And then they put ads in Snap Maps? Then I think it was just like, "Well Snapchat, you're not exactly that much better because you launched this..." Like, yes, you have fewer information about your users because inherently, they're just not... Adding everything about them and like showing everyone what they like. But they have added features before where people have been very concerned about like their privacy and,

• 8:55Speaker 03

  you know, like if anything Instagram came up with the whole location tagging thing and that also had previously led people to being robbed before. So this whole like copying each other, trying to keep each other safe and private. It's like, meh, well, I don't know.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  We need a spectrum. We need to name a spectrum of how terrified.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  A privacy spectrum?

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  A privacy spectrum. Cause Snapchat, yeah, they do accidentally disclose their location. Facebook has built a complete mathematical model of your brain. And they're like, then they can inject your brain with a desire to buy anything at any time. But like, what is the, there's like a creep spectrum.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Well, most, most secure.

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  The targeting tunnel.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Is writing in a, um, what's it called when they have the secure document viewing things? Is it a skiff?

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  A skiff?

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. You write in a personal paper journal.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  And you view it in a skiff?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  In a skiff with pen and paper and you have no devices with you.

• 9:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So that's like all the way on the left.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, uh, skiff journal.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  Skiff journal. But what's the name of the spectrum?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  The creeptrum.

• 10:04Nilay Patel?

  The creeptrum?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  The creeptrum.

• 10:06Nilay Patel?

  The panoptica creep.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Cambridge Analytica's on one end.

• 10:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So all the way on the other end, right? This is what I mean. So you gotta place Snapchat on the spectrum. You're either, I don't know, writing on charcoal in the skiff with Paul.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  All right. If Cambridge Analytica's a hundred.

• 10:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  And you have, um, skiff journal as a zero. Snapchat is like a 90, 95.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  You think so?

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  I disagree.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if it's that bad.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  I feel like, like every, every technology, everything that you have like a user identity and they're storing information about you on their servers is like 90 plus.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  Is just automatically 90?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna be more charitable.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna give them an 80. The second you have a user account, I agree with you.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Second you have a user account and Snapchat can be like, he scrolled five times today and then stopped scrolling and Evan Spiegel's like, ah, we have to redesign the whole app. Our scroll depth is off. All right. You're at 80 instantly. And that's like every app with a user account. Like, just straight up. But where I think it's different is, I don't know that Snapchat is building interest graphs around you.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  Right, they're not targeting the advertising particularly well, right, they're trying to do this premium advertising thing. That's what, like, creeps you up. So, like, Facebook is like, "You're a man who once looked at a belt. Every belt manufacturer in America can now specifically target you."

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Isn't that just data lying fallow?

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  It is, but Facebook is like, app, like, collecting it to build these profiles of you. Right, so they're all, they're, they're much farther along.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Snapchat doesn't have a little embed thing on every single website on the planet.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Right, they're not, like, tracking you across the entire web.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  It's also not building like a family tree of everyone you're related to, including your children, who aren't getting started on Messenger Kids, if so.

• 11:49Nilay Patel?

  Max does not have Messenger Kids. Maybe she should. Anyway, somewhere in between there, and I think this is actually the, the thing from Code that, like, struck me is, like, the thing we should be talking about the most, is AT&T and Verizon, but AT&T is the people this week who talked about it. Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, onstage at Code, talking to Peter.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  I think he's the president.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  President. The lord of AT&T is onstage, talking to Peter. "What, hey, you're in a big lawsuit with the government."

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Oh, he's CEO, I'm right, you're wrong, I'm right, you're right, I'm wrong.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  Again, the, the preferred title is, uh, "Lord."

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  The primary landholder of AT&T. Onstage, Peter, talking about Time Warner, they want to buy Time Warner, the government's suing them, they think it's ridiculous. "Hey, why do you actually want to buy Time Warner?" And he came right out and said...

• 12:43Speaker 02

  He just said it.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  He just said it.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  He just said it.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna read it to you, this is, this is his answer.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  No, no, but it's like, okay, just in the context of a conference that is after Cambridge Analytica, where everyone's talking about, "What are you doing with user data? Are you tracking people? How should we feel about it? How are you keeping it secure? Like, no one, no one trusts Facebook or anybody else to have all this user data, what should we do about it?"

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh, hey, by the way, Randall Stevenson, why, why is it that you want to buy Time Warner? And he says. Time Warner has an amazing inventory of advertising. They just kind of sell broadly. It's not very targeted. AT&T has an amazing amount of data. Customer data for 40 million pay TV subscribers in North and South America, 130 million mobile subscribers, 16 million broadband subscribers. You have really great customer insight and what kind of shows and media content they're viewing, where they are, and all kinds of other information on the consumer.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  This makes me want to, you know, those DirecTV commercials where you're watching DirecTV all sorts of different places?

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Just like add, add little metadata to like, at the dry cleaner.

• 13:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Mail, 45.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  It gets better. How is that useful? Can you, actually, it keeps going. Can you pair a very formidable ad inventory with a very formidable amount of data and information to the customer, viewership data, and all kinds of other information? Can you create something unique? I think that you can. So here's the deal. This is what Verizon is doing too. Verizon bought, so AT&T is going high. Verizon went low. AT&T is like, I want to buy HBO, like Game of Thrones, that's what I want. Verizon's like, we own Yahoo.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  I mean, props to the guy for being honest.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  They're just saying out loud. I mean, they have to sell this deal to their investors, right? So that they, they don't have, they can't like hide the ball.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  No, I know. I'm just saying, props to the guy for literally being like, yeah, like what? It, it reminds me of that tweet where she's like, I had been investigating this for a year and he just tweeted it out.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  I've been investigating whether AT&T had, had been doing some really shady stuff. And the guy's just like, well, yeah.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. So Verizon owns Oath, which is a on Yahoo. They have millions and millions of page views. On their own network, they insert a thing called the super cookie. So now they, they have scale, right? There's a good chance that in the course of your life, you'll land on a. Yahoo webpage and millions and millions of people do or a webpage. They know what everything that you do on the Verizon network. They just know it because they insert the cookie into the network. They know where your phones are, obviously. And they're combining all of that and saying, hey advertisers, do you want to reach, you know, 20 something women in New York City who happen to be within 20 feet of a particular store? And they can definitely serve that advertising at a high level of precision.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  AT&T is saying the same exact thing, only instead of whatever garbage scale Oath provides Verizon, their media scale is, we know exactly what you're watching.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  How many more ad dollars are there to capture? Is it just re- No, he directly addressed that question. He basically, like, when you sell ads that aren't well targeted, you can only charge a certain amount and you have to have more of them. So that's why, I think he said like the average show on Turner's network, there's like 16 minutes of advertising in an hour. But when it's on DirecTV, AT&T gets to have two of those minutes. And they make more money off of those two minutes where they actually know everything about the customer and could direct ads to them than they do off the other 14, was his claim. And so he thinks that he might actually be able to quote unquote, reduce the ad load. They might need to have fewer, like, length of commercials, a smaller length of commercials,

