Previewing Apple's 2025 WWDC

Developer conference season is almost over, but we've got one show left to see: Apple's WWDC begins on Monday. Nilay, David, and Joanna Stern spend time going through both what they expect to see at the show, and why this year's WWDC might feel a bit different than in years past. Apple is in a tricky place with regulators, developers, and users alike, and has some genuine explaining to do. After that, they talk about the launch of the Nintendo Switch 2, and David's surprisingly easy adventure to acquire one. We also have a bit of smart glasses and AI gadgets news to discuss, so we do that too. Then it's time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, and an update on a couple of the interesting new fediverse projects launching this week. Further reading: Verge subscriptions are on sale 40 percent off American Society of Magazine Editors Announces National Magazine Awards 2025 Winners Apple ordered to keep web links in the App Store Payment companies team up to help developers ditch App Store billing Apple could be adding camera controls and sleep detection to your AirPods Switch 2 launch: where to find restocks online and in-store Look inside the Nintendo Switch 2 with the console’s first teardown Mario Kart World’s designers had to rethink everything to make it open world Nintendo is updating even more games for the Switch 2 Here’s what’s inside Meta’s experimental new smart glasses Meta’s reportedly shopping for exclusive content on its upcoming VR headset Meta reportedly sidelined ‘Quest 4’ designs for a goggles-like mixed-reality headset FCC investigation looms over EchoStar’s missed interest payments and a new satellite From Ars Technica: FCC Republican resigns, leaving agency with just two commissioners Jony Ive’s OpenAI device gets the Laurene Powell Jobs nod of approval ChatGPT’s goal is to be a ‘super assistant’ for every part of your life Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Help us plan for the future of The Vergecast by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. 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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• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verge Cast, the flagship podcast with doghouse chatter. You'll see what I mean. Hi, I'm your friend Neil. David Pierce is here.

• 2:10David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Joanna Stern is here.

• 2:12Speaker 07

  Hello.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  Joanna is live from her office at the Wall Street Journal. It's very fancy. This might be the fanciest situation we've ever had in the Verge Cast.

• 2:19Speaker 07

  We have a map.

• 2:21David Pierce?

  If you're watching this on YouTube, you should know that just outside of Joanna's frame is like 6,000 square feet of her office with several couches and a bunch of like glass statues. Like that's the, that's the image I want you to have in your mind.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever seen Succession?

• 2:36David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 2:38Speaker 07

  And we also have a bunch of typewriters. This is a newspaper and we have newsprint everywhere.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Can you yell "stop the presses" right now? What would happen?

• 2:47Speaker 07

  All the people that work on video will stop their presses because they sit right out my office.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. The people who are tasked with like Joanna YouTube stunts will be like, "What presses? Were we supposed to get a press?"

• 2:59Speaker 07

  They're like, "We did get that press two years ago."

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Speaker 07

  It was a sandwich press.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  Like the person holding the kayak for your next trip to an island with a robot will be like, "I don't, is this a press?"

• 3:09Speaker 07

  We haven't done that in like three years.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  It's still the best stunt you've ever done.

• 3:12Speaker 07

  I know.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  Go, if you're listening to this, just type Joanna kayak island and you'll find it. Lots of stuff to talk about. Next week is WWDC, so we're going to preview that. Elon and Trump are in some sort of fight, but we're not going to talk about it too much. I just want to bring that up in the context of what's going on with Starlink. There is a lot going on with Starlink, actually. The Switch 2 launched and David has one.

• 3:33David Pierce?

  I do.

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  So we got to talk about that. But I want to start with a little Verge news. We won some awards this week. It's a real thing. We won Best News and Entertainment Design. The American Society of Magazine Editors gave us the award for Best News and Entertainment Design for our 2004 package, of which I would say David is at fault for because it was his idea and then everyone had to think about 2004 for like six months. That's basically how that turned out. But that incredible art, we'll link it. You can go see it. It's one of the best interactions we've ever done. Our incredible creative director, Kristen, and our art director, Cath, worked on that really hard. They got to accept the award.

• 4:08David Pierce?

  The award, by the way, is spectacular. Because they just, they just printed out the top of the website and put it onto like a glass plaque and gave it to Kat.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  Well, in a glass plaque. It's not, it's all like rubber cemented on the top. It's in it.

• 4:22David Pierce?

  Fair. But it's just like a printed piece of paper inside the glass plaque.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. And then Mia Sato won the ASME Next Award, which is for the best reporters under 30. I want to be careful to distinguish it from 30 under 30. If you win 30 under 30, you go to jail.

• 4:40David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 4:41Speaker 07

  Yes. You get handcuffs. Golden handcuffs.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  That's the fast track to being incarcerated. Mia just won it for being a great young journalist. And actually announced it by saying this is the future of journalism and then I heckled her for being the future of journalism for the rest of the night. It's very good. Congratulations to them. Incredible work from our team. I will remind you that the way to support our team and all that work is by subscribing to The Verge. It's developer conference season is almost over. Our sale is almost over. Right now they're 40% off. Go to theverge.com/subscribe. I'm getting better at pitching the subscriptions, Joanna. I've never been made to sell anything.

• 5:18Nilay Patel?

  You know, that's just not what we do here.

• 5:20Speaker 07

  You just sold me, but I already paid, so.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Cheaper than the Wall Street Journal. That's.

• 5:25Speaker 07

  I mean, that is a good sale right there.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's start. It is developer conference season. We've had Microsoft, we've had Google, there's been some other ones in the backdrop. Anthropic had its first one, just to, you know, join the fun. The last one, traditionally sort of a big one, is Apple's WWDC. It's coming up next week. I would, I would just want to start with the context of WWDC. So this week, there was a huge court ruling that said, "Apple can't block web links in the App Store." So, right, Apple had the big case with Epic. They went back and forth for five years. Eventually, the judge in that case got fed up with Apple, accused it of lying on the stand, of having executives lie on the stand, referred that executive

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  for criminal contempt proceedings and said, "Screw it, we're done here. You have to allow alternative payment systems in the App Store." This is a huge threat to Apple's business. They immediately appealed and said, "Stay the ruling while we appeal how wrong this is," and they lost that fight. So the the ruling is in effect while Apple goes through a field, which effectively means for years now, Apple is going to have to allow links in the App Store, allow payment links to the App Stores.

• 6:33David Pierce?

  It feels like that's done now. Like, I'm I'm sort of at the point where the and we talked about this before that like, even if Apple had gotten this particular victory, it it would have felt like putting toothpaste back in the tube in a certain way. And I think we've already seen so many of these apps update to go with other systems of linking out. And all of a sudden you realize like, oh, I can click the button in the Kindle app and go buy the Kindle book. Like, what a world. And I think it was always going to be very hard to go back from that. And I feel like now, at this point, it feels very hard to me to imagine Apple winning and undoing all of this. Like, it's so crystal clear how crappy a move that would be for Apple

• 7:14David Pierce?

  that I think like even the company that is seems increasingly clear being or increasingly happy being the bad guy. I don't I don't know how you do that one.

• 7:22Nilay Patel?

  Yep, and Fortnite is back in the store. They had a big fight and the judge basically said, figure this out or I'm going to figure it out for you. And Apple said, we figured out Fortnite's back in the store. We have an interview actually with Tim Sweeney. Jay Peters interviewed Tim Sweeney this week. And he said, I thought this would be two weeks and it was five years, but we were happy to wait it out. And because because they won, of course, he's happy to wait it out.

• 7:40David Pierce?

  Tim Sweeney is so full of shit.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:42David Pierce?

  Can we just say that? Tim Sweeney, who has at every point of this process been like, well, we're just over here trying to do our best and we just want to do what's right. And it's like, no, no, no, no. What has actually happened is you have found every single way to pick a fight with Apple in court that you have been able to for five years. You have decided that it is worth all of the money that you make from V bucks to just knife Apple over and over for five years. So it's like, if if they had put him back in the store, he would have found something else to do to get kicked out of the store. I don't like, I just I just don't believe him for one second.

• 8:13Speaker 07

  Why don't you interview Tim Sweeney? I feel like that would have been the best interview there. You are full of shit, Tim Sweeney.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Speaker 07

  I'd like to open with that.

• 8:21David Pierce?

  Tim, who else would you have sued?

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  When you send the pitch emails to book the the episodes, they're like, here's our here's our angle. You're full of shit. I mean, it's worth a shot. We'll send that email at the end of the show. Uh, I mean, I agree with that. I also think they did think the fight would be over sooner. I assume that Epic thought they would win faster than they did. And it only is because Apple was so noncompliant for so long that they've gotten to this resounding victory. I do agree that the toothpaste is out of tune. If Apple succeeds in this appeal and they borrow links again, well, it turns out now there's a lot of data about how much money was going to Apple instead of the app developers that different countries and regulators around the world can all look at. Right. And that's going to be the case in the EU. It's the case in Japan. It's like all over the place.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  We're running this big A B test and the data shows, oh, Apple kept a lot of money that could have gone to developers and created jobs and all this.

• 9:12Speaker 07

  Right. And now like the Amazons and the Spotify's of the world will have the other data that says, look how much money.

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And that this is just a big deal. The reason I bring this up ahead of W W C preview conversation is this is the developer conference. This is where Apple says, look at all these new capabilities of our next generation operating systems. Can't you get excited? Won't you get excited about building your apps using our new A P I's and features and hooks? And like, look at all the cool new stuff you can do on the iPhone. This is why it's worth paying us 30% of every in-app purchase because our operating system is better developers. And I think they're coming into this totally on their back foot with developers who are by and large unhappy, who are already starting new kinds of companies and organizations to manage payments differently. Right. You're seeing an alternative payment ecosystem develop, who are pretty annoyed about the A I stuff, right?

• 10:03Nilay Patel?

  Like the energy is elsewhere in A I and who are also just like, we are tired of this company, this heel turn that Apple is doing, saying, we're definitely going to yell at everyone. And we have all these emails from inside of Apple, basically being like, how do we squeeze our developers from these court cases? And I just think it's a weird spot for Apple to begin this developer conference season.

• 10:23Speaker 07

  I agree. And I think the tide has turned for Apple, not only in the space of the developers and the 30% and the 70% and all of the money, but also just in terms of the fanfare for the company and the product, which as we all have gone to these conferences for, I don't know, 150 years now. Like there's the excitement there, not only about like, oh, I'm going to build this app. It's just like, I'm excited about Apple, right? Like people are just excited about the devices. They're excited about the software. And to your point, like they're very, right now, there's this big shift towards these A I platforms. What can we do with A I? And Apple's been out of that conversation. I know you guys have been discussing on the podcast too, like the Ive and Altman partnership.

• 11:05Speaker 07

  I mean, there's, there's this appetite and excitement for something else right now. And it's not Apple that seems to be delivering it.

• 11:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, and Apple's on this kind of sneakily bad run recently of a mix of launching things with incredible fanfare that it claims are going to be the next big thing that either aren't or don't exist at all. And so I think, like, I think about the, we've always talked about WWDC differently than some of the other ones. And like, the, the rap on Google for a long time was we would go to Google I/O and they would show us science projects. And then we would go to WWDC and they would show us products. And they were like, Apple was unusually clear at showing things that were finished, that were going to ship, that you were going to use.

• 11:52David Pierce?

  And we've had a bad run of that with all of the, there's been the CarPlay stuff that lingered a long time and then changed and got weird. Siri, which is the biggest story of this year's WWDC, because I would bet you $500, it's just not going to be there.

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  Nope.

• 12:10David Pierce?

  Is it now a year old and we have not seen one lick of what it's supposed to be? Then throw in the Vision Pro, which was supposed to be the next big thing that was going to change everybody's mind. That hasn't really worked. There's just this sense of like, I think WWDC was sort of the year Apple like set agendas for a long time. And it really doesn't feel like that is what's coming anymore. And it's a very strange shift.

• 12:33Nilay Patel?

  And I would add to that, they set design agendas for the year, right? Cause they would show you app designs and new features and new modes of interactions and animation flourishes and all this stuff and everyone would copy it. And I, I don't know, we, you know, we're hearing that there's going to be a big redesign of all their operating systems this year. We've, we, and I think Greg Josrick tweeted some joke about the word sleek. Right, like it's coming.

• 12:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, and they sent it out in an email, like a sleek, it's like a sleek peek.

• 13:00Nilay Patel?

  And those are the invites, right?

• 13:02David Pierce?

  Yeah, I didn't like that.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  They're hinting that there's gonna be some, some big visual redesign. And it's fascinating because they're diverging from the rest of the industry. And I'm not sure the rest of the industry is gonna follow them into their like last based redesign language. Maybe, maybe they will. People tend to copy Apple quite a bit. But you can just see the rest of the industry is kind of headed back towards skirmorphism, which is wild. And like, weird, that's just weird, you know? Like even Apple not as design leader is truly novel.

• 13:33Speaker 07

  But I actually think, I mean, it will, it will learn about this. And I, I keep having like a little bit of this nightmare that it, that it launches in September. The operating cell, operating system itself like looks great and, you know, hopefully works. Fingers crossed, everything sort of works. We don't have this buggy situation. But then the apps you're in just look completely different. I mean, we had this with, with, when the iPhone X came out, right? There was like that gap in time that the apps had to catch up. And it looked like garbage on the phone. You remember that time that like? I don't know. It's probably like six months, right? Where the app developers had to update for the update with like the no home button design and all that. It's like, kind of like cringed at the apps that didn't have the update. Like, there's a possibility that some of these developers don't get on board

• 14:17Speaker 07

  or they don't get on board right away because they're put their resources into something else. But I'm sure we're gonna hear a lot about how easy it is to do X, Y, and Z. I mean, two clicks and X code, all of those types of things.

• 14:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it does seem like to that point, I, I'd like, this is another thing where it's gonna be an interesting test for Apple. Because again, it has spent the last few years just pissing off developers left and right. And essentially telling developers that they don't matter, that Apple's in charge, that it can do whatever it wants. Uh, and then also asking developers to do more all the time. And I think thi- this is a thing I've heard a lot from folks over the last year or so is this question of, okay, I'm being asked to make a really great iOS app. Uh, and last year it was all of the new like color tinting and all the, the dark mode stuff. And so they're like, okay, well now I have to rethink the way that my widgets work and the way that my home screen stuff works. And there's the new control center stuff and there's the new lock screen stuff. So I have to build this whole new controls thing.

• 15:11David Pierce?

  But then there's also all of this new stuff being done so that I can port my iOS app to other platforms, which is extra work that I have to do. And now Apple also really wants me to build an app for the Vision Pro. And it's like, if you're- Netflix, you can like figure out how to make apps for lots of platforms. But if you're like one person or a small team of developers, which is most of the apps in the App Store, that's a giant amount of work to give people.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  So what's fascinating about that is how did that, how did that problem get solved most often? Is they started using web frameworks to do all that stuff, to get the app logic in more places. And then you can just skin the sort of app logic in the web framework. And so many apps now are just like, like web apps and wrappers, which is fine and great and fascinating. But it means all the actions on the web.

• 15:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  And that's where all of the AI apps are being developed. Like fundamentally, all of the best AI apps are starting as deployed on the web. Cause you know, the backend is in the, in the cloud anyway.

• 16:03Speaker 07

  Right. What you talked about with Sundar in your interview, which was really fascinating to me. Like that's where people are going to launch their, their apps.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  Sundar said that he had vibe coded in Replit and the CEO of Replit clipped that and he got a million views and he's just the happiest.

• 16:19Speaker 07

  I was actually just thinking like, maybe we should just show up to WDC as developers and just be like, now I'm a vibe coder now. I'm gonna stay with the developers.

• 16:26Nilay Patel?

  I watch a lot of TikToks of people one-shot coding iOS apps, right? It's just like, here it is. And I don't know if that's good or bad. I just, I know that the action isn't on Apple's platforms, right? The action of where's, where's my app being first developed? It's kind of on the web and that is remarkable. I continue to think the web is remarkable, but it just means the part where you make it pretty for iOS is like a second order phenomenon. And it used to just be the, the first thing. It used, the first order bit was like, do I have a great iOS app? Cause that's how I make all the money.

• 16:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, there are, there are legions of Android apps that are just iOS apps. Like that's it because Apple was able to lead that for so long, right? That it was, the assumption was that your Apple version of your app was going to be the best one. And then you would, you would scale that in whatever way you needed to off to other platforms. And like to your point about Apple sort of skating in the other direction from all these companies. Like that's a big swing because if you're not leading now. It's gonna feel bad. And it's like, there, there is a real perception that like, people with great taste use Apple products because they are cohesive. And you can lose that really quickly.

• 17:33Speaker 07

  I'll make a bet here. And I think, again, in our 150 years of going to WWDC, we know that Tim Cook usually opens talking to the developers and like highlighting how much money they made for them. Right? Like, so to play the other side of this, like, Apple still makes a lot of money for these developers, probably the most. And so they'll lean into that. People aren't gonna go anywhere. Maybe they won't update as quickly. But Tim Cook will still be up there talking about how much money he made for developers.

• 18:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  I know they're gonna do that because Apple keeps putting out press releases saying how much money they put out for.

• 18:07Speaker 07

  Okay, so there's no bet here because we all agree.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like, literally today, they're like, look at how big the global App Store ecosystem is. And it, uh, the answer is 1.3 trillion dollars in developer billings and sales.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  That's gonna be on the slide.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  And 90% of billings and sales went to developers with no commission paid to Apple. These are the first two bullet points. What are they trying to point out? Right? They're like, we don't take any money from, look at all this money we didn't take. And it's like, well, the 10% you did take is still a huge amount of money.

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, I don't know what to tell you.

• 18:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's gonna be the slide. That's like, one of the first slides. You're right.

• 18:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so you can just see that they're, they're trying to make the case they're providing all this value. I wanted to start there, not to just be negative, but to point out, this is the context. Like, the audience at WWDC is developers who are feeling these pressures. The point of this conference is sometimes to launch a Mac Pro, right? And to get some flash of consumer recognition. And obviously, Apple has a lot of fans. But the point is to get developers excited about building for Apple's platforms as opposed to Microsoft's or Google's or OpenAI's or whoever. And they're just in a weird spot. Like, I think, I think that will be an undercurrent of this entire thing next week, that developers are, they need to be convinced in a way that hasn't been true of Apple in a very long time.

• 19:23David Pierce?

  I do think, though, to Joanna's point, that there is a real, like... Where else are you gonna go thing that Apple continues to have going for it? And this is again, like a lot of the the sort of developer energy I hear around AI stuff is like, maybe that's the platform shift, right? It was like, there was a minute where everybody was like, maybe we'll investigate the metaverse and then that wasn't it. And then everybody's like, is it web three? And they're like, no, that's not it. And now there is the sense that, okay, maybe AI is the thing that I can I can build something into that will not come with all of the problems and restrictions of iOS, but like the the people who have been making iOS apps for 20 years and are really pissed at Apple are going to keep making iOS apps. And the problem is Apple knows that

• 20:05David Pierce?

  and is is going to continue to bleed that fact and those developers for as long as it is able to.

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, except they can't take the money from the web links anymore, so they have to fight.

• 20:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, this is the this is the dynamic. There's where else are you gonna go? And the answer is, well, somewhere else. There's, I can go somewhere else now. Have you considered that, Tim?

• 20:27David Pierce?

  For that thing, for sure.

• 20:28Nilay Patel?

  But that's the money. So I think that brings us to the the the operating system updates and and a bit of the preview here. We're expecting some visual refresh across the operating systems. We are expecting them to mention the Vision Pro, which continues to exist, obstinately continues to exist. They're going to rename them all to, you know, iOS 26, wherever in your thing. Then there's like

• 20:49David Pierce?

  Actually, wait, can we talk about that? Joanna, I want to know how you feel about this. We've talked a lot about this on this show, but you are a person who cares deeply about version numbers.

• 20:57Speaker 07

  I care a lot about this. I have a lot of thoughts. I tweeted this. Okay, first of all, I get the year thing, but it is 2025 right now.

• 21:07David Pierce?

  This is what I said.

• 21:07Speaker 07

  There are still a number of months where we have to process that. And I'm still writing 2024 on my checks.

• 21:15David Pierce?

  Oh, my God. Yes. How many checks are you writing?

• 21:18Speaker 07

  I knew you were gonna ask that, and I would like to talk about my checks.

• 21:21Nilay Patel?

  This is what happens when you work at a print newspaper.

• 21:23Speaker 07

  No, it isn't what happens when we're in a print newspaper. It's what happens when you have an accountant who is old school and will only take checks. It's when you have a lighting guy for your house and he only takes checks.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  Your lighting guy doesn't want you to pay him on Zelle under the table? This, I've learned that this is Zelle's fault.

• 21:39Speaker 07

  I do so much Zelle under the table. I mean, I don't, if you're listening to this, someone who's trying to audit all the people I pay for things for houses, stuff. Um, yes, so much Zelle. Anyway, I still write some checks. Okay? It happens.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 07

  Um, mostly for house stuff.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it seems like Zelle under the table.

• 21:59Speaker 07

  I feel like I need a spin off of the Virg cast, which is just about my house and the things I do in my house.

• 22:05Nilay Patel?

  We can stop this right now if you just want to talk about your house.

• 22:08Speaker 07

  We did the garage. That was a great hit. I feel like that was a great hit.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  We still get emails about the garage and I delete them before Neil I can see them.

• 22:14Speaker 07

  I know we had, you know, we did, we did a postmortem on that. I think there were ways we could have done it better, but we'll, we'll work on that for our next project. Anyway, I'm worried about the year thing. I will get over that. It's also so many numbers. My annual tradition is to do the number of tips to correspond to the iOS version. And so there's just no way, I think physically I can do 26 tips for iOS 26.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is your problem.

• 22:37Speaker 07

  I'm, I'm gonna try. There's, I'm, I'm up for the task. I'm not too old to do it. I think I can, I can overcome. But that's a lot of tips to do.

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  It is a lot. They, they jumped you by like eight.

• 22:50David Pierce?

  It is gonna, it's gonna get into like new formatting tricks in Apple Notes and it's gonna be like, it's gonna be at the bottom. Where, but what I, my challenge to you, Joanna, is, is to do 26 tips for TVOS 26. That's the one. If you can do that, you deserve all 8,000 square feet of your office.

• 23:08Speaker 07

  For all 26 viewers.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Isn't this what ChatGPT is for? I need eight more tips, buddy. Get out there.

• 23:18Speaker 07

  You know, ChatGPT tends to be wrong on the tips. They'll be like, you need to adjust this settings menu and this. And it's like, that doesn't exist. Okay. I've tried it.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  That's the foundational stuff. And obviously Joanna is very annoyed because she has to do slightly more work than last year. Great. Um, we should talk about the actual features. Here's the thing that I'm most interested in, in the context of making developers excited. The iPhone has an incredible fast processor, right? It's the, it is the best mobile processor on a phone. Qualcomm has caught up in some ways. I'm sure we'll get some emails about someone's Nvidia Shield that they're powering with a USB battery pack or whatever, like it's all happening. It's great. But they've got the neural engine. They've got a best in class mobile processor. They can run local models. Do you think that they're going to find a way to tell developers like just do the AI stuff here instead of on Azure, using an OpenAI? Like, because that is the game, right?