• 16:23Speaker 02

  because these commercials will be so much more directly targeted at people. The other thing is, this is about advertising, but it's also about, I think it's about Netflix a little bit. There is a real sense that Peter Kafka and Randall Stevenson went round and round about like, no, why do you need to buy them? You can just like, figure out some other way to do the data for ads. And that's true, but I think that they also are a little bit nervous not being in like, direct video, direct relationship with the consumer and having a vertical integration of those things altogether, just in case it turns out that they need it. They'd rather be able to be like, yep, well, we're just a total independent video provider now with HBO now and whatever DirecTV does, and we don't need anybody else,

• 17:07Speaker 02

  than to have to partner in the future. Because that's, you know, I don't know, Verizon's trying it with Go90. But there, I think there is a real sense-

• 17:14Nilay Patel?

  If you're a Go90 user, can you tweet at me? And I need to be, you know, if you're just on the Go90. You have gone 90 recently. Just tweet it. I just want to hear from you.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  YouTube people call themselves YouTubers.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  What is it going?

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  Nineties.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Nineties?

• 17:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like old timey gold diggers.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  Weren't they called, did they have a name? The Panhandlers? They're like, they're like- Seventy-sixers? Seventy-sixers.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Oh, seventy-sixers.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're nineties. Only instead of potentially striking it rich, they're watching medium good content on their mobile phone. They're not driven by a sense of optimism and a love of the West.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  Alright, stop. If you, no, but honestly, if you've gone ninety recently, just please be in contact with me. I'm dying to know.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  I'm just struck by, I really enjoyed the comments on Hacker News about the, uh, Microsoft passing Google in valuation for, I don't know.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  Twenty minutes.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  And, uh, Google has an ad-based business. Microsoft, with all their problems, sells products to people.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  And I, you know, you obviously can't put too much stock into just stocks, but I just feel like this, we're, this well of advertising has to run dry. Please let it run dry. I'm tired of ads.

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  So, by the way, so your question very specifically was, how much more advertising is there to go around? The answer is virtually none. So when you look at the stats, Google and Facebook are the only companies growing their share, or like, the overall amount of digital advertising. It's like ninety-nine percent is Google and Facebook. Everyone else, including our company, Box Media, isn't like one percent. Right, so they have this commanding share of digital advertising. So if you are AT&T, and you are looking at what's happening on your network or your Verizon, you could very fairly say, hey, we sell these pipes. Good business, everyone likes it. But everything that happens, all the money that's being made on the phones, is going to these two companies.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  We'd like a piece of that. We are some of the only companies that can actually just like brute force our way into that market. Doesn't make me like feel warm and cozy.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, I'm not like.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  These companies have to work to get geolocation data about people. It's part of our service.

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, I don't, it's not like a bedtime story told to me to make me feel really comfy, so I'd like, secure, but they're the only ones who can do it.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  And I, that's, this is to me why, you know, TMO and Sprint are allowed to merge, which seems very likely. There's only going to be three national carriers left and two of them are going to be doing just extremely aggressive ad tracking and retargeting across their entire networks in order to compete with Google and Facebook. And then Sprint and TMO will probably just do it too, because they'll be like, why the hell not? And then you have, you are limited, absolutely limited in your choice as a consumer to like opt out of that. That seems icky to me. I hope AT&T updates its privacy policy. I consent. All right.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  This episode of the Vergecast, sponsored by IBM. We live in a world that's creating AI-enabled everything, a world with more IoT devices than people. Today, technology has never been smarter, but smart only matters when you put it to work where it matters. When we put smart to work, we can help save the species, increase cop yields, and make progress not only for a few of us, but for all of us. So let's get to it. Put that smart to work, people, Paul. Find out how at ibm.com/smart.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Sounds like you said, increase cop yields.

• 20:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, more cops.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  More cops. Not only more cops, but less water.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, more cops or less water with AI technology from IBM.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about Apple. WWDC is next week. Yeah, there's a lot going on. Now, you want to, you want to talk us through what you think's going to happen at WWDC?

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Tough to say, you know, normally, there's a lot of excitement about, around WWDC. Everyone wants to know about what's coming up on their iPhone and MacBooks and whatever, but like this year's is super quiet, because I think everyone's just been too busy upset at how much iOS 11 has wrecked their iPhones.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  iOS 11 has been, uh, it's like a thrill ride.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  My icon's going to be here today?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  It's like, will, will typing a happy face turn it into a question mark?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  My latest iOS 11 thing, and I'm like, not mad, I'm just confused. My wallpaper on my lock screen just sort of like starts shifting to the left. Oh no.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  That would drive you insane.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Just a little bit hanging.

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  That means you're shifting to the right.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Think about it.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  I just don't know how and why this is happening.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, or maybe you just need to sleep a little more.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  There's like a couple leaks, right? So we know there's, it's WDC, there's always new version of iOS.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  There's always.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  New version of iOS 10.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe we'll get a name. There's been some leaks about what it could be called, but you know, it's something beautiful and scenic, I'm sure.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  And.

• 22:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm sad they don't do cats anymore.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Cats were fun.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Cats were the best.

• 22:26Nilay Patel?

  Cats were a good time.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  Panther.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Anyway.

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  Snow leopard's still the best version of iOS 10.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Very fun. No, they don't do cats anymore, I guess. I don't know why they don't bring back cats, just because like that, that literally everyone loves cats. Just go smaller.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Mac OS Peline, it's great. But there is a new digital health feature that is very much like the stuff that we saw from Google with Android P, where reportedly they will now have a dashboard that shows you how much you're using your iPhone. And with the hopes that you'll avoid overusing your smartphone. So now tech companies are all in on this whole time well spent. And let's not overload ourselves with how much technology is ruining our lives. Or like, and if you're doing that, it's not our fault, we tried to help.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  So yeah, that's coming up. There's some new Apple Watch stuff with some new watch faces. We'll see if Siri gets an update, like it desperately needs one, but we'll see.

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  If they don't spend the entire keynote being like, we hired the dude from Google. He's in charge of Siri now. You're, you just talk. Get out of here. Get out of here, man. Or he's just like, here Siri, talk to it.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's so hard, it's so hard to prove that you're doing new, better stuff.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Especially when the evidence suggests that you are not. Yes, exactly.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  We all have a lived experience of Siri being bad. And so if you go on stage and show us five new things Siri can do, we're like, well, nice cherry picking.

• 24:04Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm, I would say I'm looking forward to, but in a disappointed way.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  You're looking forward to being disappointed?

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just like, how do you, how do you, how do you define this emotion?

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Are you sad that you'll be happy about something?

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna be, I, I'm looking for, I'm anticipating, I'm anticipating groaning.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Dread. Dread is pretty good. You're looking like a fur.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  But dread is, has fear.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  A cutesy version of dread.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, dread involves fear. This is more like drangst.

• 24:38Nilay Patel?

  Alright, here's what's gonna happen. They're gonna be like, Siri, it's great. We updated, the voices are better, 15 accents, 35 languages. It can, I don't know, it's more open, Siri kid has been improved. At the very end, they're gonna be like, Siri, set a timer for two minutes. Siri, set another timer for three minutes. And people are going to fucking cheer. And that will be the saddest thing that ever happens. When they set two timers at once on their supercomputer, thousand dollar smartphone, and an audience of developers is like, you did it! That's gonna be horrible. And I don't know, I'm like, looking, I'm looking forward to it, but in a sad way.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  What they need to announce is a service for restaurants and hair cutting salons.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  That answers the phone with Google calls and it pranks Google.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that'd be kind of amazing. Oh no. I mean, look, Apple has a long history of prank calls at their events. Steve Jobs prank called Starbucks in the first one. I imagine they spent a lot of time on Siri. I bet they spent a lot of time on iOS 12. There were some rumors that they were gonna redesign all of iOS with iOS 12. It's up in the air, they walked it back.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  I would be a little surprised.

• 25:53Nilay Patel?

  There was a story, I think Mark Gurman had several months ago, that Craig Feigery said, "This is just a bug fixing update. We're gonna lock everything down, make everything better." I would be-

• 26:01Speaker 03

  I feel like that's what they need to do, though. Like, it's boring, but that is exactly what people act- Like, you know, I feel like a lot of times we cover WWDC and everyone's all like, "Yay, excited, oh, awesome." And then it reaches everyone else who owns an iPhone, which is the majority of people, and everyone's just like, "Where is this?" Like, I don't see why everyone was so excited, because this sucks. So they should just spend the time actually doing it, right? And I think that people would be much happier if their phone just worked versus all the other stuff that they say will come, and then like, half works.

• 26:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I think people like a redesign.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  I love redesign so much.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  No, you two like redesign. I think most grandmothers don't like a redesign. Like, your mom is gonna start calling you or being like, "I can't go to the genius bar, so you're just gonna have to explain to me how, why my iPhone looks like this."

• 26:44Nilay Patel?

  I have definitely, in my mind, set aside the time after iOS 7 was released, and it just showed up on my, my parents' devices. Where like, like, one minute they were holding like a very nice piece of green felt, you know, and the next minute it was like, "Welcome to Tron world." Like, there is no comfort here. That was horrible. But I don't think they're gonna be that.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  I didn't get, nobody asked me how to do any, maybe they're just tired of asking me how to do things, but maybe I gave them poor answers, but nobody asked me how to use iOS 7.

• 27:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it was much more how to use, it was more like, "This is ugly now, and because you are tangentially related to technology, it's your fault."

• 27:26Speaker 01

  It's definitely your fault.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  It was definitely an accusation. Like, I hadn't done enough to stop it. One thing did roll out early from, so I was looking at everything that announced last WWDC. One thing came, AirPlay 2 hit this week-

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  With iOS 11.4.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Yes, in time.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they like just hit the year mark with AirPlay 2.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  They were afraid that journalists were gonna be like, "Well, what about last year? What didn't come?" And they were like, "Well, we have exactly four days before we get called out on our shit."

• 27:54Nilay Patel?

  AirPlay 2 is very strange. Dieter edited my post about this and he got all mad at me.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  He was like legitimately angry.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Very angry at you. You, this is your fault.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  See? So here's the deal with AirPlay 2. iOS 11.4 and tvOS 11.4 and I guess it's HomePod iOS. Whatever version of iOS that runs on a HomePod. Now supports, this is not part of AirPlay. Apple actually emailed me to correct me on this. HomePod stereo pairing is one thing. Over here, AirPlay 2 is another thing. Did not know that before. So you can now, with iOS 11.4, you can pair two HomePods in a stereo pair. It sounds fine. Good. You're happy about that. You cannot however, take two AirPlay 2 devices and make them a stereo pair because that's a different thing. Got it?

• 28:41Speaker 01

  But you can have two or more AirPlay 2 things playing the same thing at the same time.

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  Yes, but they won't play the left and right channel.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:48Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a weird thing, but anyway. So you can pair the HomePods in stereo if you are a person who has one HomePod and desires another. There are three of you. Again, if you are those people, please let me know. I will send you a subscription to Go90. That is not a real promise, but let's pretend it is. Okay, so AirPlay 2, here's the thing about AirPlay 2 that I don't understand and it made Dieter very angry. Theoretically, this is like a thing that any manufacturer can implement. There's other AirPlay speakers on the market. Here is the insane limitation. When you use a Google Cast speaker or a Spotify Connect speaker or even an Alexa device, the thing itself is connected to your Wi-Fi network, connected to the internet. It runs a version of the stream music service on it, an embedded version.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  So you're like, Alexa, play a song from Spotify. Your Echo connects to Spotify and Spotify streams a song to your Echo and your phone is doing nothing. When you use Google Cast, you're like, cast a song to Google Cast speaker, Chromecast Audio, what have you. Your phone, literally all it sends is a URL and an authentication token for the service that you use. And then the Chromecast audio or whatever connects to Spotify, authenticates the URL, starts streaming the song directly. AirPlay 2 does not do that.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  When you cast, when you, when you AirPlay 2 Spotify from your phone to an AirPlay 2 speaker, your phone connects to Spotify, pulls down the file, re-encodes it to an AirPlay 2 compatible audio format, and then streams that over the network to your speaker.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Same thing with video, right?