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Where your AI app logic is running right now is going to tell us a lot about the future of this industry writ large. And Apple hasn't made a big play for, well, actually a bunch of the stuff you want to do, you can do locally on the phone because we have the processors to do it. And all of the built for Apple intelligence stuff came to nothing. But if they actually did build the phone for Apple intelligence, well, maybe they built the phone to run some models that are useful for app developers.

• 24:34Speaker 07

  And private cloud compute, which like I think they want to keep selling. They obviously put a lot of investment, we think into that. So I think that that's like one way they get into the AI story this year without getting into Apple intelligence, right? Like to all of our conversation about the developers, they try to say, hey, we're going to give you access to small language models that run on a device. We're going to give you a large language model access and private cloud compute. And you can build great things. We don't even know what you're going to build. So you go, go build it. I issue there and like, you know, it's like, are the models any good?

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Good is a, has a relationship to cost. So if the model on the phone is like kind of crappy, but it's free to use, well, it's fine. You know, like, I think that that's the case for them to make because I don't think that they can run a GPT four class model on private cloud compute right now. Maybe they will. Maybe that's what they're going to announce, but like, that's your problem. If you, if you want that thing, you gotta go pay OpenAI or you gotta pay Google for Gemini or who, like you got, that class of model exists on someone else's data storage right now.

• 25:38Speaker 07

  But even like just all of our complaints that we probably have about Apple intelligence, the issues are largely because the models just don't feel that smart. Right? Like you even just take the, you know, the image editing, right? Where you're, you want to get something out of the background. That is not as good as what you see from a Google level type of. Experience or model, whatever, take summaries and notifications. Those summaries make very little sense and to the point where most people have turned them off. Like, that's the intelligence. And so if the intelligence that they're going to give access to isn't actually all that intelligent, I'm not sure what the sale is.

• 26:17Nilay Patel?

  Cheap.

• 26:18David Pierce?

  It's really interesting because in theory, if Apple were good at this, it is actually like perfectly positioned to do this in a really cool and coherent way where like, like you said, it has more stuff to work with locally than almost anybody. And, and there are a lot of good and useful things you can do on your phone with local AI models, right? Like it solves a lot of search problems. It solves a lot of like, how do I do small things on my phone? Like, what if it made timers faster? Like, there's just a lot of things you could do.

• 26:46Nilay Patel?

  Wait, David, can we just unpack what if it made timers faster?

• 26:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. Okay, I didn't want to cut you off.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  What if it sped up time? You're like, 30 seconds now goes by in 25.

• 26:55David Pierce?

  No, I'm talking about the, the gap between me saying timer and the timer start.

• 26:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see.

• 27:01David Pierce?

  There, there have been these moments with Siri in particular in the past where they, they took a thing that had to go to the cloud and they made it run on the device and it immediately feels better.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  So I just know all three of us are parents and we've often all made pasta. And it's like, if I could get this done in six minutes instead of nine, we're gold, you know?

• 27:17David Pierce?

  I would buy every iPhone.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  The power of Apple intelligence.

• 27:20Speaker 07

  Bath times just gets going from like 10 minutes to two and you're like, it's 10 minutes, I swear.

• 27:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, we, we just solved some things.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  Get on it, Craig, timers faster.

• 27:32Speaker 07

  What was that quote was like, time is not a?

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  Trump's like head of like White House technology was like, we can now travel through time and space. And everyone's like, are you sure?

• 27:45Speaker 07

  That's it. That's exactly what I'm thinking of.

• 27:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause I'm good on space. I know we can travel through space. Very confused about time.

• 27:52Speaker 07

  Sorry, David. Go on.

• 27:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, now we'll come back to that. That's a Vergecast.

• 27:59David Pierce?

  But you start with that, right? And you have the sort of base layer of on-device, private stuff. Apple gets to tell its big story about privacy and all this stuff like that all works great. Then the second thing is the is the private cloud compute stuff that Apple like, by all accounts, the infrastructure for that is actually pretty good. We have not seen it do anything interesting, but like as a as a theory and a product, it seems to be pretty interesting to a lot of people. That's where you can do a lot of stuff. And then for the most aggressive, impressive sort of needy stuff, you have this seamless integration out to ChatGPT. And one of the rumors this time is that they're going to bring more partners into that. So you could you could route to Gemini,

• 28:41David Pierce?

  you could route to Claude, like you basically have this thing where you need your phone to do something and it has every available option to choose from, from fast to slow and from cheap to expensive, right? That's very cool, except that Apple sucks at this. And it's like, and there is it's so frustrating because like you can see the idea being right and the execution just being a disaster over and over and over again. And so with all of this, I do think one of the things Apple is going to do is point some of the Apple intelligence stuff at developers as a bunch of APIs, you could call, right? That like it's going to bring them in as features, but it's also, I think, going to start to give developers more access to the underlying

• 29:24David Pierce?

  models and technology. And that's, again, potentially really interesting. And it is a very Apple-y thing to do to be like, hey, you know, rewind all the way back. And Apple's like, you don't have a phone with a camera that knows where you are. What do you want to do with that? And people found really interesting stuff to do with that because there's interesting stuff to do with that. But the product sucks. So it's like, Apple's going to be like, hey, here's a bad model that doesn't do anything. Is this interesting to developers? And I think developers are just going to be like, no.

• 29:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, because they can just go build on the cloud on GPT-4 or Gemini or Claude or anything else. And that part to me is fascinating because the history, the reason Apple has all this clout with developers is because you got a bunch of stuff in the 80s and 90s, developing for the Mac got you a bunch of stuff for free that like you had to basically hard code into Windows and then nothing was cohesive. Right. So you got like proportional fonts. This was like Steve Jobs' favorite thing to talk about. He did proportional fonts and Windows proportional fonts and Windows proportional fonts were like really bad for one time. You got that stuff for free. So a bunch of developers like, oh, I want to make beautiful stuff here. You can go on and on and on down the line, all the way to on the iPhone, you got iPhones like theming toolkit for free.

• 30:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Nilay Patel?

  Like they would upgrade to iOS seven and everyone like ran to use iOS seven's design language and that was cool. Here, the capability you're talking about, the thing you're supposed to get for free is like, oh, there's a bunch of AI on the phone that I can use. And I build an X class of application. And I think developers like, yeah, but I can just use Gemini on the web.

• 30:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  And then that rules.

• 30:51David Pierce?

  I can get that from other places. Apple is by a mile not the best provider of that stuff right now, even if you're building iOS apps.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  But they do, to your point, they do own the phone. So until someone displaces the phone, I think they do have a little bit of where are you going to go? And so we should go through the other features that are rumored. As David mentioned, more integrations with outside AI partners. I'm actually really looking for how they integrate Google Gemini. I think it's in it's in both Apple and Google's interest to move the money from Google paying Apple for Google search to be the default in Safari to something else. Cause that is under antitrust pressure. You know, there's this stat about Google searches and Safari falling anyway that Sundar basically doesn't want to talk to about. So if you move that money to a Gemini integration, interesting, right? Maybe you escape the problem. We'll see, but I'm curious how that plays out.

• 31:44Speaker 07

  Have you guys changed your search default on Safari?

• 31:47Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 31:48Speaker 07

  To anything? Is it, it still goes to Google?

• 31:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  No, I just added Chat GPT to my action button.

• 31:54Speaker 07

  Okay. So I changed my Safari search to Chat GPT.

• 32:00Speaker 07

  And it's a really poor experience, like Chat GPT has this extension. So it's there as an extension. And so I think there's a lot of potential for them to change that to tap into, and we know they're talking to perplexity. We know they're talking to these other companies. Whether they do it as default, or you know, they could keep Google as a default because we all, there's all that baggage, but they could make it considerably easier for you to use the address bar in Safari to get to an AI chatbot, which I would love to see. What I was going to jump in and say is like, the ChatGPT integration with Siri is terrible.

• 32:36David Pierce?

  It's awful.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  It's very bad.

• 32:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 07

  So either they have to improve that considerably and add extra partners, like if they do add an Anthropic and they do add a Google there, like they say, you know what, just like we let you change your whatever default of whatever over the years, they've given us more of those options. We'll let you change the default on the, you know, Siri will default to go to Claude or Gemini, but they have to improve that experience because otherwise like no one, there's no benefit in it.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, the baggage you're describing, to be clear, is literal bags full of $20 billion.

• 33:10Speaker 07

  Yes, right.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  Like they have to move that money. Right. And to say to Google, okay, you were paying us to be the default search provider, we might change that to perplexity because it's a better experience. We would still really like your $20 billion. Here's this other integration.

• 33:27Speaker 07

  And that integration is the Siri?

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't know the answer. I just, I, I suspect because there's antitrust pressure on the deals exist now. They will find some other place to make Google and Gemini the default that lets them preserve $20 billion.

• 33:40David Pierce?

  But then while this is happening, you also have the DOJ pointing at that possibility going, we cannot allow that to happen, right? That is like, they're like, we have to get this trial done now so that Google can't make this next deal with Apple the way that it is currently attempting to do with everybody.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's like, you know, I have Siri, like the action button opening ChatGPT. This is a very dumb example, but because we're, whenever Joanna's on, we only talk about home repair. I hung up a light fixture yesterday and it had weird connectors for the LEDs inside. And one of them broke and I hit the action button and I took a picture of the weird connector and I said, how do I fix this? And ChatGPT just told me how to pry out the little pin that was broken, re-cream it and stick it back in there and it was fixed. And I was like, oh, this is very useful.

• 34:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you're not using Apple's visual intelligence to do that, which could do it.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  I'm, but I'm using Apple's button. Right. It's like if Apple can get $20 billion to set that button to Gemini instead of ChatGPT, we're like, they're in business.

• 34:33Speaker 07

  Well, and the visual intelligence taps into Google. So maybe that's another place. And we've heard about that, I believe, a little bit in the trial, that that's another place that they're building that future of the relationship.

• 34:44Nilay Patel?

  So that's one aspect. We're looking for those integrations and who will be the providers and who will be the faults. I'm very curious about that. The second one that's on the list is this idea that they're going to redesign shortcuts and then Apple Intelligence will help you like write better shortcuts, which is super fascinating, not because I think it will be any good.

• 34:59Speaker 07

  David, you actually, when you worked at the Wall Street Journal, did a column on shortcuts, and I'm still go back to that column to try to figure out how the fuck to use shortcuts.

• 35:07Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 35:07David Pierce?

  The thing I say on this podcast sometimes that I get emails about every single time is that shortcuts is a bad app and a failed experiment by Apple and everyone who made it should feel bad. And people get very upset with me about that, but also I am completely correct.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 35:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, but like the potential of it is amazing.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  Yes, it's such a good idea.

• 35:25Speaker 07

  Back to home stuff. I know there's so many home things I can do with shortcuts.

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  But none of them work because they, the phone forgets to run your shortcuts.

• 35:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. And David didn't write about it like six years ago.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 35:36Speaker 07

  And I don't know how to do it.

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, you don't have a PhD in software engineering, so you can't possibly use the shortcuts app.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  So this is what AI should fix, right? You have this automation engine inside the phone already. And then you're like, robot, do something. It's like, I'm gonna use this automation engine. And so much of AI stuff right now is just basic automation wrapped up in a natural language interface.

• 35:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's, it's not as complicated as anybody is making some of this stuff.

• 36:03David Pierce?

  I will say, you, you say that like it's, it's a small thing, but that's actually a huge thing. Like, automation, natural language automation, if that's the extent of what AI ever turns out to be, is still like an enormously huge deal in how we use computers, which is the thing that drives me so crazy. It's like, it's just, it's sitting right there. It's also the easy part. Like, you, all the developers have said, here are all the building blocks that I have. And you have a thing that in theory is very good at assembling those building blocks all by itself. What are we doing here?

• 36:32Speaker 07

  You know what I'm sort of thinking? I know I'm cutting off your list, but like.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  The rest of the list I would say is bad.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  No, this conversation has like made me feel like maybe Apple really isn't going to fail at AI in the same way like Apple failed at Mobile Me but still pulled through on cloud. Like, let me go a little bit to explain that a little bit more. Like, Apple intelligence as a term is a thing that is not good or associated with good things with at least our community of people that work and think about tech a lot.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  No, and everyone. I don't know anyone in my life who has, who is like, you know what's tight is Apple intelligence.

• 37:10Speaker 07

  Well, I think actually those people in your life, like, they didn't even know it was there. Right? And so like, maybe this is Apple's like Mobile Me moment in AI. And now we're going to, they will unlock the things that where AI will actually play a big difference on the iPhone. And this race towards making Siri, like, maybe we let them go for a little bit and go and hopefully fix that. It's very important. Don't let me say like it isn't important, is absolutely important. If they do not get Siri right, they will lose to these other companies that are building great conversational AI. But like, I have hope in the things we are talking about right now.

• 37:46David Pierce?

  I do too. And it's actually, it's the kind of thing Apple historically does really well, including with like machine learning and the neural engine stuff. Like, so much of what everybody is now calling AI features, we used to just call like, features. It's just software in so many ways.

• 38:03Speaker 07

  It's like stuff you use.

• 38:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. And so I think there's a bunch of things, right? Like, the idea that you can, you can essentially prompt your way through shortcuts is fundamentally just a, an AI feature, but it's, we don't think about it the same way. And like, one of the big things that has been rumored is AI-powered battery management, which is also just called battery management. Like, it's just, it's, it's just software, but it is using.

• 38:24Speaker 07

  Went through this with the cloud too. Like, this is where I'm going with the Mobile Me iCloud situation, right? Like, Mobile Me was not good.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  Mobile me famously prompted a meeting where Steve Jobs said, well, Mossberg said we were bad. Whose fault is this? And you got mad at everybody.

• 38:39Speaker 07

  Right.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  Not great. But when you say they they came around, they like they did iCloud. And then the big innovation iCloud is not giving enough storage by default. So that you have to pay them more money every month.

• 38:51Speaker 07

  I don't know. Photos iCloud works pretty great.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  Except it fills up your storage and you pay them more money. Like that. That's what they solved in the cloud, right? They backed everybody up and they they made a business out of it by selling.

• 39:01Speaker 07

  It's capitalism. I don't know what to tell you.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  But it's true. It's not broken the way that Mobile me was. The the problem you have with shortcuts with a, you know, a prompt engineering interface is shortcuts doesn't work. Right. Right? So it would be really cool to be like, hey, every single day when I wake up, I check these four apps. I need you to go check them for me and tell me if anything good happened. Right? This is like a thing that a lot of people would love to automate. And shortcuts today will be like, I am drunk and I didn't do it. Like, well, you are a bad friend. Like, you're just untrustworthy and I'm going to check the apps on my own. And you can put a whole layer of AI on top of that. But the the core engine of that product doesn't work.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  And like, I don't know if Apple can solve that.

• 39:49Speaker 07

  I'm even going to see what my shortcuts are.

• 39:51Nilay Patel?

  Do you have shortcuts?

• 39:52Speaker 07

  I have a short because I've tried over the years, like I have.

• 39:55Nilay Patel?

  The only shortcut I ever had that was any good. It was it was, I would say, Vergecast famous. In like the mid 2010s, when Mike McCarthy was the coach of the Packers and would consistently lose in the playoffs.

• 40:06Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  I had a shortcut on my home screen that just tweeted the words fire Mark Mike McCarthy. And I pushed it with fail every Sunday. That's pretty good.

• 40:15Speaker 07

  All my, okay, this is amazing. This is very Virch. All my failed shortcuts are for the garage.

• 40:22Speaker 07

  I tried so hard. I must have tried so hard. Siri, where are my keys? I mean, I've got some stuff.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna fix your own garage one of these days.

• 40:29Speaker 07

  No, we fixed it. My garage is great. I didn't like.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm killing it.

• 40:33Speaker 07

  My garage is great. You know, you saw my garage. It's great.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  I did. I was there. It worked.

• 40:37Speaker 07

  Hey Siri, I'm gonna say it on the pocket. So everyone's garages will open or like the two people that set up their garages. Every time I say, hey Siri, they open the garage. It works.

• 40:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm the other one of those people and my garage is open.

• 40:47Speaker 07

  Opening the garage.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  Did it actually just do it?

• 40:48Speaker 07

  Yes. And my wife is going to text me and say, there's somebody in the house who opened the garage. Yep, just got an alert. All my devices just said smart garage door opener.

• 41:00Nilay Patel?

  This is great radio.

• 41:01Speaker 07

  Hey Siri, close the garage.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god.

• 41:05Speaker 07

  Closing the garage.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Two things on this are kind of the same thing. One on the iPhone and one on the iPad. And they're basically, it's every, every year it's rumored that they will fix the iPad in some way.

• 41:16David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  And by fix, I mean just make it a Mac. Um, or add better multitasking. So there's either they will add a menu bar, they'll add free for multitasking. And then on the iPhone, there's the idea that they will add like Stage Manager or make it more like Dex that lets it, the iPhone itself, connect to a monitor and be a computer. If they did no AI stuff and they were just like, you can plug your iPhone into a bigger monitor and use it like a computer. I think people would lose their minds.

• 41:43David Pierce?

  I would, I would just die of happiness that day. It would be managed so badly. It would be such an unusably chaotic feature. And I would love it to absolute pieces and use it every single day.

• 41:55Speaker 07

  But isn't that what they did last year?

• 41:57David Pierce?

  No, so now you can have it so that you have a separate monitor when it's plugged in. But it's, you're, you're essentially just moving an app. And, and that's only on the, that's like, the iPad is like slightly better at this. You can do Stage Manager on an external display. Like it's all well and good.

• 42:13Speaker 07

  Sorry, I mean, I guess I mean iPhone mirroring.

• 42:16Nilay Patel?

  Right, but that's, you can like plug a mouse into your iPhone and, and look at it on a monitor. This is, you have multiple monitors on iPhone. And then ideally what you have, Google basically announced a riff on this. Like Samsung's had Dex for a while, where you like plug your Samsung phone into a monitor and keyboard. And you get like a Linux desktop with a weird Samsung browser.

• 42:34David Pierce?

  Neil, I valiantly tried to do it.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  This is my dream. I tried to use this for a while. It was not good.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  But Google's gonna do it. And I think that might be really interesting if that's part of Android. We actually get proper Chrome instead of weird Samsung stuff.

• 42:47David Pierce?

  I mean, plug your phone in and it becomes a Chromebook is like the dream. Like it would work. It's just sitting there.

• 42:53Speaker 07

  Just like this doesn't make any sense for Apple. They want you to buy a Mac. They want you to buy the iPad. So why would they want you to plug your iPhone into a monitor?

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  Because they gotta compete. They gotta do stuff.

• 43:02Speaker 07

  I don't think so.

• 43:03Nilay Patel?

  They're behind over here. What, oh, your phone's a banana. Like they gotta come up with ideas. Like, let's do it.

• 43:08Speaker 07

  I just think there's like no, there's no upside for them here on this.

• 43:12David Pierce?

  This rumor is pretty thin.

• 43:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't believe it.

• 43:14David Pierce?

  And I would bet against it coming true, but it also like, Neil, I just think about something like you and I every year sit in meetings with Apple executives. And every year, the Apple executives tell us the story about how the devices are different and they are for different purposes. And it is like, it has reached a point now where A, I believe Apple when it says these things, that it perceives the devices to be differently, but I also think it is so obstinately clinging to that idea that these devices cannot run into each other, that they're leaving like obviously good ideas on the table.

• 43:45Nilay Patel?

  I think the iPad is fully in the where are you gonna go zone.

• 43:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:49Nilay Patel?

  Like they don't need to have more iPad ideas, cause like, someone's gotta watch Disney Plus. It's like, where are you gonna go? And like, so it goes. And eventually I think it will just ease its way into being more Mac like. I think that's just happening every year. But the idea that the phone itself would get this tech stuff, kind of interesting.

• 44:08David Pierce?

  It would be super interesting.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  There's other stuff, we can just go through them. You're gonna get chat GPT access on watch OS, maybe, we'll see. There's literally no rumors about Mac OS, except they're gonna name it Tahoe, which Mark Germain reported like it was a big deal. He's like, they've been waiting for this one, for it to use the name like Tahoe, because they all have houses.

• 44:26Speaker 07

  They all have houses there. They always are on vacation there.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  I think they should start naming them after small Midwestern towns. Mac OS, Racine, Wisconsin is available. Craig. Um, there's much of AirPod rumors, sleep detection, camera control. Sure. I mean, what they, the AirPod update everyone wants is you can just talk to a voice assistant.

• 44:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  Just waiting on that.

• 44:48David Pierce?

  The camera control thing is neat, I will say. I think, I, that would be just from like a pure UI perspective. I'm fascinated to see that one, because it's like, are we gonna get to a point where half of everybody's photos now just have them with like two fingers on one of their ears? Or is there gonna be like, we're gonna get the new like millennial pause while everybody clicks the thing and then waits for it to start to like, I don't know. I have so many questions, but it's, it's like, it's a smart idea to let you have a remote on your AirPods.

• 45:13Speaker 07

  I would use this feature once a year, uh, like our family, you like, you do the big family picture and you set your like, right behind you, David, you set your like camera up on the, like above the fireplace on that little mantle. And then you have to like, like struggle with your watch to figure out how to take the photo. I don't know why I would have my AirPods on in this.

• 45:34David Pierce?

  It's because you're not a cool zoomer who just wears AirPods all the time.

• 45:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, I guess. Like, but when am I ever gonna want to take a photo? Like, I guess like you want to take a selfie.

• 45:44Speaker 07

  But you have your arm out. I don't know. It's, it's, I'm really interested to see the video that they like, show this feature in or like the still shot. Like, what is the real life scenario when you want to touch your iPad, your AirPods, take a photo?

• 45:56David Pierce?

  A bunch of people in our Slack were suggesting that Apple should let you just hold it in your hand and do it and just have it as like a little discreet quicker. That would be very cool.

• 46:04Speaker 07

  Oh, like the selfie clickers that they like sell the little like cheap China button with the little camera button? All right, fine, I'm sold on that.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  I can't think of a more dad situation than me being like, get this out. I mean, get my AirPod out of its case, hold it upside down. Uh, as opposed to just being like, someone else will take this photo. Uh, we'll see.

• 46:21David Pierce?

  I don't know. Joanna's out here going everywhere in Meta Smart Glasses so she can take pictures of her kids on another AirPods.

• 46:28Speaker 07

  Oh, I love my Meta Smart Glasses. I don't think we're talking about that here.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, last one. There's like half a rumor. I just want to do a time check on it. People think we might see Apple's smart home device. I, I think this is zero percent happening. What do you guys think?

• 46:46Speaker 07

  Same.

• 46:46David Pierce?