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  No, video is different because you're mostly doing video with an Apple TV, and the Apple TV will, in some, in, depending on the app that you're using, will do the streaming locally.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  So video, video is a little bit different.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:38Nilay Patel?

  But with audio, it is very clear that only the HomePod will connect to the internet by itself, and it will only do that with Apple Music, and no third-party AirPlay 2 devices talk to the internet themselves, everything happens through your phone.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  So the HomePod is not a faithful implementation, or is not a simply an implementation of an AirPlay 2 device?

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  It is?

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  It is an iOS computer.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  That runs Apple Music.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  And Siri.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  And can also AirPlay 2 things.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  And the HomePod can control other AirPlay 2 devices, because it's an iOS computer. So you can start a song on the HomePod and be like, also, stream that in the living room, and you're like, Pioneer receiver, Denon receiver, whatever, will start doing it.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  If you AirPlay 2 something to a HomePod, like from your phone, are you streaming it from your phone in that scenario?

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Unclear, because if it's Apple Music, there's a real chance it will just like happen locally in the HomePod, but if it's some other AirPlay thing on your phone, it will definitely stream from your phone. Now, this is not sounding a big deal, this is a very weird implementation detail that I'm discussing at great length, but it means that multi-remedia on AirPlay 2 cannot do things like play two different songs from your phone in two different rooms, which is like a thing Sony's people can do at will. It means that if your phone dies, the music will stop. It means that if you start a song and then leave the house, the music will stop because you're not on the network anymore. Like, all of these like very little edge cases that... When you think about it, you actually run into all of the time, they're just gonna be in front of you. And then Apple very confidently told me, they're like, "Oh, but we saw the most common ones."

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, now you can AirPlay from your phone, and if you watch a video, the music won't stop. Your phone will keep streaming the audio in the background while you're playing the game or watching the video.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Also, like, your notification dings, your notification dings won't go to the speaker.

• 32:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  It basically creates a, when you start an AirPlay 2 stream, it creates like a separate audio stream that's separate from what the rest of your phone's audio world is doing.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Maybe that explains why it took so long, because they like had to set up a whole other like audio output thing into iOS.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  They had to build that machine where the guy takes a bite of the food, and then like it drops the laptop on a baby, and then he eats the pie. You seen that video? That's AirPlay 2.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm talking about here. So it's just like, it's very confusing, it, no, it's not very confusing, it's gonna work for people. But it's befuddling to me that, it's like, the list of AirPlay 2 devices, all of them are insanely expensive. The cheapest one is the Sonos One, which is $199. The most expensive one's like $5,000 receiver thing.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  And then you have the HomePod, which I think, like, Apple finally said, or I think, either Apple said or some analyst said that they have shipped 600,000 units of, shipped, not sold. So who knows how many of those like are just sitting in inventory. Sounds conservative to me, especially, I think, like this week, there was a report that Google Home speakers outsold Echoes for the first time, so like, where does Apple fit in into all of this? Like, clearly, people aren't buying HomePods as their smart speaker at home. Like, it's just a fancy speaker, it is a very good speaker. But like, where does the HomePod fit in all of this in terms of capability, pricing, and like, trying to even pretend to compete in this market?

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't, I just don't know the answer. And I asked Apple why, you know, other AirPlay 2 devices won't do this direct streaming. Because it's, if you buy a very expensive speaker, and then it, because of this feature that says it's compatible with your Apple stuff, and then it literally does not work unless you are home with your phone, I think that's a weird... This is a weird situation, right?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  It's also just weird for Apple to like, you know, create an iPhone where it's like, this is the device that travels with you, except when you want to listen to music.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just like, uh, there's something deeply strange about it. Anyway, um, I asked like, why don't you let these third-party things do actually, like, the, the HomePod is, we really designed it for the HomePod to be a streamer. You know, it's got an A8 processor, so I suppose. Do you need an A8 processor to stream some audio? It's like Chromecast Audio is like, there's like a, a couple of like, like cells in there, you know, like, like amoebas just like spinning around. That's all the, that's all the more power it has. Like, it's like a tiny little thing. I don't know. But anyway, that's what Apple says it's out. It's good that it's out. We're playing with it. You can read some Matthews. I just think that what's interesting to me about this is Apple always, by default, puts the phone at the center of the universe. And that means I just don't know if anyone at Apple lives in a house with other people.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  Aww.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, do they all have their own separate homes? And then they like-

• 35:10Speaker 03

  I mean, given the amount of like, how much Apple employees probably aren't allowed to tell their family members what they're working on, that would not surprise me.

• 35:17Nilay Patel?

  I just like, if you have any other people in your house and like, a thing that you would like to do is listen to two songs in two different rooms, like, and you're the person who usually just like, does the thing, like, just running, like, no Sonos person has ever thought, has ever even thought that that's not a thing they could do. Google Cast can just like, do that, right? And like, AirPlay 2 is, unless you're the person holding the phone in charge. I don't know.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  But this, this thing, like, we've been banging on about this for a while, that like, Apple products are fundamentally lonely. This has been my gripe about the iPad since I, for years now, that there's not multi-user on it. Um, and this is another thing where they just assume, you know, that everyone, that the solution to the problem is just buy more, uh, Apple devices.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, buy more HomePods. Uh, also, messaging iCloud is here. It is the most hidden feature ever. Uh, you have to, it's only, you can only enable it in one specific settings pane in Settings. And then it'll say, oh, your messages will be in the cloud. That's literally the name of the thing is what it does. It means that you won't, when you, you know, when you haven't opened your laptop in a few days? It's like the weekend. And you get all those dings. Yeah, it's gonna figure, it's gonna know. Well, it's also syncing your grain texts too, right? I believe it's syncing your grain texts and if you have a, it'll, it'll pull all the media off. This is a weird little trade off that you have to make. So if you have a bunch of photos in your messages, sucking up a bunch of storage on your phone, it'll offload all those in iCloud, but then it will use it up in iCloud.