  I'm pretty close to zero. I think the, the only thing I can think of is if you're Tim Cook right now and you've gone through all this stuff and you've said, we need, we need, we need a thing there. Cause there isn't, there isn't a thing in here unless the redesign.

• 47:04Nilay Patel?

  I think the redesign is the thing.

• 47:05Speaker 07

  That's just the thing.

• 47:06David Pierce?

  I assume it'll be the thing that they mostly talk about and it probably, but like, I don't know, maybe my hopes should be higher. My hopes are not super high for what that's going to turn out to be, but, uh, like, maybe you're Tim Cook and you look at this and you're like, we need a one more thing to just like get everybody's minds going and they just preview it in some way. And they're like, Apple has gotten increasingly comfortable being like, here is a thing that's coming later. Uh, and I, I could see it. I wouldn't bet on it, but I also like, I could see the logic for like running the video at the end of the keynote.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just think they got really burned with Apple Intelligence last year. And they can't do that again.

• 47:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  I also think the point of this smart home device is

• 47:48Speaker 07

  Siri.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  To is Siri is to say like, you can just talk to this thing and it'll talk back to you. And you can do automations by just saying out loud, like when Joanna gets home, just open and close the garage door 50 times in a row.

• 48:00Speaker 07

  Just so like and celebrate that it does it. Do a dance.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we'll see. I mean, it would be exciting. Jen, are you gonna be there? Are you gonna be there?

• 48:08Speaker 07

  I'm gonna be there. I have, I have made a list of three things I would like to see. Would you guys like to hear that?

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Speaker 07

  Maybe you guys can share your lists. We should have prepared this, but my number one want is in iMessage, in group messages, typing indicators for everybody.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that'd be good.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  Like multiples, each person gets a typing indicator?

• 48:29Speaker 07

  Yes, just like

• 48:29David Pierce?

  I like that.

• 48:30Speaker 07

  every other chat app has, basically. I would love them to fix this reactions problem on the Mac. It's happening to me right now. Why does this pop up come up all the time?

• 48:42Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what's pop up. What are you talking?

• 48:44David Pierce?

  The one where you do a thumbs up and it does the, it does the wild thumbs up emoji?

• 48:47Speaker 07

  Or it just like has an, like an alert here that says like, your reactions are enabled.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. It sucks.

• 48:53Nilay Patel?

  Just turn it off.

• 48:54David Pierce?

  No one wants this. This has a 0% approval rate, this feature. Just turn it off.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  This is a real like COVID idea that just needs to go away. I know what you're saying. Yeah.

• 49:02David Pierce?

  100%.

• 49:03Speaker 07

  My last thing is a Siri thing because this happens to me every morning when I want to ask the HomePod to do something, but all the other Siri devices are doing them, like my iPhone or my watch. And I just think like some improvement. And I actually think that's one of the main reasons. Not, there's a lot of reasons people hate Siri, but I think that's one of the most frustrating real like consumer pain points of Siri, which is like, you want your Siri here to do a thing, but this Siri in the next room is doing it, or your spouse's Siri or whatever is doing it.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  You're like a Siri power user.

• 49:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I have that problem with Google Assistant, but I don't have a problem with Siri.

• 49:38David Pierce?

  I'm so sorry to everybody whose devices just went off 25 times.

• 49:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 49:42Nilay Patel?

  Open the garage door.

• 49:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, like I have HomePods, I've got iPhones, I've got watches, got iPads.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  I have Siri wake words disabled on all of those things. I have a multiple device wishlist too, which is if they just spend an hour being like, we've made it so that the important notifications come to your actual phone instead of disappearing into the void on whatever other device we think is alive.

• 50:06David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 50:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  That would make me very happy.

• 50:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, this it would be an interesting version of this year's WWDC if if instead of like announcing, you know, big giant sweeping changes to how everybody is going to do everything. They were just like, hi, we spent a year just fixing things.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  Snow leopard, baby.

• 50:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is snow leopard. We're just doing it again. And because there's so many little things, it's like, for me, it's like, fix headphone routing so that when someone calls me on my phone, it doesn't ring every device and decide to put my AirPods on my MacBook, which is closed in my backpack. Like, what if we did that? Wouldn't that be cool? There's just so many of those little things that it's like, actually, if put enough of those together, and I think you might win a lot of people over in the course of like an hour of talking about it.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  Can I just issue my wonkiest feature request related to headphone routing?

• 50:56David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  You ready? So I've got, I have a computer. As many people know, I have a computer. And my computer has multiple monitors. And one of the monitors is like the video conferencing monitor, and it's got like a little Logitech speakerphone dealy. And I can't be like, the windows on this monitor, the audio needs to come out of that thing. And the windows on this monitor need to use these speakers.

• 51:18David Pierce?

  That's a good one.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  And if I could just assign speakers to a display so that audio playing from a Chrome window on this computer, on this screen, came out of these speakers and audio playing on this screen came out of the, I would just be, that's it, that's WWDC. I'd be like, Apple's stock price should go up 30 to 40% today. Like, don't worry about this AI stuff. They fixed, I can assign speakers to displays. And I think I might be the only person in America with this problem.

• 51:44Speaker 07

  No, I have this problem. Not as like, I don't have as many monitors as you, but I feel that problem. I, this should be the one more thing that Tim Cook announces. It's a, you know, they did all the stuff around the calculator last year. Was that last year? It's a tariff calculator.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  The numbers just magically change every five minutes for no reason.

• 52:05Speaker 07

  It's like you wanted to calculate it today. Here you go.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  That's what AI is good for, is non deterministic math. Where you're like, how much does this cost? It's like, I made up an answer.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. All right, we should take a break. Speaking of terrorists, we gotta come back. We gotta talk about the switch too. And we'll see how much David paid for his. We have to take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Yeah, Switch 2 launch week. We started with Apple rumors because, you know, it's developer season and there's a lot going on over there. And also, the Switch 2 literally came out this morning. So there's not much to say, except David has one.

• 54:29David Pierce?

  I do.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  Lots of people on our side have them, actually. What's it like? Are you happy?

• 54:32David Pierce?

  Well, I really like it so far. So let me, let me, I had a really interesting experience trying to get it. So it launched at midnight and we've been covering kind of the run up to it and there are like discords upon discords of people trying to figure out how to get one and gaming the system and keeping an eye on what's in stock and when. And there are, I live in a pretty sort of dense urban area. So there are lots of places around me that were open at midnight, but there are two, two doors apart from each other. There's a Best Buy and a Target. And I was like, all right, one of them will have it for me. So I went over at like 10:30 last night. Just to see, I was like, if the line seems plausible, I'll sit in it and try and get one at midnight.

• 55:13David Pierce?

  Like 100 plus people in line, super nuts. So I just turned around and bailed. Came home and I was like, well, I guess I'm not getting a Switch. I won't have one to talk about on the podcast today. And then this morning, I'm sitting around looking at my phone, ignoring my child as I want to do from time to time. And I was just like, went to target.com and was like, I wonder if they, and it just said like, oh, in stock at the Target, right next to the Best Buy. So I literally just drove to Target and bought a Switch 2. It was like, it was the most mundane launch day experience you could possibly imagine. And I got there and there was a steady sort of rush of people, like as I was walking in, two people walked out with switches, both of whom were like clearly pumped that they had scored a Switch. But then I went over and there was a case

• 55:58David Pierce?

  full of them. There are probably 15 of them just sitting in this case. They had three bundles left. The woman in front of me bought one for her 13 year old son for his birthday and was like the relief on her face that she had managed to get. Like, I cannot describe to you how happy this woman was. And then I got one and then the person behind me got the last bundle. And nobody wanted anything other than the bundle that comes with Mario Kart World. And so there's just a bunch of them lying around. And so I just like shot, just sort of without even meaning to, just like came home with a Switch 2. Set the thing up, giant pain in the ass.

• 56:33David Pierce?

  And then like posted something being like, I can't believe how easy this was. And I have heard from so many other people who were like, yeah, Nintendo put us through this weird rigmarole for months. Trying to, you had to get an invitation from Nintendo for a specific time to like insanity. And then you could just wake up and go to Target and get one. Like truly bizarre launch day experience. Should I get one? You should definitely get one.

• 56:56Speaker 07

  What accessories does the bundle come with?

• 56:58David Pierce?

  The bundle comes with, it comes with the dock.

• 57:02David Pierce?

  It comes with the weird controllery thing that I can't find.

• 57:09Speaker 07

  Comes with that pillow. Amazing.

• 57:10David Pierce?

  It comes with a pillow. I also bought the, the camera.

• 57:14Speaker 07

  You bought the camera. I was gonna ask. So you have to buy the camera separately, right?

• 57:16David Pierce?

  I have not set this up yet. Uh, there's the, this was the Switch two camera. I think it was like $55, which is absurd for like a little camera on a stick. And then there's the Pro Controller, which everybody on our team tells me I need to buy, which is $85. So I'm like, I'm like 650 bucks deep on this thing by the time I actually get it fully like up and running. But I will say, uh, I played it a bunch this morning because it was, it was journalism.

• 57:42Speaker 07

  For work.

• 57:42David Pierce?

  And my, like, the first game I played was, was FIFA, which is secondly called EA FC 25. And I get emails every time I don't say that. I'm aware of the name of the game. It's still called FIFA. Unbelievably faster, like night and day faster from the Switch that I was using. And that was the main thing I was wondering about. Like there's lots of new games. Mario Kart World is, is big and very fun and I've played a little bit of it. But just the, the like raw speed upgrade of the old games that I had been annoyed by on an eight year old console. Like it, like new games, which was very exciting.

• 58:15Speaker 07

  Go buy one. I don't want to buy one, but my seven year old is like, he doesn't actually know that there's a new Switch out, I don't think. But I am like, it is a maddening experience, experience downloading games on his Switch. Like the slowness, the everything is just like at the parent, the parental control. I mean, talk about software that needs a refresh. Like, I don't know if that's been done. Is that done on the, on the two? Because there are like-

• 58:39David Pierce?

  It's sort of stylistically similar, but it's, it's clearly not the same software. If that makes sense, like they didn't blow up the model, but it is it is noticeably better and faster in basically every interaction.

• 58:49Speaker 07

  That might be worth it. I just sell this old one.

• 58:51David Pierce?

  I've been very impressed so far, but what's been really interesting is like the vibes around this launch are not that good. I don't think we've been talking a lot about this internally, but also like there were there were these big lines, but also Nintendo didn't do reviews ahead of time for a couple of different reasons, which is like, fine, but I think also there is something to the like, coverage in the lead up to this thing that would have been exciting for people. But then also, everybody I talked to is like, ah, I'll buy it when there's better games.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's kind of how I feel. You're 650 deep into Mario Kart world and like, eh, I can wait.

• 59:26David Pierce?

  So that's where a surprising number of people seem to have landed. And I think there's there's the Donkey Kong game coming like they had the the announcement that the Nintendo Direct of all these games, what in April? And people came away from that being like, great, there's an awesome slate of games, lots of stuff is coming, but on day one, it really is a $500 Mario Kart machine, like in a really real way.

• 59:47Speaker 07

  With a bigger screen.

• 59:48Nilay Patel?

  With the bigger screen. I mean, that's a big boy. Hold it up again.

• 59:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 59:51David Pierce?

  It is big. So this is the Switch 2.

• 59:54Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:55David Pierce?

  And I'll just, just to compare. This is the regular switch. So it is like.

• 1:00:01Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Look at that.

• 1:00:02David Pierce?

  Meaningfully bigger thing.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, the only game we play on the Switch is Untitled Goose Game, and I think we can, we'll make it through.

• 1:00:10David Pierce?

  Think about how fast the goose will.

• 1:00:12Speaker 07

  We play Mario, we tend to play a ton of Mario Kart. My son's obsessed with Among Us.

• 1:00:17Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I gotta start doing that with Max.

• 1:00:19Speaker 07

  Obsessed. So I mean, like that, like very simple 2D game, I'm sure is not necessarily any better on the Switch 2. So we're good.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're gonna have lots of Switch coverage coming because like so much of our staff has a Switch 2. They want to talk about it a lot. I suspect next week, David, you're gonna have a whole Switch 2 situation.

• 1:00:37David Pierce?

  So yeah, we, I can just tell people the schedule here. So Tuesday is gonna be our big post WWDC episode. And then I would say most of next Friday, and then all of the following Tuesday is all gonna be Switch stuff. Because that's when we'll have, we will have reviewed the thing, we'll have played all the games, we'll have tried all the accessories, like we're sort of deliberately waiting a minute to like, really do this thing big. So we will, we have a lot more coming. And also, call the hotline and send us emails if you have questions, because like, 2/3 of our staff has one of these. So we're gonna get a lot of them on to talk about it with us.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, Jen, I know you gotta, you gotta jump out here real quick before you go. There's a bunch of new news about Metas like experimental smart glasses, Aria. You are like, you're, you know, you're the Meta glasses stan on the show. What do you? And then they're gonna start to, I mean, you wear them and you take pictures.

• 1:01:26Speaker 07

  I do.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  That's more than I do.

• 1:01:27Speaker 07

  I do wear them.

• 1:01:28Nilay Patel?

  I bought the clear Ray-Bans when they announced them and I was so excited to get them and I bought them and I put them on my face and I was like, no, thank you. And I sent them back.

• 1:01:36David Pierce?

  You're mad that you have a big head. It's, it's fine.

• 1:01:39Nilay Patel?

  They were not big enough for my head, like even a little bit.

• 1:01:41David Pierce?

  I also have a big head, like I get it, but it's not Meta's fault that we have big heads.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  I was just like, I have good cameras that are fun to use and this is, wow, what am I doing? And then they, there's some Quest stuff coming along, like there's a little bit of arm search from Apple and Meta about like exclusive VR content. I don't know. What do you think of the, these new glasses? Cause it seems like no one has solved the display issue for augmented reality glasses, but we're adding more and more sensors to the prototypes every single day.

• 1:02:09Speaker 07

  Well, I feel like this is what, like a step towards more towards the Orion type of dream.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  And Orion were the augmented reality glasses that cost $10,000 a unit that Meta could not manufacture at scale.

• 1:02:20Speaker 07

  Right. And this is what a, a, something that's supposed to come out later this year for researchers to work with and developers to work with, I believe. So there's like some real actual movement towards this. Which I think is like been what Meta does that I think, and I think intentionally does that Apple doesn't, right? They're like building out in front and they're just saying, hey, here's where we're having issues. Here's where we're trying to build. I think we're seeing Google try to do that to a degree right now with, I get very confused, the XR glasses, which are not the XR headset that's supposed to come out this year. Am I, is that right?

• 1:02:57David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, there's, there's the headset, which is Project Muhan, which I always remember because it's such a stupid name.

• 1:03:03Nilay Patel?

  It's a very bad one. Also, Suneer referred to the headset as goggles, which is an incredible term.

• 1:03:08Speaker 07

  Well, I loved that actually from him. He was like, we're gonna have goggles or we're gonna have glasses.

• 1:03:13David Pierce?

  Do you think he knows that Google already made a thing called goggles? A long time ago.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  No, no, Muhan.

• 1:03:20Speaker 07

  But Muhan, back to Muhan. Muhan is also like considered under Android XR. Is that right? Like, is that? Yeah.

• 1:03:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Speaker 07

  Very confusing. But what's happening, like, it's like, everyone has these two paths going, right? Google, Meta, Apple, we think Apple, at least on the glasses, but for sure, they do. There are some efforts that are going towards the goggles, as Sundar said, and some efforts that are obviously going towards the glasses. And hopefully, eventually, they think these things will converge and they'll, they'll come together. But like, the focus on the goggles right now is really interesting, is that we had, the, the Journal had the story that Meta is trying to go after Disney with exclusive content. It's like, is this a world, like, we're gonna probably hear more about the Vision Pro last year, like, where, like, you just feel like no one's really using that type of device at scale. I mean, not, not we don't feel like it is, it's true, the numbers are there, right?

• 1:04:14Speaker 07

  Like, the number, people aren't. But yet, they still keep pushing into those directions. My guess, though, is like, for the hope that eventually that stuff comes, when we're down the path, that it comes to the glasses.

• 1:04:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you look at these new glasses, and, I mean, it's just a bunch of sensors, really, right? They've added more spatial mics, they've added ambulance sensors, more track, movement trackers, more eye tracking cameras. Like, no one has solved the problem of the display, right? The, Meta's Orion glasses were an attempt to solve the display problem, which is why they were so expensive and unmanufacturable at scale. So like, we can put stuff in front of your eyes. The Google glasses we just saw were like, we're gonna put stuff in front of your eyes, but they were teeny tiny field of view. And it wasn't like mapped to reality in any way, it was just, it's basically a screen in front of your face. There's this big problem where no one has solved the core component of augmented reality glasses,

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  which is putting stuff on a screen that is like mapped to the world. And I think that's why everyone is doing these like ski helmets.

• 1:05:17Speaker 07

  Because they can do it there.

• 1:05:18Nilay Patel?

  You can do, right, camera pass through VR, XR, and then it's like, you've built a simulator of the thing, but at least you're working on it. Well, you know, some mad scientist is solving your display problem. But it's, none of it's convincing.

• 1:05:33Speaker 07

  Well, that's all I know, like how we all felt about the Vision Pro, but it's like they still keep going at it. Which I guess if you're the size of these companies, you can.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, David, you were saying this, the sensor problem is so big that maybe they're just focused on that while someone figures out the display problem.

• 1:05:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the, the thing I keep hearing about smart glasses is that the people who are making them are like, everybody is wildly underestimating how hard every single part of this problem is like. I remember years ago, some of the folks who were running this at Google were like, you don't understand how different a thing it is that I have to make a product that if it gets in your way at the wrong moment, once, it has ruined the success of that product. Like if I, if I push a notification while you're asleep, or like, I don't know, whatever, having sex, like, once, the whole thing falls apart. And they were like, the bar for the user interface is so high. And what it means is, I have to have perfect awareness at all times of both you and the world.

• 1:06:29David Pierce?

  And both directions of that are incredibly hard. And so I think what's interesting to me about this meta thing is like, the idea of how do we put all this stuff in these glasses that can just look at your eyes all the time, right? It's like blink detection and, and directional, like following your eyes where you go and looking at per eye detection. Like this stuff is so hard and it's such cutting edge science and it is just one piece of the equation here.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  I just have, sorry, I just had this, you said this and now I have to think about Mark Zuckerberg is like, I need to know if you're banging.

• 1:07:00David Pierce?

  We got a hotline question, maybe 10 days ago that I will, we will answer on the show. From somebody who was like, I have smart glasses. Do I need, and they have my prescription. Do I have to take them off before I have sex? Otherwise there's cameras on my face while we're having sex. And I have been not, I have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since.

• 1:07:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, I was wondering where that came from, David.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  Get some other glasses, bro.

• 1:07:21Speaker 07

  It came from nowhere in your example.

• 1:07:24David Pierce?

  That was the question. Do I need dumb glasses for the bedroom and smart glasses everywhere?

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  Out of nowhere, it's like, like your Instagram followers have sent you three messages. It's like, no.

• 1:07:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, pretty sure you're throwing those things in the trash for some that happens. You know what I mean?

• 1:07:39Nilay Patel?

  Like a pure growth hacky Instagram notification would be horrible.

• 1:07:43David Pierce?

  Vsong heard that hotline question and immediately demanded to talk about it with me on the show. As did my wife, so we will come back to that.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  But the idea that like getting all the sensors, I mean, we've gone through this list so many times. Smart bot, you need the display, the displays are impossible, but no one can, literally no one has built one. That works at scale, that is manufacturable. You need to put compute in there that you need a lot of it to detect the world and then like immediately overlay graphics. And then you need connectivity and then you need a battery that can support all that compute and that connectivity in real time. That is running all the time. And then you need like a content moderation system. So if you're looking at the United States Capitol on January 6th, it doesn't tell you like this was the site of Donald Trump's greatest triumph. Like you've got a million problems to solve and bang detection apparently is very important to everyone.

• 1:08:32David Pierce?

  Big one.

• 1:08:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  I don't, we're just years away from this. I think this is why you get, I think it would be better if the industry is like these mixed reality VR headset. They are the simulators. Like I think if everyone was honest that these are not products meant to scale. But this is how we're going to work our way towards building the appropriate applications. It might just like change how everyone perceives them.

• 1:08:55David Pierce?

  But I think like also to your point, Joanna, about the, the content thing. I think one of the reasons everyone is chasing that idea so hard is that it feels doable. Right? If, if it's just, we're going to build all this wild stuff, but if the first thing we can build is just like a sick personal television that you wear on your face, maybe that'll work for people. And I'm, I'm suspicious of the idea that that's a thing anybody wants, but I think it is, it is at least like, it is a version of this that feels achievable for these companies. And so they are like pushing relentlessly after it.

• 1:09:26Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I mean, obviously that's what Apple's been marketing still with the Vision Pro, right? It's like your personal TV.

• 1:09:33Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen an ounce of Vision Pro marketing in the past five months?

• 1:09:37David Pierce?

  They just put out like a Bono video that no one watched.

• 1:09:41Nilay Patel?

  Bono's everywhere right now.

• 1:09:42Speaker 07

  Any of the pitches you get from PR, anything they post to the news, like is all about the content. It's really not beyond that at this point, right? Watching sports, watching this, watching that, like. Maybe using your Mac, right? They had the improvement or the Apple Intelligence came for that. I mean, yeah.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  Did you see that Price is Right clip where people try to guess the price of the Vision Pro?

• 1:10:04Speaker 07

  Yes, amazing.

• 1:10:05David Pierce?

  It was very good.

• 1:10:06Nilay Patel?

  People were like, $100.

• 1:10:08Speaker 07

  It's funny, as we have you guys, somebody I believe wrote about these there. You've seen these? These are the X Real glasses that are with the space top. I can't get them on right now.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Pretty hot, I have to say.

• 1:10:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, they look pretty sick.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they look like Wayfarers, but they are very, very chunky.

• 1:10:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, they look awesome. Everyone here keeps telling me that I look like, you know, one of those like, like glasses with a mustache.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  But they have a cord. That's a cord.

• 1:10:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, the cord connects to the laptop.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say we're far away from air glasses.

• 1:10:40Speaker 07

  I will say the only use of those that I do, like, there's, everything aside, I do like having multiple monitors when I don't have, when I'm away from my computer.

• 1:10:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. Joanna, you have to go, and we should also take a break here, but I, we have not heard what you think Johnny Ive and OpenAI are building. And we got a little bit of stuff this week. There was like Johnny Ive did an interview with Lorene Prowl Jobs, talking about the unintended consequences of the iPhone and how they wanted to fix all the harms that smartphones have done. And ChatGPT wants to be like a universal life assistant, but we still don't know anything. What do you think they're building?

• 1:11:15Speaker 07

  I don't think they're building glasses. I mean, they've basically said that, right? I, there was a lot of chatter at Davos this year, like before this deal was announced, but there was a lot of chatter already about the partnership between these two. Yes, and this was South.