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  So the, the argument is you use less data on all of your devices, but more data on iCloud. And then Tim Cook is like, would you like to upgrade from your five gigabyte iCloud plan? I pay, I pay for iCloud. I'm fine with it. I pay, yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  iCloud needs a better like middle ground. There's like, there's, there's the free plan, which is not enough for anybody ever. And then there's like the deluxe plan and there's not like the like regular Joe, you know, plan. There's not like the middle plan.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  There's not the plan where Apple literally opens its Scrooge McDuck like piggy bank. That is the size of a building and full of cash and says, everyone gets 10 gigs of free storage because it costs nothing. It costs nothing.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you think one day Tim Cook's just gonna lose it and just be like, here, here's all the stuff you ever, everybody wanted, we're doing it. I just want you to like.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Leave me alone.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm out of here. You wanted 10 gigs of free storage, you got it. Never talk to me again. All right, Paul.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  Every week, my friend.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 37:44Nilay Patel?

  You do a segment. What's it called?

• 37:46Speaker 01

  What, what is it called?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  It's called embarrassingly parallel.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  And parallel?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  No, it's called embarrassingly parallel.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Which is a popular term in computer science for certain problems that are easily accelerated by adding more CPUs or GPUs. And so today we're talking about the Asus H370 mining master.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  This is a motherboard that can support 20 GPUs.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Would you say it's the mother of all boards?

• 38:21Speaker 01

  I would say, I would say it's definitely.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  I would say it's definitely a mining master.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. 20 GPUs.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  20 GPUs. They're all plugged, you know, typically, a typical motherboard will have like two or four PCI slots. Only two of them are like actually very fast. And you typically slot the video card right on to the motherboard. Here, it's like 20 USB plugs. And because, because for mining cryptocurrency, you just need a ton. It's an embarrassingly parallel problem, which is why it's on my weekly segment.

• 38:58Nilay Patel?

  I got it.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  And so you just, more GPUs you can plug in, the better. And so you just plug in 20 GPUs to this thing, and you just can make so much Ethereum.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  So much. How much does this thing cost?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Uh, we don't know the price yet, but apparently Asus doesn't typically go crazy price-wise with its motherboard. So Stefan, who wrote this stuff, is thinking like, maybe around $400. The thing is, is that right now...

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  $400 to your mining master? Oh, you gotta buy the GPUs.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Right now, the GPUs are so absurdly expensive right now. It's crazy. I built a computer for myself like over a year ago for a thousand dollars, and to get the same parts would be probably maybe $1,400 right now. Like to get like the 1070, get the RAM.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  It's, the crypto industry has really marked up those prices. But at least Asus is here to help you.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  I am told that there's a, there's like a custom, a custom piece of software that lets you check the status of your GPUs.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  That's important to me.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  It's cool. It's got...

• 40:08Speaker 03

  You can check in. How are you feeling today?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  A little naming convention and like shapes. There's like the triangles and the squares and hexagons. For some reason, all of their hexagons are red. But everything else is going fine.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  Do you see, Shannon wrote a story today about a guy who was, his account on PayPal was frozen and he was blocked by Stripe for some time. So this is a guy who was just building PCs, but he was calling them cryptocurrency mining rigs. His base chassis was like 1800 bucks, 900 bucks. And then he was selling GPU configurations up to like 47,000 dollars with the GPUs in this rig. And this is great. So first he like started to set up a store and it's just, they're just PCs.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 40:54Nilay Patel?

  They're just PCs, but he called them crypto mining rigs. So he got into some dispute with PayPal because they're like, we don't support cryptocurrency.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Because it's an existential threat?

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and then he went to Stripe and then he, you should read the story on the site. Shannon did a great job with it. But he had some big dispute with Stripe over what he was selling and why. So he just moved his entire business to Etsy.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Etsy?

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Etsy?

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, Etsy's just like, I just want to sell like handmade socks.

• 41:25Nilay Patel?

  It's a handmade mining rig.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  I mean, have you seen, I feel some of the, I, I, I am of the sort of persuasion that the YouTube algorithm has discovered that I would love to see YouTube videos of people building Bitcoin mining rigs. And some people have shelves, like they just take a literal shelf and then like they create their own, like they use two by fours to make mounts for their, their GPUs and then just line all the GPUs up and it's just in a closet.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Now you gotta go, so the ones I've seen are like, you know, they build a shed and they like cover the shed in solar panels to power the thing. Cause the whole thing is can you, can you mine fast enough to offset your power cost? You gotta, you gotta pay for the juice.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so you just gotta live somewhere with cheap electricity.

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's one.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  That is also cold.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  Paul's thought about this a lot. Paul's specking out igloos. Like, he's like, I got this. No, the solar panel stuff is neat.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  But they don't obviously solar power.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Apparently, I'm not on the solar panel mining rig YouTube algorithm.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  That's where my mind is. My mind is renewable, sustainable. Other people are like, we're moving to Montana. We bought a strip mall and we're just going for it until the local townspeople kick us out, which is, by the way, a true story.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  This is, okay, so I'm looking at his Etsy page right now and it looks like

• 42:51Speaker 03

  in 2015, he used to sell like Fallout toys.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, you're going deep on his Etsy page?

• 42:56Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I'm just looking at his, he has a wonderful five star review. So I just wanted to know who, like 130 reviews. And I'm just like, there's no way he's sold this many already. And, and yeah, and it looks like a couple of years ago, he used to just make toys that like, they are, they're just like

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  little cute toys for him like Fallout.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  There's no $47,000 version of a Fallout toy.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  No, only very recently did, um, his sales become these supercomputers. And yeah, it's funny because in the quote, um, I mean, in the story Shannon quoted him saying, or not quote, but he said, quote, "Using Etsy isn't glamorous," Katz says, "but at least he knows he'll get paid."

• 43:35Nilay Patel?

  I like the idea that you're drawn to a payment vendor for your Bitcoin mining rig because of the glamour.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Like, I'm on Square. It's very glamorous.