• 1:11:29David Pierce?

  Everybody's clinking champagne glasses and talking about.

• 1:11:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, we're like, what are they building? What are they building? There was chatter about the headphones, like earbuds with cameras or like, which would make sense, but I believe now, like, people have shifted and said they don't think that.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  I've been straight up told it's not headphones.

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  I'll just, I don't think, I think it's like, I think it's like a necklace.

• 1:11:53Speaker 07

  Oh, I hope it's not a necklace. But I will say, so I did a piece a few weeks ago on these recording devices. Neil, I went to a dinner with me and I was wearing the recording device. And I tested both the Limitless and the B. These are both like AI recording devices. They listen all the time and they summarize and make notes and to do lists for you. And I will say, there were some very positive uses of those. So if they can figure out the privacy stuff and they can do this in a smart way where like you can talk to your chat GPT assistant all the time, but it's also listening, maybe looking. And again, they need to get the privacy stuff right. There's a lot of potential there.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  But all those things had phone apps, right? The interface was a phone app.

• 1:12:38Speaker 07

  They all had phone apps.

• 1:12:39Nilay Patel?

  It was just a little piece of hardware.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  But you don't have to like be looking at that. You just live your life with the device listening all the time.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just don't think Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are building a device whose fate lies with an iOS phone app.

• 1:12:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like that, that just seems really hard to me. So by the way, it's all the same problems minus the display. They need compute, they need connectivity and they need a battery, it needs to be unobtrusive. And then I think they've got this other problem, which is if at the end of the day, the way that you set it up and use it is by configuring it on an iOS device, like you've accomplished very little.

• 1:13:11Speaker 07

  I think that though, he said that in the video. He said that in the, I love San Francisco, I want to have sex with San Francisco video. Like.

• 1:13:17Nilay Patel?

  Why did this podcast get so horny in the past 10 minutes?

• 1:13:20Speaker 07

  Well, I just, David, David said we can say sex, so here we are. This is the energy I bring. This is what we're doing.

• 1:13:25Nilay Patel?

  All right, so Johnny Ive wants to bang San Francisco and he said something about the iPhone during that time?

• 1:13:29Speaker 07

  They said something, they said about the laptop and that we've moved beyond.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  They call those legacy products.

• 1:13:34Speaker 07

  Legacy products that are still staples in your life. Like, I mean, I don't remember exact wording, I don't have the transcript, but there was a, there was a lot of like implication, like we're not going to replace those things. We will still have them. This is the new thing.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I don't know, we'll see. I'm, I just, the only thing I know is I, I've heard a lot of chatter about headphones and I was kind of told it wasn't headphones. And there's a lot of chatter about a pendant and I have no idea if it will be a pendant. That's it, that's what I got.

• 1:14:00Speaker 07

  I love an, I love a new necklace.

• 1:14:02Nilay Patel?

  But I, I think they've got, I think they have to build something that does not rely on a phone. If they build basically a phone accessory. They're not going to get to where they want to go.

• 1:14:09Speaker 07

  But then you have the same issues of the humane pen, which we, you guys have talked about, but like, that had cellular built in and that was a big problem.

• 1:14:18Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:14:18Speaker 07

  It was a big problem for that device. It might have been the biggest problem for that device. There was a lot of, sorry, let's not.

• 1:14:23David Pierce?

  It's a long, it's a long list of possibilities on that one.

• 1:14:26Speaker 07

  It's just, it's very high up on the list is the fact that there was cellular in there and that ran hot and it was, caused the bad, yeah, anyway.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  It's a big set of problems, but in the way you solve it is by offloading all those problems to a phone, which has already solved in its scale, right?

• 1:14:40David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:14:41Nilay Patel?

  But if you do that, you're not like, you know, you're not taking the big next step. You're like, I made AirPods, but weirder and like that. I don't think that's the ambition.

• 1:14:49Speaker 07

  Though I spend a lot of time talking to chat GPT now and I would be happy if they were on my headphones. Like if they were in, if they were in my AirPods and could work well, like we talked about, like that, that would be great for me. Also, like Sam Altman listens to this, right? Like the only thing I want is a CarPlay chat GPT app. I know Neil is like, please, no, please.

• 1:15:08David Pierce?

  You could be one of those people who instead of talking to their friends on car rides, just talks to chat GPT, which is cool and not bleak at all.

• 1:15:17Speaker 07

  I'm already that person.

• 1:15:18Nilay Patel?

  This is why, and I'm, I'm just worried about you as a friend.

• 1:15:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, you should be worried about me.

• 1:15:23Nilay Patel?

  Available to you if you would like to talk to someone.

• 1:15:24David Pierce?

  Well, this is why we have to podcast with Joanna. It's the only time she talks to humans.

• 1:15:27Speaker 07

  It's the only time I talk to people. It's the only time.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  If you want to talk to a confident liar, you can just call me and I'll just make shit up at you and it will sound super real. Whenever you want.

• 1:15:38Speaker 07

  Please prepare me for this meeting I'm going to. Anyway, honestly, that would be far better.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  Here's what you do. You say, Rupert, double the salary about the door.

• 1:15:49Speaker 07

  You say Siri, okay. Thank you guys for having me. See you at W W C.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  It's a delight. We'll see you soon.

• 1:15:56Speaker 07

  Bye, guys.

• 1:15:57Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

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• 1:17:47Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I'm excited to see Joanna and just mumbling to ChatGPT in the corner of W W C for a couple of days. It'll be good.

• 1:17:55David Pierce?

  It's really like give it to Joanna. She's like, she doesn't half ass things. You know what I mean? Like when Johanna decides to make AI her life, she goes for it.

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  She's going for it. I mean, she's writing a book about it, making AI her life. So she's going for it. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round, which I am told is sponsored. As you know, we exist free of the business pressures of our company. We just spend the money. Eric, what's going on here?

• 1:18:20Speaker 10

  That's right. Uh, this week's lightning round is presented by Google Gemini.

• 1:18:25David Pierce?

  Eric, that's great. Great job. I'm really proud of you. Good work.

• 1:18:28Nilay Patel?

  That's the information. Still flavorful, I would say. Very flavorful. And in fact, I know it's gonna be flavorful because David, it's time.

• 1:18:36David Pierce?

  It is. It's once again, it's summer, but it is still time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Future Webby Award winning podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Eli, how does this keep happening? Like every week, I'm like, I have a line in the rundown that just says Brendan Carr is a dummy. And I'm like, oh God, there's not going to be any links. This is going to be so great. We can finally not talk about this stupid man. And yet here we are. We do this every time.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  We do, and, and there's no shortage of it. I will say this week, usually we get notes that are like, he's not a dummy. He's a threat to free speech. And I agree with those people. The thing is that he's also very stupid.

• 1:19:13David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  Right? So he, he does all these investigations and threatens the companies for not being racist enough. Brendan Carr stuff. But he's also not good at executing or thinking more than one step ahead. Right? He's a dummy. I, I can't say this clearly enough. Brendan Carr, the Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, aren't the regulator in charge of our nation's communications infrastructure is a dummy. And sometimes it just expresses itself because well, the only thing he succeeds in doing is shooting himself in the foot.

• 1:19:47Nilay Patel?

  And I think it's starting to weigh on like the other people at the FCC because they're all quitting.

• 1:19:56Nilay Patel?

  So we're down. We're supposed to have five FCC commissioners. And depending on the president's party, you're supposed to have three of the majority party and two of the minority. Right? And then, you know, you kind of, the votes go either way, but you have this like bipartisan. Agency committee that like makes decisions altogether and ideally they make them unanimously because they've done the hard work hashing out good policy from both sides out, you know, stuff.

• 1:20:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19Nilay Patel?

  Government stuff.

• 1:20:20David Pierce?

  Government.

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  The thing you're supposed to do. Brendan is such a dummy that he's not doing that at all, where he's just like issuing proclamations about how there should be more censorship in America or whatever he wants. And I don't know what he's doing. So this week, two different FCC commissioners from different parties just resigned. Jeffrey Starks, who has been on the Vergecast before as a guest, Democratic Commissioner, quit, goodbye. I think he, people kind of knew he was gonna leave, but he's gone. And then surprisingly, Nathan Symington, uh, who is sort of just like another toady, like another revolving door Verizon toady. He's just been there for a while. He was an assistant to, to Pi and, and Carr in different ways. And then he became a commissioner. He, he bailed too.

• 1:21:02David Pierce?

  He was appointed by Trump in the, in the first Trump administration, wasn't he?

• 1:21:06Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:21:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Nilay Patel?

  Cool. I don't, I don't have a high opinion. These guys are all just sort of like, we're here to do what the cable companies all do. Like, fine, like you're, you're interchangeable toadies, but, uh, you would think that he'd be riding high in a Carr FCC. Cause you know, he gets rubber stamp stuff too.

• 1:21:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:22Nilay Patel?

  But, but no, he's, he's gone and the, the reports are, uh, that he wants to do other things. Presumably he's gonna go work for one of our nation's solcoms. Like that revolving door is just gonna spin really fast and spit out millions of dollars in lobbying fees and Nathan Symington's gonna collect them. I know this is what happens to all of them.

• 1:21:39David Pierce?

  It's all like.

• 1:21:39Nilay Patel?

  G-Pi, uh, the CEO of our nation's preeminent wireless industry lobby right now. That's, that's how it goes. But so we're down to, we're supposed to have five in a Trump administration, you have three Republicans and two Democrats. And we're down to one Democrat, Anna Gomez, who is literally touring the company, saying that Brendan Carr is a threat to democracy and free speech right now.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  And is also like operating under the assumption that she's going to be fired at any minute.

• 1:22:02Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think she's trying to get fired.

• 1:22:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  So, and to, to prove a point, which is, I think, one of the reasons they're not firing.

• 1:22:08David Pierce?

  What if it's just Brendan?

• 1:22:11Nilay Patel?

  Do you see what I'm saying? And then there's Brendan.

• 1:22:13David Pierce?

  Oh my God.

• 1:22:14Nilay Patel?

  And he's, he's pushed everyone else out and the government is such a disaster right now because Elon and Trump are fighting that like, there's no chance we're gonna nominate four more FCC commissioners, two of whom have to be Democrats by, by statute. It's just not gonna happen.

• 1:22:29David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:22:30Nilay Patel?

  So we're, we're down to Brendan and Anna. They don't even have like a quorum, like they can't do anything anymore because they don't have enough of them.

• 1:22:38David Pierce?

  Right, because they'll just, it'll be one to one on everything and they just leave.

• 1:22:43Nilay Patel?

  And there's a lot of stuff to get done. Like there's broadband to roll out in America. There's spectrum auctions to be held. Like there's all this stuff to do. And Brendan is so distasteful and so stupid that he, you know, Brendan his way into not having a functional FCC. Very good Brendan, you succeeded. And the only other person who works there now hates you so much that she is literally touring the country, calling you a threat to free speech. Well done. Just, ah, when I think of like pure political operators, you know, like people who like really just like work the system like they're playing a video game. It's not Brendan Carr. Like whatever this is, is not that outcome. So that's one.

• 1:23:25Nilay Patel?

  Very funny. Just like pure idiocy. So distasteful that everyone else quit, including the other Republican, who is himself kind of a toey.

• 1:23:33David Pierce?

  It's insane.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  Then there's like, this one is a winding road, but it might be even funnier.

• 1:23:40Nilay Patel?

  So you will recall Brendan launched an investigation into Dish Network's use of spectrum to build a, what was supposed to be a nation's fourth wireless network. And he said, you're not using the spectrum. I'll come to why they are not using that spectrum. But the reason he launched that investigation is because Starlink put out a report saying it had investigated Dish all by itself and they weren't using the spectrum. That is just corruption. That's not how that's supposed to work. Straightforwardly, that's not how that's supposed to work. You're not like, oh, Starlink has a good point. We should trust them and take the spectrum away from another private company.

• 1:24:14David Pierce?

  I'm doing a great job, says me.

• 1:24:17Nilay Patel?

  So they launched this investigation. Now I believe, wholeheartedly, the Dish Network is not using the spectrum appropriately. Because it turns out there is not a fourth wireless network in America.

• 1:24:27David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 1:24:28Nilay Patel?

  If you see it, if you see the fourth nationwide wireless network that is striking fear in a T-Mobiles, you let me know. But I, I've looked around and by look around, I meant waved my phone in the sky.

• 1:24:43Nilay Patel?

  However, you look around, it's not there. It's not there. It's supposed to be there because Brendan's predecessor, Ajit Pai, allowed T-Mobile to buy Sprint, consolidating the wireless industry, rubber stamping, some telecom stuff. This is what these guys do. And made them promise they would turn over spectrum to EchoStar Dish Network and they would light up a fourth wireless network, a 5G network. And EchoStar made all these promises about how they're going to take over Boost and then use these MVNO agreements with AT&T and T-Mobile and use that to bootstrap a network while they built a cutting edge 5G network using open RAN technologies running at AWS. We've covered this at length and Ajit Pai hoodwinked, fully into believing this.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  And said, okay, we're going to let T-Mobile buy Sprint. We're going to cut the amount of competition in America in wireless. Sure, prices go up, but Dish Network will show up to save the day and restore competition. It is 100 years later. They have 20 subscribers. They still run Boost Mobile, but they're constantly roaming on an AT&T. None of this exists. Just none of this exists. This is failed Republican policy from the first Trump administration. Okay. Starlink has said they're not using the spectrum. We'd like it. No process. Brendan's like, yeah, I'll give it to my buddy Elon. Elon has now fallen completely out with Trump. Like as we are speaking, they continue to tweet at each other about how much they hate each other. It, that seems like a poor political move from Brendan who can't see two feet in front of his face.

• 1:26:10Nilay Patel?

  And EchoStar Dish Network, what have they decided to start doing? They're going to start missing their interest payments on the loans they took out for the spectrum. So they can declare bankruptcy and get out of this whole deal. Wow. They're actively missing their payments on the spectrum now. And they're doing it in response to this investigation. They're saying, you investigated us, we're, we're headed for the exit. So Brendan, who again threw his lot in with Elon Musk to, to take spectrum for a company that wasn't using it under a plan that his own predecessor launched, has now put himself on the wrong side of Donald Trump, his putative boss, and in a position where EchoStar might outplay him by just declaring bankruptcy. We will still not get a fourth wireless network in America out of this. Super not gonna happen.

• 1:26:55David Pierce?

  But we'll burn a bunch of money and jobs.

• 1:26:57Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna burn a bunch of money and jobs. And I, I think Brendan has, because he's so dumb, didn't see the two moves ahead of him. That perhaps Charlie Ergen, the CEO of EchoStar, the parent of Dish, would have another card to play.

• 1:27:13Nilay Patel?

  He's just a moron.

• 1:27:14David Pierce?

  Right. This is just what we're doing here.

• 1:27:16Nilay Patel?

  That's been Brendan Carr's dummy. As always, Brendan, if you can show up on the podcast and defend these moves or any others, you're welcome to come. We'd love to have you. You're not doing anything else. All of your coworkers quit.

• 1:27:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's literally no one else. Anna Gomez is on tour. Go on tour. Go on tour to the Ferg Cast. This is what we ask for.

• 1:27:34Nilay Patel?

  Make the case that you didn't just get thoroughly outplayed by like a Wildcat Satellite Operator, who's gonna declare bankruptcy and you're gonna have to resell the spectrum. And you're probably not gonna be able to just give it to Starlink the way they want.

• 1:27:49David Pierce?

  I also, I was just reading Brendan Carr's blog post on the FCC website that he wrote, sort of announcing these changes.

• 1:27:59David Pierce?

  He's just so annoying.

• 1:28:02David Pierce?

  Let me just read you a paragraph. There's a lot of time between now and our scheduled June 26th commission meeting. So I wanted to lay out a couple of items that I would like to get done at the meeting if we can. Stay tuned on that front. What does he mean by that? I just said, stay tuned. That's all. I just read words.

• 1:28:16Nilay Patel?

  That's what he wrote?

• 1:28:17David Pierce?

  That's what he wrote.

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  He wrote, what does he mean by that?

• 1:28:19David Pierce?

  He wrote, stay tuned on that front. And then in italics, what does he mean by that? End italics. I just said, stay tuned. We always make a final decision about the commission meeting and its agenda closer to the meeting date. We will do so again here. That's a whole paragraph of no words.

• 1:28:34David Pierce?

  What are we doing, Brendan?

• 1:28:36Nilay Patel?

  He's, again, he's not smart. I, I know a lot of people are like, you should call the segment something else. You know, you should really. We, we do get this out. You should really make sure that people understand the threat. Yeah, there's some threats. I've called him a traitorous moron many times on our podcast, which is not regulated by the FCC. Sorry, buddy. But he's just stupid.

• 1:28:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:56Nilay Patel?

  And like, you, you see it play out. Like, he doesn't, he can't think two moves ahead. Anyway, again, I repeat, Brendan, you're, you're welcome. I know you listen. I know that you hate it. If you can show up, you can show up on Decoder. You know, people come on Decoder all the time. They answer their questions. They do their best. They leave, you know? They can show up here. David will tell some jokes about you to your face.

• 1:29:19David Pierce?

  I just read him blog posts. You can yell at him. I'll just edit his writing on his stupid website.

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr is dummy America's favorite podcast with a podcast.

• 1:29:29David Pierce?

  That's beautiful.

• 1:29:30Nilay Patel?

  David, I think we need a, we need a little bit of a palate cleanser.

• 1:29:33David Pierce?

  You want to talk about the Fediverse for a minute?

• 1:29:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would love to. It's my favorite thing.

• 1:29:37David Pierce?

  So Feti Forum, which is like a big Fediverse event is this week, but did you see the, the news about this tool called Bounce?

• 1:29:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is the one that lets you move, move things around?

• 1:29:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. So Bounce is basically, it's, it's pretty straightforwardly, just like a migration tool from Blue Sky to Mastodon.

• 1:30:00David Pierce?

  Not all that exciting. It's built on top of this thing called, I think it's called Bridgie Fed, which is some like underlying work that ties the two things together. But it basically connects these two accounts so that you can move all of your stuff from one to the other and still be able to post where you were. This is like, this is the stuff, right? It's just like, every once in a while, we get an announcement or a new product or a thing that people are explaining that it is like, this is the stuff. This is what we're doing when we talk about the Fediverse and like, Bounce, A, in the fact that it is kind of messy to explain and the reason they call it Bounce is because they're trying to get you to bounce from Blue Sky to Mastodon, which is like pretty good.

• 1:30:43David Pierce?

  But it's like the idea that I can just pick up my stuff on a social network and put it down on another social network. Like that's it, baby. That's the stuff. And we're like, starting to see this.

• 1:30:54Nilay Patel?

  There's a bunch of stuff out of Feti Forum where it's like new ways of thinking about the protocols. I really broadly, I think we spent the last year or so talking about capabilities. Like here are some technologies that will enable capabilities. And the Fediverse is absolutely that thing. Activity Pub, App Protocol, whatever. It's like, look at these core technologies and you gotta build them. And now, same as Trave, look at these models and how they can lie to you. And now we're in the products phase. And like you can see the Fediverse products are coming pretty fast and furious now.

• 1:31:24David Pierce?

  It's taking a little longer than I would have hoped, I will say. I think there's been, there was so much energy 18 months ago that I think got a little bit, wasted is too strong, but didn't quite get fully utilized. And I think a lot of people were excited about what Threads is doing and the Threads Fediverse momentum seems to have slowed pretty aggressively. Blue Sky is doing great. Blue Sky is a version of the Fediverse, but is not sort of the whole story in a way. So it's like, we continue to be like right at the edge of the thing, but I think you're right that the answer is just, people just have to start building things people like to use. And then, and then we're going to start to be there. And it is like,

• 1:32:05David Pierce?

  every, every version of this that comes out where it's like, we're getting another piece of the puzzle together. Uh, and I think especially the stuff that touches Blue Sky, because that's just, it's just the one with the juice right now. Right? And so like, any piece of it that is like, let me just attach a little bit of the open web to Blue Sky, I think is, is super exciting. Uh, and I suspect there will be more stuff coming out of the, the Fed if Forum. There was a lot of news at the last one. I suspect there will be more this time. But it is like, the, the momentum is still there. I just wish it were like shipping a little faster. You know what I mean?

• 1:32:38Nilay Patel?

  I feel like there was a, the momentum slowed because you had the VHS versus beta moment with at Protocol and Mastodon and Activity Pub and Threads. And everyone thought Threads would just make Activity Pub win. And then it turns out Meta runs it.

• 1:32:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:53Nilay Patel?

  And that just made people be like, what if I choose Blue Sky, which exists and it's just a different protocol? And so stuff like Bridgie Fed is really interesting because it, it shoves that down. And like part of the promise, a lot of stuff we've seen at the Forum is like, we made interoperability happen, but those still aren't products.

• 1:33:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:33:10Nilay Patel?

  And I think now we're just headed towards, like Surf Social is like fascinating. It's just an app that like connects to all these services.

• 1:33:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:16Nilay Patel?

  So I'm excited for these products. We still have big ideas about how we will integrate the version to them. But you know, you gotta pick VHS for beta. And like, we'll get there.

• 1:33:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Nilay Patel?

  We'll get there.

• 1:33:27David Pierce?

  I'm excited about it. And I think, uh, there was another one at Fediform, I think it was called like channel.org or something that's poking at some of the same stuff, um, that Surf is doing where it's like, how do I take a bunch of different feeds from a bunch of different places and make them one packageable thing that you can then like share to lots of different places and read from lots of different apps. And it's like Surf's big idea is like, everything is just going to be feeds and you can create feeds from anywhere. You can consume feeds from anywhere and feeds can be anything. And it's like, that is an incredibly powerful idea that we have like only just begun exploring. And so I think every, again, every, every piece of that that I see, I'm like, this is, this is the stuff.

• 1:34:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's gonna get there.

• 1:34:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:09Nilay Patel?

  The, this is, it's, it's product time. You gotta, you gotta make some products, everybody.

• 1:34:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:13Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if Apple's like, we're gonna do a full hour in the Fediverse.

• 1:34:17David Pierce?

  We're bringing back Ping and it's the Fediverse this time.

• 1:34:20Nilay Patel?

  That'd be great. All right. We are at WWDC next week. We'll have lots of that. We have lots of Switch coverage to come.

• 1:34:26David Pierce?

  Oh, we should say, by the way, our, our WWDC episode is going to be late on Tuesday, just because the way WWDC works, we're not going to get to record until late on Monday. Uh, and then we will, we will have it as up as early as we can on Tuesday. But if you're like waiting for the episode for your morning commute, just know that I'm sorry. And it will be an afternoon commute kind of show for you.

• 1:34:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I have to get to a hotel room and record the episode after WWDC.

• 1:34:48David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:34:48Nilay Patel?

  That's, uh, lots to come. That's Vergecast. Thanks to Joanna.

• 1:34:58Nilay Patel?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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