• 43:44Speaker 03

  What's wrong with Etsy? That's so shady.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  Actually, we were talking to the editor of that piece, Michael Zlenko, about the word glamorous. He's like, he said it and I'm using it. And I was like, I don't really want to get into conversation about whether Etsy's glamorous. I love the idea that Etsy, though, is, they're like, yes, a handmade cryptocurrency rig is acceptable here.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  Fits our motto.

• 44:03Nilay Patel?

  It's true. All right, last thing. Google's reported planning Pixel 3 for October. Pixel 3 XL, pretty nasty looking notch.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  If, if that leak is correct, it's a pretty nasty looking notch.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  And like notches in general are not great.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Believe it's not.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I kind of don't believe it.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  I'm also kind of

• 44:22Speaker 02

  I think it's real.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  I'm kind of annoyed because I think they're doing a thing again where she's like, if you want the better phone, get the XL. And then like, if you want a smaller, less good phone, get the regular, which is very offensive to me. Someone who has very small hands can not reach an XL phone's screen with just my thumb.

• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, we're only going off the screen protectors, right?

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Sure. But like, in general, like, I feel like, you know, companies have a newness where it's like, if you want the best flagship phone, it's just going to be bigger physically.

• 44:51Nilay Patel?

  It's just the bigger one.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  And that's kind of very annoying.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Well, they didn't do that with the Pixel. They were both, they were both equally good at the Pixel. And then the Pixel 2, they tried to say that they're the same phone again, but like, everybody knew that those bezels were not fun. And so it was not really the

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  The smaller Pixel 2, and I know there are people who love it, but the smaller Pixel 2 is legit one of the ugliest phones ever made. I'm just going out there.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Wow. My, my, my regular Pixel 2 is sitting over here crying.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. No, but you have, you have a very nice case on it.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  Well, this is, no, this is the regular Google Fabric case. Cause like, there

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause you take it off there, you have to look at the Pixel 2.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  No. But also, like, there just aren't that many options for nice looking Pixel 2 cases.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  What that case covers up is the extraordinarily nasty chrome bezel around the screen, which is, what are you doing? I, every time I look at it, it makes me sad. But your case is nice.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it's like, it's, I didn't have an option to sit through a lie. It was this or like a live case.

• 45:53Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard of a website called Etsy?

• 45:55Speaker 03

  You know?

• 45:58Nilay Patel?

  You should definitely get a Pixel 2 case from it. See if he'll make you a Fallout

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Let me, let me, let me holler at this dude. Um, no, I mean, like, it's just, I think it is time for Google and Apple and a bunch of other smartphone makers to actually start making good phones that aren't massive. Cause no one wants Fabulas. I think everyone's

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  What about the iPhone 10?

• 46:18Speaker 03

  That's, everyone's over the, the, um,

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Is my, isn't, is this phone as big as that?

• 46:24Speaker 02

  iPhone 10 is like, pretty small. They, they did it.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  No, it's good. I mean, like, it's fine. I'm just also one of those people who just don't really want to use an iPhone.

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  Came out, it happened.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  Although, um, after getting locked out last week without my phone or key, um, I now wish I had messages in iCloud so that I could find my line of access phone number.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  It's all coming together.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  I'm happy if they keep on making tablets, but like, I don't, I don't understand the, the, the pixel two. The pixel two XL makes sense. The pixel two doesn't make sense. So why not make a pixel three SE? That's the size. Right? Make, make a, make an iPhone five sized phone and make your jumbo phone.

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Those, those seem to be the two things that people actually want. And maybe you can't get enough battery in the small phone anymore to like, match the, the fancy processors you got going on.

• 47:23Nilay Patel?

  I think it's Android in particular seems like it's, it's trending towards larger screen sizes.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, Android wants to be on a bigger screen size and I can't, I can't tell you exactly what it is, but there's, because it's not necessarily the core navigation of it. Cause actually swiping down from the top is annoying, but there's just something with the way that like font sizes and spacing and sort of everything about Android just feels better on a big phone and doesn't, and just feels really cramped and weird on a small phone.

• 47:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Our hands aren't getting any larger.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  No.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the way.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Wait, what if they are?

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  No, they're definitely not.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  The, the mechanism by which evolution would make our hands bigger in this instance is if people with small hands who use larger phones died at a slightly higher rate.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Also.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  And I just don't think that's happening.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  I also think that like, as more people use smartphones and we're all just like craning our necks down, like we're just gonna have this weird curved spine with like big hands.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Well, it's gonna look like a fish.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  This is vaguely relevant. I need to tell the story about the coolest thing I saw at Code. So I, I got to lead this little intensive about robots. And the first one was Nightscope with the like, you know, the creepy Dalek looking security robot. Uh, and he told us that nine 11 and crime, and so we need robots. That was fine.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  The second one was great. It was Cosmo.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  Quite a thing to just gloss over, but okay.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm just moving on. The second was Cosmo, the little anky robot dude. He's cute. And the third one, they weren't technically a robot company. It was Control Labs. And they brought a robot, that robot spider that moves around. And then what they've made is an armband. You put it on your forearm, right? And it can read the neural signals you're sending to your hand. And they put it on your forearm instead of like on your head because you never send a neural signal to your hand unless you mean to, so there's less noise there. And you can have more intentionality about the signal. And they can read all of those signals really well. And their core thesis is as a human, you have a huge, high amount of bandwidth coming in,

• 49:31Speaker 02

  but your output is very low bandwidth. Think about everything that you use to control a computer. It's literally moving things with your fingers or maybe talking, right? It's all like controllers and buttons and mice and whatever. And so like, well, we're gonna read your hand movements and we're gonna translate that directly so you don't actually have to have a physical controller. So he held up his right hand and moved his fingers. And then the spider robot moved its legs at the exact same pace and rate. Which was crazy. But then, think about it. If you want to move your index finger, you can like, you think, move my index finger, your index finger moves. But you could also like, say, I'm gonna move my index finger and then like think you're doing, about to do it and then not do it. Just think about moving your index finger without moving it.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  When you do that, there's still a neural signal getting sent to your finger. It's just not enough to like make it move. And they can read that. So he then set the spider on the ground and then just like held his hand out and didn't move at all and was controlling the spider and making it move around the room. Making it walk around the room. It's like subvocalization. Yeah. So what I like, the end state of this is, arm is a pretty good place for it. You could have this thing wrapped around your arm and you could have a big honkin' dumb phone and it doesn't matter that your fingers can't reach the top because you just think, what if my finger were reaching the top right now? And then it would just do it.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  You can control all of your, all of your digital stuff just by like imagining you're moving your hands to control them instead of actually controlling them.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  A lot of people think that the natural, like, evolution is us building technology now. So maybe we are evolving bigger hands. They're just imaginary hands.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  I would be scared of that future just because like, there's so many things that we think and we just don't do. And if computers are now doing the thing that we're just thinking about, that's going to lead to a lot of sloppy interaction.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  This is why you didn't put the brain scanner on your head because like, you daydream, you like, think about food. And if you're like, just sitting there and there's a scanner on your head and you're like, I'd really like a taco right now. You could like, have a taco suddenly arrive on your computer.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  That's the optimistic view. I'm saying like, if I get in a fight with somebody and like, in my head, he's like, oh, I can kill you right now. And then he like dies. Like, that's a problem. I'm sorry, this got dark.

• 51:55Nilay Patel?

  We're, A, that's, yeah. B, are you disagreeing that it's a problem if Nat thinks, I want to kill you and then someone dies?

• 52:03Speaker 03

  I mean, The Vergecast, this is a podcast about technology and homicide.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  I would, I would give Nat that power. I think she would wield it well. You know, I think that would, it would certainly sharp up, sharpen up the tech news team.

• 52:22Nilay Patel?

  That's something.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  The tech news team, it turned into that episode of The Twilight Zone with a kid. Anyway, sorry.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  No, but we're not, it's not, you think about a taco and a taco appears. It's, you think about a taco and then like a spider skitters across the crap. That's like a different kind of problem. Like, yeah, I would like to have it where it's just like, I'm thinking of foods and then like, various things are dancing around me.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Like the snack cat hot dog?

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he's having the burrito dream again. Like, that'd be great.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  A lot of dancing burritos.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  I think it's.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  I think this is a great time to bring up, Dieter wrote an amazing piece that I absolutely loved about technology being instrument, an instrument.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  Kind of like a musical instrument rather than a tool. I just really encourage everybody to read it, but it brought up a lot of, a lot of thoughts for me and I'm still kind of unpacking it.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  I don't even know if it's the right one, but it feels way better than tool. Do you, can you explain it a little bit, Dieter?

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I, I actually wrote a thing three years ago after watching Neelai interview Aaron Sorkin and we watched the Steve Jobs movie that he directed. And so I, I wrote it badly then and I was like, well, okay, I need to, I need to do another episode of Processor. It'll air someday. It's actually the first one that we shot. And so what's timeless? Well, I'll redo this argument. Uh, but basically everyone, like when people talk about their phones or other tech, there's like, oh, it's, it's just a tool. It's a tool. And, um, I think that the word tool has a bunch of connotations around it that minimize its impact and its position in your life. And to be fair, all metaphors break down and tools can be amazing things that do, you know, blah, they're extensions of you as a human, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  But I think using the word instrument, not the measuring instrument, but like an actual musical instrument is it forces you to actually engage with that thing as a piece of culture and as a thing that creates culture. And it just, it gives you a better relationship with the technology because there's a bunch of stuff that you associate unconsciously with the word instrument that really map nicely to having a healthy relationship with technology. Like you suck at an instrument when you first use it. So you might suck at your phone and you get better with practice as you use the phone. And so it's just a, it's a really tiny thing and it's an invitation for people to argue with me about words, which everybody loves to do.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  But it's mostly like we, there's been a lot of doom and gloom about tech and like this time well spent thing is a big part of it. And then, you know, Facebook has destroyed democracy. And all of that is true, but I, the, the natural reaction to that is just be like, no, we're going to put tech in a box. It's going to go in the corner. We're going to keep ourselves as humans separate from that thing because that thing is dangerous and scary. And I just think that's dumb. I think that. Creating tools, creating instruments is a very human thing to do. They are extensions of us. And the solution isn't to just say, "Nope, I'm not going to ever use my phone again. I'm going to like, limit myself to only 20 minutes a day of, you know, phone

• 55:33Speaker 02

  use." It's to recontextualize your relationship with that thing, so that that thing extends and deepens your humanity, instead of making you feeling less connected to it.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's hard for me to say I disagree now.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Okay, were you thinking about, one, dancing burritos, two, the skittering hand robot?

• 55:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I can kill you with a thought. I think it's a Chad Vader joke.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 56:02Nilay Patel?

  I like it too. So my whole thing with The Verge is that what we fundamentally cover, um, tools, right?

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  In this, outside of Dieter's conception of these words. And so the reason we cover culture too, and the reason that link works on our site, is people make the tools, those people are interesting, the tools are often very interesting, and then people use the tools to make culture, and then the culture informs the next generation of tools, and on and on and on it goes.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Actually, so my disagreement there, Neelai, is I think that setting up the equation in that way is people make the tools, we judge the tools, and then the tools create culture. The tools are themselves culture. Like, if, if, if we were making, Facebook is a chair. If we were having this debate, no, no, I'm serious. If we were having this debate about chairs.

• 56:58Nilay Patel?

  I got you there. I got you.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  If we were having this debate about chairs, you would not argue that a nice, cool, you know, fancy designer chair is not itself a piece of culture, right? It's, we could judge its ability to like, recline, and the specs of the, you know, the, what's the thing? The pneumatics that allow it to rise and fall, and, you know, is it good for your back, and blah, blah, blah, blah. We could do the speeds and feeds on a chair, but really, you also want the chair to look nice in your room. And so, when you have a phone, you decide you're an Android stan. Or you only love Apple products, or you know, whatever. You are taking a technological product and making it a part of your world, a part of your culture. People got mad at me for this iPhone case thing that I did, like, this isn't very deep.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Why are you just showing me how to patina a phone? And it's like, technology shouldn't be separate from the rest of our physical world, which is inherently cultural and we all know it.

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I guess when I keep saying it's tools, what I mean is that's like consumer technology. And I think the big move, the thing that has happened that is super interesting is as we put more and more consumer technology into our lives, there's more and more things on the internet, we have also democratized the idea of creation. So like Chad Mum, who now runs Vox Entertainment, literally our TV division at Vox Media, started as a video producer and gadget with us. So like, that's meteoric rise for our boy Chad. But the reason he was able to do that was we started on the internet, digital cameras,

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  digital video cameras in particular, in particular, the 5D Mark II. And then the 70, the Canon 70, allowed us to capture HD video, looked beautiful with like cool lenses. It literally, that thing, which is not like, not a, cameras are not chairs. We're really, we're really doing this today. But that thing, the, the object of the camera enabled creation that was previously not avail, not, we, no one could do before at a much lower cost.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  But, but there was a subtle art to Chad using that camera. It's not something that you just purchase off the shelf and then it just does the thing.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  Right, but I'm saying that, that's what I mean by it was, it's a new kind of tool. And then Chad was able to use that tool in a variety of ways, just like I own a bunch of power tools, but there are people who are much better at working it, literally almost anybody. Just like shows up cold and they're better at it than I am. But that's what I mean, I think, and then that turned into this explosion in digital filmmaking, that explosion in digital filmmaking looped back around. Canon started making the cameras.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't see why this is, why this is a counter to what I'm saying. I mean.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Because I don't think the cameras themselves are objects of culture in that way.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  They absolutely, no, they absolutely are. The cameras in and of themselves are objects of culture in exactly that way. Chad being a person who could operate that camera changed Chad's identity as a person and what he thinks of himself as an artist.

• 1:00:06Nilay Patel?

  Chad's ears are burning right now.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  He, uh. But that, but like, let me spin this out.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  The look and the, the aesthetic of that thing like has an effect on you. Like it's, I don't know. When you choose to wear the shirt you're wearing, you're.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  But, but if I spin that out, what you end up with is not more documentary filmmakers or, you know, heads of TV departments. What you end up with is YouTubers and you end up with Instagrammers, right? Who are now their aesthetic is just Instagram stories shot on the front camera of their phone. And that, that part of the phone that is enabling them to do that, there's so many different pieces of that phone that are objects of culture and not objects of culture that I think it's just. This is, it's like a very subtle disagreement that we're having, but to me, I think the, the loop back around is fundamentally, the tools are disposable. And like so much of technology is disposable and I think what people are always chasing is the form of the culture.

• 1:01:01Nilay Patel?

  And they will move on to the next better tool. The second it makes it easier, whereas you never move on to the next better guitar.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  So well, so here.

• 1:01:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, in like, unless you have a good one.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  But you can love, you can love and cherish an instrument and I, one of my big things is I want people to start making their own software. And I want people to think of the computer as a bicycle for the mind as a capability enhancer and extender and not just. So basically I want, I want our tools, I want us to buy, instead of buying our tools on Amazon and in Apple stores. I want us to buy our tools on, on Etsy. That's where I'm at. I have no idea. I want to go to a secondhand music shop instead of getting the Walmart $99 guitar.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But once you get the, there are like lots of people who are like swear by that guitar. That's Cedar's point.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  Nobody swears by the $99.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  You don't think Jack White is like, I'm putting out my next album on $99 Walmart guitar because I can just do it.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  He has like a very specific retro bad guitar that he credits for a lot of his artistry. Yes.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  But you could argue that he has made that.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  I got you. I got Dieter to say Facebook is a chair and I got you to admit that Jack Watt uses a crappy guitar. That is the Vergecast, ladies and gentlemen.

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  Now, Dieter, you probably are right. You should go watch Processor. It's good.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  You also got me to admit that I maybe would like messages in iCloud.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  No, you are a murderer. I think is where we ended up with you. So we're just gonna see where that goes.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Don't piss me off, guys.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  All right. That is it. We are, in fact, over time. Dieter, is there any more Code Conference coming?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:02:46Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  It's all over.

• 1:02:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, go on Recode.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  You should go to Recode's YouTube channel in particular. There's a bunch of videos. There's one presentation in particular I hope they post that was Estelle from Vox.com did like a presentation version of a video that she's.

• 1:03:01Nilay Patel?

  You can watch this. I watched it last night. It is great.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  It is an amazing presentation where she finds the full history of this thing called the orchestra hit, which is this funny sound you hear in 80s hip hop and beyond. It's amazing.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  You want me to? Okay. Everybody watch that and then think about this tools versus instrument conversation. Because the first thing that sampled orchestra hit was a very important instrument. But then that sound went away and it's now part of everybody else's instruments. Think, just think, go watch the video. It's great. You will love it. But then let me and Dieter know which side you land on, because that video is a perfect encapsulation of this thing, I think.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  You just gotta have the last word. You're just mad that I came up with a better metaphor than you did.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you're out there tweeting that synonyms don't exist. You're just on a different plane of existence, man.

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  I mean, that is, that is.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  100% true. We can't, we can't. We gotta, we gotta end.

• 1:03:51Nilay Patel?

  That was our podcast today, the flagship podcast of this very confused media company that we are part of. They just keep letting us say.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Would you say the Vergecast is a tool?

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  That is it. Please, there are other podcasts to listen to at this company. Many of them are much more focused. None of them will have homicide threats on that. Please listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. That was wonderful. Recode Media with Peter Kafka. I encourage you, I've been listening to Today Explained, Vox's daily show, every night at 4:00 a.m. I feed Max, and that's what I listen to, because I can't use my hands, so I gotta listen to something. It's great. It's like almost the perfect amount of time to feed a baby, in case you have a baby. It's really good, but Russell Brandon, we actually stuck it in the feed this week, Vergecast feed. Russell Brandon was on it this week talking about GDPR, so listen to that. And our boy Casey Newton, Converge, episode two out this week, really good. Check

• 1:04:47Nilay Patel?

  that out. So much to listen to. Hit us up on The Verge, watch the YouTube videos, look at the grams, maybe visit our website directly.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Engage maximally, unless it's not ideal for your digital health.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  Max clicks, that's what I want. Give them to us. Rock and roll. That's The Vergecast.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  Paul.

• 1:05:23Nilay Patel?

  This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by IBM. By the end of this podcast, nearly 10,000 new malware variants will have been launched, but now AI can help protect your data from threats wherever it lives with IBM Security. Let's put smart to work. Learn more at ibm.com/smart.